REGISTRATION IS FULL - The Life and Art of Carmen Cicero: A Panel Discussion Moderated by Curator David Ebony

Friday, September 12, from 5:00 - 6:00 pm.

with Mary Abell, Bill Evaul, and Deborah Forman, moderated by David Ebony

[Image: Carmen Cicero in his Bowery loft, c. 2012.]

Mary Ellen Abell earned her Ph.D. in Art History at the Graduate Center, City University of New York, focusing on American art. She was curator of the comprehensive 2007 exhibition Edwin Dickinson in Provincetown 1912–1937 at the Provincetown Art Association and Museum, which won an award from the International Art Critics Association (New England chapter) for “Best Historical Monographic Museum Show in New England” (2007). In addition to her writing and curatorial projects, she was on the faculty and Chair of the Department of Visual Arts, Graphic Design and Digital Arts at Dowling College in Oakdale, New York, and Director of the Long Point Gallery in Provincetown (1987-1994). She is a member of the International Association of Art Critics and married to Carmen Cicero. She resides in New York and Truro.

Bill Evaul studied painting and printmaking at Syracuse University School of Art and Pratt Institute (BFA) with graduate seminars at the Whitney Museum of American Art (1981). He came to Provincetown in 1970 as a painting Fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center. While living in New York, Evaul further developed his printmaking skills by working at Solo Press -- contract printing for artists -- and teaching lithography at Pratt Graphics Center. As a contributing writer for Print Review and other magazines, he produced reviews and scholarly articles, including an important historical research paper entitled The Provincetown Printers: Genesis of a Unique Woodcut Tradition, which helped in the revival of the obscure and nearly lost technique of single-block "white-line" printmaking.

Evaul's work has been exhibited or collected by numerous museums including The Zimmerli Museum of Art at Rutgers University, The Georgia Museum of Art, The Sunrise Art Museum, The Kresge Art Museum, The Provincetown Art Association and Museum, The Pilgrim Monument & Provincetown Museum, the Cape Cod Museum of Art, and the Museum of Fine Arts (CCMoA), Boston, among others. Evaul was the recipient of the 2020 CCMoA Muse Artist Award for his contributions to the Cape Cod arts community as an artist, educator, historian, and curator. A one-person exhibition of his artwork titled Song and Dance at the CCMoA followed in the same year.

As an educator, Bill Evaul periodically presents lectures and workshops at a variety of institutions such as the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art, Philadelphia, PA; The Georgia Museum of Art, Athens, GA; The Sunrise Art Museum, Charleston, WV; Syracuse University School of Art, Syracuse, NY; The Zimmerli Art Museum and others, as well as numerous local arts and historical institutions on Cape Cod, MA.

David Ebony is a contributing editor of Art in America and a frequent contributor to Artnet News and Yale University Press online, among other publications. He is the author of numerous artist monographs, including most recently Larry Poons (Abbeville) and Stephen Antonakos: Neon and Geometry.

Deborah Forman is the author of five books published by Schiffer Books: Perspectives on the Provincetown Art Colony; Contemporary Cape Cod Artists: Images of Land and Sea; Contemporary Cape Cod Artists: People & Places; Contemporary Cape Cod Artists: On Abstraction; and Art from Cape Cod: Selections from the Cape Cod Museum of Art. She also wrote Horizon by the Sea: Paintings by George Xiong and Shaping Cultural Diversity: Paintings by Duoling Huang. Her essays have appeared in The Art of Carmen Cicero and The Tides of Provincetown catalogue (New Britain Museum of American Art). She has curated several exhibitions at the Cape Cod Museum of Art: The Hans Hofmann Legacy: Creative Diversity; Modernists Out of the Mainstream: Art from the Permanent Collection of the Cape Cod Museum of Art; Go Figure: Exploring the Human Form; Interpreting Their World: Varujan Boghosian, Carmen Cicero, Elspeth Halvorsen, Paul Resika; and Donald Stoltenberg: Building His World. She wrote the script, conducted the interviews, and worked on the filming for Art In Its Soul, an award-winning documentary on the history of the Provincetown art colony, which aired on public television stations nationwide. As an artist, she works in mixed media and digital art. She is represented by Cross Rip Gallery in Harwich Port. She studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and the Philadelphia Museum School of Art, and has a degree in journalism from Temple University.

