Five Abstract Artists Finding Joy in the Process

What is not to be found in the often colorful and abstract work of our five featured artists? From sculpture, to paint, to installations, these five women from different backgrounds and generations offer their viewers meaningful journeys into the best of abstraction. We think you’ll agree these are five artists to follow and know.

Yayoi Kusama (Japan)
Carmen Herrera (Cuba)
Chaikaia Booker (U.S.A)
Rachel Jones (U.K)
Amy Feigley-Lee (U.S.A. and a TTN artist!)

#1 Yayoi Kusama

Yayoi Kusama has become a monumental artist over her long and illustrious career. Born in Japan in March of 1929 to a merchant family who owned a plant nursery and seed farm, Yayoi was surrounded by colorful natural forms from a young age.

Her visual language developed early on. She was fascinated by river stones, pumpkins and imagery from hallucinations that became more prominent in her life around the age of ten. Her parents had a dysfunctional relationship which led to traumatic experiences for Yayoi that have stayed with her and influenced many parts of her adulthood.

Her mother was not supportive of her art and would often take her drawings away from her before she was finished. At thirteen years old Yayoi worked in a Japanese military facility sewing parachutes for the war effort in World War Two. This time was tense and difficult for her, not only because of the war, but also because she lacked agency and freedom in her life.

While studying traditional Japanese painting at the Kyoto Municipal School of Arts and Crafts in 1948, Yayoi became frustrated with its restrictive style and began to broaden her artistic influences into European and American Avant-Garde work.

By the 1950s Yayoi’s work was becoming acclaimed in Japan. Her distinct style of polka dots painted on canvas, walls, floors, and even people was building her reputation. She pushed herself, creating absorbing spaces for her audiences to enter and be engulfed by.

While living in the United States Yayoi sought career advice from artist Georgia O’Keefe and developed a deep friendship with Eva Hesse. Unfortunately, some of the work she made at this time was copied by a male artist who received great acclaim for the work. Yayoi continued to be highly productive despite her disappointment over this setback. In the 1960s she gathered more acclaim for her famous freestanding installations that incorporated mirrors, lights, and piped-in music, known to most as her mirror/infinity rooms.

The emotional and mental toll of working with critical success but financial hardship led to several hospitalizations and eventually Yayoi moved back to Japan in 1973. She continued to be creative writing shockingly visceral and surrealistic novels, short stories, and poetry. Yayoi found solace in working with an art therapy doctor while living in a mental hospital where she still lives today. She continues to bring joy to thousands with her immersive infinity rooms and bright artworks. To learn more visit here.

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Yayoi-Kusama

#2 Carmen Herrera

The art career of Carmen Herrera is a testament to the importance of persistence and joy when making your work. 

Born in Havana Cuba in 1915, Carmen was lucky to have a supportive father who signed her and her brother up for art lessons at the age of eight. At fourteen, she attended the Marymount School in Paris, where she fell in love with the city. She studied art history, French, and visited cultural centers. After she returned to Cuba, she was exposed to the plight of artists fleeing persecution from the Spanish Civil war and she created a piece of protest art, a sculpture called Cristo, held in an outdoor art exhibition in 1936.

Because Cuba faced political unrest fairly often, Carmen attended an architecture school when her art school was not open for lessons. This was the one of her first encounters with an institution telling her that being a woman made her aspirations almost impossible. 

Undeterred, Carmen married American teacher Jesse Loewenthal in 1939 and they moved to New York city. In New York, Carmen was disappointed to see how little modern art was hung in local galleries and museums at the time. She shifted her focus from sculpture to painting. Travel was frequent in Carmen’s life and in 1948 she and her husband moved to Paris where they were part of the intellectual and artist circles of the time.

During the following five years Carmen continued to refine her hard edge abstraction paintings that were described as containing vibrancy and life and an almost spiritual quality.

Her reception during a solo show in Cuba in 1950 was not encouraging. When Carmen and her husband moved back to New York due to financial hardship, she continued to be excluded from abstract art exhibitions due to her gender. Though her work was on par with male artists of the day she was openly told on numerous occasions that her gender was the reason she was left out.

Despite these challenges, she still found joy and fulfillment in the creation of her work. Like most abstract artists Carmen’s work was often a deconstruction of larger themes. Her seminal twelve-year series Blanco y Verde (1959) for example, is a deconstruction of traditional landscape painting.

It was late in life that Carmen was given her due for the place she had persisted to occupy in the art world regardless of recognition. In her 80s her work was acquired by museums such as the Whitney, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Boston Museum of Fine Arts.

She died in February of 2022 at the age of 106, and has been quoted as saying that the beauty of the straight line was what kept her going so long. To learn more visit here.

https://www.theartstory.org/artist/herrera-carmen/

#3 Chaikaia Booker

With her larger than life sculptural works Chaikaia Booker uses materials such as rubber to construct abstract objects that speak to themes of class, labor, and gender.

