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VirginiaJaramilloPrincipleofEquivalence_final.pdf

“Virginia Jaramillo: Principle of Equivalence” provides a comprehensive look at the artist’s career from 1964–2021.

This summer, Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art will present Virginia Jaramillo: Principle of Equivalence, the first retrospective exhibition by New York-based artist Virginia Jaramillo (Mexican American, born 1939). The exhibition debuts in Kansas City, MO where it will be on view at Kemper Museum from Jun. 2–Aug. 27, 2023 before traveling nationally. 

Jaramillo has been at the heart of influential movements in American post-war abstraction for decades. She was born in El Paso, TX, raised in Los Angeles, CA, and moved to New York City in 1966 after a year in Paris. When she settled in Soho at 109 Spring Street in the late-1960s, Jaramillo’s neighbors were artists Frederick James Brown, Mark di Suvero, Donald Judd, and Joan Semmel, alongside other influential New York artists, musicians, and writers. Throughout the 1970s and 80s, she participated in artist organizations and groups including the New York Feminist Art Institute and the 120 Wooster Street Collective. During this period, her work was included in group exhibitions at institutions such as the Whitney Museum of American Art; the Mexican Museum in San Francisco, CA; and the California Museum of African American Art in Los Angeles, CA, among others. Notable examples include The De Luxe Show in 1971 in Houston, TX (considered the first racially integrated exhibition in the U.S. to gain national attention) and Women Artists of the 80’s, in 1984 at A.I.R. Gallery, New York, NY. 

The significance of Jaramillo’s work has been affirmed in recent groundbreaking group exhibitions including Now Dig This!: Art and Black Los Angeles 1960–1980 (Hammer Museum, 2011); We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965–85 (Brooklyn Museum, 2017); and Women in Abstraction (Centre Pompidou, 2021); yet there has not been a comprehensive presentation of the 84-year-old artist’s practice and impact before Principle of Equivalence.

Throughout her career, Jaramillo has explored earthly and metaphysical realms through abstract paintings and handmade paper works with such diverse interests as physics, the cosmos, mythology, ancient cultures, and modernist design philosophies. This exhibition presents more than 70 exceptional paintings and handmade paper works, including her breakthrough Curvilinear series and large-scale linen fiber work, Anonymous Site #1-603 (1990) from Kemper Museum’s Permanent Collection.

“This exhibition is a milestone in the artist’s career and serves as a reminder to look with intention toward those who have made important—if historically excluded—contributions to the history of American abstraction,” said Erin Dziedzic, director of curatorial affairs for Kemper Museum. “Tracing the impact of Jaramillo’s practice, the exhibition will feature early examples that pushed the depth of the painted surface to its very limits, innovations in the centuries-old practice of handmade papermaking, and recent large-scale paintings in which Jaramillo abstracts the architectural ruins of spiritual sites.”

Virginia Jaramillo: Principle of Equivalence is organized by Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art in Kansas City, Missouri and curated by Erin Dziedzic, director of curatorial affairs. A full-color catalogue in conjunction with this exhibition will be distributed by Yale University Press. 

Major support for “Virginia Jaramillo: Principle of Equivalence” is provided by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. 

Hardcover
9780300270303
200 Pages
9.00 x 10.00 in 
130 color illus.

Edited by Erin Dziedzic. Contributions by Matthew Jeffrey Abrams, Barbara Calderón, Iris Colburn, Elisabeth Kirsch, and Courtney J. Martin. Virginia Jaramillo: Principle of Equivalence documents more than 60 works. In addition to an overview of Jaramillo’s life and work, this comprehensive catalogue includes in-depth essays on the artist’s formative years in Los Angeles, her forty-year devotion to hand papermaking, and the recent resurgence of her painting practice. An interview with Jaramillo rounds out the volume. Distributed for Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art by Yale University Press. Click here for more information about the catalogue.

The exhibition includes more than seventy works created from 1964–2021. Six distinct series are represented: the Black Paintings, the Paris Paintings, the Curvilinears, the Stained Paintings, a selection of nearly thirty years of handmade paper works, and recent paintings.  

The Black Paintings comprise the earliest series on view in the exhibition. Jaramillo created these works in the early 1960s in Los Angeles. Inspired in part by California desert landscapes, these works demonstrate Jaramillo’s innovative use of color and material, achieving a rich earth-like texture and quality. Structure Nine was featured in the 2011 “Now Dig This: Art and Black Los Angeles 1960–1980” organized by the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, CA. It is the first time Terra Mancha (1964) has been on view.

Virginia Jaramillo (Mexican American, born 1939), Structure Nine, 1965, emulsion and gesso on canvas, 60½ x 43½ inches, Private Collection, London. © Virginia Jaramillo. Image courtesy of the artist and Hales Gallery, and Pace Gallery. Photo: JSP Art Photography.

