Quirky and perky, with a face full of determination, it’s hard not to get a quick crush on Vivian Grant the way that Daisy Patton paints her, circa 1960, in a series of women’s portraits on display at Denver’s Art Gym Gallery.
With her emerald green dress, dangling earrings and precision-plucked eyebrows, Grant radiates the kind of organic optimism that could carry her far in her burgeoning career in New York’s publishing world.
But the accompanying text tells a story with a different ending. At 23, she found herself showing signs of pregnancy and sought to terminate it.
Abortion was illegal in those days, and dangerous, the stuff, as we say, of back alleys and shady practitioners and Grant, like many others, was one of its victims, dying from complications of the procedure. An autopsy later showed it was a false pregnancy.
Tragedy on top of tragedy. That’s the narrative arch of Patton’s “Would You Be Lonely Without Me?,” which captures in oil paint on paper the images of 15 women who died as a result of botched abortions in the era before the 1973 Roe vs. Wade Supreme Court decision made abortion legal, and raised the medical standards around the procedure.
Yes, the exhibit is political. Patton’s portraits are rich in physical and emotional detail. They raise sympathy for women who make the difficult decision to end their pregnancy — and their sale could raise money for national organizations that support the ability for all women to make the choice.
In her artist’s statement for the show, Patton, writes of a time when an estimated 5,000 to 10,000 women died each year from abortion-related injuries that were caused by unskilled doctors or self-inflicted by those, fearing no where else to turn, who treated themselves with knitting needles or drank bleach or other chemicals.
She notes, citing published research, how things have changed in the last four decades: “Now it is statistically more dangerous to give birth than to have an abortion.”
“Would You Be Lonely Without Me?” is relatively small as painting exhibits go, and the Art Gym Gallery is a casual space, doubling as the popular artist co-op’s lobby. But the exhibit delivers an emotional punch beyond its size.
Because abortion is such a charged topic in the United States, it’s impossible to judge the exhibit as anything other than what it truly is: some would called it political, others might label it propaganda. But both camps should see the show because — whichever of those things it is — “Would You Be Lonely Without Me” is exceptional.
Patton has crafted a series of portraits that understand the possibilities of the tools and materials artists have at their disposal. She works in oil, a nod to the long history of using that medium as a way of memorializing everything from royals to farmworkers. It is the finest of art traditions.
Yet, she tweaks it just right by painting directly on paper rather than on the customary stretched canvas artists have used for centuries. Her subjects are more fragile than queens and kings and she renders them accordingly. They are installed at the Art Gym with the same informal sensibility — unframed and simply tacked to the walls.
Patton clearly put in the research time required of artists who take on historic material. She spent hours uncovering the names of women who died from botched abortions, then hours more tracking down photos of them or looking for clues about what they looked like, how they dressed and carried themselves. Her investigation went deep, into archives of big-city newspapers and specialized ethnic publications who reported stores about African-American women the mainstream media ignored.
In the case of one subject, Joan Ethel Rollins, who died in Lakewood, N.J., in 1954 at the age of 20. Patton was only able to locate a picture from her high school yearbook in Falls Church, Va. The yearbook described her as “enticing, radiant, diverting” — qualities that went into the portrait.
The exacting research gives the exhibit its real power. Side-by-side the paintings and the brief texts presented play out like chapters from a novel.
Often, they are touching. Like the story of Vivian Campbell, who died at 27, leaving two other children, under the age of five, without a mother.
Or Virginia Washington, who died at 23, after her boyfriend told her he wanted nothing to do with her pregnancy.
Or Mary Magee, who died at 26, after being injected with pine oil, leaving her four year old to be raised by grandparents.
Or Lola Huth, a dancer with the legendary José Limón Dance Company who died at 23, after her doctor, fearing prosecution, suggested she remove her own IUD to end her pregnancy. She punctured a vein and bled to death.
Sometimes, the deaths play out like true-crime mysteries, full of almost unbearable violence. Like the case of 19-year-old college sophomore Barbara Lofrumento, whose doctor, trying to cover up his illegal, fatal abortion, chopped her body into pieces and attempted to flush the pieces down a toilet. He was later arrested.
Or 17-year-old Arlene Thompson, whose boyfriend asked for a discount after an abortion left her dead, and then buried her body in a vacant lot.
“Would You Be Lonely Without Me?” does, indeed, pile on the grief. It’s a somber exercise and Patton keeps it personal. With every portrait, she hand-embroiders the name of the subject directly into the paper. Interestingly, instead of working from the back and cutting off the excess threads, she works from the front and leaves the threads hanging. There’s something unfinished about the way they look, as if the work of sewing, like these women’s lives, was interrupted before completion.
There’s mystery to it all that pulls the show together. Patton’s painting style is full of personality, but not detail. You see curls but not strands of hair, skin but not blemishes. The portraits are not caricatures, but not quite realistic either. Patton is not pretending she knows all that much about these women, just where they fit into the historical picture of abortion.
That seems appropriate, too — to keep them a little mysterious, vague. As real as “Would You Be Lonely Without Me?” tries to make them, they’re not really people whose loss we feel directly. They are symbols. We don’t own them, we just evoke them for whatever reason we choose. Patton’s evocations, suiting her message, feel something close to perfect.
“Would You Be Lonely Without Me?” continues through Aug. 3 at the Art Gym, 1460 Leyden St. It’s free. Info at 303-320-8347 or artgymdenver.com.
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