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Grant Wahlquist Gallery is pleased to announce Jill Poyourow’s second solo exhibition at the gallery, “You’re Gonna Make It After All!” The exhibition will run from March 3 through April 8, 2023. The gallery will host a reception with the artist on Saturday, March 18th, from 2 – 5 pm.

“You’re Gonna Make It After All!” is a focused presentation of new paintings and monoprints by an artist whose practice is exceptionally expansive: biology, natural history, migration, personal and cultural genealogy, the history and uses of photography, popular culture, illness, abstraction, and quotidian observations—Poyourow wrestles with and synthesizes them all. Originally trained in the environmental and biological sciences, Poyourow’s earliest works were driven by a hunger to capture the world around her, and this impulse to digest the panoply of her experiences remains, further deepened by lessons learned as a student of Allan Sekula and John Baldessari at CalArts and the indelible imprint of studio visits with feminist artists such as May Stevens and Eleanor Antin. Storytelling is at the heart of all her work, and Poyourow’s own story traverses the heady Los Angeles art world of the 1980s and 90s and her past nearly two decades in the woods of Cape Neddick, Maine. “You’re Gonna Make It After All!” contains many stories, which emphasize resiliency and solidarity from a uniquely Jewish American, feminist perspective.

There are many protagonists in these tales. Some are family members: Great Aunt Esther, who taught Poyourow how to draw and paint as a child; Great Uncle Alex, a lyricist in New York’s vaudeville circuit of the early 20th century; ancestors who made the journey from Eastern Europe to the United States for many of the same reasons as other members of the Jewish diaspora; and the artist’s late and dearly missed mother. These family stories intersect with larger historical narratives, for example that of Emma Lazarus, the Jewish poet and activist whose poem “The New Colossus” is inscribed on the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty (“Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free!”). Lazarus is the namesake of the Emma Lazarus Clubs, organizations of progressive Jewish women including Poyourow’s Great Aunt Esther, and this exhibition includes many iterations of a letter of solidarity Esther wrote on the Bronx Council of Emma Lazarus Clubs’ behalf to African American civil rights hero Rev. Joseph A. DeLaine in 1955.

These pieces also include numerous images of icons of popular culture of the second half of the 20th century, which not only serve as a generous access point for the viewer but also manifest Poyourow’s commitment to exploring where the public and the personal intersect. These icons share a sense of buoyancy, sometimes quiet, sometimes brash, that make them beloved by audience members who do not always share their backgrounds: Barbra Streisand as Fanny Brice riding a tugboat through New York harbor past the Statue of Liberty in “Funny Girl” (“Nobody’s gonna rain on my parade!”); Jennifer Grey held aloft as “Baby” Houseman in the Borscht Belt (“Nobody puts baby in a corner!”); and, of course, Mary Tyler Moore tossing her hat into the air.

Significantly, the dominant style of the works in “You’re Gonna Make It After All!” is collage-like, and nearly all of them contain some mixture of the above reference points and characters. The mood is Rauschenbergian: bright colors (pastel or acid pinks, blues, yellows, and greens), hybrid media, public and private meanings all mixed together. The exhibition’s retinal zing prompts reflection on enduring and resolutely contemporary questions: How do the stories we inherit and retell create that ever-slippery thing we call “the self”? How does trauma instill or defeat resiliency? How, without collapsing real and salient differences between them, can the experiences of oppressed groups contribute to meaningful solidarity? How do we contextualize and appreciate prior expressions of solidarity in view of changing understandings of what solidarity means? Poyourow’s embrace of these questions results in works that are personal, specific, accessible, and open all at once—and above all, exceptionally fresh.

