Exibitions & Press are below.
I post on Instagram @tarawgeer
May 17, 2023
Though drawing is traditionally considered the preparation or practice for, say, painting, Geer harnesses the temporality and quickening of a sketch to make large, monochromatic work with stark emotional power. Her drawings have both expertise and moving roughness. In this first public, large-scale installation of her work, strange bulbs, pale stems and wildly scribbled panels hum with possibility and raw, determined life.
The Arts Center at Duck Creek is pleased to present Tara Geer: Sown in the Half Light, A drawing installation, opening on Saturday, July 22, and on view through August, 20, 2023. A reception for the artist will be held from 5-7 pm on Saturday, July 22. The artist will lead a Talk and Visual Thinking Strategies discussion with the audience, on 8/20 at 3:00pm.
After visiting Duck Creek on a bleak day this past winter, Geer started making work specifically for our barn. She has been drawing –and discarding drawings– for this exhibition in alliance with our mission to honor the majesty of the 20th Century barn that houses our main gallery. To prepare, Geer drove out from the City with carloads of drawings and paper, on the week overcast with smoke from the Canadian fires. She measured, cut, tailored and re-sketched each work with respect for the historic structure of our barn walls. Her work matched the rawness of the space: the tangled lines, and lumpy things seem to grow, not entirely rationally, in the half light.
Geer’s focus, surprisingly, is not so much on what we see, but on what we feel. She mixes acute observational drawing, snagging details from her surroundings, with an imagination driven, at times, by what she calls a “stomach-clenching fury.” “I stand in a darkening studio, in a city filling with smoke and heat, groping for something to say outside of language– not a replica of the place, or the details, or the news, or even an articulate explanation, but to extend the mute feeling of it.” While you see her very skillful draftsmanship, and versatile mark-making, it’s as if she is barreling past that, to communicate some kind of stark aliveness. She is interested in the kind of seeing we do before we recognize something --not of a world of known, knowable, sure things-- but of forces in the periphery. Things she cannot explain. “The wildernesses I find just off the ground.” She writes. “We are all trying to learn how to live with what we have previously sown in a half light, of not knowing what we are doing, or not being able to see well enough through the haze. We have to learn how to live with the things that have grown tall since we first padded the seeds into soft soil.” Geer draws, and uses drawing, to uncover the bare bones of making and being. “Not to find the skin of the visible world, but to find what lies, heaving, right beneath it.”
TRODDEN PATH
July 23 - August 19, 2023
68A Schellinger Road, Amagansett, NY
Trodden Path brings together the works of 17 artists, using the language of abstraction to respond to the fury as well as the calm hush of the outside. Artists are closely bound to nature. Reinterpreting one’s environment from the lens of an artist’s eye and hand proves more than mere creative inspiration, but a deeply ingrained instinct to revel in and capture natural beauty. Trodden Path brings together works which viscerally reimagine well-considered landscapes, tapping into the artist’s subconscious. Going down a trodden path is all at once a comfort and a neurotic tick. Familiar forms are rendered into shorthand, neither real nor fictional, rather they oscillate between tapping into memories of interactions known and felt, and to those completely fabricated. Wistfulness, exuberance, and longing pervades the works; edges cannot fully converge, the drudgery of looping repetition and labyrinth- esque entrapments are drawn.
Small Horizon, Tara Geer, Charcoal, chalk, pastel, pencil 2023
UNSTILL WORLD, drawings by Tara Geer, APRIL 20- MAY 27, 2023
Guild Gallery is pleased to present Unstill world, the first solo exhibition in NYC of work by artist Tara Geer. Geer has drawn ceaselessly for the past 25 years in her West Harlem studio creating unspooling monochromatic abstractions that have a sculptural, unstill quality to them. For Geer, drawing is not a means to an end, but rather it’s her way of thinking and feeling through the world. As Geer states: “Drawings carry motion. They have a quality of being in the middle of doing. Even when finished and framed, drawings balance within the process of becoming. Alive enough not to be done. Delicate puffs of air and gale force winds rising.” Her powerful wall-sized drawings, and smaller works –over 85 linear feet of drawing– fill up the gallery with the essence of the qi—a term used in traditional Chinese culture to refer to the energy that pulses through all living beings.
