New Collections: Joan Semmel, Benjamin Harjo Jr., and Mary Heilmann Oral Histories

This entry is part of an ongoing series highlighting new collections. The Archives of American Art collects primary source materials—original letters, writings, preliminary sketches, scrapbooks, photographs, financial records, and the like—that have significant research value for the study of art in the United States. The following essay was originally published in the Spring 2024 issue (vol. 63, no. 1) of the Archives of American Art Journal. More information about the journal can be found at https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/toc/aaa/current.

The life stories of three pathbreaking painters have recently entered the Archives’ oral history collection. Joan Semmel gives shape to the bold, woman-centered canvases that have defined her career; Benjamin Harjo Jr. details the confluence of historic and incipient traditions in his work; and Mary Heilmann contextualizes the disparate elements that have fueled her experimentation.

Speaking with art historian Gail Levin in Semmel’s Nolita, New York, studio, Semmel (b. 1932) describes the currents of self-revelation and self-empowerment that led to her radical feminist painting practice, which treats her body as a landscape replete with wonder and discovery.

From her childhood in the Bronx to later negotiation of the art market, Semmel candidly grapples with the misogynistic conditions that guided her personal feminist revolution.

Though a painter, Semmel works from photographs, and she describes the power of inhabiting that gaze to define herself on her own terms: “[T]he use of the camera freed me up to use my own body, and to use it from my own point of view, and that’s how I got the idea to abstractly construct the paintings from that point of view, because it illustrated . . . my political idea of forming your own self-identity, and of how a woman needs to see herself and experience her own body rather than take the male view of the female body.”

In a virtual conversation with curator Laura Marshall Clark (Muscogee Creek) from Harjo’s home in Oklahoma City, recorded just before his death, Harjo (1945–2023; Seminole and Absentee Shawnee) describes the progression of the market for contemporary Native American art and the intimacy of community building through shared heritage practices. He recalls a precocious childhood in the arts and yearning for more information about his ancestors and their world. In adulthood, Harjo scoured estate sales and consignment stores for historical documents, materials, and relics that could tell bigger stories about his community. These efforts expanded his visual lexicon, which draws heavily from Seminole patchwork and comic graphics, while evoking mythos and nature through an electric palette. Harjo offers practical advice for the next generation:

I tell young artists, I say, “You want to carry a sketchbook with you. You want to constantly be sketching. You want to write those ideas down. Put them somewhere where you may not work on it at that time that you do it. But later on, when you’re pressed to come up with something, then you refer back to your sketches. . . . It’s always a satisfying time when you can finish a painting, a drawing, a woodcut, and . . .it becomes, in your imagination, far beyond what you anticipated.”

This paradigm served Harjo well in his playful, vivid, and evocative work as he animates the palimpsest of graphic history, retelling stories that assume new form by conjuring the past.

From her Bridgehampton, New York, studio, in conversation with curator Terrie Sultan, Mary Heilmann (b. 1940) recounts her movement between the East and West coast of the United States and the productively contrastive elements that have enriched her life and work along the way. Heilmann outlines her omnivorous approach to creative expression: “I started out with ceramics. Then I started doing sculpture. Then I started doing painting. I was a writer. I did a lot of writing, and so telling stories is a part of it, and different ways of working is a part of my—my way of doing it. So, it sort of tells a story when you go in a show and see all different kinds of stuff all over the place.” Heilmann conceives of herself as an orienting conduit for her wide array of influences—Beatniks, surf culture, minimalism, geometric abstraction, literature—and she has developed her own cohesive mode of painting, inviting viewers into her space of joyful, nondidactic freedom.

Each of these painters has cleared a way forward with new approaches to the medium, introducing materials, perspectives, and inspirations that extend the horizons of the canvas, canon, and culture. Reflecting on her long career, Semmel finds poignance in hard-fought recognition: “[F]or me, the joy is the work, and . . . seeing it now getting the attention that I’ve always wanted it to have, and feeling like I made a contribution, and that that contribution has value not only to me but in the larger sense of the word.”

Ben Gillespie is the oral historian at the Archives of American Art.