Jill Poyourow received a B.S. from Western Washington University, Bellingham, and a B.F.A. and M.F.A. from California Institute of the Arts, Valencia. Poyourow's solo exhibitions include: Grant Wahlquist Gallery; POST, Los Angeles (catalogue with essay by Chris Kraus); and the Apex Gallery, South Dakota School of Mines, Rapid City. Her work has been featured in group exhibitions at venues including: POST; Thomas Solomon’s Garage, Los Angeles; the Center for Maine Contemporary Art; Dave Muller’s Three Day Weekend, Los Angeles; Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions; the Skirball Cultural Center, Los Angeles; the Armory Center for the Arts, Pasadena; the Laguna Art Museum, Laguna Beach, California; Annika Sundvik Gallery, New York; Side Street Projects, Santa Monica; and the First Biennale Internazionale delle Arti FiliForme.

The gallery is located at 30 City Center, Portland, Maine. Gallery hours are Wednesday through Saturday, 11 am to 6 pm, and by appointment. For more information, visit http://grantwahlquist.com, call 207.245.5732, or email info@grantwahlquist.com.

A story/some notes about my 2023 exhibition title

It was the summer of 2021, and after initially joining back into the world after the Covid lockdown we were all sent back into lockdown with the Omicron variant. I had been working diligently on some paintings to process grief over the unexpected loss of my mom, who was my best friend, in the spring of 2019.

But to tell this story I must back up a little bit. In 2015, my email address began to be included on a bunch of housing email lists when I began looking into a possible relocation to New York's Hudson Valley, where I grew up. Over the years since then, every now and then something comes into my inbox with a street address I recognize. Mostly I ignore these messages. But on a late July morning in 2021, one of these emails contained the address of the house next door to the house I lived in, the house where I had my first job, babysitting a newborn while the parents went into the city on Saturday nights for dinner and a show. I think I was probably around 12 years old at the time I began the position. I loved that there was always Coca-Cola stocked in the fridge, and a fresh bag of BBQ potato chips would be out on the counter for me to enjoy. I would be shown these things, each time before the couple left, to remind me where they were. I don't think I ever even saw the baby, maybe only one time. It was asleep when I arrived and was asleep when I left, usually around 2 am, when I myself would be asleep. I would only wake when the husband of the couple entered the TV room where I had drifted off some hours before their return home. He would drive me home since it was a very dark night, likely wintertime, and it was up a steep hill and then long steep driveway to my parents’ house on Bryant Pond Road in Putnam Valley. This makes me think of the times a child would be carried sleeping from the couch or back seat of a car, or wherever they fell asleep, to their bed, by a loving parent. Being very small at that age, it was one step beyond the neighbor carrying me from their tv room couch to my house. There is a difference though. Dollar bills were exchanged in the car's front seat before I got out of the passenger side and groggily made my way into my house and bed.

The housing listing caught my eye as I quickly perused my inbox since the street address instantly looked familiar. As a result, it sparked my attention, so I clicked on it. Very quickly I knew it was the house I used to babysit in. As I checked out the photos in the listing, I was gobsmacked that the kitchen was the same kitchen! Same bright red Formica countertops and built-in booth with red Naugahyde upholstery, complete with the original decorative metal upholstery tacks, and the same kitchen cabinets! I then saw the room where I used to sit and do my job. My job consisted of sitting on a couch and watching a color tv. And drinking Coca-Cola and eating barbeque potato chips. My house did not have a color tv at this time, only a very tiny black and white tv, so this position was quite the first gig!! In that room I very clearly remember a built-in glass doored cabinet, inside which would have been religious curios, icons, etc. I always remembered that cabinet as it was very unusual and commanded presence and attention, especially the ceramic statue of the Virgin Mary inside it. There it was, empty but still there! The entry doorway of the room just to the left of that built-in cabinet, there it was, exactly as I remembered. I took a whole bunch of screenshots, my excitement mounting. Then I discovered the Google maps icons, and immediately clicked the street view option. There I was, on the road where I used to live. It was a bright sunny morning when the Google truck took those photos. With the most gorgeous and painterly puffy white clouds reaching overhead. I walked (clicked) up the road to what used to be my parents’ driveway. I saw the mailbox of the current owners. I walked (clicked) up a little bit further, to the next house up, which used to be the Dworkin’s driveway, where I loved to pick and gorge on the wild berries that grew prolifically on a huge thicket every summer. And where there was a large field with a beautiful old red barn that I painted in autumn with a palette knife and fell in love with oil paint as a child. And where the school bus would turn around before heading back down the dangerously steep hill and pick me up on its way back to the main road a mile or so below. After one storm the ice was so treacherous that on the way down the bus slid off the road and was hanging on a tree trunk —the only thing keeping it from toppling over off a cliff and crashing. Coincidentally, that was one of the few days I was absent that year, not boarding the bus that morning.

