Deborah Remington

Deborah Remington
Haddonfield (1965), oil on canvas, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
Born	Deborah Remington June 25, 1930 Haddonfield, New Jersey, U.S.
Died	April 21, 2010 (age 79) Moorestown, New Jersey, U.S.
Nationality	American
Education	Philadelphia Museum School of Industrial Art, San Francisco Art Institute,
Known for	Abstract painting
Movement	Abstract Hard-edge painting

Deborah Remington (June 25, 1930 – April 21, 2010) was an American abstract painter. Her most notable work is characterized as Hard-edge painting abstraction.

She became a part of the San Francisco Bay Area's Beat scene in the 1950s. In 1965, she moved to New York where her style solidified and her career grew substantially. A twenty-year retrospective of her work was exhibited at the Newport Harbor Art Museum in California, in 1983.^[1]

Her work was a part of more than thirty solo exhibition and hundreds of group exhibitions including three Whitney Museum of American Art annuals.^[2] She was the descendant of artist Frederic Remington.^[3]

Biography

Remington was born in 1930 and grew up in Haddonfield, New Jersey. She was the daughter of the late Malcolm VanDyke and Hazel (née Stewart) Remington.^[4] With an early inclination towards art, she enrolled in classes at the Philadelphia Museum School of Industrial Art as a teenager. In 1955, she received her BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute where she studied under Clyfford Still.

By the time she graduated from the Institute, she had become affiliated with the Bay Area's Beat scene. In 1954, she was one of six painters and poets, and the only woman, who founded the now legendary Six Gallery in San Francisco.^[3]

After graduation, Remington spent two years traveling and living in Japan, Southeast Asia, and India. While in Japan she studied classical and contemporary calligraphy and earned money by teaching English and tutoring actors. This led to some work acting in B movies, including the film "Nightmare's Bad Dream".^[5]

Returning to the United States, she took up painting more seriously. She began to exhibit her work at the Dilexi Gallery in San Francisco and had solo shows in 1962, 1963, and 1965. In 1965, Remington moved to New York City. She had her first solo exhibition in NYC in 1966 at the Bykert Gallery at 15 W. 57th Street in Manhattan. She had four solo shows there between 1967 and 1974.^[2][3]

In 1983 Remington had a twenty-year retrospective exhibition that opened at the Newport Harbor Museum in California. This exhibition later traveled to the Oakland Museum (today, the Oakland Museum of California) and other venues.^[2] In 1984 she received a Guggenheim Fellowship.^[6]

She was elected to the National Academy of Design in 1999,^[7] and in the same year was the recipient of a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant.^[2]

Death

Remington died April 21, 2010 in Moorestown, New Jersey of cancer, aged 79.^[3]

Exhibitions

In 1962, while still living on the East Coast, Remington began showing at Dilexi Gallery in San Francisco. It was at Dilexi Gallery where Remington had some of her first solo exhibitions. After moving to New York, she became associated with the Bykert Gallery, with a solo exhibition there in 1967.

In December 1983, a twenty-year retrospective of the artist's work opened at the Newport Harbor Art Museum in Newport, California, curated by Paul Schimmel and accompanied by an exhibition catalog with an essay by Dore Ashton. The exhibition traveled to the Oakland Museum of California.

Selected collections

Remington's work has been collected by numerous institutions both in the United States and abroad: the Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois; the Auckland Museum, New Zealand; the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris; the Boymans Museum, Rotterdam, the Netherlands; the Centre d'Art et de Culture George Pompidou, Paris; the Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus, Ohio; the Museum of Art at the University of California, Berkeley, California; the Smithsonian American Art Museum (formerly National Museum of American Art), Washington, D.C.; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.^[8]

Awards and recognition

In 1999, Remington was elected to the National Academy of Design and received a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant that same year. She was awarded a National Endowment Fellowship from 1979-1980. In the fall of 1973, Remington was a Tamarind Fellow Artist-in-Residence.^[8]

References

External links

• Biographic notes
• Whitney Museum of American Art Deborah Remington Collection
• Art in America review
• ArtCritical.com review