Barbara Nessim has been drawing and painting for most of her life. My Compass Is the Line, her first solo show in Chicago, spans media, including drawings, computer-generated prints, and a site-specific installation. Still, the real heart of the exhibition is her sketchbooks. She calls them her forever books, and the phrase is exactly right.
“The books tell the story, they see it all, the good parts, the bad, and the ugly. Nothing escapes. Nothing edited. It’s the rule. It must have a beginning and an end, just as I live my life.” They have the quality of a private document that has been made public without being sanitised.
Nessim was born in the Bronx in 1939, grew up watching her mother design clothes, and got herself through Pratt Institute by creating fashion illustrations in New York’s garment district. She graduated in 1960 and went freelance almost immediately. The 1960s and 70s were productive and politically charged for her, with imagery that responded directly to the conditions facing women in American society. Nessim’s work challenges traditional gender norms, and she has been an important figure in the women’s movement. She was one of the first women to build a serious reputation in commercial illustration, a world that was, and largely remained, dominated by men.
What makes Nessim genuinely unusual in the history of American art is the 1982 residency at Time Inc.’s Video Information Services, after which computers became central to her practice. This was 1982. The tools were crude, and the aesthetic possibilities were almost entirely uncharted. She went in anyway. The computer art prints in this show carry that early-adopter energy, images that look both of their moment and somehow ahead of it. By the time digital art became fashionable, Nessim had been working in it for a decade.
She has spent a substantial part of her career teaching, including chairing the illustration department at Parsons from 1992 to 2004 and working in the MFA Computer Arts programme at the School of Visual Arts. The Norman Rockwell Museum made her its first Artist Laureate in 2009. These are not incidental biographical details. They suggest an artist who has thought seriously about how creative practice gets transmitted and sustained across generations.
The line in the exhibition’s title is not a metaphor. It is the actual thing. Nessim has described her process as starting with a line anywhere and following it to uncover what lies beneath. The paintings and drawings in this show have that quality of unfolding rather than arriving fully formed, each mark prompting the next, the image discovering itself as it goes. There is real confidence in that approach, a willingness not to know what you’re making until you’ve made it.
The exhibition is curated by Ionit Behar and supported by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, among others. If you are in Chicago or can get there, it is worth your time.
Barbara Nessim: My Compass Is the Line is organised by DePaul Art Museum and curated by Ionit Behar, PhD. The show closes this month, on June 21st.