In the Archives: The Saving Martha Project

In the Archives: The Saving Martha Project

By Leilani Alontaga-Caithness

Originally published in the June 2022 issue of the Journal of San Diego History (University of San Diego).

We present here an installment of a regular feature of The Journal in which contributors compose brief essays about collections in the San Diego History Center’s Research Archives. Our goal is to illustrate how the archival collections constitute a rich community resource that provide researchers the raw materials we need to interpret the history of our region.

In 1969, American artist Mierle Laderman Ukeles (b. 1939) wrote her manifesto, “Maintenance Art Manifesto 1969! Proposal for an Exhibition: ‘CARE,’” which went on to influence generations of feminist artists. In this seminal piece, Ukeles posited that the maintenance of objects, spaces, and people are poorly remunerated (often unpaid) and rarely acknowledged yet essential daily tasks crucial to the success of the family, home, and society at large. She wrote, “I am an artist. I am a woman. I am a wife. I am a mother (random order). I do a hell of a lot of washing, cleaning, cooking, renewing, supporting, preserving, etc…now I will simply do these maintenance everyday things, and flush them up to consciousness, exhibit them, as Art.” ?

Ukeles’s manifesto had its greatest influence on art produced from the 1960s to the 1980s, when women artists freely explored the environment of the home, domesticity, family, and the objects associated with those facets of life across a variety of media. One such creative, Martha Matthews (1935-2019), the subject of the Saving Martha Project, was a San Diego-based artist who was also influenced by the idea that daily rituals in the domestic space could serve as valid and important inspirations for artistic practice. Examples of this influence can be seen in her nearly 300 collages and silkscreen prints that were produced during the latter half of the 1970s, many of which drew inspiration from everyday domestic objects.

Similar to other feminist artists of the time, Matthews appropriated the use of unconventional subjects and media that were traditionally linked to femininity. Matthews also aimed to expand the definition of fine art while incorporating her own social and political perspectives and ideas—a break from the formal training she received at art school where she was encouraged to draw from the theories that inspired the work of the abstract expressionists such as Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko.?

The Artist: Martha Matthews (1935-2019)

Matthews was born in Rhode Island in 1935 and throughout her childhood enrolled in art classes at Rhode Island School of Design, where she later attended college and graduated in 1956 with a degree in illustration. Soon after graduating, Matthews worked as a trainee artist for the New York advertising firm Carloni for nine months before she married Jerry Matthews and moved to Kansas. In 1965, they settled in Del Mar when her husband accepted a position at the Scripps Institute of Oceanography. In 1976, she graduated with a master’s degree in fine art from San Diego State University and taught drawing for several years there as a teaching assistant and at other local colleges in and around San Diego. It was during this period that Matthews produced nearly 300 hand-pulled silkscreen prints that explored her fascination with perforated kitchen gadgets such as colanders, tea balls, and sink drains. She wrote in 1976, “the narrow rectangles that confine the tea ball, and the repetition of this shape in defining the borders that surround it, symbolize the frustrations of our lives.” Pivotal to her style were atmospheric narratives influenced by pop art, filled with symbolic motifs that have been sharply undercut with themes of irony, monotony, humor, and joy—all grounded within domesticity and inspired by the objects that are linked to the many important roles women must play in daily life.

As a result, Matthews used textiles and other organic media as a basis for experimentation throughout her prints. In Juggling Acts/Vacation (1977) a busy narrative is anchored by a large, blue doily serving as the central motif of the print. The days of the week, written out in order and repeated twice, sequentially around the doily, are separated by a finger pointing to the next day; they serve as a border to the doily that contains two hands within it that appear to be in motion, juggling a teapot (a kitchen object), a butterfly (a symbol of ephemerality, fragility, and salvation) and an auspicious pear (a symbol of fecundity). In the lower right section of the print, the same finger that separates Saturday and Sunday points down to an illustration of a geographic region in southeast England, perhaps the destination of Matthews’s vacation.?

By combining text and images Matthews aimed to construct and highlight the complex definition of female identity while highlighting the literal realities of juggling daily life and critiquing the stereotyped and fetishized depictions of women in art that, until then, largely ignored the female experience. Matthews also attempted to give symbolic value to overlooked sources of female creativity, while simultaneously acknowledging that a woman’s value and relevance are heavily based on the idea of motherhood and the domestic space.

The Saving Martha Project

In 2017, San Diego-based artist Lynn Schuette (b.1948) established the Saving Martha Project with the mission of preserving and archiving Matthews’s artworks. Schuette has stated the singular focus of the project was to “…preserve Martha Matthews [sic] print work from the 1970s by?documenting and storing it in archival materials, working to get it accepted in appropriate institutional archives, arranging exhibitions, and preparing related historical documents. The Saving Martha Project can be used as a model for other San Diego women who have bodies of work that lack recognition.”

