Stuart Riordan

Stuart Riordan is an American painter and designer born in Lynchburg into one of Virginia’s First Families-- “landholders and doctors, mostly.” Early on, Riordan thought she might become an engineer, like her father, or a surgeon, her imagination stirred by the anatomy texts in her family’s library. Riordan described the intersection of art and anatomy:
Landed for a short spell at age four, in San Antonio, Texas where the Mexican culture was full of bright colors and wonderful blue bread. My doll was a plaster Day of the Dead skeleton with joints which allowed it to dangle in my arms the way a real sleeping baby would. The human form was important to me from the start. My baby doll was an eye brow raiser back in Virginia in spite of the fact the family was full of doctors. I became aware of the different perceptions of beauty.
This early interest in the body is evident in the art she creates, mostly nudes, photographed, drawn or painted in the classical style. Along with oils, acrylics and dry pigments, she often uses dirt in her paintings, inspired by walks in the desert outside of Tucson, Arizona. “Looking down at the dirt, little pieces of mica would reflect the sky,” she told an interviewer in 1988, who noted that Riordan’s “new work, with its overlay of prehistoric signs, also mirrors the desert.” Riordan’s work has been described as “feminine” , “feminist,” as “beautifully rendered,” , as “vicious but powerful,” and as “controversial, dark and foreboding.”
In 1987, one woman called an exhibit of 11 of Riordan’s photographs “obscene” and tried to have a judge remove them from an exhibit at Polk County Community College in Winter Haven, Florida. The photographs depicted three nude women fighting over a piece of meat. In a statement, Riordan wrote “The subject matter of the photographs is an exploration, an exploitation, if you wish, of our primordial tendencies.” The judge rejected the complaint.
Early life
After graduating high school, Riordan studied classical art at the Corcoran College of Art and Design (formerly the Corcoran School of Art). A few years later, she studied art at both Oklahoma State University and the Tucson Art Center. Continuing her education at Averette College in Danville, Va., she studied etching, and upon moving to Florida she studied lithography with the legendary Ding Dong Daddy, William Walmsley. Riordan and Walmsley shared an exhibition at the Dubuque Museum of Art in 1997.
Career
A 1993 exhibit at the Virginia Beach Center for the Arts (now the Contemporary Art Center of Virginia) featured women “fluctuat between the poles of sexuality and domesticity, caught in the roles of temptress or housewife.” In the painting, “dish it out,” a woman with her breast exposed sits next to a huge slotted spoon, causing the reviewer to wonder, “Amazon, seductress or nursing mother? Or is she just another useful domestic object equivalent to the tool she uses?” Other paintings, “mama told me not to come” and “Vasa” depict women “with nothing above the neck but empty space.” These women, the reviewer notes, “save themselves by their insistence on privacy.”
In 1995, funded by a New Forms Florida Grant, a grant in turn funded by The National Endowment for the Arts, The Warhol Foundation, and The Rockefeller, Riordan worked with poet Barbara Hamby on a project titled “Word and Image.” Riordan was no stranger to mixing words and image; as she said in an interview, she often scrawls words onto paintings: “I write what comes into my head as I paint...it’s not totally controlled.”
Riordan’s work was exhibited alongside George Blakely’s in Duo Solos II, a 2006 exhibition at the Mary Brogan Museum of Art in Tallahassee, Florida. Curator Cynthia Hollis observed that by “referencing the muscular androgyny of the Italian Renaissance,” Riordan is able to “ emotions through body language when the faces are wrapped or turned away.” Noting that her work had changed in the 1990s, Riordan wrote “Now there’s more sumptuous flesh, bright deliberate colors squeezing the body out from the surface...” In one five panel work, darling,’ the cicadas have come and gone, Riordan employs, as Hollis writes, “a 14th Century painterly device—creating narrative via repetitive depictions of a figure within the same frame. The figure is lusciously female and moves from stillness to rapture to stillness again in a dazzling and dream-like confabulation and play between water and light.” Riordan’s work still maintained its political edge, particularly in works like Traffic, which references the Russian sex trade and Juan, which references the unsolved murders of women in the border towns of Mexico.
