Judy Targan: A Life in Art
Pierro Gallery at the Baird Center
Opening Reception Wednesday Sept. 23, 6 p.m.-8 p.m.
Open Daily 9 to 9 through November 8
Growing up on the Upper West Side, renowned artist, art collector, and benefactor Judy Targan was an artist born. Her educator parents sent her to The Walden School, known for fostering student creativity.
“There were 24 guitars and one paintbrush in my class,” Targan, a sixty-plus South Orange arts mainstay, has famously said.
She was the paintbrush.
Targan turns 95 in the middle of this month and she’s the paintbrush—superbly—still.
Blake Smith, who curates and designs the shows at the Pierro Gallery, is mounting a comprehensive retrospective of Targan’s splendid paintings, master prints, commercial graphic work, and more.
“Judy has lived a life so full of creativity and curiosity and has given so much to the community,” said Smith, who is also South Orange’s Director for Arts & Cultural Affairs.
Smith has been convincing Targan, the 2024 recipient of the South Orange’s inaugural SHERO Award for Art, to let her create this retrospective since Pierro’s reopening that year.
The exhibit is also part of the 23rd SOMA Studio Tour (November 7-8). Targan was a part of the tour’s founding and her studio is a longtime must-see destination.
Targan has also been a docent at the Newark Museum of Art, sits on the art committee of the Montclair Art Museum and is a benefactor at the Visual Arts Center in Summit. Coming of age when doors were largely shut to female artists, Targan has been opening them, especially at her beloved Smith College (class of 1953) and its renowned Smith College Museum of Art, where she has exhibited.
She has also shown at scores of art institutions nationwide, and her art is in many prestigious corporate, public, and private collections.
Starting with her schoolgirl paintings of her and sister around New York City, Targan has always enjoyed a confident line, a firm sense of color and form, and an embrace of life.
“I have always loved shapes,” Targan said during an extended interview.
These delightful youthful paintings are on exhibit, as are three 1954 panels painted to screen the crib of her and late husband Ronald Targan’s first born. Follow the curves of the mother and child giraffes, their whimsical tails echoed in simple flowers at lower left. Feel the mother-child bond. That’s Targan’s power: the sense of connection, joy, possibilities, affirmation that animate her work be it animal, vegetable or mineral.
The Targan line can be followed in the many reclining female figures that Targan first created in the 1970s and 1980s while doing graduate art studies at Rutgers-Newark and has more recently revisited. With featureless faces, these works are about shapes, blocs of color, negative and positive space — figurative works where the actual figure is one with the whole. In an untitled linoleum cut from 1972, blue limbs and head flow into the surrounding blue ground.
In the 1970s and 80s, Targan mastered intaglio embossed printing and became known for her fruit and vegetable prints and posters. Shown is her pea plant from a Gallerie Affiche exhibit in Philadelphia.
The emphasis is on the plant’s graceful green leaves; the bursting pods are subtle, embossed in high relief. In both her Arts Expos and her New York Botanical Gardens Gallery print, New York City’s signature red big apples strike the eye.
“Prints of the Botanical Exhibit’s art were sold in their gift shop,” Targan said. “My piece was chosen for the exhibit catalogue cover.”
Targan holds special pride in having designed cards for UNICEF, her fruits and vegetables a hope for abundance. With her artist credit in five languages on the back, the boxed set of five designs were sold internationally as well at a local butcher shop and by Columbia High School students.
There are some stylistic experiments in the show, a standing figure executed in broad, painterly brush strokes. Smith uncovered Secret Garden, a mid-1990s landscape that marks Targan’s transition to painting oil on wood.
“It was forgotten, off in a corner.” Smith said. “I knew it had to be in the show.”
A road cuts through a mountain landscape. Tellingly, the browns and green of ground and hills carry over onto the frame.
Why the move from canvas to wood? “With printmaking, I became attached to hard surfaces,” Targan said.
She honed a highly stylized vocabulary of sky, sun, moon, rainbows, wave-filled waters, bending birch trees, rocks, shrubs, peace doves and ladybugs. Scale is wildly manipulated, curvilinear shapes abound. Motifs echo–the dots atop three giant lanternflies repeat in the multitude of stars in a moonlit scene.
The paintings extend around the sides of the wood surfaces, sometimes wryly. Asymmetrical diptychs and triptychs tell stories, as in of the biblical flood of 2023’s Escape/Return Memory.
There may be a hint of darker forces–huge leaves hovering like shark teeth. Mostly Targan’s works are peaceable kingdoms of enchantment, a smile of humor and beauty.
