What is made visible

by Katie Cercone

Featured artwork:
Nancy Azara, Heart Wall, 2000
Carved and painted wood with gold and silver leaf and encaustic
6 x 24 x 3′

Through the course of her several decades making art in New York City, gender-non-conforming Italian American artist Nancy Azara never felt recognized by mainstream culture, nor was she celebrated within the context of the male-dominated art world. Although she’s quite social as a Libra and spearheaded some of the earliest organizing initiatives which sparked the 70s Feminist Art movement here on the East Coast, she often harbored the feeling of being invisible amongst the invisible.  Growing up in the 1950s within a Catholic, Italian American community in New York, she often felt her autonomy and personal power was stifled. Mom said “You ask too many questions, no one will marry you.” Through many years of dedicated commitment to art as a life-time pursuit, Azara always sought within her pieces to realize the balance we often fail to achieve in our human relationships. Perhaps characteristic of her Italian heritage, Azara’s pieces can be quite flashy – her sculptural forms never failing to gleam (usually with gold). Whether taking the form of massive structures of painted wood, often carved by hand and overlaid with brilliant gold leaf; or rough hewn works on paper, Azara’s artistic output is simply teeming with life. 

This fall, as the trees upstate cloaked themselves in bright yellow and burnt orange gowns, I had the opportunity to speak with Azara in her spacious second studio upstate. What once was a full-fledged barn adjacent Nancy and her longtime partner painter Darla Bjork’s Woodstock home, over time evolved into a spacious maker’s lair with high ceilings and only the occasional animal familiar. Outside it was the early fall, inside Azara’s studio was frosty white – dotted with handprinted sculptural trees cast alive with a silvery sheen. The atmosphere was spectral and otherworldly.  As a tiny mouse ran through the studio, Nancy revealed that the sculptural works and small collage drawings for her upcoming exhibition at A.I.R. High Chair and Other Works, a show more or less about death. 

With a lengthy history of scavenging fallen tree branches from the street and dressing them ornately with paint and carved symbolism, Azara’s signature visual grammar rings out clear and distinct in her latest works. Having made a stunning departure from her usual jewel tone palette to icy, opalescent white, she’s heightening an aesthetic which has become uniquely hers over the years. While it may speak to death and dying, the works have a strong aura, an energy and life force all their own. Along the back wall is her piece Cradle, whereby a horseshoe shaped branch with ends accented in faint pink rests on a golden bough. The overall sheen of the works creates a dynamic interplay between pieces. While all the white surely evokes a feeling of absence, by the same token, I felt the energy of the works wrapping around me as we discussed her process, including Nancy’s journey into esoteric healing arts, yoga and Hinduism. A life time of inner work informs Azara’s practice. 

With names like Ghost Ship, High Chair, Child’s Chair and Young Tree, the free-standing white sculptures swathed in subtle opalescent swirls felt more delicate, more withered than Nancy’s earlier explorations with wood. I wondered about what felt like references to early childhood in a series about death, only later to recall how in most of the non-Western world, death equates with rebirth, and the coming of a child is an ancestor returned.  Over the years Azara’s sculptural wood forms have loomed large as walls and towering totems, often monuments to loved ones. In a 2000 New York Times review of Nancy’s large installation Heart Wall, Holland Cotter referred to Nancy’s work as having “a Byzantine or South Asian splendor.” For an artist that has often conflated women’s rights and women’s justice with her studio and spiritual practice, it’s no coincidence that Cotter also writes that her works “make vulnerability seem like a considered choice.” (1) Sounds very well enough, dignified even. And yet, the feminist scholar in me reads within and around the colloquial play of words a subtext that speaks deeply to the artist’s original feelings of invisibility.  While the classical art review format is in itself limited at best (and dismissive at worst) – these words cherry-picked by the New York Time’s critic serve to highlight limitations women artists face. In a patriarchal society that takes for granted the lesser status of the feminine, vulnerability can be valiantly reclaimed. While Nancy has surely fought tooth and nail to carve out a small following working the more or less integrated circuit of an intergenerational feminist art community, the now nearly two decades past review crystallizes the real constraints one faces working within the dominant white male capitalist-purview. That which assures us of what is valuable, what is worthy and ultimately –  what is made visible, what is Art.  

At the same time, within this milieu of constraint, this human dimension wrought with power and control, Nancy painstakingly established a line of flight beyond, an otherwise continuum for understanding the nature of being. During our interview I asked Nancy what has changed over the years.  The artist recounted how given the mirror of her spiritual process with art, she no longer seeks the recognition and validation she once craved. What’s more, she feels that her art has done its job in terms of clearing out the psychic debris. Just as she has poured so much of her vital life force energy into her sculptures, they give back. “You receive wisdom from the piece, you see in a larger broader context,” remarked Nancy. 