Chaikaia was born in New Jersey in 1953. Her female relatives taught her to sew as a child and the fixing, repairing, and manipulating of objects during this time became instrumental to her artistic development and practice later in life.

She attended Rutgers University graduating in 1976 with a BA in sociology. She earned her MFA in 1993 from City College of New York. Alongside her academic studies she learned African dance, ceramics, weaving, basketry, and tai chi, which all influenced her art.
In the 1980s Chaikaia began making wearable sculptures, which reflect her physical practice of connecting with her materials. She wears one of her sculptures as a headdress alongside her more practical clothing that allows her to use discarded construction materials for her outdoor and gallery sculptures. 

In working with rubber, Chaikaia sees connections between the material itself and human diversity. The marks on the rubber reference many things including: aging, African scarification and textile designs.

The durability of rubber makes is ideal for outdoor public installations and Chaikaia’s work has been installed in such locations as Millennium Park, Chicago, the Garment District Alliance Broadway Plazas in New York city, and the National Museum of Women in the Arts New York Avenue Sculpture Project in Washington DC.

Throughout her career, Chaikaia has used stainless steel and fabric to create sculptural works in addition to rubber tires. Not only interested in sculpture, in 2009 she began an in depth exploration of printmaking creating graphic works that largely focused on the process of chine collé. Her approach to printmaking processes is similar to her modular working methods in sculpture. Printmaking has become a regular part of Chaikaia’s artistic output, and as with her use of rubber, she has invented unique ways of manipulating materials and process.

Chaikaia has works in more than 40 public collections and has been exhibited across the United States, Europe, Africa, and Asia. Her work was included in the 2000 Whitney Biennial, she received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2005, and an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award for Art in 2001. Chaikaia is still living and working in New York city, she also has a production studio in Allenstown, Pennsylvania. To learn more visit here. https://chakaiabooker.com/

#4 Rachel Jones

Through gestural abstraction with representational details, Rachel Jones’ work has been described as rooted in the sheer joy of abstraction. 

Born in East London in 1991, Rachel grew up in Essex. She graduated from the Glasgow School of Art in 2013 and received her MA in Fine Arts from the Royal Academy Schools in 2019. Known mostly for her paintings she also works in performance, sound, and sculpture.

Rachel uses color, shape, and form to speak to people in an emotional way. This method came from her intrigue in these formal elements and also from a desire to figure out how she can fit into the history of abstract expressionism and explore her interest in representations of Blackness.

Her prodigious, unstretched canvases are layered with oil stick and oil paint, many having bold crimson backgrounds overlaid with gestural patterns in even more bright colors.

Mixed in with the vibrant colors and mark making you can often see references to teeth, mouths in Rachel’s paintings. Rachel sees these body parts as different register points for people to relate to the work.  Regardless of who the person is, or what their cultural history, race and gender are they have teeth and a mouth. Rachel has also used flowers to introduce patterns into her work, rendering them more visible in some pieces than others. 

A rising star in the art world, Rachel's work is already in the collections of The Tate, Arts Council England, The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami. She has also been and has been artist-in-residence at the Chinati Foundation and Masterworks Museum of Bermuda Art in and designed the statue for the 2024 Brit Award winners.
Learn more about Rachel here: https://rachelvictoriajones.co.uk/

#5 Amy Feigley-Lee

Amy Feigley-Lee is a member of Thrive Together Network and her joyful artworks are created using colorful wallpaper.

Currently living in Detroit Michigan, with her family, she earned her MFA in 2007 from Cranbrook Academy of Art with an emphasis in Sculpture. Art has been central to her life since she was a child. Since the beginning of her career teaching art has coexisted with her studio practice teaching students from pre-k through college. Motherhood transformed her studio practice, as she adapted her work to fit life as a parent. She found that transformation allowed her to find a great community and empowerment.

Amy’s process of making brings her comfort and therapy, and connects her past with her future, as it was a large visual presence in her childhood. Using found antique and vintage wallpaper, Amy’s process involves arranging small, hand-cut strips of found wallpaper in a variety of shapes and configurations resulting in an exuberant display of maximalist geometric abstraction. The aesthetics of the work have been distilled from decades of interest in and exploration of domestic narratives and materiality.

She is inspired by the colors, patterns, and textures found in wallpaper as well as the formalist sensibilities that come with being an art foundations educator. 

Amy's work has been exhibited both nationally as well as internationally in venues such as the Freud Museum in London England, The Daimler Chrysler World Headquarters in Berlin Germany, The American University in Cairo, Egypt, and was selected to participate in Andres Serrano Pick Detroit, at the College for Creative Studies in Detroit. 

Outside of her studio practice, Amy helps build community among artist/mothers in the Detroit metro area through facilitating studio visits and critiques. She also holds the title of Special Lecturer of Studio Art at Oakland University in Rochester Michigan where she has been teaching for nearly 15 years.

To learn more about Amy visit here: https://www.feigleyleestudio.com/

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We hope you have enjoyed learning about these 5 Abstract Artists Finding Joy in the Process written by Jennie Johnston!

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