Contemporary abstract artist Lily Stockman discusses her work, drawn from nature and its grammar of symmetry, camouflage, and repetition to create large-scale abstract paintings, during the spring Lenhardt Lecture
Lenhardt Lecture: Lily Stockman
Cocktail Hour 5:30pm
Artist Talk 6:30 – 8pm // Whiteman Hall
TICKETS: Free for Members | $5 for the general public
Join contemporary artist Lily Stockman for the spring Lenhardt Lecture. Based in Los Angeles and Yucca Valley, California, Stockman draws from nature and its grammar of symmetry, camouflage, and repetition to create large-scale abstract paintings.
About Lily Stockman
Lily Stockman (b. 1982, Providence, RI) is a Los Angeles and Yucca Valley, California-based painter. Drawing from nature and its grammar of symmetry, camouflage, and repetition, Stockman plumbs her familiar landscapes (Los Angeles, the Mojave Desert, a remote island in Maine) for her distinctive palette of glowing, tertiary colors– crackling orange, red earth, Holbein brown, and Fra Angelico blue. The New Yorker art critic Johanna Fateman describes the artist’s biomorphic compositions as “both diagrammatic and vaporous, a combination that calls to mind the spiritualist abstractions of the American modernist Agnes Pelton. Although they’re more lyrical, Stockman’s nested shapes also have the meticulous magic of Josef Albers’s squares.”
Stockman’s paintings emerge from a wide range of references, from natural phenomena— vernal pools, mineral licks, birdsong, black ice — to the esoteric — Shaker gift drawings, medieval hocketing, portable Renaissance altarpieces, poetry meter.
Stockman’s work is in the permanent collections of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, Institute of Contemporary Art Miami, Palm Springs Art Museum, Farnsworth Art Museum, and Orange County Museum of Art, where she was included in the California Biennial 2022: Pacific Gold.
About the Lenhardt Lectures
The David and Dawn Lenhardt Lecture engages Valley audiences with some of the most acclaimed contemporary artists in the world. In 2018, the inaugural lecture presented New-York based artist Jim Hodges, and subsequent lectures have featured artists Shara Hughes, Daniel Joseph Martinez, Arcmanoro Niles, Teresita Fernández, Amalia Mesa-Bains, Derek Fordjour, Rashid Johnson, and Otis Kwame Kye Quaicoe in conversation with Larry Ossei-Mensah.
The Lenhardt Lecture is a key component of the David and Dawn Lenhardt Contemporary Art Initiative. Made possible through the generosity of the Arizona-based Lenhardt family, the Lenhardt Contemporary Art Initiative was established in 2017 to deepen the Museum’s commitment to contemporary art through various programs, namely the Lenhardt Lectures, which engage Valley audiences with some of the most acclaimed contemporary artists in the world; the Lenhardt Contemporary Art Acquisition Fund, which enables Phoenix Art Museum to collect works by contemporary artists; and the Dawn and David Lenhardt Gallery, designated for the presentation of contemporary art, including works acquired with funds from the Lenhardt Contemporary Art Initiative, loans from national and local collectors, and a rotating series of artworks from the Lenhardts’ own collection. In 2021, the initiative was expanded to support the diversification of the contemporary art collection of Phoenix Art Museum through the acquisition of works by artists contributing to discourses on race, gender, and other socially relevant concerns, including those by Black, Indigenous, Latinx, and women artists, among others. Since 2017, the Museum has acquired artworks by Shara Hughes, Arcmanoro Niles, Derek Fordjour, Rashid Johnson, and Otis Kwame Kye Quaicoe with funds from the Lenhardt Contemporary Art Initiative.
The Lenhardt Lecture is made possible through the generosity of The Dawn and David Lenhardt Contemporary Art Initiative.
