Fiercely Feminine: Barbara Minch
Kean University’s Nancy Dryfoos Gallery
January 30, 2025 to June 20, 2025
Opening reception: February 7 from 5 p.m. to 7 p.m.
Watchung Arts Center
January 18, 2025 to February 22, 2025
Artist Talk: Sunday, February 16, 2 p.m.- 4 p.m.
I walked into the nearby studio of veteran—revered actually—artist Barbara Minch and I walked into a universe of boundless imagination. Painter, collagist, sculptor, if you know Minch for her closely observed pre-9/11 urban photorealist watercolors or her decades of teaching and mentoring, you only partially know her remarkable work.
During the past few years, Minch has been orchestrating her technical prowess, humanist sensibility, political acumen, and perhaps most of all, her personal journey into a wonderland of mythical, elemental creatures both on canvas and in the round. Predator and prey match wits in feminist battles. A queen commands her acolytes. Minch’s vision is simultaneously of this world and a Jungian world of larger truths, of tales and dreams.
I walked, too, into reliving the puzzlement and wonderment of childhood that only a rare artist such as Minch captures. I reached out to comfort her 2021 sculpture Little Man, his arms outstretched, a bird perched on each shoulder. Innocence shields this lifelike unreal child.
Little Man is physically made of paper clay and collage and spiritually made of maternal love. “My son, an architect, and his family live in Hong Kong. When they visit, I make tape casts of the children, in part to keep them near,” Minch said. She casts her daughter’s children—closer to home and now adolescents—too. The paper clay and collage incorporate diverse techniques born of pandemic necessity and Minch’s striving for the perfect mediums.
Sometimes Minch’s subconscious takes over and afterwards she realizes meaning. In one grouping, she thought she was creating a family but after completion realized it was a vision of a matriarchy. “Sometimes, I don’t know what to expect,” Minch said. “The work drops from my hands.”
Art lovers and Minch-admirers and mentees throughout the greater metropolitan area will soon be immersed in her current sculptures and paintings when Kean University mounts a five-months-long, one-woman show, Fiercely Feminine, in honor of Minch, a graduate. In addition, three of Minch’s recent paintings are in the Watchung Arts Center’s group show Of Myth and Men running now through February 22 with a January 26 artists reception. (Another recent honor for Minch is her New Jersey State Council on the Arts Fellowship.)
Minch is proud of her alma mater. “Kean was the Newark State Teachers College then,” Minch said. “Now Kean has expanded from three buildings into an active campus traversing three towns. “I draw on all my lessons there—sculpture, ceramics, print making, drawing, painting,” Minch said.
Let’s return to Minch’s studio. Artist Elyse Carter is among a handful of area artists in a critique group who paint together there weekly. We looked in a closet where Minch stores some of her large, dazzling photorealist watercolors and acrylics of New York City and Philadelphia. Watercolor is notoriously unforgiving for the painter. Not in the hands of Minch and these masterful 1980s and 1990s canvases. Among other outlets, Minch was then represented by the prestigious Henoch Gallery in Chelsea. “George Henoch was an outstanding, wonderful gallerist—honest and supportive,” Minch said.
“When I was coming up, everything was Abstract Expressionism,” Minch said. “Chuck Close and Audrey Flack changed the rules. I taught myself a new way of painting and I painted on site.”
The cityscapes garnered acclaim and were in great demand. But when the planes struck the World Trade Center on 9/11, Minch had to turn away. The attack triggered hard memories of Minch and husband Frank believing that their then-Syracuse University undergraduate daughter had perished in the 1988 terrorist downing of U.S.-bound Pan Am flight 103. Days later, they learned that she and one classmate were spared by their last-minute decision to travel to France.
But trauma has a way of persisting. “After 9/11, I had to go in another direction” Minch said. “I had to express what I was feeling and thinking about what it means to be a woman in our society now. These works may not look political, but these are very political times.”
Turning to Collage
Minch turned to collage. Strange juxtapositions and re-imaginings emerged. Collage unleashed Minch’s subconscious in images of future worlds, dream worlds, surrealistic worlds, a world under Gaia, the Greek’s earth-nurturing Mother Goddess. These are collages that both stand strongly on their own and inspired a whole new fantastical and incisive body of paintings. Her 2021 Defining Moment addresses Minch finding her truest voice as an artist, a feminist voice at once defiant and eerily beautiful.
