The everlasting art of Anne Minich

The art of inner visions

Her work was most recently featured in the Bodies and Souls exhibition at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, where she studied from 1951 to 1952. She left the Academy to marry, thinking she couldn’t be both artist and wife/mother. Yet the drive to make art was irresistible, and after 15 years as a “closet artist,” Nietzschean self-determination took hold and Minich forged a new creative life.

The decades since have produced a prolific body of work recognizable for its layered symbolism, idiosyncratic imagery, and resistance to easy interpretation. Her images arise from what she calls her “inner visions.” Although often perceived as having a feminist vibe, Minich insists she does not have a political agenda, as she believes it inhibits creative freedom. Instead, her studio practice centers on deeply personal work rooted in childlike, playful curiosity.

Much of Minich’s art is constructed in mixed media. Her imagery deploys text and figurative images such as limbs, heads, and torsos, often in silhouette. These are layered with shapes like fleur-de-lis and found objects such as seashells. Many works hold sexual and religious suggestions, with hints of subversive humor. An admirer of Duchamp, Minich approaches art as an arena for ideas more than aesthetics, consciously resisting what she calls "pretty." Chance, geometry, and psychological inquiry also shape her thinking, influenced by artists such as Quintin Morris and Marlene Dumas.

“The real and the unreal”

A work in Woodmere’s collection, Boneboat (2013), reveals how memory, humor, found objects, and art history converge in her practice. She recalls, “When I was about 12, my father took me to the Metropolitan Museum where I was struck by Arnold Böcklin’s painting Island of the Dead (1880). I didn’t understand its meaning at the time, but its power stayed with me.” For reference, Island of the Dead is a haunting nocturnal scene depicting a small boat carrying a coffin and two figures toward a rocky island of cypress trees, where tombs are carved into sheer cliffs.

In Minch’s reimagining of Böcklin’s painting, a largeish fishbone is mounted into the wooden support, evoking a boat with a rudder that sits atop a dark sea beneath a pinkish sky. (Note to reader: boats are an old connotation of female genitals.) The bone came into her possession when her son’s friend sent a box of smelly fish bones as a resource of found objects. Minich tried various methods to remove the odor but wasn’t entirely successful. She constructed it anyway and laughs at the possibility it may still emit a fishy scent.

Like many thriving elders, Minich’s viewpoint is forward-looking rather than sentimental. She is currently preparing for a four-person exhibition at Fjord Gallery in October by continuously exploring ways of expression. For Minich, artists occupy two realms—the "real and the unreal." As an example, she points to Magritte's The Treachery of Images (1929) as a reminder that pictures and words invite us to consider the nature of representation.

Minich’s studio efforts are driven by the same remarkable curiosity that first compelled her to make art as a child, to take risks, to become a lifelong learner, and to question authority. In her resolve to be open to all possibilities, Anne Minich says yes to life.

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