In 1965, Jaramillo’s husband, Daniel LaRue Johnson, was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation fellowship and the family relocated to Paris for one year. During this period, many American artists—particularly women artists and artists of color—pursued their work overseas due to the lack of opportunities, exclusivity in institutional representation, and discrimination that pervaded the art scene in the United States. It was Jaramillo’s first time abroad and the experience had a major impact. The Paris Paintings mark important developments in Jaramillo’s practice—the inclusion of more color, loosening, and smoothing of paint material, and transition of scale. This is the first time these four works are on view.


Virginia Jaramillo (Mexican American, born 1939), Paris Painting, 1965, oil on canvas, 18⅛ x 15 inches, Courtesy of the artist, Hales Gallery, and Pace Gallery. © Virginia Jaramillo. Image courtesy of the artist and Hales Gallery, and Pace Gallery. Photo by JSP Art Photography.

Jaramillo’s breakthrough Curvilinear paintings comprised her first major series created in New York, and they represent a defining period of aesthetic resolve. Jaramillo wanted the lines in the Curvilinears to appear as if someone had thrown a piece of thread onto the canvas. In these works, she made a small gesture seem immense, not simply by magnifying it, but by sparking the phenomenon of a metaphysical idea made tangible in paint. Green Dawn (1970) from the Joyner/Guiffrida Collection and Untitled (1971), from the Brooklyn Museum collection, both on view in this exhibition, were included in the 1971 “De Luxe Show” in Houston, TX, the first racially integrated exhibition in the U.S. Jaramillo was the only woman and only Latina in the exhibition.

Virginia Jaramillo (American, born 1939), Green Dawn, 1970, acrylic on canvas, 83⅞ x 72⅛ inches, The Joyner/Giuffrida Collection. © Virginia Jaramillo. Image courtesy of the artist and Hales, London and New York. Photo: Phoebe d'Heurle.

Created in the 1970s, Jaramillo’s Stained Painting series brings together some of the earth-like textures and forms of her earlier Black Painting series with a color palate inspired by her personal experiences traveling. While these personal references create a departure from her contemporaries, this series has formal connections to abstract painters such as Mark Rothko and Agnes Martin. This painting is part of Kemper Museum’s Permanent Collection and inspired the exhibition title.

Virginia Jaramillo (Mexican American,  born 1939), Principle of Equivalence, 1975, oil on canvas, 48¼ x 60 inches, Collection of the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, Missouri, Gift of Robert and Sally West, 2012.01.01. © Virginia Jaramillo, courtesy of the artist and Douglas Drake Fine Art, Kansas City, Missouri. Photo: E. G. Schempf, 2019.

In 1979, Jaramillo began creating handmade paper works; a practice she maintained for decades, but that is largely unknown in comparison to her paintings. These works, many of which are quite large, feature embossed details that are concealed and revealed throughout the physically demanding papermaking process. Jaramillo expressed her changing sensibility through this departure in media, exploring ideas from ancient land and archaeological sites to scientific theories and cosmology. The handmade paper works included in the exhibition were exhibited throughout the 1970s and 80s and many placed in institutional and private collections in and around the Greater Kansas City area.  

Virginia Jaramillo (Mexican American, born 1939), Untitled (#418), 1982, acrylic paint on handmade paper, 34¼ x 24½ inches, Courtesy of the Daum Museum of Contemporary Art, Sedalia, Missouri. © Virginia Jaramillo. 

After decades of creating handmade paper works, Jaramillo returned to painting with a focus on geographical sites and archaeological foundations in 2016. They are composed of linear constructions of angular and curved passages with textural surfaces that recall her continued interest in the earth. Elements of the compositions of these works are also culled from areas of earlier works, showing Jaramillo’s reflection on her decades-long practice. This site work, like many others, are titled after the geographic coordinates of a specific location, in this case Stonehenge. Her choses sites often carry a spiritual resonance with them as well.

Located in Kansas City, Missouri, Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art is a leading presenter of global modern and contemporary art in the region. As the first contemporary art museum in the state, Kemper Museum has connected Midwest communities with the artists of our time since 1994. The museum cares for nearly 1,500 artworks by hundreds of artists in its growing Permanent Collection. A rotating selection of these works are on view in the museum’s Gunnar Birkerts-designed building, alongside rotating special exhibitions. Each year, the museum presents eight to ten exhibitions and major projects, with a special focus on emerging, mid-career artists, as well as artists from historically excluded groups. An active calendar of creative public programs provides meaningful engagement opportunities for visitors of all ages and backgrounds.

Kemper Museum is an independent 501(c)(3) non-profit organization. Admission, parking, and public programs are always free, thanks to the generosity of members and other donors.

Media Contact: Louise Forster, lforster@kemperart.org, (816) 753-5784

Virginia Jaramillo’s first retrospective brings overdue attention to the artist’s practice, spanning nearly 60 years.