Joan Waltemath, born in 1953, grew up on theGreat Plains where her German ancestors settled in the late 19th century. Her early experiences in nature and looking at native geometries inform her subsequent abstract paintings.
Waltemath is an artist whose work investigates the temporal and spatial registers of painting and drawing set in relation to architectonic elements (
Tilted Arc). Grounded in the cross-disciplinary exchange that began for her in the 1970s downtown New York, her practice continues to engage dialogically with other media and disciplines. She has collaborated with filmmakers, musicians, architects and writers in collective groups and through special projects since the early days of the No Wave era.
Waltemath’s work emerges as a response to materials, visions, architectures, and historical contexts. Her engagement at the
I. S. Chanin School of Architecture since the early 90’s has led to several collaborative projects: with architect Heike Büttner in Berlin, with
I Beam Design in New York and with architects
Ballman/Khapalova in Hooper, Nebraska for theJoan Waltemath Foundation.
Her ongoing dialogue with architecture both informs and inspires her work. A series of eight large-scale paintings, begun at the Bemis Center in 2008,
The Treaty of 1868: an epic (2009-2018), takes as its subject her relationship to the genocide unleashed upon the Plains Indian tribes in the aftermath of the Fort Laramie treaty between the United States and the Dakota, Lakota, and Arapaho tribes. In 2011, after two years of work on the project, Waltemath sought out Lakota medicine man Dave Swallow and ceremonially requested his help in coming to terms with her legacy as a descendent of peoples who settled on the treaty land. Working on grounds of multiple sewn canvas panels, Waltemath’s monumental paintings reflect the fractured and multi-perspectival nature of the history being told as she processes her ongoing relation with Swallow’s family.
Her paintings and drawings are in the collections of the
Museum of Modern Art, the National Gallery of Art, Yale University Art Galleries, the
Harvard University Art Museum and the
Art Institute of Chicago, among others. Her solo exhibitions include
One does not negate the other, Peter Hionas Gallery, New York, NY (2015);
Torso/Roots, Galerie von Bartha, Basel, Switzerland (2007);
The invisible web of Iktomie iyokipi, Newspace, Los Angeles, CA (2002); and
Joan Waltemath, The Drawing Center, New York, NY (1998). Her work was also presented in the group exhibition
Géricault to Rockburne: Selections from the Michael and Juliet Rubenstein Collection, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY (2020).
Waltemath is the recipient of the
Helen Frankenthaler Award for Painting (2022) from the Foundation for Contemporary Art, the
Jacob Lawrence Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters(2018); a
Creative Capital Award for the Treaty of 1868: an epic (2012);and a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant (2008). She has participated in residencies at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, Omaha, NE (2017); ArtFarm, Marquette, NE (2014-2016, 2011, 2009); the Jentel Foundation, Banner, WY(2008, 2005); and The Edward F. Albee Foundation, Montauk, NY (2006, 2003).
