ABOUT
30 minute interview with Ann, as part of the Westport Library's series "Artists in Residences", conducted by Miggs Burroughs.
The last image announces the next video in the series.
Ann Chernow’s art is intimate. She creates private moments, engaging us in a contemporary narrative with a remembered past. Her work addresses the human condition.
Chernow's entire oeuvre includes paintings, drawings and prints. The work is related by themes, among which are: communication, gesture, glance, waiting, self absorption, loneliness, anxiety , optimisim, tenderness, alienation, fatigue, and confidence.
In l945 when her family moved to Flushing, Queens, the town boasted two major movie houses: Loews Prospect and RKO Keiths. Both were within a few blocks of Chernow’s apartment. From age 11 on, she and friends would escape into the fantasy world of film and the figment of the theater being ‘home.’
Every genre of l940s film fare – the womens’ “weepies,” Westerns, war movies, mysteries, science fiction, serials and newsreels –fascinated the young viewer and became the lifelong basis for her work.
In 1957, she participated in her first New York gallery show, at the Duncan Gallery, which began her serious attention as an artist. Chernow’s aesthetic vision defies pigeonholing. She works in the tradition of artists termed “painter/printmaker”. Her original purpose: to preserve a genre’s cinematic moment, to transpose nostalgia, to juxtapose fantasy and reality.
Chernow has created a personal, defining body of work that is recognized as unique: moments of suspended reality based on material from all aspects of American movies from the 1930s and 1940s, totally reinvented in her own vocabulary. Her attention to images of women dominating the content of her work brings an underlying sexual politic. Affectionately dubbed “Queen of Noir”, her work now concentrates on subjects from 1940s American Noir film.
Chernow’s work has been shown nationally and internationally. Public collections include: the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Museum, the DeJong Musem, the National University of Taiwan, the Tel Aviv Museum the Coupozoulos Museum in Athens and many others.
She can be contacted by email: annctfinearts@gmail.com