Artist Joan Danziger, 91, gets her first retrospective

At 91, artist Joan Danziger is the subject of her first career retrospective, filling an entire floor of the American University Museum at the Katzen Arts Center in Washington, D.C.

The show, titled “The Magical World of Joan Danziger,” includes 40 sculptures and 28 early drawings from 1963, alongside a separate exhibition of 24 additional works titled “Ravens: Spirits of the Sky,” devoted to her newest series of glass ravens.

Both shows, on view through May 17, are curated by Jack Rasmussen. Each is accompanied by the publication of full-color catalogs.

Danziger estimates she has made roughly 380 sculptures over her lifetime, many now scattered across private collections and public institutions. It is the first time so much of her work has stood together in one place.

In a 38-minute Zoom interview, Danziger discussed her daily practice and what it took to assemble the shows.

“It’s an artist’s dream, and most of the time, it doesn’t happen,” Danziger said. “It’s like the ultimate for an artist, to see your work spread out so many years.”

Danziger spoke from inside the exhibition itself, seated at the museum and surrounded by her sculptures. At an age when many artists have long since retired, Danziger continues to cut glass by hand, assemble wire armatures and give tours and lectures to visitors.

The ravens are part of a newer body of work in glass, a material she only began using in 2008 after a friend encouraged her to take a workshop. She began in glass with her “Beetles” series, then glass sculptures of horses, and now her ravens. In the show of her ravens, the birds loom and hover, with three suspended in flight.

She described the process of cutting and scoring pieces of glass to attach to the wire armature as “very difficult” and a process that can take two to three months to make one of her ravens. The glass is not heavy, she said, making it manageable for daily work.

“It's not stonework. It's not wood carving,” Danziger said of her glass sculptures. “I don’t think about age, anyway. To me, I’m kind of ageless, in a way. I’m very active.”

Danziger noted that she has always had a studio assistant who would aid her with monumental commissions.

“I've done 16-foot suspended sculptures. I don't do that anymore,” she said.

She added that she also doesn’t believe in keeping a regular schedule, besides getting up early to go to her studio, and often goes out to art museums and to attend lectures.

“I believe in keeping up with what's happening in music and art and theater, which enriches my artwork,” she said. “In fact, after we talk, I'm going to see a show of Aboriginal art at the National Gallery. … In Washington, they have wonderful museums, so I'm always looking at different art.”

The retrospective includes sculptures of brightly colored trees, horses, musicians, masked bicyclists and fantastical furniture-like forms that trace her decades-long fascination with dream imagery and the natural world.

It includes her 1968 work Bird on a Scooter, now owned by George Washington University, and other sculptures dating from the 1970s onward. Pulling the show together required tracking down dozens of pieces from collectors, museums and institutions.

“I borrowed 20 sculptures from different collectors, and that was complex,” she said. “In fact, one collector wouldn’t lend it. She said, ‘I can’t do without her for four months.’”

That collector, Danziger said, looks at the sculpture every day and talks to it. The attachment does not surprise her.

“Even my birds talk to me,” she said. “When I come to my studio in the morning, the ravens say, ‘Hello, Joan,’ they perk up, and the people who own my ravens say the same thing, that they feel alive to them.”

Not every work could be located. Some were lost in the deadly Palisades fire in California. Others disappeared when institutions closed or sold buildings. Public art, she said, can be especially difficult to trace over decades.

Danziger was asked if there were any artworks she had made that did not make it into the show that she would have liked to have had included. She named two: Magic Sam, of a massive frog sitting in an antler chair, and another titled Rhino Chaise Lounge.

The first, Magic Sam, is currently in Ashland, Oregon, which she said was too long of a trip. The second is in Santa Fe, and it was just too complicated to ship it, she said.

She said she has never forgotten a work she made. Danziger described seeing a large number of her works all together for the first time in preparation for the show as an incredible experience.

“I look at them, and I see the line of inspiration, creativity, because I do sculptures in series, like I did a bicycle series, I did a musical series of musicians, I did the trees,” she said. “They all have a reason for being, as part of my life.”

Her series often grew out of lived experience. Years of bike riding led to masked bicyclists. Backpacking and sleeping outdoors shaped her tree sculptures and animal forms.

“When you’re sleeping outdoors in the West, you really observe nature very differently,” she said. “It becomes part of you. So, the trees and all the animals became a very part of my natural creativity.”

Danziger moved from New York to Washington in 1968 and has lived there since. She credits the city’s museums and arts community for sustaining her practice.

“Being a museum town, it’s fabulous,” she said. “Everything seems to come to Washington. I love being in D.C. I fell in love with D.C. the minute I arrived here.”

The American University Museum show occupies the entire third floor — a rare honor for a local artist. The opening drew about 1,500 people, Danziger said, and she has since been giving tours and lectures to groups ranging from museum docents to high school students.

“I’d love to have another show in New York,” she said. “With just my ravens.”

Danziger said she is not dwelling on legacy. She is focused on her mornings in the studio and her days attending exhibitions and lectures in the nation’s capital.

“I don't think about tomorrow. I'm very engrossed in all the work I've done now, and I don't think about the future,” she said. “I will go on to do other things, but right now, I'm not involved with my next project. There always will be another one.”

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