Ann Agee
[8][9][10] She first received critical attention in the influential and divisive "Bad Girls" exhibition,[11] curated by Marcia Tucker at the New Museum in 1994, where she installed a functional, handmade ceramic bathroom, rendered in the classic blue-and-white style of Delftware.
[32][33][10][34][35] Agee engages these traditions and materials with an irreverent, feminist stance that incorporates her personal experience, particularly around work and gender issues, such as the juggling of artist, mother, homemaker and producer roles, the division of labor, and the conceptualizing of craft skill in relation to art.
[4][38] The imagery offers what Metropolis calls, "a Rabelaisian tour" of the flows of the water supply through cities, factories and home, connecting the body, public and private functions, and the architectural and anatomical.
[6][45][44] Writer Maureen Sherlock calls the show "a tender catalogue of the unique phrasing and nuanced dressing of the battalions of women in the street" articulating the partial triumphs, daily struggles, and inventiveness of everyday life;[6] Dominique Nahas writes that each figure suggests its own world "with an almost Baudelairean concern with individuality of expression," which he compares to the observational Ashcan School paintings of John Sloan and George Bellows.
[3][37] Agee next placed her figurines in multi-figure narrative tableaux, whose expressive postures, gestures and facial features portrayed ordinary rites of passage, manual labor, and domestic scenarios.
presented five birth-focused sculptural tableaux, including Birth Class, which features colorfully dressed, slightly giddy pregnant women and partners watching a couple and a midwife give a demonstration.
[1][12] Artforum compares the dense, decorative layered imagery on the vases to the Surrealist "refraction of the unconscious and the everyday";[5] Lilly Wei describes the figurines as "earthy, lively, both sardonic and goofily sweet, updated commedia dell'arte types";[1] This work—often solid white and appearing silhouette-like against bright, hand-painted wallpapers—is frequently produced and replicated under the auspices of "Agee Manufacturing Co." (complete with stamps like those on Kohler Co.
[12][1][47] The home-industry concept places Agee in the roles of worker, shop boss, owner and shopkeeper, opening a conversation touching on class, the dignity of labor and craft, feminism, capitalism and modern family life.
[47][48][49] Agee's later exhibitions and installations offer diverse displays of ceramic figurines, domestic objects and pieces of furniture, set against hand-painted and stenciled, large-scale "wallpaper drawings" on Thai mulberry paper.
[5][8][20] Agee first exhibited wallpaper drawings in her "Quotidian" show (1996), re-appropriating inexpensive fabrics and bits of household product labels that she painstakingly painted in floral-like motifs on long scrolls (e.g., Jello Yellow Calico, 1995).
[6][23][33] In their repetition and fragmentation, her wallpaper drawings suggest mass production and modernist collage, yet subvert both with what Maureen Sherlock calls their "Flatbush funky, homegrown American Pop," hand-painted technique.