Perhaps in the space between cultural  “validation” and Holland Cotter’s “vulnerability” we find something altogether different, the otherwise rubric Nancy continues to share through her creative workshops and publication of the book Spirit Taking Form: Making a Spiritual Practice of Making Art. Call it empathy, vulnerability or razor sharp intuition, Nancy often works from psychic imagery she has retrieved while doing chakra-oriented body work.  Nancy reads chakras and teaches chakra reading. Despite this being an area of interest which is increasingly accepted if not trending for younger generations, chakra-work felt like something Azara had to safely guard from the art world skeptics of the eighties. 

Brought to life in her famous Heart Wall,  in this piece we see pink in abundance connoting the gateway of the heart center, the practice of empathy and the experience of opening and openness. As Chögyam Trungpa writes in Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism, there is optimally a point in human evolution where we become empty of needs, of world hypocrisies and personal idiosyncrasies.  Herein lies the real jewel, “Shining in its brightness” we find “the energetic, living quality of openness, the living quality of surrender, the living quality of renunciation.” (2) Not only does Nancy no longer seek acclaim, her lovingly rendered benches and chairs reflect more of a sense of female exploration and discovery than an effort to claim a seat at the proverbial Father’s table. Nancy’s journey in this right began with the birth of the early 70s feminist art movement she helped to spearhead as a co-founder of The New York Feminist Art Institute (NYFAI) in 1979. Back then, Nancy recalls how everyone was trying to find a “women’s aesthetic.”  While the artist still believes there is some basis of truth to this, she adds, “We don’t really know what a woman is, women have been so trained to defer to men – it will be a while before we really see a true feminist or women’s aesthetic,” says Nancy.

Her many applications of tree limb as surrogate self is a motif we see surface again and again in the work. In 2010 for a piece for Women’s Art Journal titled “The Healing Art of Nancy Azara,” I wrote about how Nancy applies the tree as a metaphor of the self and timeless symbol of transformation, an act situating her art practice in rhythm with seasonal life cycles. At times, this is made most visible in the energetic quality of wood transformed by sun, wind and rain. Often working with abandoned wood that has been discarded, the tree represents not only a surrogate self, but the collective voice of the feminine. Tree leaves typically become representative of hands, which become a repeating element in her practice, along with feet.

In her series of horizontal pieces began in the 1970s, Nancy’s form and function spoke to the feeling of not being able to stand on her own two feet. Otherwise put, the wounded feminine and the road of emancipation that will opportune standing our ground. As a child, the yearly trimming and wrapping of fig trees was hard for Nancy to bare. Her Father said, “It’s for their own good.” Nancy recalls, “Wildness wasn’t allowed, especially as girls.” When painted and carved the pieces of dead tree veritably become animate again, Nancy frames it as a collaboration with the tree. As a longterm maker and spiritual seeker, in her otherworldly strokes of hand and heart we find an intuitive but not necessarily essentialist understanding of women as linked with nature, knowing all too well how “Nature,” like women, for all of its creative chaos and beauty, has been subject to systematic violation and control. Nobby trees transmogrify into organs of the physical body, intestines, or the pulsation of dancing nerves. Nancy explains how carving within the body of the tree is like scripture on an interior scroll, a secret writing, informed perhaps by Nancy’s study of Western calligraphy (a traditional art tracing back to the glyphs of Ancient Sumeria).

While Nancy’s work is certainly situated culturally and historically in the global Art capital of the world, vulnerable and wisely innocent amidst it all, it also recalls, and likewise envisions, something else altogether. Many of us understand the tree as axis mundi, symbol of an earth/sky continuum and the link to shamanism and animist religions of the ancient world. Certainly, within the matrifocal earth-based societies of prehistory, trees were celebrated and revered. Whereas Azara’s earlier works in gold-leaf drew on the qualities we associate with gold (opulence, royalty, sin, sunlight), these latest trunks and tendrils exude silver and white to express wisdom and the moon, recalling how organic matter tends to appear more luminous in the moonlight. 

As A.T. Mann proliferates on in his book The Sacred Language of Trees, across the world ancient indigenous societies shared a holy reverence for trees. In the Hindu cosmology, based on tree worship in India tracing as far back as the fourth millennium BCE,  the tree indicates the state of the universe – what is created, peaks and is destroyed through the vacillating energy of Shakti, or the manifest Goddess power of the Universe. The cosmic world tree of Hinduism symbolizes the power of vegetation, universal life, potency and immortality. The Hindu culture of tree worship reflects the way in which trees, like female humans, are very much considered an embodiment of the Goddess – the spirit animating the physical world of nature affecting fertility and growth. If Nancy’s ritual dressing and shaping of wood is a physical manifestation of her sensuous relationship to nature, her study of folklore and proto-patriarchal tradition has only magnified the cultural biases around gender and age todays female artists face. 

