For her forthcoming installation on the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum’s Anne H. Fitzpatrick Façade, American-born artist Elaine Reichek has chosen to focus on the long and intimate correspondence between novelist Henry James and Isabella Stewart Gardner.
BOSTON, MA (June 2017) – For her forthcoming installation on the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum’s Anne H. Fitzpatrick Façade, American-born artist Elaine Reichek has chosen to focus on the long and intimate correspondence between novelist Henry James and Isabella Stewart Gardner. Ever Yours, Henry James is a graphic sampler composed of a selection of phrases James wrote in closing his letters. The site-specific work is on view beginning June 27.
Reichek, a 2001 Artist-in-Residence at the Museum, is the tenth artist to create an artwork for this public art space. She was drawn to the many ways James closed his letters to Isabella—from the more formal “with many good wishes, Very truly Yours” to the very affectionate “always constantly.” By focusing on these farewells, Reichek hopes to convey the depth and genuine feeling in the long friendship between Gardner and James.
Putting Gardner’s personal correspondence on the façade mirrors the very subjective way Gardner integrated artworks into her own very aestheticized domestic setting, and hints at the influence of her personal relationships in building the collection. “By making use of the older 19th-century private epistolary mode for a public contemporary art piece, I wanted to cross the literal passage between the old and the new, connect contemporary art with the older collection, and by doing this perhaps mirror Isabella’s own non-hierarchical, non-linear methods for the display of her collection,” says Reichek.
Ever Yours, Henry James will also coincide with the Museum’s fall exhibition, Henry James and American Painting, opening October 19 and featuring a selection of the letters and artworks that resulted from the famous friendship.
Elaine Reichek is a conceptual artist who uses multiple media to examine beliefs and preconceptions about aesthetics and culture. She investigates images, texts, and objects, seeking stories she can retell in her work. Reichek has exhibited extensively in the United States and abroad for nearly forty years, including solo exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art and the Jewish Museum, New York; the Wexner Center for the Visual Arts, Columbus, Ohio; the Palais des Beaux-Arts, Brussels, Belgium; the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, Ireland; and the Tel Aviv Art Museum, Israel. She received her BFA from Yale University and her BA from Brooklyn College. She lives and works in New York.
The Artist-in-Residence Program is directed by Pieranna Cavalchini, the Tom and Lisa Blumenthal Curator of Contemporary Art, and is supported, in part, by the National Endowment for the Arts and the Barbara Lee Program Fund. Funding is also provided for site-specific installations of new work on the Anne H. Fitzpatrick Facade on Evans Way. The Museum receives operating support from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, which receives support from the State of Massachusetts and the National Endowment for the Arts. Media
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