In 2018, the Saving Martha Project donated a small but very significant part of its collection to the San Diego History Center’s Research Archives. The donation consisted of eight silkscreen prints, some from the Tea Ball series (1976), in which Matthews aimed to “record the adventures of an animated tea ball,” and artifacts such as the Atomic Bomb Potholder (c. 1970) and the Jimmy and Rosalyn Carter Flyswatter (1970). The majority of the pieces donated to the History Center are from the period in which Matthews was almost exclusively engaged with the practice of making silkscreen prints, from 1973 to 1979.

?

While Matthews’s contemporaries such as Eleanor Antin (b.1935) and Martha Rosler (b.1943), both teachers at the University of California, San Diego in the 1970s, received international acclaim for their work, very little is publicly known about Matthews, despite her having exhibited work in dozens of important exhibits in the San Diego region. Soon after Matthews’s death in 2019, an exhibit, SASSY, curated by Lynn Schuette, sought to reinvigorate the work of the late artist and inadvertently established a basis for broader intellectual inquiry into the intersections of art and feminism in San Diego during the 1970s.?

Notes (for complete footnotes, please refer to the Summer 2022 issue of the Journal of San Diego History (USD)).

?Hilary Robinson, Lucinda Gosling, Amy Tobin, The Art of Feminism: Images that Shaped the Fight for Equality, 1857-2017. (San Francisco: Chronicle Books LLC, 2018), 96.

?Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Manifesto for Maintenance Art, 1969! Proposal for an Exhibition: “CARE,” Philadelphia: Oct. 1969. Four typewritten pages, each 8 ? x 11 in. Courtesy of the artist and Ronald Feldman Gallery New York, 3. <.https://feldmangallery.com/exhibition/manifesto-for-maintenance-art-1969> April 1, 2022.

?Understandably, this school of thought split into two theoretical branches: one that considered that women in the home were in “internal exile” and another that used motherhood and the domestic space as a source of reflection and believed the home could be considered a place of creativity. Hilary Robinson, Lucinda Gosling, Amy Tobin,The Art of Feminism: Images that Shaped the Fight for Equality, 1857-2017 (San Francisco: Chronicle Books LLC, 2018), 96.?

?Martha Matthews, “The Tea Ball: Ironic and Decorative Images in Art,” MFA thesis, (San Diego State University, 1976), 2.

?Ibid.

?Leah Ollman, “Show at Sushi is Artistic Alternative to a Diet of Fabergé Eggs,” Los Angeles Times, Friday, October 27, 1989, F25.?

?Robert Perine, “Painter Martha Matthews Transcends the Light of the Upper World to the Mysteries of Catacombs, Cave and Subway,” The Publication, August 1998, 4. Correspondence with Lynn Schuette and Jerry Matthews, email message with author, March 10, 2022.

?Email correspondence with Lynn Schuette, email message with author, March 10, 2022.?

?Perine, “Painter Martha Matthews,” 4.?

?Matthews, “The Tea Ball,” 2.

?The term radical domesticity was coined by Bruce Kamerling Curator, Kaytie Johnson, who assisted in the 2018 donation of the accession 2018. Conversation with Lynn Schuette during studio visit, February 1, 2022.

?Matthews was inspired by decorative art, indigenous art, na?ve art, and other artistic practices that were traditionally associated with women as discussed in her MFA thesis. Matthews, “The Tea Ball,” 2-3.

?Lucia Impelluso, Nature and Its Symbols, Guide to Imagery Series (Los Angeles: Getty, 2004), 112, 154. The pear was associated with Venus because the broad lower part of the fruit bears semblance to the female womb.

?Lynn Schuette met Martha during the 1970s and they remained close friends throughout their time in San Diego. Lynn Schuette was the executive director of Sushi Performance & Visual Art (1980-1995) which she founded. Sushi developed from the 1979 visual and performance series Artists Work Here, also organized by Schuette. The non-profit organization was created to be an alternative exhibition and performance space that would support both local and visiting contemporary artists.

?Email correspondence with Lynn Schuette, April 1, 2022 with author.

?San Diego History Center Accession number 2018.56, Gift of the Saving Martha Project and Jerry Matthews.?

?Matthews, “The Tea Ball: Ironic and Decorative Images in Art,” 2.?

?Karen Kenyon, “Martha’s World of Fantastic Irony,” North County Panorama (San Marcos, CA), December 30, 1982. After 1980, Matthews went on to create a series of ominous paintings in which she critiqued industrialization and depicted barren industrial landscapes scarred by technology that was introduced under the guise of progress and advancing civilization. This shift in medium was due to the severe asthma-like symptoms that resulted from Matthews’s exposure to printing solvents. Hilary Robinson, Lucinda Gosling, and Amy Tobin, The Art of Feminism: Images that Shaped the Fight for Equality, 1857-2017 (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2018), 7.

??Lynn Schuette, “List of Group and Solo Exhibitions for Martha Matthews,” (San Diego, 2019). Exhibition Prospectus.?

?Lynn Schuette, SASSY, An Exhibition in Celebration of Her Art and Spirit (San Diego, 2019),1. Exhibition Prospectus.?