Francine Hunter McGivern
Spatial Isolation = Architectural Adjustment. 2022
Gouache and Acrylic on Cardboard (framed)
14” x 11”
EXCERPT from Carter Ratcliff’s essay, Francine Hunter McGivern: An Art of Everything
In these works, begun late in 2019, before the onset of Covid and throughout 2021, the holes symbolize loss; the memory and universal absence of those who have died in her lifetime. At first, Hunter McGivern pierced tracings from earlier paintings onto acetate transfers of images. By enlarging the piercings to larger holes in painted paper, wood panel and cardboard, the artist created variations on the geometric configurations of Compossibilities and the Hermetic Cipher series. Lacking the artist’s commentary on the In Memoriam/holes works, we would view them as variations on her other geometric pieces. To understand her purpose, we need her to tell of her grief and her need to acknowledge it with images we might well call ceremonial. She gives this account with unmitigated indifference to the modernist dictum that abstract art should stand on its own, untouched by language. To the impossible ideal of “pure art” Hunter McGivern has always responded with an exuberantly practical impurity rooted in a deep understanding that art generates its meanings from new mixtures, even conflicts, of modes and manners.
Carter Ratcliff
See longer bio on Hunter McGivern’s work at the end of this page.
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Francine Hunter McGivern
For the last fifty years, Francine Hunter McGivern’s work has embraced a range of ideas grounded in a Post-Conceptual practice that includes performance, video, text, multi-media installations, drawing, painting and sculpture.
In 1977, Hunter McGivern, inspired by Warhol’s Factory, opened Jungle Red Studios in Tribeca. Under the nom d’art, “Jungle Red” (aka Francine Hunter), she developed experimental work in theatre, performance, and cabaret and is acknowledged as a “legendary” member of the New York Underground of the late 1970s through the1980s, and referred to as “Downtown Royalty” by the poet Wayne Koestenbaum. The artist’s life and work have been featured in many publications, books, films, and other artists’ memoirs. Notorious for her style, wit, visionary design, and ground breaking advertising, Jungle Red Studios (1977-1988) was highly sought after, with its unique “bordello in the daytime” atmosphere, by high-profile clients and big players in art, music, fashion, and media. Her extensive contemporary art collection, speaks to her role as Muse to the many contemporary artists, friends, and collaborators, who also defined the “Downtown decade.”
From 1981-1988, Hunter McGivern created a series of performative portraits (tableaux vivants), in which she conceived, costumed and set-designed, portraits of herself as iconic women of power and allure. Nan Goldin, Laurie Simmons, Thomas Höepker, and other distinguished photographers documented the tableaux. Despite a penchant for exhibitionism before the camera, this body of work was not created for public consumption The work was shown in 2005 in a Jungle Red Retrospective, curated by Dr. Cornelia Lauf at Camera Oscura, a gallery in San Casciano dei Bagni, Italy, founded by Joseph Kosuth.
Hunter McGivern’s, early performance works and subsequent photo narrative series were part of a ten-year exploration of feminist sexual anthropology grounded in her early life in burlesque in the late 60’s and subsequently as a sex worker through the mid 70’s. “Night School” (1979), “Victory in a Void” (1990-1992), “Latex Labor” (1978), and “The Shoe Fetish Show” (1982) are a few of the extensive series of her multimedia works. The works all address subjects often considered taboo. After viewing “My Body Paints My Brain Bleeds” (1992-1994) in her 2018 Hudson Hall Retrospective, the Artist Carolee Schneemann sent Francine a letter stating:
“I was thrilled to see your installation. It deserves an extended gallery viewing to further appreciations for your pioneering feminist premises. There was no cultural receptivity when you initiated this overt body of radical work; manifesting the life of our physicality was considered vapid (actually terrifying to male values).”
In 1989, in the wake of profound personal losses due to the AIDS epidemic, Hunter McGivern moved to Italy. While living in Positano through 1997, the artist became inspired by life on the Amalfi Coast. She experienced a deep transformation amidst the powerful volcanic energy fields and developed a varied and unique vocabulary for framing spaces and materials that has evolved into her present practice.
Diagnosed with epilepsy at age six, Hunter McGivern began counting interior grids and geometric forms as a simple methodic exercise to perceive and map spatial delineation, thus locating and re-entering her physical form in the spaces between. These out-of-body seizures are the roots of her conscious creative development and have guided her lifelong research into the Hermetic in art, philosophy, metaphysics, geometry, numerology and mathematics, as germinating ciphers that continue to determine and shape the artist’s practice and process.
In 2011, Hunter McGivern rebuilt two floors of a 15,000 square-foot cinder block building with 105 windows, in Linlithgo, New York, and founded CR10arts; a five-year conceptual curatorial project inspired by her experiences of DIA, and investigating the role of the Kunsthalle in the 21 st Century. From 2012 through 2016, grounded in “practice, process, form, and archive,” Hunter McGivern curated and produced exhibitions featuring one hundred artists who were invited to create site-specific installations, performances, film screenings, and video works. The project was documented extensively for the artist’s archives.
The Jungle Red Studios archives, the CR10arts project, and fifty years of her multi-disciplinary artworks are at present, housed and on view in The Frank Institute @ CR10 (a non-profit entity) where Hunter McGivern has her studio. It also houses her contemporary art collection. Hunter McGivern has performed and exhibited in New York, Italy, Turkey, Germany, Canada and Korea. Her work is included in many private collections in New York and Europe.