ANEKA INGOLD: THE HUMAN CENTER By Michael Clawson
ANEKA INGOLD’S EMPOWERING, DEITY LIKE FIGURES WIN THE INAUGURAL BENNETT PRIZE AT THE MUSKEGON MUSEUM OF ART
The Human Center On May 2, painter Aneka Ingold was sitting in a crowded reception hall and as the artists around her were being honored her mind drifted back to the studio. “Tomorrow, it will all just get back to normal. I’ll just go back to my studio and that will be it,” she remembers thinking. “But then they called my name and it was like a dream.”
The award she won was the inaugural Bennett Prize, created to honor the work of figurative realist women painters, and while she was up on the stage preparing to accept the award all she could do was take a deep breath. “This is going to change my life,” she said to herself on the stage. Bennett Prize co-founder Elaine Melotti Schmidt overheard her. “She tapped me on the shoulder and whispered in my ear, ‘You are changing your life,’” Ingold says.
It’s a small distinction, but one that shook the young artist to her core, and one that forms the foundation of The Bennett Prize, which put out a call to women artists all around the country so it could find artists who were exploring those key insights that are underrepresented in the art world. More than 640 artists applied, each one offering a unique perspective as a woman living in the 21st century. Ten finalists were chosen for the award, which was given out at the Muskegon Museum of Art in Wisconsin. And from those 10, Ingold’s work was selected for The Bennett Prize, which honors the great achievements women are contributing to realism in America and beyond.
“It’s all about the female perspective. We’ve been seeing the male perspective for so long, and exclusively in many cases, that’s why this is such an amazing and important event,” Ingold says, invoking the kind of passion that has fueled women’s rights
issues, the #MeToo movement and crumbling glass ceilings all around the country. “We have to change the whole mentality of the world. Women are just as capable, just as important, as men. I’m a woman, a wife and a mother and my point of view—and the points of view of the other finalists—needs to be supported and perpetuated. That’s why something like The Bennett Prize is so needed.”
Ingold began to find her voice as an artist as an undergraduate student at Grand Valley State University in Allendale, Michigan, where she was awarded, and fittingly so, the Alexander Calder Honor Scholarship. It’s hard to know what Calder, the great modern sculptor and painter, would have thought, but he surely would have been tickled by Ingold’s use of bold color and her magical figures in abstract settings. She continued her education at the Kendall College of Art and Design in Grand Rapids, Michigan, where she discovered she could combine painting and drawing—acrylic paints, water-based paints, paint pens and Prismacolor pencils—to begin to bring her mixed media work to life. “I haven’t looked back since,” she says.
Today she lives in Tampa, Florida, with her husband and two children. She’s very much a working mom— she teaches at the University of Tampa and at the Hillsborough Community College—which adds a whole new dimension to her perspective as an artist. Many of her works show people like her: strong, independent mothers whose lives, and their femininity, are linked to the world in both subtle and explicit ways. In one work, Postpartum, which was on display at The Bennett Prize event, her subject is a nude mother breastfeeding a baby as her feet soak in a tub seemingly connected via yarn to a vintage radio and prehistoric arthropods. The figure dangles her arm out a nearby window, as if to suggest that motherhood has not removed her entirely from the world. In Tributary a female figure wears a dress printed with organs, including a reproductive system, kidneys and underlying breast tissue. Veins seem to connect the woman to the fabric of the dress and also the surrounding land, including a river that flows behind her. Although Ingold prefers to let audiences come to their own conclusion, one thing is
very clear: her women are woven into the very fabric of the universe.
“The figure, both nude and clothed, in Aneka Ingold’s surreal environments suggests an archetype or deity, the human center of a language of symbols meant to explore and reveal the experience of being a woman, of her role in history and the future, of her biology and identity, and of what being a woman means to the artist and view,” writes Art Martin, the director of collections and exhibitions at the Muskegon Museum of Art. “…Ingold’s nudes are so skillfully rendered that their flesh defines a unique physical being, an independent agent outside of the influence of the viewer.”
When it comes to nudes, Ingold is very much aware of the “male gaze” and how it perpetrates itself within the art world. “What I’m doing here, this is what women go through. When I paint a woman nude it’s not going to be for a man—it’s going to be for everyone. This is how women see themselves, and this is how y’all—I’ve been in the South long enough to draw that out— should see us. Woman are not the perfect little sexual objects that men can enjoy. There is so much beauty and variety, and different cultures and backgrounds…let’s embrace that and who we are as a country. We can’t keep showing one version of a woman,” she says, though she’s quick to add that these are her own views, and encourages others to come to their own conclusions. “I’m not speaking for every woman or telling every woman what femininity or womanhood should be, especially in terms of non-binary, non-gender-conforming people. And I’m only halfway through my life. When I become a grandmother, I imagine there will be other roles to play. It’s going to continuously change.”
The fact that these issues can be pondered within Ingold’s work, and are being pondered at viewings of her paintings, proves the validity of The Bennett Prize, says its founders Steven Alan Bennett and Dr. Elaine Melotti Schmidt.
“We didn’t have to meet her as an artist to know her, because you could see she’s destined to great things in her work. She has a strong sense of the figure. Her paintings are real. Some of her scenes are magical and improbable, but they are real and they speak to us and to others who have seen them,” Bennett says. “She’s also a wonderful first recipient. It was a pleasure getting to know her and her work.”
“When you read about her work, she struggles and triumphs and being a woman in our society is tough, but there she is, the mother of two small children. She’s in the
midst of what so many women do, which is balancing her children with her successful career,” says Schmidt. “She’s also a capable painter, who represents women’s issues in some very unique ways.”
Bennett, who was one of the jurors with artists Andrea Kowch and Maria Tomasula, as well as Martin at the museum, says that he’s quite gratified with the results of The Bennett Prize, adding that several finalists have secured gallery representation based on their submitted work. (Ingold is represented by RJD Gallery in Bridgehampton, New York.) And in the end, the prize is doing what it was designed to do: “Promote and propel the careers of women figurative realists,” he says. “At this point our objectives have been met.”
Submitted works by the 10 Bennett Prize finalists will be part of the exhibition Rising Voices: The Bennett Prize for Women Figurative Realist Painters, now on view at the Muskegon Museum of Art through September 9, after which it will travel to the Reading Public Museum in Reading, Pennsylvania, and in the summer of 2020 to the Pittsburgh Cultural District in Pittsburgh. In addition to Ingold, the finalists are Dorielle Caimi, Jennifer R.A. Campbell, Kira Nam Greene, Mary Henderson, Stefanie Jackson, Rebecca Léveillé, Jenny Morgan, Daniela Kovačić Muzio and Carrie Pearce.
For Ingold, the award has been a dream, but it has likely grounded her further to her family, her studio and her creativity. The Florida painter, who confesses she often works from a studio in her bedroom so her children can be near her and her work, is excited years of hard work has brought her to this point, and that it is has vindicated and validated what she’s trying to convey through paint.
“I’m just trying to connect to the world,” she says. “Just one thing at a time.”