Hannah Holliday Stewart
Matthews Gallery | July 2014
Hannah Holliday Stewart (1924-2010) was a Houston-based sculptor with an uncommon array of major public art commissions a rising national reputation before she mysteriously turned her back on the art world and assumed a life of seclusion two decades before her death. At the time of her passing over 120 sculptures were discovered in her Albuquerque studio and many of these will be featured in Hannah Holliday Stewart: An Artistic Legacy Rediscovered.
“This is an artist who spent most of her life building a legacy, and then turned her back completely on the art world, for reasons she never revealed,” says gallery owner Lawrence Matthews. Two years ago Matthews was given the opportunity to explore Stewart’s Albuquerque, NM studio, untouched since her death in 2010 and full of artwork spanning her career. Matthews says, “Stewart had incredible drive and passion. She exhibited her work in major museums and created numerous monumental public art commissions. I thought, ‘Why isn’t she better known today?’”
Stewart was born in Birmingham, Alabama and studied at the Cranbrook Academy of Art. Early in her career she spearheaded multiple public art projects in Houston, big victories for a young female sculptor. Stewart gained national notoriety as part of a generation of second-wave feminist artists who incorporated ancient myths and goddess imagery into their work, but was equally influenced by scientific findings and natural phenomena. At the peak of her career she exhibited at the Smithsonian Institution, the San Francisco Museum of Art, the Dallas Museum of Fine Art, the High Museum in Atlanta and other museums across the country.
“My goal is to render visible the hidden realities of pent-up contained energy,” wrote Stewart. “Each sculpture is an energy form, the movement arrested in space, a form sustaining an energy.” At Matthews Gallery, Stewart’s elemental abstract sculptures will serve as intricate puzzle pieces to an artistic legacy rediscovered.
Press
“Stewart left Houston without saying goodbye in 1987, just as the art scene she helped establish finally began to blossom. Few friends knew where the pioneering sculptor went: not her most recent art dealer, nor her agent, nor people who’d been close enough to visit her weekly. (…) It appears she never exhibited again. Until now, posthumously, at an art gallery in Santa Fe.”
— Molly Glentzer, Houston Chronicle
“An artist on the front lines of feminism, Stewart reconfigured the feminine, crafting new structures and introducing new symbolism. This exhibition affords a rare opportunity to study a modern yet consummately contemporary artist, whose work can be experienced visually as well as intellectually.”
— Iris McLister, Pasatiempo
My contributions: Assistant curatorial under Lawrence Matthews, didactics, catalog design, press relations, blogging