The exhibition will be on view April 13 through May 27. Please come for the opening, Thursday 6-8:00, April 20.
article on why the design firm, Roman & Williams, opened a gallery
click on the image below to read the full review...
Tara Geer: Strangely Blooming features a series of monoprints created by the artist upon her return to New York City this past Fall. Inspired by her beloved City’s resilience, the exhibition also features two large collage drawings.
Artist Statement: This Fall my family moved back into our apartment in Washington Heights, and I went back to work in my studio in West Harlem, after a year in an old farmhouse, in the woods, in MA.
I have lived in NYC since the ‘80s, but returning, I was surprised to see almost everything –in every direction– is made. Someone’s hands have touched, and painted, and sanded, and caulked, and dirtied, and worn down every single part. In all these stacked and mortared bricks, sidewalks of things made and broken, garbage, graffiti, printed signs, take out containers, plastic bags skittering along the pavement, I found myself wondering how do things grow here? Or, where do they grow from? This City, even harmed and threadbare and exhausted as it feels right now, is so alive. You feel an almost insane heartbeat, and yet, where would something like a sprout emerge? I wasn’t exactly wondering about real plants –which seem largely doomed– but the palpable quickening, soil, lumpy bulbs. In elevator shafts, and gloomy laundry basements across the city, zombie-like bloomings are unfurling with delicate and ghastly paleness. The poet Roethke wrote, “I can hear, underground, that sucking and sobbing, In my veins, in my bones I feel it, /The small water seeping upward, The tight grains parting.”
Months into the strangely blooming drawings, during the winter surge, I went to an art store with my 7-year-old. We happened upon envelope-sized sheets of soft, fake linoleum to make fabric stamps. Who knew there was such a thing as fake linoleum? By the end of the week, I advanced to pink linoleum, and within a few months, I’d carved scores of bulb-ish things and stems, and unfurlings, and then inked, and combined, and pressed them onto many notebooks of paper. I didn’t know much about printing. I made lots of mistakes. I drew in fixes. Then I'd draw in a few connections and lumps. None ended up like the one following.
There are also two –almost 9 foot– collaged drawings of what I call my giraffes. I tape and glue pieces of other drawings–pieces that seem alive– onto the wall until I feel a creature's quietness. They blow through their lips while I work, and add a note of faint, preposterous, magnificence.
Being in a pandemic this year, somehow, translated into the unchecked carving and printing of more bulbs than fit on the paper –and giraffes. Sometimes being an artist is like this– stumbling upon the joy of pink linoleum and gawkiness, strangely blooming.
Miss 2017
2017
Victory Garden Collective
On view at The Met Fifth Avenue in Gallery 690
Designed to be worn by participants at the January 21, 2017, Women’s March on Washington, these sashes are embroidered with witty and ironic feminist tropes. Part of a set whose titles are printed on a small poster, they were made by the Victory Garden Collective, women artists who create works in the spirit of a World War II "victory garden." Seeing the world as "again in political and environmental turmoil [... and] similarly in need of nourishment and unification," they make publicly engaged art that seeks to address those needs. This example evokes the efforts of early twentieth-century suffragettes, who marched under purple and green banners to assert women’s right to vote; the sashes also raise traditional, more troubling associations for feminists, such as the attire of parading beauty queens.
I had the honor of becomming friends with William Louis Dreyfus over the decades of him collecting my drawings. He was the first real collector to buy my work --when I in was a few years out of grad school. His faith in me, and rank refusal to countenance any wavering on my part, is part of how I learned to be artist. He bought good drawings and figuring-it-out ones. I knew he loved many of the 50 or so drawings he bought over the years-- he would come to my studio, eye the walls and then sit down in front of a drawing and curse. But I also think his point to me, in so steadily supporting me, was less about the specific work, and more about the imnportance of the endevor. He spent years composing poems in his head, that he hated to share, and I know he appreciated the work we do in laboring to make things-- as well as the joy of having made them. He was my friend.
I miss you, William. Thank you for the pleasure you took in the drawings. I remain, to this day, every day, grateful for your support and belief in me. 
