Sachi Yanari-Rizzo, Curator of Prints & Drawings
Jacqueline K. Bishop explores environmental issues in her paintings, installations, and prints. Her concern for nature grew out of firsthand experiences at home in Louisiana’s Gulf Coast and through her travels in the US and abroad. Bishop was born in Long Beach, California and now splits her time between New Orleans, Louisiana and Columbia, Mississippi. She studied art and philosophy at the University of Kansas and completed her bachelor’s degree in painting at the University of New Orleans. She received an M.F.A. from Tulane University.
In 1975 Bishop, living near a poverty-stricken area in the Dominican Republic, observed the decimation of acres of rainforest. From 1992 to 2006 the artist traveled to developing countries in South America, Central America, and Southeast Asia, often accompanying scientists, botanists, and ornithologists. She was profoundly touched by the life and work of Brazilian eco-activist and union organizer Chico Mendes, who fought against deforestation and promoted sustainable solutions benefitting indigenous communities. After his assassination in 1988, Bishop annually incorporated images of the fallen leader in her work and wrote the book Em Memoria Chico Mendes: A Tribute on the Ten-Year Anniversary of His Death. Living in New Orleans, she witnessed the environmental devastation caused by Hurricane Katrina in 2005 followed by the Deepwater Horizon Spill (or BP oil spill) in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010, which remains the largest maritime petroleum oil spill in U.S. history. In response, she volunteered in wildlife remediation at Grand Isle State Park where her swamp boots became contaminated, exposing her feet to the oil dispersant Corexit and affecting her skin for weeks. These experiences helped shape the direction of her art. She explained, “I’ve been focusing on and studying and exploring environmental issues for the last 40 years without realizing it. . . .It was in my graduate work at Tulane. I didn’t even know it at the time, and it took maybe ten years after that to realize where I was going. So I guess it was always there, just part of who I am.”i
The Fort Wayne Museum of Art owns six prints by Bishop. Published by Zanatta Editions, Bishop’s lithograph and pigment print Sonatina (2010) was created in collaboration with fellow Zanatta printmakers Karsten Creightney and Neal Ambrose-Smith. It began as a collage and took about a year to complete.
For her watercolor collages, the artist typically culls fragments from newspapers and discarded papers saved from her travels. She paints over this layer of images with watercolor mixed with water collected from the Amazon River, the Mississippi River, or the Gulf of Mexico after the oil spill. Each sample of water possesses unique chemical qualities that affect the medium.
Bishop achieved a similar layered quality in her lithograph and pigment print Sonatina. The base layer is a blend of images from 100-year-old women’s journals, biology books, and vintage song books. It is printed in yellow and grey inks to give an aged quality. The text references Brazil, Amazonas, and written passages in Portuguese. Overlaying this are silhouettes of flora, birds, butterflies, fish, and small mammals forming what the artist considers the contemporary landscape.
Trees play a key role in Bishop’s work and are often depicted without foliage to focus on their twisting branches, trunk, and gnarly roots. Bishop portrays the trees as life giving, supporting, and sometimes anthropomorphic. In Sonatina, silhouettes of trees appear four times and subtly take on the form of a female body. Bishop suggests interconnections in nature through one of the trees that uses her branches to hold an oversized bird’s nest and another tree trunk that morphs into a rabbit at the base. She added a small baby to include human’s relationship with the natural world.
Dark Oak, Sisters, and Three Graces (2015) are all monotypes with similarly drawn trees. In monotype the artist creates an image out of ink or paint on a smooth, non-porous surface, and then transfers the image to paper, yielding a unique impression. Sometimes there are enough remnants of ink or paint on the matrix after the first printing to make a second, lighter impression, which is often called a ghost print. This technique is seen in the faint blue lines in Dark Oak and Three Graces.
Birds are also a favorite subject for Bishop as they are found all over the world. The artist recalled that after Hurricane Katrina there was a “deafening silence” and that there were no birds for days.ii Terra (1986-2002) is a monumental installation consisting of hundreds of portraits of birds from the Americas. In the process of doing research, Bishop discovered that the birds she was painting were rare, endangered, or extinct.
Out of the Blue, State I (2013) is much smaller in magnitude but still labor intensive in the research, sketching, and carving leading up to the finished linocut. Bishop printed 26 portraits of birds on a colorful commercial map of Brazil. The birds are systematically described in profile as if it were a field guide. In this case, however, the birds are all extinct. Rather than representing the birds in their true colors, the artist chose black. Is the color significant to call to mind birds covered in oil from a spill or charcoal from a forest fire?
In Bishop’s 2012 solo exhibition, Against the Tide, water was an important theme in her work. Animals, trees, plant-life, and the planet were enveloped by massive bodies of water with plumes of smoke and red-orange skies on the horizon. Sometimes they ride in boats to seek refuge, like an imaginary mass exodus.
In Untitled (Migration) (2015) the focus is on a green and blue orb that is unmistakably planet Earth. Similarly, it is partially submerged in water and surrounded by only the white tips of wave crests with no land in sight. Bishop commented, “During spring migration when birds migrate from South America to North America then return to South America in later months they sometimes find their forests are gone. Some birds can adapt to the changes but recent studies have shown that many bird species cannot adapt to a changed landscape, which begins the extinction process.”iii Although migration is in the title, the planet seems to be struggling to stay above water. In so doing, Bishop encourages us to consider how life will survive in the wake of a disaster.
Bishop’s work is held at the Detroit Institute of Arts, Minneapolis Institute of Art, and the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, among others.
i Beach Museum of Art, “Let’s Talk Art: Jacqueline Bishop,” September 27, 2020, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dHdFTaN01L4.
ii Laura M. Amrhein, “The Re-enchantment of Art: Jacqueline Bishop’s Imaginary Landscapes,” Arthur Roger Gallery, November 3, 2012, https://arthurrogergallery.com/2012/11/the-re-enchantment-of-art-jacqueline-bishop%E2%80%99s-imaginary-landscapes/.
iii Jacqueline Bishop, Jacqueline Bishop: Losing Ground: Imaginary Landscapes, 2005, New Orleans, LA: Arthur Roger Gallery, 2005.
Thank you for a fascinating look at her prints.