Charlotte Schulz (born 1960) is an American visual artist best known for intricate charcoal drawings, sometimes composed of multiple sheets that she tears, folds and distresses in order to disrupt the two-dimensional picture plane.Parks, John A. "Space, Charcoal, and the Mind of Charlotte Schulz," Drawing, Spring 2007, p. 116–27.Shuster, Robert. "Best in Show," The Village Voice, October 20, 2010, p. 149.Genocchio, Ben. "Opening a Window on the Creative Mind," The New York Times, January 27, 2008. Retrieved August 17, 2020. Her work explores personal and collective responses to traumatic, often-public, experiences and events, interweaving vignettes of landscape, interiors, disasters and unexpected elements in dreamlike combinations that upend spatial and temporal conventions.Gupta, Arjun. "Charlotte Schulz," artUS, Fall 2008. Retrieved August 17, 2020.Castelbuono, Juliann. "On the Cover," Chronogram, October 2011, p. 12. Retrieved August 17, 2020.Hodara, Susan. "Using Nature to Depict Itself," The New York Times, April 12, 2013, Sect. WE, p. 11. Retrieved August 17, 2020. Artillery critic Seph Rodney describes her drawings as works of "elegant and surreal lyricism" that are exquisitely rendered, thick with detail, and perplexing in their mix of fractured visual logic, overlapping realities, and speculative ruminations on space and time.Rodney, Seph. "Charlotte Schulz," Artillery, November 2014. Retrieved August 17, 2020.
Schulz has been recognized with a Guggenheim Fellowship and awards from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation and New York Foundation for the Arts.Artforum. "NYFA Announces 2017 Fellows," News, July 7, 2017. Retrieved August 17, 2020.Artforum. "2010 Guggenheim Fellows Announced," News, April 17, 2010. Retrieved August 17, 2020.The Pollock-Krasner Foundation. Charlotte Schulz, Artist. Retrieved August 17, 2020. She has had solo exhibitions at Smack Mellon, Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum and Mills College Art Museum,Streitfeld, L.P. "Preparing fertile ground in Ridgefield," The Advocate & Greenwich Times, September 7, 2003, p. 3. and been featured in group shows at the Weatherspoon Art Museum, Tampa Museum of Art, and Dorsky Gallery, among others.Spinella, Rachel. "Art on Paper at the Weatherspoon," The Carolinian, February 13, 2019. Retrieved August 17, 2020.Birmingham, Mary. "Women's Work," The Jersey Journal, March 2, 2007, p. 4.John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. Charlotte Schulz, Fellows. Retrieved August 17, 2020. Schulz lives and works in Peekskill, New York and teaches at Parsons School of Design in New York City.
Early life and career Schulz was born Charlotte Lentner in the small working-class city of Massillon, Ohio in 1960.Parsons School of Design. Charlotte Schulz, Faculty. Retrieved August 17, 2020. After studying art at Kent State University, she and her family moved to Florida, where she worked with painter Mernet Larsen and earned a BA degree at University of South Florida (1983).Milani, Joanne. "Art of homes stretches into the unconscious," Tampa Tribune, November 4, 1996. She later studied at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (1992) before returning to University of South Florida to complete an MFA degree in 1993.
After graduating, Schulz began to exhibit her paintings and drawings regionally, including shows at the John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art, Dunedin Fine Art Center, Society of the Four Arts, Tampa Museum of Art, and Lee Scarfone Gallery (solo);Marger, Mary Ann. "Diversity is in the works," St. Petersburg Times, June 17, 1994, p. 20.Milani, Joanne. "Florida artists," Tampa Tribune, July 28, 1994, p. I.Milani, Joanne. "Some scenes from a crisis," Tampa Tribune, September 8, 1995, p. I.Marger, Mary Ann. "Where art dwells," St. Petersburg Times, March 22, 1996, p. 25. the Ringling show, curated by former Metropolitan Museum of Art curator Henry Geldzahler, led to the museum's purchase of her painting, Room of My Own (1992).Geldzahler, Henry. "Featuring Florida," Sarasota, FL: John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art, March 1994.
In 1999, Schulz moved to Brooklyn. She was awarded fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts and Aljira Center for Contemporary Art in 2001 and 2002, respectively.Artnet. "NYFA Grants, 2001," News, July 2, 2001. Retrieved August 17, 2020.Bischoff, Dan. "Aljira's Emerge 2003," The Sunday Star-Ledger, August 15, 2004, p. 3. Retrieved August 17, 2020. Her first solo museum show, "An Insufficiency in Our Screens" (2007), was held at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum and traveled to the Mills College Art Museum in Oakland in 2008.Cheng, DeWitt. " A House Subdivided: Charlotte Schulz deconstructs the McMansion," East Bay Express, July 16, 2008. Retrieved August 17, 2020. Her subsequent solo exhibitions have been held at Smack Mellon and Wake Forest University (2010) and Beacon Project Space (2015).Patterson, Tom. "Fundamental Medium," Winston-Salem Journal, November 28, 2010, D-5. Retrieved August 17, 2020. Schulz has taught at Parsons School of Design since 2000.
