Betty Branch catalog (6-21-23)) - Flipbook - Page 13
The Journal of Betty Branch
xploration of the female body in three-dimensional form is undoubtedly the central
focus of Betty Branch’s prolific artistic career. Early in her creative endeavors and
before finding her métier within the realm of sculpture, the artist experimented with
many different media, including painting, drawing, and photography, as well as textiles and
weaving, ceramics, and other artistic materials. It is clear from even the briefest perusal of her
working drawings and journalistic notebooks that the artist’s graphic and poetic explorations
are accomplished and refined. In essential ways, the power and complexity of Branch’s sculpture
can only be fully appreciated when seen within the context of these wider creative endeavors.
Her working notebook encompasses not only drawings, graphics, and designs on paper, but
also language, poetry, and prose on the page. Expanding into related arts of movement,
performance and documentation, her journals reveal a powerful feminism grounded by
intimate autobiography and fortified through shared community.
E
This broader context for her sculpture is evident throughout the artist’s bound volume that
pieces together and interweaves the many disparate sources that inform her sculptural work.
A collection of intimate drawings, personal writings, as well as newspaper, journal, and book
clippings of all kinds are montaged together so as to convey sources of and influences upon
the artist’s life and work. Various precedents for representing the female form throughout the
history of art are catalogued and inventoried amidst many carefully rendered sketches and
excerpts from scholarly catalogues and illustrated publications. This imagery often dates back
to prehistoric periods and ancient times, as well as from distant reaches of the globe and from
widely disparate human cultures. Every example in this volume is carefully and meticulously
annotated according to time, place, and source, emphasizing not only the erudition of
Branch’s expertise within art history, but also the artist’s endless appetite for knowledge and
understanding of the origins of her own formal interests and investigations. The examples of
archeological and art historical sources throughout her journal are profuse, almost overwhelming:
— In her handwriting we read, “Spain, Neolithic . . . . Cliff paintings of abbreviated
human figures compared with similar designs from painted pebbles of southern France.”
— And then turning a page, “The Primordial Goddess . . . . Clay Figurines . . . .
Romania, prehistoric also in Syria, Crete, Mesopotamia [and] India.”
— “A Cycladic fertility figure of goddess, in marble, now in the British Museum.”
— And an “African figurine by the Congo people from Zaire” found on the cover of
The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin, Fall 1981.
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Karl Emil Willers, Ph.D.
Chief Curator and
Deputy Director of
Collections and Exhibitions
Taubman Museum of Art
