Championing Women's Contributions
by Elisa Gallaro
Visual artist Jennifer Cecere (B.F.A. '73) has spent much of her 40-year career creating artworks that beautify public spaces while challenging traditional perspectives on "women's work."
Long associated with the Pattern and Decoration movement, Cecere is perhaps best known for pieces that embrace and reimagine the domestic doily. For centuries, these accessories protected furniture, added decorative touches, and showcased women's needlework skills. In Cecere's bold designs, free from the constraints of homes, the doilies take on a much larger role.
"My goal is to reference handicraft in the built environment, to capture people's attention and encourage them to reconsider what they think is valuable," Cecere says.
"Too often, women's contributions are overlooked," she adds. "By championing women's work and making it more visible, I hope to open people's minds — to change the way people think about what art is and what it can be."
Cecere's giant doilies — some as large as 20 feet in diameter — have graced public spaces throughout New York City, where she has lived since graduating from Cornell. Her artwork has been installed in trees in Socrates Sculpture Park in Queens, attached to a baseball backstop in Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx, suspended above a courtyard at Pratt Institute Sculpture Park in Brooklyn, and hung in the gateway of a Staten Island Ferry Terminal in that borough. Closer to the ground, Cecere's etched and stenciled designs have adorned Jersey barriers along Manhattan's FDR Drive and are featured in laser- cut tree guards on Myrtle Avenue in Brooklyn.
Her double-sided, doily-shaped bench, appropriately named Double Doily, has provided a unique, if transient, resting place near New York's Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) PS1, in a public plaza in Lower Manhattan, and in Civic Center Park in Newport Beach, California. In Cleveland's Little Italy– University Circle rail station, commuters and other travelers pass under Cecere's lacy Chandelier on their way to and from the train. The five-domed structure is made of white powder-coated laser-cut steel, measures 7.5 feet by 5 feet by 15 feet and, like many of Cecere's creations, has its roots in childhood memories of her grandmother.
"I was pretty young when I started getting interested in lace, embroidery, and different crafts," she says. "My grandmother embroidered designs on pillowcases, crocheted doilies, and made so many different things. I was just fascinated."
As she got older, Cecere learned that the skills and designs she admired "were never going to be considered art. They were safe outlets that didn't challenge anybody," she says. "If you had these creative impulses, the world would let you display them by knitting, embroidering, or crocheting, but that's about it."
Cecere had bigger plans. "These are legitimate art forms with as much value as painting or sculpting," she says. Her public installations drive that message home by highlighting women's handicrafts in places "where you don't see many curves, natural forms, or anything organic. You certainly don't see lace."
Cecere grew up in Richmond, Indiana, the oldest daughter in an Italian-American family. As a child, she often chafed at traditional boundaries. She also had the confidence and resolve to go after what she wanted. When she learned that a neighbor taught painting classes in her garage, Cecere used her babysitting money to pay the 50 cents per lesson and buy paints and other supplies. "I used to paint in the basement," she recalls.
At the recommendation of a family friend, Cecere was enrolled at Phillips Academy Andover in Massachusetts. The only child in her family to attend boarding school, at first Cecere felt she was being "sent away." Today, she acknowledges that her time at Andover "totally changed my life," giving her access to classes and opportunities she wouldn't have had at a traditional high school. Art teachers at Andover recognized and nurtured Cecere's talent, and her work was displayed in campus exhibits and at local art fairs.
Those experiences cemented Cecere's determination to attend art school after Andover. When her parents insisted that she choose a college with a strong arts program instead, Cecere opted for Cornell — a decision that continues to serve her well. Classes in painting still influence her use of color, form, shape, and space. And no one is more surprised than she at how much she draws on the lessons of an early sculpture class. "l wasn't very good at it," she says. "I never thought I'd end up making sculptures."
Among her most memorable professors was renowned abstract painter Friedel Dzubas, a visiting artist and critic at Cornell from 1970 to 1973. From him, Cecere learned as much about work ethic as she did about technique. Dzubas had a studio in downtown Ithaca, and "he went to work every day," Cecere says. "He impressed upon us that being an artist is a job like any other, and you work at it."
Cecere has followed Dzubas's example ever since. The result is an extensive portfolio of striking, often thought-provoking pieces and installations exhibited at venues including MoMA; the Guggenheim Museum; Pratt Institute; Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum; the Addison Gallery of American Art; the Hudson River Museum; the Burchfield Penney Art Center; and Cornell's Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art. Several works, including Cat Throne and Chandelier, traveled to Musée d'art moderne et contemporain (MAMCO) in Geneva and Le Consortium in Dijon, France, as part of a multicountry exhibition. Her creations are also featured in Ornamentalism: The New Decorativeness in Architecture & Design by Robert Jensen and Patricia Conway and in Pattern, Crime & Decoration edited by Franck Gautherot and Seungduk Kim.
Cecere made her mark early in her career, in 1979, with In My Room, part of a MoMA PS1 Special Project installation at the former Public School 1 in Long Island City. Select artists were given three weeks and free rein to transform abandoned spaces. "My approach was unapologetically female and domestic," Cecere says. "I embraced the opportunity, armed with women's work, lace, doilies, and gel- thickened paint."
At the end of the three weeks, classroom 206 was bursting with colors, textures, and sculptures that resembled household furnishings: rugs, screens, and a sofa covered in women's handicrafts. Curtains with intricate patterns adorned the drafty windows, and Cecere had turned the blackboard into a "quilt." She'd painted a wide swath of the floor pink and laid tin tiles on top. As a finishing touch, she'd added "gel-thickened squiggles as a comment on the minimalist fashion of the day."
Cecere's approach was in stark contrast to the sharp angles and geometric patterns of many of the other Special Project displays. Her work caught the attention of well-known collectors and led to opportunities at galleries and other exhibition venues. The early success came as a surprise, but perhaps it shouldn't have. With In My Room, and every project since, Cecere has simply been following her own advice to other artists: "Don't pay too much attention to what other people are doing. Just get in your lane and swim. You can look around when you get to the other side."