School of Art Newsletter Fall 07 vol. 2 issue 1

Goddess of Roses: School of Art Professor Joanna Frueh Receives 2008 WCA Lifetime Achievement Award

Jill O'Bryan and Joanna Frueh, threshold, from the series Joanna in the Desert  (2006)

 

Artist, writer, scholar, and mentor, Joanna Frueh was made a 2008 recipient of the Women’s Caucus for Art (WCA) Lifetime Achievement Award.  The award, in recognition of Frueh’s remarkable accomplishments in the visual arts, will be presented to her in Dallas, Texas, on February 23rd , 2008. An affiliate society of the College Art Association, the WCA was founded in 1972 and is dedicated to creating opportunities and recognition for women in the arts.  The Lifetime Achievement Award was first presented in 1972 and is awarded annually in celebration of the outstanding achievements of individual women working in the arts.  Other 2008 recipients include Ida Applebroog, Nancy Grossman, Leslie King-Hammond, Lowery Stokes Sims, and Yolanda Lopez.  Recipients from the past include Louise Nevelson and Georgia O’Keeffe.

Joanna Frueh is an art critic and art historian, a writer, an actress, a singer, and a multidisciplinary and performance artist. Her most recent book, Swooning Beauty: A Memoir of Pleasure (2006), continues the trailblazing consciousness she explores in concepts of love, Eros, sex, and human relations that appear in her previous books, Monster/Beauty: Building the Body of Love (2001) and Erotic Faculties (1996). Clairvoyance (For Those In The Desert): Performance Pieces 1979-2004, a collection of her essential performance texts, will be published by Duke University Press in January 2008. Frueh’s performance texts and her writings on contemporary art and women artists have appeared in numerous books and journals. Recognized as a powerful, provocative, and articulate performer, she has presented her one-woman shows—as well as lectures—at museums, galleries, universities, and conferences in the United States, Canada, Australia, and the UK.  Joanna Frueh is a Professor Emerita of Art History at the University of Nevada, Reno. 

Frueh began teaching performance art as an Adjunct Instructor for the School of Art in the spring semester of 2007. In early September, her one-woman show, Goddess of Roses, was presented at the Marroney Theatre in the College of Fine Arts in conjunction with the 2007 School of Art Faculty Exhibition. Goddess of Roses is a celebration of living wholeheartedly. Using roses as symbols of both spiritual and carnal love, as they have been since ancient times, Joanna Frueh explores passion, pleasure, humanity, and divinity. Glamour, elegance, and playfulness characterize the performance; Frueh’s costume embraces and reveals her body, white roses surround her, she enjoys chocolate malts, and she scents herself with Caron’s Rose perfume while speaking as Goddess of Roses, a deity from her imagination. In this performance, Frueh continues to develop a philosophy of pleasure, grounded in passion, love, beauty, and Eros, from her experience as a woman and a lover, her research as a scholar, and her thinking and feeling as a person who observes the beauties and vulnerabilities of human beings. Gentleness, struggle, sex, religion, aging, and more all receive the rich observation of Goddess of Roses.