Carmen Cicero is now in the midst of his seventh decade in the contemporary art world of New York City. His works of the 1950s—collected by the Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim, the Whitney, and other major museums—combined the gestures of Abstract Expressionism with the complex emergent forms of Surrealist automatism. In the 1960s, Cicero was one of the first members of the American avant-garde to return to figuration, pursuing, through the 1960s and 1970s, a style called “figurative expressionism.” This evolved, beginning in the 1990s, into his more recent “visionary” mode, in which he depicts, with a startling clarity, mysterious scenes animated by multiple contradictory feelings—unfulfilled desires, jealousy, despair, and isolation—as well as a generous dose of humor.        

Carmen Cicero was born on August 14, 1926, in Newark, New Jersey. From 1947 to 1951, Cicero attended the New Jersey State Teachers College (now Kean University), Newark, and in 1953, he briefly pursued graduate work in painting at Hunter College, New York, studying with Robert Motherwell and Hans Hofmann in Provincetown. The two abstract painters and their circle of artists, poets, and musicians were immensely influential for Cicero, whose singular explorations of abstraction coalesced within the overarching New York school of his teachers and friends.

Cicero's early work combined the gestures of Abstract Expressionism with the artist's interest in Surrealist automatism. Many of his paintings were first executed in light brushstrokes, free-associating shapes with geographic locations or literary motifs, such as the mountains of Catalonia (in Near Tibidabo, 1950) or the strange creatures of Franz Kafka (in Odradek, 1959). The artist would work his black-and-white compositions further, adding the sharp lines and erratic forms that distinguished his oeuvre in the 1950s.

In 1956, Cicero had his first solo exhibition at Peridot Gallery, New York, the gallery that exhibited the works of Louise Bourgeois and Philip Guston in solo shows a decade prior; Peridot continued to exhibit Cicero's abstractions through 1969. His work was also shown at such venues as the Museum of Modern Art, New York (1953, 1956, 1957, 1959, 1960, 1961, 1962); Newark Museum (1955, 1964, 1966, 1967); Art Institute of Chicago (1957, 1959, 1961); Fine Arts Pavilion, New York World's Fair (1964); Whitney Annual (later the Whitney Biennial), New York (1955, 1959, 1960, 1961, 1962, 1963, 1965); as well as the Guggenheim Museum's 1959 exhibition inaugurating its Frank Lloyd Wright–designed building. In 1957 and again in 1963, he was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship. From 1959 to 1968, Cicero taught painting at Sarah Lawrence College, Bronxville, New York.

In 1971, the contents of Cicero's Englewood, New Jersey, studio, which included the entire body of work still in the artist's possession, were lost in a fire. From that point forward, his painting took a personal turn, combining figuration, landscape, and wit in compositions with Surrealist overtones. Eschewing pure abstraction, Cicero focused instead on the continued development of what he referred to as "figurative abstraction," a style he experimented with in the 1960s that would become emblematic of his later work's representation of states of mind. From 1970 through 2001, Cicero was a professor of painting at Montclair State University, New Jersey, where he earned an MFA in 1991. Cicero received the Krasner Lifetime Achievement Award from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation (2007), the Jacob Lawrence and Gwendolyn Knight Award, American Academy of Arts and Letters (2016) and the Lifetime Achievement Award, Provincetown Art Association and Museum (2012). He lives and works in New York City and Truro, Massachusetts with his wife Mary Ellen Abell.

To date, Carmen Cicero has had over 70 solo exhibitions, been in over 220 group exhibitions and included in 33 museums (including four works in the Whitney Museum, two drawings at the Museum of Modern Art, one painting at the Guggenheim and three paintings at the Hirshhorn Museum).

[Information excerpted from the Guggenheim, New York.]

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