“Over and over, she read the last few lines on the page,” wrote Maria Porges. “They could mean the end, or a new beginning. But was it new? No start can really be fresh, anymore. They’ve all been used. A hundred times. The best she could do, she surmised, was to settle for in medias res: to start in the middle. Methodically, she ripped the manuscript pages to the halfway mark, one by one. Settling again on her small, hard chair, she began to read the last lines on the page. They could mean the end, or a new beginning.”

In the catalog for her 2016 exhibition, Maria Porges: Shortest Stories and Exhortations, at Seager / Gray Gallery, the artist paired micro stories, like the one quoted above, with individual artworks. The collage paired to the Shortest Story quoted here depicts a range of cutouts (including the African continent upside down, the top half of a woman placed upon a chess pawn with a serving dish, a dog chasing a cellist, and a girl standing atop a circle cutout of a forest scene holding a picture from which outflows a billowing fabric that hovers above her head, amongst other fragments). Telling stories, particularly focusing on time and text, with juxtaposed visual elements is the artist’s forte.

Maria Porges was born in Oakland, California in 1954 to parents who were pursuing graduate study at the University of California, Berkeley on the GI Bill (a US federal government program providing benefits to those who served in World War II to help them transition back to their daily lives). Porges returned to the Bay Area after her graduate studies at the University of Chicago, and she never left.

As an artist, she has incorporated the written word in her creative works and has incorporated books directly into her sculpture as well. For a 2016 interview with fellow artist Elise Morris, Porges said “The major furniture feature in my home as a child was books. We were allowed to read anything, but there were rules: no turning down page corners, leaving books upside down, and NEVER mark anything. I used to say that this attitude is what led directly to me hacking them up into chunks, gluing them together, etc.”

Another Shortest Story in the Seager / Gray catalogue reads:

“The problem with language is that it is made out of words. I can tell you about a person, a place; a smell, a sound, or a quality of light, but my description is just an abstraction of the things I am talking about. Although a word can evoke a feeling (and often does), there is no guarantee that the contents of a powerful phrase: the associations that lie beneath its skin, will be the same for you that they are for me. Unable to enter each other’s minds, we can never be sure that our experience of things truly coincides—that the color of the sky or the taste of rice is the same for us both. All we really know (or think we know) is that what we call rice isn’t what we call blue.”

In addition to text, memory is another recurrent theme in Porges’ work. In a press release for the 1996 exhibition Maria Porges: Anodyne at Arthur Roger Gallery, the artist is quoted as saying, “I use the past to talk about the present, mining the parables and metaphors of history for some kind of clue to the time in which we live.” The stories she tells in her work prompt viewers to think back about their own pasts not only through concepts inherent in her art, but also through the physical form of the material with which she works.

One of the works by Porges in the Roswell Museum’s collection, Circular Time, resembles a wreath composed of 26 books. In a recent email exchange, the artist told me: “time just keeps going. The divisions are arbitrary. It’s not a cycle, but more like a spiral… As the years go by, we pass the same signposts—holidays, birthdays—but see the ones in the past from an increasing distance. This is what I meant by ‘Circular Time.’ It’s a joke, of sorts.” This piece was donated to the Roswell Museum’s collection in 2023 by Albuquerque-based collector Ray Graham as part of an extremely generous gift of 151 artworks.

Porges teaches in the undergraduate and graduate programs at California College of the Arts in San Francisco and has taught at many other institutions as well. In 2024, Porges received the Distinguished Teaching of Art Award from the College Art Association of America. Her teaching has as much impact on her work as an artist as her family has. “Life itself impacts artistic process,” she told me. “Having children late was just as significant as teaching. And the two are related. Part of the reason I seriously pursued a full-time teaching job was because I had twins late in life and realized that continuing to produce enough work for two or three solo shows a year AND raising them would not be possible.”

Writing about other artists’ work is another important component of Porges’ practice. She told Morris in the 2016 interview, “I write about art—reviews, articles, catalogue essays—as a way of articulating thoughts about other people’s work and helping to build the community within which I find myself.” Her outstanding writing was recognized in 1988 when she was awarded the John McCarron Grant for New Writing in Art Criticism. Her writing has been featured in an impressive array of publications including Artforum and Art in America.

She received the prestigious SECA Art Award (Society for the Encouragement of Contemporary Art) from the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) in 1992. Porges has attended a number of artist residency programs and has exhibited her work extensively across the United States as well as in Italy and Russia. In addition to SFMOMA and the Roswell Museum, her work is in many institutional collections, including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in California, the Oakland Museum of California, and the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art in Arizona, among many others.

The statement “It’s Your Art” is meant to emphasize that the Roswell Museum’s collection is your collection. Despite the museum’s closure due to the October 2024 flood, staff continue to work behind the scenes on care for and conservation of collection objects. Please stay tuned for more from the Roswell Museum. We appreciate the outpouring of support from the community during our closure. And remember, “It’s Your Art.”