May 3 - June 13, 2004 at Tenri Cultural Institute of New York
by Robert C. Morgan
Throughout her long and distinguished career as a Professor of Art at New York University and as an internationally recognized art educator - who has expanded the notion of what it means to be an educated artist - Angiola Churchill has never forsaken her initial ideals as a painter. As a student of Hans Hofmann, when his school was on Eighth Street in the Village during the fifties, Churchill became enchanted with the breadth of expressive possibilities in abstract painting.
Over the years she has tenaciously evolved her own abstract vocabulary, working primarily in white and black, sometimes on canvas, but most often with paper. Her extensive work on paper is viewed by the artist as symbolic gesture related to her role as a woman, representing “the incapacity to speak - the inheritance of silence from the woman’s world.” She has also borrowed signs and symbols from her Lombardian heritage along with a certain vision of the light. She has brought this vision into the context of decorative significance. Put another way, Churchill has somehow evolved according to what the late nineteenth century artist and critic John Ruskin once understood as a hybrid sensibility between Italian and Anglican perspectives. Precision sensibility, expressive articulation, and attentiveness to the craft in art - these were the elements that constituted the goal of the artist.