For Susan
Artist
Brenda Goodman
(American, born 1943)
Date1976
MediumInk, gouache, pastel on cardstock
DimensionsImage Size: 7 1/2 × 5 5/8 in. (19.1 × 14.3 cm)
Paper Size: 6 × 8 in. (15.2 × 20.3 cm)
ClassificationsDrawing
Credit LineGift of Susan F. Rossen, 2013
Object numberUAC6088
DescriptionSusan F. Rossen received her master’s degree in art history from Wayne State in 1971. A curator and educator, she was also the first publisher at the Detroit Institute of Arts, where she edited and contributed to a number of books and journals. Being active in the Detroit art world in the early ‘70s, Rossen would naturally have been familiar with the artists of the city’s vibrant Cass Corridor scene, and was even “a very special friend” to at least one: Brenda Goodman. In 2013, Rossen donated four small drawings by Goodman to Wayne State; three of them are on the fronts of postcards preprinted with both Goodman’s name and that of the Alternative Press, Detroit artist/poet team Ann and Ken Mikolowski’s long-running publishing and mail art venture, then based in Grindstone City (at the very tip of Michigan’s thumb). Every year the Press sent packages of letterpress-printed literature and original art to its list of subscribers. One postcard is dated 1974, another 1976, and one is undated, though the printing on its back is identical to that of the ’76 card.
The 1974 drawing depicts a large pig, rapidly sketched in ink with swirling lines, scratchy crosshatching, blots and stippling. The creature bounds along so quickly it appears to have five legs instead four, and it hovers over a large dark shadow on the ground. It is constrained, however, in a tight-fitting net of red lines, drawn in colored pencil and opaque watercolor, that hugs the pig’s body like a custom-made cage against which the beast struggles. It is signed simply, “To Susan Love Brenda Nov. ’74.”
The undated drawing, in marker and colored pencil, is a child-like depiction of a prop-driven airplane, with a thick black fuselage and stubby brown wings, but a rainbow-hued rudder that complements the red-orange band around its nose and its purple cockpit. A funny yellow tailpipe pokes out from the plane’s rear end. While the drawing harks to the series of similarly stylized World War 2 fighter plane scenes Goodman showed in a group exhibition at the Cass Corridor’s storied Willis Gallery in 1971, it contains none of the violence of those drawings; this plane sails peacefully through a placid blue-green sky dotted with clouds.
The third of the Alternative Press postcards, from 1976, relates stylistically to other surreal images Goodman was making at the time: strange, tapered figures, trussed up with string, with squashed facial features and gangly limbs, are posed in spare, claustrophobic rooms littered with bric-a-brac. In this drawing, a female figure, with bare breasts and a short skirt, stares (with the dotted lines of a cartoon character) into the void of a black rectangle hanging from the ceiling. Two bent nails protrude from the figure’s lumpy abdomen, and one tiny arm seems to quiver. The skirt has tabs attached, like a paper doll’s clothes, and what looks like hair seems to spill from a seam. At this woman’s feet are a number of desserts - donuts, an ice cream cone, cookies and a slice of pie. Along with a greeting of “Happy Birthday” to Rossen, the artist has written the word “Before!”
The remaining drawing, the only one not, apparently, on an Alternative Press postcard but on similar card stock, is dated November 21 and 23 of 1984. (By that time, Rossen had been living in Chicago for three years, heading up the publishing department of the Art Institute there.) This image is even more mysterious than the one from ’76. In a small rectangle, dense with felt tip pen and colored pencil scribbles, two dark presences loom in the middle distance. On the right, three pale orange sausage-like objects slouch against each other, while other indeterminate shapes float through the scene. A note in the upper right corner reads, “for supplies thanks,” and below the image Goodman writes, “For you Susan… a very special friend you are.” If there is a deeper meaning behind this inscrutible image, perhaps it’s known only to the two friends.
Rossen worked at Art Institute of Chicago for 28 years before leaving to become a freelance consultant. In 2017, she was honored with an Arts Achievement Award from the Wayne State College of Fine, Performing and Communication Arts.
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Native Detroiter Brenda Goodman was born in 1943. She studied at Wayne State, but she got her degree from the Detroit Society of Arts and Crafts (now the College for Creative Studies). There she received rigorous formal training, and honed her craft by copying both Old Master and Modern painters. Goodman turned the skills she acquired to exploring her own emotional and psychological state. Her work over the years has always included both abstract and narrative or autobiographical elements, existing somewhere between abstract expressionism and a kind of surrealism. She has taught and lectured around the country, and participated in numerous exhibitions. “My intent is to extend the parameters of my specific and personal issues to reveal and comment on basic universal emotions and conditions,” read her artist statement for a 2007 solo show at the Brooklyn Museum, which featured a series of starkly honest and revealing self-portraits of a woman then in her early 60s. “My work is about reality, not irony.”
Text by Sean Bieri
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