Three drawings in the lobby of the beautiful, Roman Williams designed, ACE hotel in downtown Brooklyn:
links to articles:
https://www.sleepermagazine.com/stories/projects/first-look-ace-hotel-brooklyn/
https://tophotel.news/design-led-ace-hotel-brooklyn-welcomes-first-guests/
https://www.alhaus.com/alhaus-magazine/ace-hotel-brooklyn
The 2019 National Arts Club Drawing Invitational: October 28, 2019 - January 3, 2020 Gregg Gallery, Free and open to the public
The 2019 NAC Drawing Invitational pairs two celebrated New York artists, Barbara Nessim and Tara Geer. Geer, creates large abstracts in black, white, and grey based on the close observation of insignificant details of her everyday surroundings.
The National Arts Club-- drawing invitational: OUTSIDE THE LINES
The Fourth Annual NAC Drawing Invitational A showcase for artists who have enhanced or abandoned traditional media to create powerful expressions through line. Included are works by Miriam Brumer, Peter Cox, Joan Cross, Tara Geer, Anki King, Elsa Mora, Sue Muskat, Irving Petlin, Grace Graupe-Pillard, Melodie Provenzano, Viviane Rombaldi Seppey, George Towne, and Jimmy Wright.
February 1 - 24 in the Gregg Gallery
OPENING RECEPTION: February 1, 6:00 PM to 8:00 PM
The National Arts Club
15 Gramercy Park South New York
New York 10003
nationalartsclub.org
Collecting the Women’s Marches
January 19 - June 3, 2018
On January 21, 2017, hundreds of thousands rallied at the Women’s March on Washington for diverse issues including women’s rights, racial equality, and the environment. Counting more than 500 sister marches across the United States, it was the largest single-day protest in the nation’s history. As part of its History Responds program, the New-York Historical Society collected a range of artifacts, including signs, sashes, pussyhats, and colorful props, to document the moment. One year later, Collecting the Women’s Marches highlights some of the political and visual themes that emerged, as well as the efforts of individuals and groups that worked behind the scenes. An adjunct display of protest clothing by Olek (Agata Oleksiak), an artist who works in crochet, and Brick x Brick, a public art performance group, will be on view. Curated by Rebecca Klassen, assistant curator of material culture.
http://ndrmag.org/artwork/2017/04/4-pieces/
http://ndrmag.org/
Yale University: Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library
Friday, January 19, 2018 to Sunday, April 15, 2018, 121 Wall Street | New Haven, CT 06511
The best creative collaborations call into question the mythologies of individual genius and invite us to consider the additive possibilities of thinking and working together. Studies in Creativity contemplates a diverse range of collective art-making models by exploring classic and cutting edge works of art and literature devised or authored collaboratively. Artistic partnership, creative competition, the power of the muse, the influence of the impresario—these and other varieties of imaginative or inventive combination and exchange may be shaped by productive challenges or by destructive forces. Love and anger, pleasure and jealousy, conversation and argument—emotion and energy can seem to be multiplied in collaborations. Archives provide uncommon access to the ways works of art develop in a relational context. In documentary records we see several hands at work editing a text, many individuals authoring a stage performance, two lover-artists passing notes back and forth. A social and interpersonal mode of artistic practice comes into focus. Studies in Creativity both explores and celebrates and the spectacular potential when minds come together to make something new. (NK)
The authors and artists represented in the vitrines include Bert Williams and George Walker; the Provincetown Players Theater Company; Pool Productions; Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas; Paul Cadmus, Jared French, and Margaret French; Delmore Schwartz and James Joyce; Arthur Miller and Elia Kazan; Langston Hughes and Helen H. Watts; Saul Steinberg and Pablo Picasso; Joe Brainard and Ron Padgett; Jane and Stan Brakhage; Gerard Malanga and Andy Warhol; Pippa Anne Fleming and Lisbet Tellefsen; August Wilson and Lloyd Richards; Michael Kelleher; C.D. Wright and Deborah Luster; Mimi Khuc, Monica Ong, Monica Ramos, Simi Kang, and Camille Chew; and the Victory Garden Collective, among others.
http://planthouse.net/project_post/say-a-little-prayer-for-u-s/
prayer flags with the collective, Victory Garden, June 27- August 11, 55 West 28th St. NY, NY
Kathleen Kucka & Tara Geer
Opening Saturday, April 22, 5-7 PM
292 Manhattan Avenue (on Devoe St. next to church), Brooklyn NY 11211
Graham Avenue L stop
Indiana University Center of Art and Design
310 Jackson Street Columbus, IN 47201
EXHIBITION: In Conversation March 31 - May 27, 2017
Kathy Butterly, Hermine Ford, Tara Geer, Jacqueline Gourevitch, Michelle Jaffé, Joyce Kozloff, Kathleen Kucka, Melissa Meyer, Luisa Rabbia, Jennifer Riley, Ursula von Rydingsvard, Kate Shepherd, Kiki Smith, Leslie Wayne.
