In a city with plenty to look at, there’s something to be said for playing the conduit. Amplifying the Between, Marie Schoeff’s dazzling new show at Westmont’s Ridley-Tree Museum of Art, demonstrates the range and beauty that results when an artist commits to being present. Schoeff’s work falls on the abstract side of the spectrum between representation and unmediated expression, but there’s always a deep connection to the place and the moment in which she made each mark. These paintings, drawings, and prints reflect more than four decades of rigorous training and intense focus from a formidable intellect. Still, they flow with a grace that’s as natural as sunlight reflected on water.
Marie Schoeff: Amplifying the Between continues the Westmont Ridley-Tree Museum of Art’s commitment to showing and documenting the careers of significant artists living in Santa Barbara. As such, it reveals yet another instance of an artist evading the centrifugal force of the New York and Los Angeles scenes while still participating in the conversations happening there about the aims and methods of contemporary art. Schoeff, who grew up in Vallejo and Sonoma, attended California State University, Sacramento, where she majored in studio art. In 1977, her work was selected for an exhibition of California women artists by the sculptor and feminist art provocateur Lynda Benglis. Benglis encouraged Schoeff to enroll in the MFA program at Hunter College in New York City, the leading center for postmodern art and critical theory at that time.
It was a glorious and inspiring time to be an artist in New York, and Schoeff and GoodmanTK, who joined her there in 1979, lived at the heart of it in Soho, where they had a loft. A pair of Schoeff’s paintings from that period, “New Era” (1980) and “Eaves” (1981), provide striking evidence of how the young painter caught and rode the tidal wave of painterly energy then coursing through that place and time.