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Alice Leora Briggs (nee Brown, aka Alice Brown and Alice Brown-Wagner prior to 1998) is an American visual artist and writer whose work includes drawing, painting, printmaking and site-specific installation. Born in Borger, TX, she lives in Tucson, AZ, USA.
Alice Leora Briggs was born in 1953 in Borger, Texas and raised in Idaho Falls, ID. Following graduation in 1977 from Utah State University, she studied painting, printmaking, and drawing at the University of Iowa, Iowa City, where she received an MA (1980) and MFA (1981). Briggs taught at The Art Institute of Chicago, Utah State University, Weber State University, Pima Community College, University of Arizona, and the Academy of Fine Arts and Design, Bratislava, Slovak Republic. She has been an artist in residence at Anderson Ranch Arts Center in Snowmass, CO http://adobeairstream.com/art/interview-with-artist-alice-leora-briggs/, Tulsa Artist Fellowshiphttps://www.tulsaartistfellowship.org/fellows, and artist in residence at Jentel Artists Residency Programhttp://jentelarts.org/residents/ in Wyoming. Briggs is a Guggenheim Fellowhttps://www.gf.org/fellows/all-fellows/alice-leora-briggs/ and Fulbright Scholarhttp://printcenter.org/91st/briggs/. Briggs and collaborator, Julian Cardona, received honorable mention for the Dorothea Lange-Paul Taylor prize from the Duke University's Center for Documentary Studies.
Arts writer, Margaret Regan, observes that Briggs' images are, "steeped in art history. Her infernos recall Bosch and her nightmares Goya; her beautifully drawn woodblocks are reminiscent of Dürer's..."[1] Since 2007, Briggs’ subjects have frequently drawn attention to the cultural, economic, and political impacts of trafficking along the Mexico-U.S. border, especially in and around Ciudad Juárez. Her drawings partnered with text by journalist Charles Bowden (1945-2014) in the 2010 publication, Dreamland: The Way Out of Juárez and with Julian Cardona (1960-2020) in A Juárez Abecedario: an Illustrated Lexicon (2022), both published by the University of Texas Press.
Briggs most often uses sgraffito as a medium of choice. Employing sharp tools of various shapes and sizes to excise into a surface, Briggs exposes white lines by scoring the surface of a panel covered first with a kaolin mixture and then with black India ink. Often associated with decoration of ceramics and building facades, the European lineage of sgraffito dates back to at least to Classical Greece. She observes that, “Sgraffito fixes on two facets of my work, drawing and writing. The word comes from the Italian graffiare — to scratch. This in turn is derived from Ancient Greek, γράφειν, to cut into, to write. I work on panels that are coated with kaolin clay and acrylic medium (for binder), then over sprayed with India ink. I pull out an airbrush loaded with India ink when areas of a drawing require a darker atmosphere or obliteration. My drawing tools are simple: x-acto knives, fiberglass pencils, steel wool, engraving tools, anything that will abrade the ink’s surface or cut into the white clay. For whatever reason, I like to cut things. It’s a bonus that each cut serves as a light in a dark field."[2]
Ciudad Jaurez
Since 2005 Briggs has created an extensive body of work focused on the cultural, economic and political environment of the United States-Mexico border with specific attention on Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua. As noted by Evoke Contemporary, "Briggs probes with curiosity and intensity those facets of human life that we often seek to closet. The artist finds her subject in the narco-violence that plagues Ciudad Juárez and in an asylum built by a visionary on the outskirts of this Mexican border city. Briggs explores the daily adaptations made by the citizens of the narco-battered borderlands. She renders them in her native amalgam of classic and contemporary imagery and oblique narratives coaxed from European art history. In her persistent way, all of Briggs’ work finds a way to link our contemporary anxieties, desires, and expectations with those of the art historical past."[3]
Her series, The Smoking Room, features images of crushed and discarded cigarette packages. Suggestive memento mori, the artist observes that, "I drew these dirty and crumpled and misshapen cigarette packages in a scale that approached the human head. Their image filled each picture space. They were portraits of artifacts that shared common features, but whose histories made each one an individual. The packages came to represent the dead and their abundance..."[4]
Briggs works in etching, linocut, woodcut and lithography. In 2016 she completed a suite, The Room, printed at Flatbed Center for Contemporary Printmaking in Austin, TX and acquired by the Prints and Photographs Division of the Library of Congress. Her woodcut, La Ventana, now in the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, was noted by Flatbed, "as one of the most ambitious and powerful relief prints that Flatbed has had the privilege of publishing. Briggs is a master draftsman and her graphic sensibilities fit perfectly with woodcuts."[5]
Briggs’ installations, ranging from several hundred to more than 1500 square feet, are sheet aluminum and wood clad environments that combine labyrinthian architectural constructions, modified found objects, sculptures, and texts. Each installation is a permutation of a prior iteration, reusing materials and elements to create works and adjust the content and form to each specific site. Among these installations were Industry of Memory in the Tucson Museum of Art, Purgatorio at the University of Arizona and Utah State University, Rift in Lubbock, TX, and Bipolar at the Mesa Contemporary Arts Center.
During 2010 and 2011, Briggs completed a series of drawings burned into hand-made paper. These drawings were enhanced with acrylic ink images and words from her friend and collaborator, Charles Bowden. As the artist noted in the catalog, Asylum (2014), published online by Evoke Contemporary, "The burn drawings were created in the same manner that I record private thoughts in a diary--these burned experiments were not initially conceived as food for anyone's thoughts but my own."[6]
Briggs handset type and illustrated The Essense of Beeing (1992, Sherwin Beach Press Chicago), written by Michael Lenehan and designed by Robert McCamant.