Reception and Panel Discussion: Friday, March 31, 5.30 - 8.30 PM
The group exhibition IN CONVERSATION is inspired by a series of interviews with female artists, which were conducted by the art historian Stephanie Buhmann between January 2013 and December 2015. Looking for an approach beyond the mainstream media coverage of the art market, Buhmann visited the artists in their studios. The conversations she conducted in these intimate spaces of artistic practices focus on process, philosophy, personal history, art historic contexts and aesthetics among others.
IN CONVERSATION is sparked by these interviews and helps to illustrate them. Though all of the artists featured are based in New York, they are working in different media and styles, reflecting some of the eclectic concerns and methods found in the city’s contemporary art world today. Buhmann notes: “In our fast-paced world, we often only glance at people and objects. In fact, most of us tend to make quick assessments based on our tastes and experiences. However, I believe that looking at art should continue to defy this trend as it takes true personal engagement. No matter how different, each conversation reveals just how much thought, emotion, work and resilience goes into making an object of art.” In addition, the exhibition is complemented by a selection of photographs by Frankfurt based artist Laura J. Gerlach, who portrayed both the artists and their studios in February 2015.
This will be the third variation of IN CONVERSATION, which was formerly hosted by the Shirley Fiterman Art Center at Borough of Manhattan Community College, New York (205) and the Macy Art Gallery at Teachers College, Columbia University, New York (2016).
For the Women's Marches on January 21, 2017, the artist's collective, Victory Garden, printed and distributed over one thousand Suffragette sashes to women in cities all over the country. We were honored that these sashes are now included in the collections of the New York Historical Society, the Beinecke Library, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The sashes and our story will be archived and included in their collection of original Suffragette sashes. For those of you interested in purchasing additional sashes, please click here
Planthouse is pleased to present Victory Garden—a salon style exhibition scheduled to run from December 8, 2016 through January 13, 2017. During World War I and II, victory gardens were planted next to private homes and in public parks throughout North America, Europe and Australia. Designed to reduce pressure on the food supply, the gardens were also considered to be morale-boosting symbols of solidarity. Government-led campaigns were mounted, with lithographic posters targeting urban and rural dwellers alike and inspiring them to plant fruits and vegetables. Citizens felt empowered by their contributions to the war effort and rewarded by the produce grown. Today, our world is again in political and environmental turmoil and we are similarly in need of nourishment and unification at the community level, this time in the form of collective political engagement. The show will feature small paintings, prints, and works on paper, with the goal of initiating conversation and action.
Installation shot of one wall of the Black & White: Contemporary & Modern Positions
41 East 57th Street • New York 10022, 11th floor • 212.319.1996 • www.jasonmccoyinc.com
BLACK & WHITE: MODERN & CONTEMPORARY POSITIONS September 14 - October 22, 2016
Reception for the Artists: Wednesday, September 14, 6-8 PM
This event will coincide with the Fuller Building Gallery Night.
Tara Geer, fluent in darkness 40"x 30" charcoal, pastel, pencil
Ferenc Berko, Debbie Fleming Caffery, Joanne Dugan, Yvonne Estrada, Richard Fleishner,
Oliver Gagliani, Tara Geer, Jacqueline Gourevitch, André Gregory, Judy Glantzman,
Peter Heywood, Virva Hinnemo, Marc Hom, Kenneth Josephson, Lee Krasner, Nick Lamia, Jungjin Lee, Christiane Löhr, Lisbeth McCoy, Robert Motherwell, Keiko Narahashi, George Negroponte, Jackson Pollock, Ryan Sawyer, Hunt Slonem, Bob Thompson, Tamara Zahaykevich.
