Jennifer Bartlett
Falcon Avenue, Seaside Walk, Dwight Street, Jarvis Street, Greene Street
1976
Not on view
Date
1976
Classification
Paintings
Medium
Enamel, screenprint, and baked enamel on steel, eighty parts
Dimensions
Overall: 51 × 259in. (129.5 × 657.9 cm)
Accession number
77.22a-bbbb
Credit line
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; purchase, with funds from the Louis and Bessie Adler Foundation, Inc., Seymour M. Klein, President and the National Endowment for the Arts
Rights and reproductions
©Jennifer Bartlett
The painted steel plates that compose Jennifer Bartlett’s Falcon Avenue, Seaside Walk, Dwight Street, Jarvis Street, Greene Street are formatted on a grid. Bartlett uses the sequence of individual steel squares to develop a larger narrative composition, which shifts from representational forms, including avenues, houses, trees, and yards, to energetic painterly passages to total abstraction. Bartlett has called the house “just a given image” that she likes to use for formal experimentation: “its construction,” she remarked, “is very abstract, just squares that are very stable and that are divisible in an interesting number of ways.” And yet the home also symbolizes the realm of human activity. Here, it is even more specific—and autobiographical. Bartlett has associated major personal experiences (birth, childhood, marriage, graduate school, and divorce) with the five different addresses that are listed in the work’s title, and which appear to correspond with the work’s five-part structure.