In 1982, Briggs self-published a suite of 6 intaglio prints with text in handset type, Dear Mr. Kappus: The Eighth Letter, to accompany one of Ranier Maria Rilke's (1875-1926), Letters to a Young Poet (first published in 1929).
Briggs and Charles Bowden (1945-2014) authored Dreamland: The Way Out of Juarez (2010, University of Texas Press, Austin), a literary and visual exploration of the violence and tragedy during the 2007-2009 crescendo of drug-related violence in that border city. This book, which won a 2011 Southwest Book Award from the Border Regional Library Association, has been described as having, "the feel of a graphic novel, the look of an illuminated medieval manuscript, and the harshness of a police blotter, [it] captures the routine brutality, resilient courage, and rapacious daily commerce along the U.S.-Mexico border."[7] Briggs and Bowden also collaborated on the broadside, Killing Is Fun (2009, Ken Sanders Rare Books/Scrub Oak Bindery/Press, Salt Lake City, Utah). Briggs' 2019 essay, Over the Line (published in America's Most Alarming Writer: Essays on the Work and Life of Charles Bowden, edited by Bill Broyles and Bruce J. Dinges and published by the University of Texas Press, explores her collaboration with Charles Bowden.
Briggs’ suite of twelve woodblock prints, The Room (2016), based on poet-laureate Mark Strand’s (1934-2014) poem of the same title, is a visual analog to each line of the poem. This suite, signed by the artist and Strand, is included in a number of public collections, including the Library of Congress, the University of Arizona Special Collections, and the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University.
Since 2010, Briggs worked with Juarez-based journalist and photographer, Julian Cardona (1960-2020), on the Abecedario of Juárez: An Illustrated Lexicon published in 2022 (University of Texas Press, Austin). The artist notes that, "Like Hans Holbein the Younger's 1538 alphabet, death is at the core of Abecedario de Juárez...a compilation of the 100+ drawings [paired] with a new vocabulary rising out of Juárez...will fix aspects of an ever-evolving language that is secretive by nature. It will inevitably be a history book. Many words and meanings will have fallen out of use before the pages are bound."20 Briggs elaborates that, "By many accounts—no one can know the exact numbers—there were over 3,000 homicides in Juárez in 2010. That same year, my friend Julián Cardona and I set out on separate paths to respond to this plague of deaths. We talked regularly about our respective projects and routinely met in Juárez and on Skype. It became important to look into one another's eyes as we wrote and spoke. As our exchange of words and images gathered speed and intensity we realized that we were working toward a mutual goal. By 2015 we'd made a career of sweating, laughing, and handwringing, without benefit of knowing where our toils might lead. By 2018 we had to set an alarm to remember to get up and walk around every 30 minutes, otherwise we would work until cemented to our chairs. Computers grew feeble during this decade, some were repaired, and one was silenced forever by a strong cup of coffee. Our task was equal parts exhilaration and exhaustion, and in the end, terribly painful. In September 2020 when our book, Abecedario de Juárez: An Illustrated Lexicon, was accepted for publication by the University of Texas Press, we met on Skype to toast each other. As he lifted his beer to take a sip, Julián turned his phone's camera to the Juárez sky. Several days later he looked into the same sky as he lay in a street of the city he loved and loathed. Julián Cardona died on September 21, 2020, just outside of his favorite coffee shop. Our illustrated glossary is a mine field of Juárez slang used by criminals, pundits, government officials and other Juarenses who struggled to find words. It explodes into first-hand accounts of extortion, kidnapping, torture and murder, provided by victims, witnesses, perpetrators and media accounts. It is a window that faces the consequences of sexenio de la muerte, six years of death (2006-2012), otherwise known as the administration of an ex-president of Mexico, Felipe Calderón."[8]
Art critic Peter Frank noted that, “Dürer and Holbein, Kollwitz and Beckmann haunt Briggs' work, symbolic and naturalistic alike; but her Germanic gloom is relieved flickeringly by the lighter-hearted, if even snarkier, shadows of Hogarth and Daumier. These are imposing figures to propose as forerunners for Briggs, but her ambition and her ability to fulfill it warrant, even compel the comparison. Indeed, there may not be another artist working in America today who more convincingly keeps alive such caustic Continental spirit.”[9]
Alix McKenna observes that, “her (Briggs') work has a dark beauty and an immediacy not often seen in contemporary art. Its visual strength and documentary quality compels you to keep looking and inspires you to learn more about the tragic situation that she chronicles.[10]
Natalie Hegert, writing about Briggs' exhibition, The Room, suggests that her woodcuts, "... are dense, claustrophobic, and grisly. Some resort to allegory, but many show more shadowy and unfathomable scenes of death, starvation, and violence among the banalities of everyday life.”[11]Seth Orion Schwaiger, also writing about the suite of prints, The Room, notes that, "Neither Strand's poem nor Briggs' prints depict a clean-cut, discernible environment or storyline; instead, they present thick, tendrilly darknesses (sic) – some loose, phantasmagoric worlds made more of atmosphere and emotion than physics and facts, yet still hauntingly linked to the one we occupy."[12]
Welsey Pulkka observed that, "Briggs is a relentless detective, visual journalist and weaver of allegories who ferrets out the truth about the social pathologies of our time. She sets upon her revelatory task with the painstaking dedication of a zealot."[13]
Briggs has received a Guggenheim Fellowship (2019-20) and was a senior Fulbright Scholar (2011, Slovak Republic). She has received fellowships and awards from the Utah Arts Council, Arizona Commission on the Arts, Tulsa Artist Fellowship, Dorothea Lange – Paul Taylor Prize from the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University, Dallas Museum of Art’s Otis and Virginia Davis Dozier Travel Awards, International Exchange of the Tucson Pima Arts Council (now the Arts Foundation for Tucson and Pima County, among others.
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