The Coke and chips would be reaching their pinnacle in my brain by the time the intro song would come on for the Mary Tyler Moore Show. I was in absolute comfort mode, so happy, so hooked, my heart cemented into every bit of action that came after. I learned how to be an American woman on these Saturday nights, and I was so excited about one day being in the world and having a job and being able to support myself and have a family of co-workers. I felt such a sense of possibility and “sky is the limit” enthusiasm about my abilities to thrive with my talents, but above all, complete and unparalleled optimism about the future.

On that day in July of 2021, it all came flooding back, as a healing balm to what I currently felt. I had been through an extremely rough couple of years with my mom’s sudden passing two years prior, and then the pandemic soon after. During these years we all questioned whether we would make it. The political divisions in the country, the escalating climate catastrophes brought on by global warming, coupled with the pandemic virus added to my own personal complicated grief over losing my mom, my primary support system. It all had added up to a chronic sense of loss, uncertainty — a sense of fear over an impending permanent state of gloom and doom, disease, and death. That morning, when I found the YouTube video for the opening credits, listening to the song and watching Mary throw her hat into the air as the music crescendoed “You’re gonna make it after all!” — in an instant it all changed for me. The high note, the last note, an air of hopefulness, the screen then freezes with the final image of the hat above Mary’s head. There was the proof, the feeling I had in my heart that morning. Anchored by how music can trigger something beyond nostalgia, a pure and real emotional response, I believed it! One hundred percent! I was gonna make it after all! We were all gonna make it after all! It was the first time in years that I felt any kind of hope. I phoned up my mom’s lifelong best friend Ellie Greenfield (we became very close after my mom’s passing) and shared the experience with her. I told her it was going to be the title of my next show at the Grant Wahlquist Gallery. I told Grant I had the title for my next show.

Please see the show catalogue for more information....

The More the Merrier

Group Show at Grant Wahlquist Gallery in Portland, Maine. December 2-17, 2022.

Press Release pasted beneath image of "Full Belly" printed in the Portland Press Herald, Sunday, November 20, 2022.

The More the Merrier
12/2/22 – 12/17/22
 
Grant Wahlquist Gallery is thrilled to announce “The More the Merrier.” This holiday season, mindful of the fact that the Christmas story is also a refugee story, the gallery will donate 100% of its portion of proceeds from sales of works generously contributed by an all-star line-up of artists and dear friends to organizations advocating for and providing material assistance to refugees nationally and locally in Maine. Gather together with us on Saturday, December 3rd, from 4 - 7 pm for a reception and a dose of good cheer as we close out 2022 with optimism and resilience. For a preview of available works, click here.  With many thanks to all of the participating artists:

Tad Beck
Leon Benn
Katherine Bradford
Sascha Braunig
Henri Paul Broyard
Tom Butler
Diana Cherbuliez
Kenny Cole
James Chute
Christopher Clark
Grace DeGennaro
Carol Eisenberg
Meg Hahn
Alison Hildreth

Smith Galtney
Kate Greene
Tessa Greene O’Brien
Joe Mama-Nitzberg
Kyle Patnaude
Julie Poitras Santos
Jill Poyourow
Kate Russo
Will Sears
Gail Spaien
Jay Stern
Sara Stites
Jimmy Viera
Marguerite White

The gallery is located at 30 City Center, Portland, Maine. Gallery hours are Wednesday through Saturday, 11 am to 6 pm, and by appointment. For more information, visit http://grantwahlquist.com, call 207.245.5732, or email info@grantwahlquist.com.