Mann explains how the most prominent representations of the tree as sacred trace back to ancient Egypt, where the celestial waters of life came from the roots of a much revered “heaven tree” or “tree of life,” often represented as a date palm in the iconography of early Egyptian Art.  Trees were not only the close kin of many a Pharaoh, they were linked to the major Egyptian gods and goddesses, namely Horus (acacia) Osiris (willow) and Ra (sycamore). Meanwhile amongst prehistoric Cretan Tree Matriarchies, trees and plants comprised the primary iconography of the sacred and were revered as goddesses. For a land covered with vast forests that provided both food as well as wood, it was natural for Cretans to worship the Goddess in the body of the tree to ensure the fertility of the land. Many recall the the double-headed axe symbol, a tool utilized to cut down trees in a sacramental way. In ancient art of this time we often see a female God figure wielding such a double-headed axe. In Cretan chopping trees and wood was a woman’s task associated with the mythical, magical world of fertility, the underworld, cycles of birth/death/rebirth and even resurrection – all common themes of Nancy’s work harkening back to matriarchal tree goddesses throughout the world. (3) 

In Azara’s Gold Coat with Red Triangle, carved and painted wood with gold leaf (2020), we really begin to see a synergy materializing around Azara’s wide range of spiritual influences and interests. The short abstract about this triumphant wall of red and gold bespeaks of Etruscan death masks, female focused spiritual practice, ritual burial sites and their treasures. Throughout her body of work we see the artist interjecting “female loss” into the often over-materialist, fallow dialogue here in the West. Meanwhile, the artist’s homemade egg tempera paint preserves the otherworldly, painted facades of her pieces for centuries. Over the year’s Nancy’s frequent use of red has connoted women’s moon blood as well as the circulation of blood which transports and expels vital substances from the body. The artist notes that in Chinese culture red represents luck and good fortune. I India, a regular female-led “Festival of Red” celebrates menstruation and women’s Shakti power in the traditionally matrifocal state of Kerala.  It is through works such as these that Azara gives voice to that which is absent within the annals of history, politics and the public sphere. Nancy also spoke to how todays increasing openness and honesty on the part of women is defining the new generation and the new age, what many seers and mystics over the years have termed the “Age of Aquarius” – the dawn of a new time on Earth defined by the attributes of honesty and compassion.

As we continue on with our quiet afternoon, Nancy calls back to a woodpecker tapping on the barn outside. A regular visitor, he comes often to disturb the quiet of her studio sanctuary in the woods. After a long chat in the barn we make our exit down the way into an adjacent smaller, heated side studio where she has tucked away the Crow and Sandal collage series. If the larger studio’s frosty hinterland spoke to death, bones, ancestors, burial treasures and renewal – this more abstract series, strewn with symbolism and flourishes of the hand – speaks more directly to death. “Up until age sixty life has a feeling of endlessness to it, even though it doesn’t,” reflects Nancy. 

Learn more about Nancy’s work at NancyAzara.com

Follow the artist on Instagram @azaranancy

Stay tuned for information about High Chair and Other Works Nancy’s Summer 2021 Solo Show at A.I.R. Gallery, join her newsletter here for updates. Nancy will also have a work in this upcoming March show curated by Linnea Vedder for Essex Flowers:

The Word for World is Forest
Curated by Linnea Vedder
ESSEX FLOWERS
March 6-28, 2021

Opening Reception: Saturday March 6th, 12-6pm

Nancy Azara / Karen Azoulay / Jesse Cohen / Tom Costa / Erin Eikler / Adjua Gargi Nzinga Greaves / Eva Joly / Caitlin Macbride / Virginia Lee Montgomery / Greg Parma-Smith / Michael Wang

NOTES

1. Holland Cotter, “Nancy Azara at Donahue/Sosinski Gallery” The New York Times, Art in Review, Friday, February 4, 2000

2)   Chögyam Trungpa,  Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism Shambhala (2002) 

3)   A.T. Mann, The Sacred Language of Trees (2012)

Katie Cercone *Or Nah* is an interdisciplinary artist, curator, scribe, yogi and spiritual gangsta. Cercone has been included in exhibitions at the Brooklyn Museum, Bronx Museum, Whitney Museum, Dallas Contemporary and C24 Gallery. She has published critical writing in ART PAPERS, White Hot, Posture, Brooklyn Rail, Hysteria, Bitch Magazine, Art511, Utne Reader and N.Paradoxa. She is co-leader of the queer, transnational feminist collective Go! Push Pops and creative director of ULTRACULTURAL OTHERS Urban Mystery Skool. Cercone was a 2015 National Endowment for the Arts Fellow for the U.S.-Japan Exchange Program in Tokyo. Follow her on instagram @0r__Nah_spiriturlgangsta and learn more at KatieCercone.com