June 4 through July 20, 2007
Trudi Ludwig: Critical Mass

Artist’s Statement

When I was a kid growing up in Iowa, my mother wrote for the Des Moines Register and Tribune and my two older brothers, who were at or near draft age delivered it.  I remember well coming downstairs first thing in the morning to see several copies of the paper laying on the kitchen table with a photograph of some grisly scene from the Vietnam war on the front page, repeated again and again and again.  These images, repeated multiple times, lead me to become a printmaker.

It’s the historically functional nature of prints as an art form that I find so compelling:  they have served as teaching aids, devotional images collected as souvenirs from pilgrimage sites, forms of protest, satire or propaganda, and as instruments of social change.  Beyond the fact that prints may be decorative, aesthetically pleasing objects, is the sense that they are ‘the people’s art’ that has always impressed me most. 

The idea that art is social conscience can be traced through time and the horrifically beautiful prints of Dürer, Holbein, Bruegel, Callot, Goya, Daumier, Posada, Dix, Kollwitz, Shahn, Baskin, Frasconi, and Kentridge.  Truly, prints keep art—and art history—current, timely, and thoroughly human.  Images such as these expose the aspirations, calamities, foibles and even humor of our species as we stumble along through life wrestling with our personal angels and demons on a daily basis. 

A central feature of my childhood home was something called the “Argument Shelf.”  When one of us five Ludwig kids asked a question, the answer was invariably, “Look it up!” at which point we were directed to a magical arena that contained The Reader’s Encyclopedia, Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, the Bible, the Koran, Cruden’s Concordance, the Encyclopaedia Britannica (with its glorious see-through overlays in the “Human Anatomy” section), out-of-date and current world atlases, a thesaurus, and dictionaries in English, French, German, Italian, Latin, Japanese and Indonesian.  You were expected to find the answers yourself.  And of course you’d get lost in time and space in these books, as you felt the slip and spark of one image, idea or ideology rubbing up against another.  The information –the social conscience—contained in these volumes served me well, and continues to grind away in my prints now.

When I was twenty I used to worry that I didn’t have anything to say, or wouldn’t have enough ideas for my artwork.  Now I realize there are too many ideas and not enough time to grapple with them all.  There is so much grist for the mill, and so much more to figure out.  I guess I’ll have to keep looking up.

And if you want biographies, do not ask for those with the refrain
‘Mr. So-and-So and his times’ but for those on whose title-page
it should say  ‘a fighter against his time.’
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Use and Abuse of History, Chapter VI

Trudi Y. Ludwig

Curator’s Statement

Printmaking is an exacting art, and printmakers tend to be as concerned with technique as they are with content.  Baltimore artist Trudi Ludwig is no exception. Her work is part technical tour de force, part intellectual puzzle, and part social critique. Deeply grounded in the artist’s faith journey and in the ongoing conversation that is the history of art, each piece asks the viewer to look closely, to pay attention, to realize that nothing is exactly as it seems.

Most of the works in this exhibition bring ancient images into conversation with contemporary realities.  For instance, the large woodcut Prima Veritas (First Truth) places three skeletons in a pose reflecting that of the three young women dancing in a springtime garden in Botticelli’s famous painting Primavera. The Grace Notes Suite, the twelve small prints of musical instruments installed on either side of Prima Veritas, is a reference to the identification of the young women with the classical “three graces”; a somewhat complicated visual analogy between the instruments and the bones of the human body; a visual pun on the way that certain notes are indicated in sheet music; and a reminder that music is one of God’s good gifts. Taken together, this installation serves as a memento mori¸ a reminder that death comes to all, and that God, who is the First Truth, is the true source of grace.

Each of the other works in the show is equally complex. They are sometimes humorous, sometimes caustic, but never cynical, and always thoughtfully and carefully wrought. Like the mirrors of the Capital Sins, Trudi Ludwig invites us to see ourselves in the context of history and faith.

Deborah Sokolove