Myrel Chernick

Density, 2020, graphite on paper,
18 X 24 in.

Soft afternoon, 2020, graphite on paper, 18 X 24 in.

From the artist’s website:

Myrel Chernick is a visual artist and writer living in New York City. Beginning in the late 1970s, she sought to combine her love of literature and language with light-filled installations. Her text and image-based multimedia installations and single channel videotapes have been shown nationally and internationally, at venues such as Artists Space, PS I, and the Whitney Museum at Equitable Center in New York, the List Gallery at MIT, Videopool galleries in Winnipeg, Canada and the International Cultural Center in Antwerp, Belgium. These works explore female subjectivity from a feminist perspective through language, literature and moving images.

During the 1990s, after being motivated by raising twins to explore maternal ambivalence, Chernick developed and curated Maternal Metaphors, a comprehensive exhibit that explored maternal subjectivity in contemporary art, and was presented at the Rochester Contemporary Art Center in 2004. An expanded version, co-curated with Jennie Klein, was shown at Ohio University in 2006. Their comprehensive anthology The M Word: Real Mothers in Contemporary Art was published in 2011 by Demeter Press. They currently have chapters in two forthcoming anthologies from Routledge. Chernick has been the recipient of National Endowment and New York State Artist Fellowships and has lectured widely on her work. She is currently developing a site-specific multimedia installation as well as completing a hybrid novel that follows a young artist’s life in Paris in the mid 1980s.