Work and reception Schulz indicates that two foundational interests have structured her art: space and narrative. Influenced by philosophers exploring malleable conceptions of space and time, such as Gaston Bachelard, Gilles Deleuze, Henri Bergson and Elizabeth Grosz, her work conveys multiple, proliferating views and a cinema-like temporality.Sozanski, Edward J. Review, The Philadelphia Inquirer, February 8, 2009. Retrieved August 21, 2020. She draws on personal history, art and poetry, news events and collective experiences for imagery; her early work was more personally focused, while since the mid-2000s, she has linked the personal with public and geopolitical issues such as the nature of violence and hatred, tragedy, terrorism and war, and the environment. Schulz's drawings evolve intuitively, often beginning with ideas from reading, which she develops in sketchbooks before rendering small sections of an image at length, often without a predetermined plan. Her delicate charcoal drawing technique has been noted by New York Times critic Benjamin Genocchio, among others, for its close observation and painstaking detail, heightened level of finish, and control of the medium's capabilities.Wilson, Beth. "Drawn Together," Chronogram, February 2008, p. 40–1. 2008. Retrieved August 17, 2020.Jordan, Courtney. "Drawing Rooms," Smithsonian Magazine, March 10, 2008. Retrieved August 21, 2020.
Early paintings
Schulz's early oil paintings arose out of the dislocation she felt following her parents' divorce and move to the alien suburban sprawl and tropical life of Florida. These large works explore memories, charged emotions and relationship to place, using a recurrent, intimate metaphor of a house set in suburban landscapes to represent the human psyche. In an effort to break from a single perspective format, Schulz reshaped styles and spatial treatments of the past—drawing on sources from Cezanne, Cubism and Giorgio de Chirico to traditional Chinese landscape painting and the early Renaissance (e.g., Giotto)—to create personal, contemporary statements. They employ subtle shifts between maze-like interiors and suburban scenes to create fictionalized, cinema-like narratives, informed in part by her reading of Bachelard's phenomenological work The Poetics of Space.
Curator Henry Geldzahler wrote that multi-view paintings like A Room of My Own suggest the complex ways we experience architecture through "an original amalgam of aspects of Futurism and American Surrealism." Other critics compared Schulz's stairways leading nowhere, unexpected doors and dreamlike, tilted rooms—in that work and others, such as Persephone's House With a Chimney (1995)—to the psychological architectures of 18th-century Italian visionary Giovanni Battista Piranesi's fantastical Carceri prison etchings.
Early drawings (1999–2005) In the late 1990s, Schulz moved to Boston (and subsequently, Brooklyn). Finding herself in a crowded urban setting, with less workspace, she turned to modest-sized, single-sheet drawings made in charcoal that, while still personal, were also informed by imagery drawn from poets such as Wallace Stevens and Robert Kelly, philosophy and psychology.Charlotte Schulz website. Early Drawings. Retrieved August 21, 2020. She relinquished the need to start with a structuring house image, instead taking an approach that upended seemingly fixed, opposed constructs like inside and outside, influenced by the fluid, non-Cartesian conception of space and events posited in Deleuze's The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque.Nahas, Dominique. "Timeless/Timeliness," Timeless/Timeliness: Aljira Emerge 2003, Newark, NJ: Aljira: A Center for Contemporary Art, 2004.Larsen, Mernet. Dark Poets, Baltimore, MD: Maryland Institute College of Art, 2007.
These ideas were compatible with her interest in portraying shifts in thought and emotion, mysterious and portentous narratives, and movement in time rather than static scenes; the resulting works, including her "Inside the Monad" series, synthesize landscape, architecture, interiors, objects and weather elements. Critic Dominique Nahas described such drawings (e.g., With head shorn, she listens to the sleeper sleeping away the dream and dreaming the lives of acquired wisdom, 2002), as delicately detailed, intensely private, charged vignettes and "incantatory revelations" that "suggest the flitting of intertwined memories."
Mature drawings (2005– ) Beginning in 2005, Schulz shifted to large-scale, intricate charcoal drawings composed of multiple sheets that she often tore, folded, bent and distressed, reshaping and disrupting the picture plane.Stein, Lynn and Daly Flanagan. 7: Out of this World, Nyack, NY: Rockland Center for the Arts, 2008. These black-and-white works drew on diverse imagery and extensive reading, and increasingly, linked personal experience to collective, often-traumatic experiences, such as 9-11, Hurricane Katrina, and the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. They employ a careful blending of charcoal and delicate erasure that interweaves vignettes of haunted landscapes and elegant interiors intruded upon by war and natural disasters amid the folded terrain, low relief and untouched voids of the paper.Kozul, Zeljka Himbele. Shift and Flow, Long Island City, NY: Dorsky Gallery, 2011.
Schulz's surfaces function like screens onto which she projects and layers beliefs, emotions, and potential realities or parallel worlds to form purposefully disjointed narratives that suggest a contemporary psychological index; the language poetry-like titles she composes mirror the juxtaposition of visual elements. A 2010 Village Voice review describes her work as conveying complex moods moving between comfort and fear rather than clearly delineated narratives, and counts it among a "renaissance in the realm of the fantastical" for realist drawing. Formally, these later drawings explore tensions between real and illusionist space and the sculptural potential of paper, often taking on non-rectangular, object-like configurations that suggest physical, dynamic forces at play.
Schulz created the eight-panel drawing The Maximum of All Possible Hate Is Realized and We Cleave to Our Screens as It Unfolds in That Disquieting Way (2005) in response to the 9/11 attacks.Charlotte Schulz website. The Maximum of All Possible Hate 2004-2005. Retrieved August 21, 2020. Its sheets are arranged on the wall like dominoes (or story panels) and depict incongruous imagery: an airplane flying through a room, everyday domestic elements, explosions, scenes of passage and escape, a sheep on a platform. John Parks of Drawing describes it as "a potent and thoughtful reflection on how public events intrude on and redefine our private lives, and conversely, how our private lives intrude on and redefine history," also noting its ability to convey connections and correspondences unavailable to a simple linear narrative.