Current Exhibition
Hera’s Gift
In a fierce 1980s windstorm, Hera, Queen of the Gods, intercepted a thunderbolt hurled by ill-tempered Zeus at Stephanie Bernheim’s fields in Ancramdale, New York. Hera transformed the bolt into a gigantic glass plate, crashing it near the barn. She understood the artist would know what to do with her gift.
Stephanie rushed outdoors. With meticulous care, she collected the glass shards into thirty-one white plastic paint buckets, which she aligned architecturally on the slope of the hill. With an artist’s intuition and patience, she stored the glass shards and waited.
Long before, Stephanie had fallen in love with glass—its transparency, colors, reflections and refractions, its layers, the way it attracts and repels paint, its secrets and surprises, its shape-shifting transformations as surface and support, flatness and depth.
A felicitous accident created a significant juncture in Stephanie’s work with glass. She was using a glass plate as a palette. As she picked it up, the multicolored layers of paint cast-offs peeled away in one piece. First Pull, 1976, in this exhibition, was the serendipitous result. Its surface rises, falls, cracks, stretches, shrinks—presaging the breathtaking reliefs she created throughout the 1980s.
Early reliefs are represented here by seven single color squares from 1979. They are lovingly layered—the result of Stephanie’s decision to “paint the paint, while digging for color and meaning.”* In 1982 emerged the immense, breathtaking reliefs, Blue Baby and Sophie’s Season—elemental cues to the earth’s core and surface, to the archaeology of ancient Mesoamerican cultures, to the living, breathing human body. To face the reliefs is to be awed by their energy as they sigh and heave.
Stephanie applied skills, which she had internalized from creating the small scale paint reliefs, to the Window Pane series of 1992–3, modernist abstractions, which distilled what she had learned from exploring the limits of acrylic paint. Now she pushed further, intensifying the triangulation of paint, glass, and herself. To the layering, she added complex ways of dripping the paint, layer upon layer. The strata pull apart and come together, in and out of the carefully controlled geometry of grids and bands. The delicate webs of paint reflect an intimate knowledge of how acrylic behaves, as well as constant, vigilant interventions and manipulations, responding with infinite nuance to the changing demands of the paint.
Recently, Stephanie sensed that the time had come to return to Hera’s bequest of storm-tossed shards. She carefully selected clusters of fragments to create the installation, Through Glass, in Gallery II. As we face the installation, we get allusions to the violence of the glass plate’s crashdown; the hurried storage of the salvaged shards; their domestication in the artist’s studio; the enduring, radiant beauty and power of glass. Above the steel shelves holding trays of glistening shards, three polaroids, taken by the artist on the day of the storm, show what appears to be a snowstorm. In reality, it was a sharp-edged glass-storm, strangely blanched—Hera’s gift** to Stephanie’s passion for glass.
Susana Torruella Leval
Director Emerita, El Museo del Barrio
New York, February 2025
* Interview with the artist in her studio, New York, 2/1/25
**This essay is a tribute to the talent and creative energy of Stephanie Bernheim. My allusion to Hera celebrates the importance of
A.I.R. as the only gallery to support women in the misogynistic New York art world of the 1970s.