Riordan was awarded the Bellinger Memorial Award, the top honor at the 52nd edition of the Chautauqua Annual Exhibition, in July 2009 in Chautauqua, New York. Reviewer Anthony Bannon, director of the George Eastman House International Museum of Photography and Film, wrote that Irena Cosmonova, the winning painting, “lives on the edge of understanding...comes from around the corner of the mind—and sticks there, beyond words.”
Other work
In 1998, the band Godhead, used Riordan’s “power tool stigmata” as its album cover.
Riordan also provided cover photographs for two of poet Barbara Hamby’s books: Delirium and Skin, as well as for the NOIR Issue of the Apalachee Quarterly (now known as the Apalachee Review.) She has also designed costumes and sets for the Avodah Dance Company, the Tallahassee Ballet, and the Florida State University Dance Department.
Partial list of exhibitions
;2009
:VACI Logan Galleries, Chautauqua, New York
:Foundry Art Centre, St. Charles, Missouri
;2008
:Victoria Arts Connection Gallery, British Columbia, Canada
:Eileen West Gallery, Seaside, Florida
;2007
:Human Rights Exhibition, South Texas College, McAllen, Texas
:The Progreso Art Gallery, Progreso, Mexico
;2006
:The Mary Brogan Museum of Art, Tallahassee, Florida Duo Solos II: Stuart Riordan and George Blakely
;2001
:Worked and studied in Chisinau, Moldova with local artists and musicians with the National Conservatory of Moldova. Developed the Art on Loan Program in Chisinau in which local artists are given space in Non-Governmental Organization offices for display. This program enabled artists to have their work seen by an international audience and clientele.
:Helix Gallery, Santa Fe, New Mexico
;1999
:Blue Spiral, Asheville, North Carolina
;1998
:Museum of Fine Arts, Florida State University School of Fine Arts and Dance, 25th Invitational Alumni Exhibition
;1997
:Tricia Collins: Grand Salon, 83 Grand Street, New York, N.Y., Group Show
:The Dubuque Museum of Art, Dubuque, Iowa with William Walmsley
;1996
:Fox Museum, University of Texas at El Paso, El Paso, Texas with Bailey Doogan
;1993
:Virginia Beach Center For The Arts, Virginia Beach, Virginia
;1991
:Focus Gallery, University Gallery, Department of Art, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL
:508 Gallery, New Orleans, Louisiana
:Center of Contemporary Art Fellowships: Florida's Finest 1990-91, Miami, Florida
;1990
:San Jose Art League, San Jose, California
:508 Gallery, New Orleans, Louisiana
;1989
:Photo-Derived National Exhibition (Juried by Joel-Peter Witken) School of Fine Arts Gallery, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana
:Florida State University Presidents Gallery, Florida State University, Tallahassee, Florida
:Gallery 621, Railroad Square, Tallahassee, Florida
:Gallery Contemporanea, Jacksonville, Florida
;1988
:Visual Arts for the Home, Southern Homes Magazine, UNICEF, Atlanta, Georgia
:LeMoyne Art Foundation, Tallahassee, Florida
:National Photography Competition, Botanical Gardens, Atlanta, Georgia
:Polk Community College, Winter Haven, Florida (Dual Exhibit Award)
;1986
:Woman's Work, Gallery Contemporanea, Jacksonville, Florida
;1984
:Southeastern Women Artists Invitational, Brenau Women's College, Gainesville, Georgia
;1983
:Woman's Work 1983, Gallery Contemporanea, Jacksonville, Florida
;1982
:Grand Prix, International d'Art Contemporain de Monte-Carlo, Musee National de Monaco, 17 Avenue Princess Grace, Monte Carlo
:Art Works Gallery, Shreveport, Louisiana
:Panama City Junior College, Panama City, Florida
;1980
:Bainbridge Junior College, Bainbridge, Georgia
;1976
:Dillard Gallery, Lynchburg Fine Arts Center, Lynchburg, Virginia
:The Danville Chapter of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts and History, Danville, Virginia (Invitational Exhibit)
:Appalachian National Drawing Invitational Competition, Boone, North Carolina

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