“Black and white may at first suggest a contrast of light and dark. But light and dark are so variable and infinite in possibility, so tender and nuanced, that they surely belong to an entirely different realm from the severe extremes of black and white. Black seems nonnegotiable. Either it is or it isn’t. However, a great many whites can pass as white, especially where black is present.” --Jacqueline Gourevitch
August, 2016, I'll be teaching at John Ashberry's poetry school, the home School in Hudson.
Art Critic, Stephanie Buhmann, interviewed me for this book available at the Berlin publishers, The Green Box, or on Amazon.
This conference coincided with the In Conversation exhibition at Columbia
I was in a panel of women artists not agreeing about the issues of women making art
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SMALL IS BEAUTIFUL 2015 exhibition at Flowers Gallery 529 West 20th street, NYC
Nov. 19 through Jan. 2, 2016; below are their 2 drawings from the spider airport,
click on images for links to Flowers gallery site
Columbia university, Macy Gallery exhibition, In Conversation, curated by Stephanie Buhmann
Silas Marder Gallery, Bridgehampton, NY; The Big show summer 2015
These I drew for a part of a Rilke poem:
My eyes already touch the sunny hill.
going far ahead of the road I have begun.
So we are grasped by what we cannot grasp;
it has inner light, even from a distance-
and charges us, even if we do not reach it,
into something else, which, hardly sensing it,
we already are; a gesture waves us on
answering our own wave...
but what we feel is the wind in our faces.
Embracing Modernism: Ten Years of Drawings Acquisitions
February 13 through May 24, 2015
This exhibition marks the 10th anniversary of the Morgan Library & Museum's pivotal decision to collect and exhibit modern and contemporary drawings. Long noted for its holdings of Old Master drawings, the Morgan over the last decade has been able to acquire hundreds of exceptional works by some of the greatest artists of our time. The show will include more than one hundred drawings created between 1900 and 2013 by artists from Matisse, Mondrian, and Schiele to Pollock, Warhol, Lichtenstein, Twombly, and—more recently—Kippenberger and Dumas.
Curated by Isabelle Dervaux, who has guided the Morgan's acquisitions and exhibition program in this area since her appointment as the first curator of modern and contemporary drawings at the Morgan in 2005, the show will propose a reflection on twentieth-century drawing, looking notably at the characteristics that define its modernity in relation to the historical tradition.
http://www.themorgan.org/exhibitions/embracing-modernism
Roy Lichtenstein (1923–1997), No Thank You! (Study), 1964, graphite and colored pencil on wove paper, The Morgan Library & Museum. Gift of James and Katherine Goodman, 2011.40. Photography by Graham S. Haber, 2013. © Estate of Roy Lichtenstein."Embracing Modernism: Ten years of Drawings Acquisitions" at The Morgan Library & Museum
Embracing Modernism: Ten Years of Drawings Acquisitions
February 13 through May 24, 2015
The exhibition is great-- unexpected and thoughtful and moving. This is my drawing that I am so excited and proud to have in the show, (thanks to the Taub Foundation purchasing it for the Morgan):
To read an INTERVIEW with Tara Geer by Stephanie Buhmann
from a studio visit December, 2014, click here
SB's blog is: http://www.stephaniebuhmann.com/interviews.html
Stephanie Buhmann curated her exhibitions of NY women artists, In conversation, twice, for two different galleries, Spring of 2015, and Spring of 2016.
SMALL IS BEAUTIFUL exhibition at Flowers Gallery 529 West 20th street, NYC
Up now through January 10, 2015, the 40th annual small is beautiful show, where everything is roughly half a standard printer page, (and reasonably priced)
These are the 2 drawings in my studio with a ruler... at the gallery they are framed.
THE LOUIS-DREYFUS FAMILY COLLECTION
The first purchases for the Louis-Dreyfus Family Collection were
made in the early 1960s. Today, the Louis-Dreyfus Family Collection
consists of more than 3,500 paintings, sculptures and works on
paper primarily from the contemporary period.
