Selected exhibitions
“Like the Back of My Hand” Carroll and Sons, Boston, MA, 2019
Wendy Richmond’s affecting new sculptures at Carroll and Sons are more concrete than her earlier work. They’re also more tragic, soul-searching, and redemptive.
In 2014, Richmond’s brother was diagnosed with cancer. He died in 2017. Confronted with mortality and loss, the artist pondered the body’s miracles and horrors, and thought of her own hands: She is double-jointed, and she has an unusual autoimmune disease that causes her fingers to swell until her fingerprints vanish. When the swelling goes down, her fingers look deflated.
Richmond cast (her hands) in hydrostone, a smooth cement. She broke some stony hands at their weak points and used fragments; others are whole. She embedded them in darker blocks and set to digging them out, uncovering them with delicate tools, like an archeologist. Her pale gray hands and their blocks form a tense figure-ground relationship, signaling struggle, connection, and hope. …
Richmond’s stone hands evoke the perils of the flesh, her blocks the myriad way life hobbles us, the trials and despairs, the great weight of mortality. Yet in her work, flesh keeps peaking through, communication continues. We soldier on. We survive. Until we don’t.
By Cate McQuaid GLOBE CORRESPONDENT MARCH 27, 2019 (Excerpt)
“Check Out This Sculpture!” New York Public Library, Jefferson Market, New York NY, 2018
Wendy Richmond’s sculptures of her hands want to go home with you, to help you find your own stories of loss and creativity. Library patrons were invited to “check out” a piece of sculpture, and when they returned it, Richmond used it to create new artwork, continuing its lifecycle.
Richmond and other artists and writers also presented a panel discussion titled "Good Grief: artists and writers share stories of loss, mourning, creativity and joy."
See New Yorker magazine Talk of the Town by Patricia Marx
“Wendy Richmond Rocks TVs” Carroll and Sons, Boston MA, 2013
“Wendy Richmond has strewn (thirteen) boxy video monitors on the floor, each with videos of the artist kicking over stacks of rocks she has come across on parkland in Maine. There are 80 short videos, strung together in eight sequences, so these little takedowns rattling throughout the gallery always seem new.
The toppling of the cairns erases manmade marks left along otherwise unspoiled beachfront. While it’s a little bit shocking — someone made those rock piles! — it’s thrilling, too, to see their destruction, and watch the little tags of ego vanish along the sand.”
By Cate McQuaid GLOBE CORRESPONDENT APRIL 02, 2013 (Excerpt)
“Wendy Richmond: Navigating the Personal Bubble” RISD Museum, Providence RI, 2012
This multi-part video installation explores how portable digital technology creates mobile zones of privacy—the artist calls them “personal bubbles”—that change the social experience of being in public. Richmond’s consideration of public privacy started in 2004, when she was commuting extensively between the east and west coasts and spending a lot of time in airports. Richmond recalls, “Waiting in security lines, waiting for boarding, waiting in food courts…most of the people around me were alone and waiting, too. We were in a very public place and also in our personal zones, engaged in our own internal worlds.”
In developing this exhibition, Richmond worked with RISD students; one class assignment asked students to make one-minute videos of themselves working in a public place, such as a café. These videos were the starting point for Alone in Public, a three-channel video installation created for the RISD Museum’s New Media Gallery.
“Each gesture reflects the mind’s eye communicating with the virtual space of the screen…countless sighs, twitches, frowns, and inward gazes—these repetitive movements create an unconscious choreography.”
Building on Alone in Public and inspired by Richmond’s background in dance, the vinyl text piece Gestures presents a choreographic taxonomy of physical behaviors specific to the “personal bubble.”
“Overheard” gallery@calit2, University of California, San Diego CA 2010
The installation "Overheard" consists of multiple displays of textual graphics, based on overheard New York City cell phone conversations ranging in subject matter from the poetic to the banal. The audio, made up of recordings of conversations spoken by actors, is triggered as the audience moves through the gallery space. In addition, two interactive rope&pulley systems will allow visitors to interface with the displayed graphics, changing their shape and size. The visual elements of the fragmented conversations continue onto the gallery display walls on the first floor of Atkinson Hall.
The artists hope that the installation will provide viewers an opportunity to reframe the barrage of private and public expression that they navigate in their everyday lives.
“Seen” Bernard Toale Gallery, Boston MA, 2007
After completing “Public Privacy,” Richmond decided to translate her 21st century cell phone videos into a 16th century medium: etchings. Choosing single cells from her videos, she created a limited edition of intaglio prints titled “Seen.” Each print is a lineup or grid of frozen moments. The process of creating this body of work, which she began at Women’s Studio Workshop in Rosendale, NY and completed at Robert Blackburn Workshop in New York City, was remarkably slower than anything she has done before, or since, with a cellphone.
“Public Privacy: Wendy Richmond’s Surreptitious Cellphone” Museum of Photographic Arts, San Diego CA, 2007
PUBLIC PRIVACY features over sixty 15-second cellphone videos by artist Wendy Richmond. Each is arranged into a series of visual grids that capture familiar scenes -- grid-lock in southern California, baggage handling at the airport, the New York City subway at rush hour, strollers in a museum foyer.
Intrigued with the larger questions of what we do while sharing public space, Richmond surreptitiously looks for the chance encounter, the telling gesture, the convergence of figures and objects in motion. From the artful to the comedic, they are riveting in what they expose of our private lives lived publicly.
Richmond’s particular way of seeing appreciates the formal relationships between people and their environments. Through her minimalist aesthetic, we see a graceful, reductive portrait of daily life. She calls our attention to the ghostly calligraphic silhouettes inside a shop window or the posture and private ruminations of a subway rider, imbuing each with a lyrical, temporal presence. Through the dimensions of time and motion, our sense of expectation is also shifted. Richmond fractures linear time and alters sequences of events: the slow pacing of a museum guard is completed in one frame while it is just beginning in another.
By discerning and then capturing the transient and often beautiful energy of public life, Richmond’s images evoke the voyeurism of Walker Evans’ subway portraits, the gold mining of street photographers such as Alex Webb, and Henri Cartier-Bresson’s decisive moment -- the “recognition, in a fraction of a second, of an expressive composition that life itself offers.” Such artful grids of small human incidences foster Walker Evans’ command for us to “stare, pry, listen, eavesdrop” -- not just at others but back at ourselves. -- Carol McCusker, Curator