Jane Dickson
Jane Dickson, a witness to her time.
Jane Dickson describes in her most recent interview for the Whitney Biennale in 2022, “I am a witness for my time, not for heroic moments, but for fresh insights into these small overlooked moments; moments that are lived in the background.” The formative years of Dickson’s life spent in Chicago and Boston gave her an outsider’s viewpoint of New York City when she moved there in the late 1970s. Her artistic lens from the 1980s onward is from the perspective of an observer as she focuses on distinguishing urban New York City and the suburbs.
Her artistry, stemming from her photographs, reveals frames of everyday life in the 1980s at the peak of the AIDS crisis, to be a time when the city was “burning, broke, and dangerous.” But, her work hyper focuses on places and experiences that stray from differences in economic advantage and offer a shared lived experience instead.
U-Dunk-Em, 1984, bought on the student art buying trip in 1985, is from early in her career. Depicted is a scene from a fair, perhaps Coney Island, fixated on two females working the basketball dunking booth. The amusement lights twinkle in the back as the anticipation grows for someone to approach the booth and begin a few moments of fun.
Living through the COVID-19 pandemic, I now understand why her work was relevant then and now. There are certain moments in life that we live with every day, whether it be walking by a laundromat on our way to work or the yearly family trip to the amusement park. In times of uncertainty and threats to our health, we make sacrifices that strip our daily routines of the little things we wouldn't know we would miss. Dickson brings life, on a massive scale, to these moments.
Lilly Reed '23, Double Major Sociology and Art History
Jane Dickson and Edward Hopper
Although they worked in opposing ends of the twentieth century, both Jane Dickson and Edward Hopper are well known for elevating life’s smaller, more private moments. Dickson argues that “a certain violence comes” when some communities are overlooked. Although this language is too modern for Hopper to have articulated in the early twentieth century, it is clear through a glance at nearly any of Hopper’s city paintings that he, too, valued society’s underdogs. Hopper and Dickson both lived in New York City during health crises – the 1918 Influenza and the AIDS epidemics, repsectively – and both artists’ work frequently ennoble the New York blue collar employee who faced great challenges during these epidemics.
In Hopper’s 1939 work New York Movie, a female movie attendant leans against the wall on the far right of the piece. The two moviegoers are silhouetted while the focus remains on the movie attendant. She has likely seen this film before and is not participating in the entertainment spectacle but instead takes refuge from it around the corner. Dickson’s 1984 work U-Dunk-EM also features women who are employed in a place of leisure. As with Hopper’s movie attendant, the women are not taking part in the traditional community of their place of employment – the amusement park or fair – because they are charged with working the game rather than playing it. Hopper and Dickson are both adept at portraying the outsider from a position unbeknownst to their subject.
Lucy Owen ‘23, Art history major, English and cultural heritage and preservation studies minors
Mark H. Reece Collection of Student-Acquired Contemporary Art, CU1985.4.1