The collection is made up of works owned by the Louis-Dreyfus
family and its foundation established with the intention
of promoting public awareness of the works represented and to
benefit specific educational purposes. Hopefully these works will
assist the Harlem Children's Zone in its educational mission.
a link to my work in the The Louis-Dreyfus Family Collection
see Tara Geer & her drawings in the documentary GENEROSITY OF EYE: It is the surprising story of a major art collection transforming into education for African American kids in the Harlem Children's Zone. A personal tale of actress Julia Louis-Dreyfus discovering how her father William's passions for art, justice and education connect in a single act of generosity. The Louis-Dreyus Family Collection -- more than three thousand paintings, drawings and sculptures will be sold to create an endowment for Geoffrey Canada's Harlem Children's Zone.
I'm in this documentary as André's drawing teacher: here's the link:http://www.beforeandafterdinner.com/index.html
"An indelible, gripping documentary. Gregory is a spellbinding raconteur." Stephen Holden THE NEW YORK TIMES
"Thoroughly delightful. Gregory's tale-spinning fluency dazzles just as much as it did in Louis Malle's My Dinner With Andre." Ronnie Scheib, VARIETY
http://www.glennhorowitz.com/gallery
Tara Geer, André Gregory, Rachel Cohen
This companion edition to Tara Geer’s first East Coast solo exhibition of drawings, Carrying Silence — held at our East Hampton gallery from August 3 through September 3, 2013 — is wonderfully augmented by new texts written specifically for the book by two celebrated writers: theater director André Gregory, and art critic and author Rachel Cohen.
For over a decade, drawing and its methodology have been both subject and object of Tara Geer’s artwork. She draws in pursuit of unmediated looking, to see the world and to question how we see it. She is interested in how drawing can mine the glossed over moments – the things we might not otherwise visually absorb. From observation, Tara explores life’s quiet details, the heft of an object, the spaces between close parts, the feel of a thing – externally informed but internally impelled.
In considering Geer’s work, Gregory — co-author and star of My Dinner with André — notes, “these mysterious meditations – elegant, disturbing, quite unlike anything else I have known. What are they? Where do they come from? Totally original, they are, for me, coded messages from the innermost, distant, topography of the psyche... her drawings, while inhabited by a ferocious knowledge of the way things are, are also amazingly calm. They have a dignified peace to them. They are the darkness and the light... her work reaches us from a place we don’t yet know, or can’t yet recognize.”
Cohen, author of the critically acclaimed A Chance Meeting and the forthcoming Bernard Berenson: A Life in the Picture Trade, describes Geer’s process in intimate detail: “What she is drawing is not fruit in a bowl or a reclining nude but the folds in her backpack, the tar stains on the roof of her studio building, the lean of the city buses parked in the lot across from 133rd Street. Over and over until something about line, space, shade, resonance seems telling, and then that caught stroke over and over, inverted, stretched, combined with other elements, until it has its own rightness.”
250 copies, the entire edition:
200 in wrappers: $125
45 in cloth, numbered and signed by both authors and the artist: $450
5 in cloth, numbered and signed by both authors and the artist, accompanied by an original artwork in a specially designed slipcase: $3,500
To order, please call either 212-691-9100 or 631-324-5511, or email easthampton@glennhorowitz.commore info at: http://www.glennhorowitz.com/catalogues
link: Tara Geer at Glenn Horowitz Books on Gotham Gal, "A few years ago Glenn took me up to see Tara in her studio..."
vision-less drawing experiments:
Speaking about, What is it we do when we draw, and running a drawing excercise at
Ink Practices Workshop
Friday May 18 5:00-7:00 & Saturday 1030-1:00
Talks from 2011 Drawing and Cognition conference were pubished, pdf link here.
Tara Geer, What We Illustrate When We Draw: Normative Visual Processing in Beginner Drawings and the Capacity to Observe Detail. p.45.
Also images of drawings (including cover) and an artists statement p.50
Round table discussion with artists and neuroscientists
Thursday, March 29, 7pm
Drawing and Doubting: STUDIO 360
A spell at the MacDowell Colony is one of the best perks an artist can get. Tara Geer, a visual artist, went twice to work on her drawings. She also interviewed a MacDowell legend, lunch delivery man Blake Tewksbury. But the whole time, she ...
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/06/nyregion/thecity/06arti.html?_r=0
culture stories I produced or was in:
http://www.wnyc.org/people/tara-geer/
I post a little more often, a little more wanderingly, on Instagram: 