Re-Marks (Memorial), 1988
Acrylic and mixed media on canvas
62 x 91 x 2 inches
Collection of the artist

Initially trained in textiles, the artist turned from the loom to canvas in 1980. While this was certainly a shift, Bart approached canvas as a fiber rather than as a support for painting. Re-Marks (Memorial) is the last in the series of stitched works on canvas she created in the 1980s. It also marks one of her early efforts to engage with the devastations of war and the complexities of memorialization. The dedication of Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., in 1982 had reanimated debates about that controversial war and how to remember it.

Against a background of spiraling painted text about the power of words from a novel by the Algerian-born French writer Marie Cardinal, Bart stitched neatly ordered rows of lines. These empty lines are meant to recall a ledger and the unknown names of people who died in the Vietnam War. She painted the canvas red and then went over each stitched line in white. The curved corners reference the television screen through which she, and so many other Americans, experienced the war.

Publication:

  • Abracadabra and Other Forms of Protection, Laura Wertheim Joseph editor and curator, Weisman Art Museum

Exhibition: