Olive Ayhens

[5][10][21] Ayhens was active among a group of female Bay Area artists in the early 1970s (among them, Judith Linhares and M. Louise Stanley), who became known for work that drew upon feminist ideas, outsider and ethnographic art, and the Funk movement to explore more direct, personal and social narratives.

[6][19][5][10] The New Yorker's Andrea K. Scott suggested Ayhens's work was what might result "if modernist Florine Stettheimer had crossed paths with Greta Thunberg": colorful, kaleidoscopic composite paintings addressing climate change in which "whimsy tends to outstrip dread.

"[9] Stephen Maine suggests that a central, animating paradox of Ayhens's work is a contradiction between its profusion of eccentric pictorial detail and its ambiguous intent which encompasses "cultural symbol, narrative device, autobiographical marker, or just the fun of paint.

[38][40][24] In brightly painted, intricate compositions she played on variations of aboriginal human, natural and fantasy forms stylized into tapestry-like patterns (e.g., Nutty Woman and Calm Man, 1971) or surrounded by seas of organic and decorative elements that suggested instability and the power of greater forces (Love in the Water, 1980).

[21][5] Arts Magazine critic Robert Mahoney described the series' title work as "an energetic, Red Grooms-like panorama of a lower Manhattan surrounded by green slime" whose skyline that seemed "to be melting like a birthday cake in acid rain.

"[47] In three solo exhibitions at Gary Tatintsian Gallery (2002–04), Ayhens presented paintings that interjected the natural into the urban and vice versa (Skyscrapers in Yellowstone, 1998) with fantastical, vertiginous scenes of cramped and crumpled, unstable metropolises and gridlocked highways overrun by herds of animals, primeval floods, canyons and forests.

"[3][8][15] In one such work, Urban Strata (2004), Ayhens introduced interior space into the composition; it merged a bird's-eye-view cityscape with a funhouse-like depiction both inside and outside a large, glassed-in auto show packed with consumers, camouflaged soldiers, cars and escalators.

[29] During the latter 2000s, Ayhens continued to explore interior-exterior ambiguities, incorporating new visual influences including opulent Moorish and Northern Renaissance architecture, the technology of modern labs and office spaces, and malls.

[10][6] Flecks in the Foam (2012) offered a panoramic cityscape of out-of-scale, swaying skyscrapers and tangled computer lab cables, a crashing monster wave and police cruisers, evoking a sense of rising ocean levels and overall calamity.

[10][19] In the latter show, Ayhens depicted a contemporary world teeming with strange creatures, as in Camelid in the City (2019), in which a prehistoric mammal perches on the banks of an acid-green East River, its yellow-orange hide echoing the glinting lights of a distant Manhattan skyline.