Famously, the twentieth century surrealists including Salvador Dali incorporated collage elements and saw it as a pathway to the subconscious. Minch took me on an intriguing detour about collage and surrealism.
“When I was 10 years old, my father took me to the Museum of Modern Art,” Minch recounted. “We got off the elevator at the top-floor gallery.”
The young Barbara was mesmerized by the famed 1931 painting Persistence of Memory, melting clocks set in an arid landscape. “There was a man standing there in a white suit with a jewel encrusted cane,” Minch continued. “My father said, ‘That’s the painting’s artist, Salvador Dali.’”
“In some art circles collage is disparaged,” Minch said. “But researchers have opened the trunks of renowned artists and they are full of collage.”
Minch’s collages both stand strong on their own and are the pathway to her recent paintings, now executed in acrylic, as large and masterful as her earlier cityscapes.
Current Painting: “In dreams, some of us run from danger– I fly,” Barbara Minch
In She Flies, a 60” by 48” acrylic, a predatory hawk and eagle train their sights on a woman, goddess-draped in gold and wearing an extravagant feathered headdress. A third bird is zooming in to join the anticipated kill. Suspended horizontally on disarmingly modest wings, the human figure defies both gravity and the rules of the patriarchal world. She flies.
In Blue Moon, (see lead image) with its luminous landscape under a brilliant blue moon, the feminine figure stares directly at the viewer, her triumph perhaps signaled by a raptor under her control. She is a Mother-Goddess figure, protector not destroyer of nature. Her helmet-like headdress is one with nature. She is a promise of protection not destruction.
As with She Flies, Blue Moon is delicately rendered, balanced. The sheer beauty of Minch’s elements—assured brush stroke, draftsmanship, composition, color palette—take us away and commands us to question our world when we return. Be it on canvas, collage or sculpture, Minch upends expectations. I let myself be haunted by her work for weeks before writing a word.
Teaching: “I don’t think I could have been the artist I am unless I taught as well”—Barbara Minch
Perhaps all great art is at least in part autobiographical and there is a vital part of Minch’s biography still to explore. She is a master teacher. In her decades of classes at SOMA Adult School and at The Montclair Museum of Art, Minch has taught probably 1,000s and shepherded the personal growth and professional careers of scores of artists. She was a founding force and long headed the Oranges and Maplewood’s highly regarded Exhibitor’s Cooperative.
I asked Minch to name some of those she launched. She demurred. “There are too many and I don’t want to leave anyone out,” Minch said.
Minch talked about how her teaching fed into her own growth. “I am verbal learner,” Minch said. Teaching, discussions spurred her on. Then, too, there was a practical way teaching contributed to her own growth. “My students kept returning and I had to invent ever more advanced techniques, for example in collage, to offer them new lessons,” Minch said.
Minch does not want to name names but I will. I asked a handful of Oranges and Montclair based artists to say a few words. Here are excerpts from their tributes and expressions of gratitude:
“I met Barbara when I joined her critique class at the SOMA Adult School. We shared our works in progress. Barbara guided and encouraged us to expand our drawing skills, find new sources of inspiration, and hone our skills,” said painter Elyse Carter, featured this summer in Arts Beat’s Drawing Community. “She has championed so many artists. I cherish her friendship and expertise. She continues to dream big for me and the other artists who gather to work with her. And her enormous, fabulous body of work inspires me.”
“Barbara’s three-dimensional figures of women and children are so otherworldly yet strangely and relatedly human in their gaze and way of being,” said collage artist Judy Gould who, at Minch’s recommendation, carries forward Barbara’s collage class at the Montclair Art Museum. “As a teacher and mentor, Barbara lives, breathes and speaks art: she has had a way of seeing my potential and pulling forth my best, most authentic work, encouraging and pushing me to dig deeper and go farther than I thought possible.”
“Barbara Minch has always been an inspiring teacher and uses her teacher’s eye and hand to create her own complex artwork,” said Lisa Suss, curator, collage artist, arts manager of the JCC and founding officer and past longtime president of the West Orange Arts Council. “She has helped me to keep my curator’s eye discerning and sharp.”
Learn More
