Energy, the capacity for doing work, may exist in different forms – kinetic, thermal, electrical, chemical, nuclear, and Judy Brodsky, an energy source who never shuts off or even slows down.
The 85-year-old Ms. Brodsky, who has lived in Princeton for 63 years, just keeps on going with great enthusiasm, commitment, compassion, and energy as a renowned artist, printmaker, curator, arts advocate, arts educator, author, wife, mother, grandmother, and friend to countless people in the arts and not in the arts.
“When measuring energy levels, there is normal people energy and then there is Judy,” said a friend in reference to Judy’s latest week of accomplishments that included the launch of a new book Junctures in Women’s Leadership: The Arts(co-authored with Dr. Ferris Olin) and a gala reception honoring the Brodsky Center’s new home at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts (PAFA).
Several of Judy’s friends boarded a bus in the Princeton Shopping Center and headed to PAFA on Friday, Sept. 28, to share with Judy the joy of the Brodsky Center’s “moving” celebration and perhaps to capture a little of the Judy energy. It is an energy fueled by a commitment to excellence in her craft and a pursuit of social justice.
A Distinguished Professor emerita in the department of Visual Arts at Rutgers University, Judy is the founding director of the Rutgers Center for Innovative Print and Paper, which was renamed the Brodsky Center for Innovative Editions (BCIE) in her honor in September 2006. Twelve years after the renaming, BCIE is entering a “very exciting” new era with its move to PAFA in center city Philadelphia, she said.
The Brodsky Center mission is to work with culturally diverse artists. Residencies have included over 300 American and international artists since the BCIE inception in 1986, including: four MacArthur Foundation genius award recipients. Projects created at the Brodsky Center are in the collections of Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum of American Art; the Smithsonian; Bibliothèque nationale; Victoria & Albert; Stadtsmuseum, Berlin, National Gallery of Art and many others.
In the Juncturesbook, Ms. Brodsky and Dr. Olin profile female leaders in music, theater, dance, and visual art. The diverse women included in this volume have made their mark as arts leaders by serving as executives or founders of art organizations, by working as activists to support the arts, or by challenging stereotypes about women in the arts.
“This is the first book to study the style of women’s leadership in the visual and performing arts. The books on leadership are not comparable because they do not address the styles exhibited by women leaders in the arts. Nor do the books on art and politics address the subject of leadership in the arts and how feminist principles of social justice have had influence on the role of the arts in social change,” said Judy who will be at Labyrinth Books (Nassau Street, Princeton) on December 6 to talk about the project.
Just writing about her titles and accomplishments takes a lot of energy. In addition to the above, Judith A. Brodsky is: chair of the board of the New York Foundation for the arts; the co-founding director (again with Dr. Ferris Olin) of the Rutgers Institute for Women and Art now the Center for Women in the Arts and the Humanities that oversees The Feminist Art Project, a national program to promote understanding of the role of women artists in the cultural environment.
Over the past 30 years, Judy has held numerous leadership positions in the art world, most notably as past national president of ArtTable, the College Art Association, and the Women’s Caucus for Art (WCA). The WCA was established in 1972 as part of the College Art Association to promote equity for women artists and art professionals.
Today it remains one of the largest and most influential organizations for women artists, with twenty-seven chapters nationwide. As the first working artist to lead the organization, Judy expanded political activism and membership in the WCA.
And finally, Judy Brodsky’s own work – about which she rarely talks – is housed in more than 100 permanent locations, including the Library of Congress, London’s Victoria and Albert Museum, Berlin’s Stadtmuseum, and the Fogg Museum at Harvard. Her images of the environment, women, and family become metaphors for life, decay, death, and possible salvation. A new body of work is titled The Twenty Most Important Scientific Questions of the 21st century.
She started her arts career in the same hyper energetic way she is pursuing it today. The art history major at Radcliffe College (class of ’54), always knew she wanted to be a painter, but discovered her true artistic passion after taking a print-making class. Her artistic cravings were put on ice for a few years after she got married, moved to Princeton and had two children.
As soon as her children started school, however, she decided to heat up her arts career, by enrolling in Temple University’s Tyler School of Art. She figured Tyler was a good choice, because she could attend classes and still be home in time to pick up her kids after school (traffic was different in those days). At Tyler, where she received her MFA in 1967, she studied printmaking and began to identify male dominance in fine art. When women’s movements rose to challenge this status quo in the 1970s, Judy Brodsky helped launch FOCUS, a festival celebrating women artists that drew feminist art pioneers.
Judy Brodsky reassured me that she does sleep on a regular basis and even engages in some downtime by reading mystery novels. There is no mystery as to why she embraces this intense and frenetic life-style. Like the women featured in her book, Judy is inspired by the deep love for the arts and a commitment to engaging in the quest for inclusivity of race, gender, and class.
“My drive comes from my identity as an artist – to create, not just traditional art objects, but to use my abilities for shaping the world around me, as well as to shape the prints and drawings I make. I believe that artists can have an impact on the world beyond the art they make in the studio,” she said.
The biggest mystery for me, however, is how she does it all with such grace, wisdom, and generosity.
