The Mary Ann Unger Estate

Scope

Editorial

Public Programs / Symposia

Reputation
Social

Writing

Partners

Client: Geoffrey Biddle, Eve Biddle, Allison Kaufman, Lauren Smith

Reputation: Brent Foster Jones

Social: Siel Timperman

Photography: Ryan Speth

In 2021, the office began providing strategy and communications advice with a special focus on media relations, public programming, writing, and focused assistance to synchronize digital, direct, and social to The Mary Ann Unger Estate, founded to further the understanding and appreciation of the pioneering and unabashed feminist sculptor (d. 1998). Unger came of age in the 1970s downtown New York art scene and is remembered not only for her monumental sculpture but for platforming other women artists and artists of color in the 1970s, 80s, and 90s while working through years of illness.

On the occasion of a first full-scale museum retrospective organized by American art curator Horace Ballard of Harvard Art Museums, and the first scholarly repositioning of the artist within the male dominated New York sculpture scene in the 1970s, 80s, and 90s by Ballard in an accompanying landmark text, we arranged the artist’s first review, ever, in Artforum by art historian, photography curator, and cultural critic Jackson Davidow, and a sweeping, incisive review by art historian Cassie Packard in Frieze.

Courtesy Williams College Museum of Art

(Right to left) Ballard; Leigh Arnold, Associate Curator at Nasher Sculpture Center; and Molly Epstein, Senior Partner Goodman Taft gathered for a morning panel, “A Dialogue of Feminist Dimensions: Sculpture in an Expanded Field,” with Ballard remarking that “in Mary Ann’s work, when you can walk into them…the human becomes the heart, the human becomes the muscle.”

We encouraged the museum to consider a corresponding symposium, resulting in a convening that looked at the sculptor's pioneering work in relation to the contemporary landscape of curators and femme artists working at the intersections of large-scale sculpture, public art, material experimentation, and feminist practice, with presentations by curators and art historians such as Leigh Arnold, associate curator at Nasher Sculpture Center. We arranged for a contributor to Sculpture Magazine, curator and critic Leah Triplett Harrington, to attend the symposium, who subsequently filed a fresh essay that has significantly contributed to the new and ongoing study and understanding of the artist. “Unger’s intertwined roles as mother, activist, and curator, as well as artist,” she writes, “foreshadowed those of today’s cultural workers, who often juggle organizing, administration, and educational work in addition to art-making.”

For impact, we helped steer a nearly year in the making story offered exclusively to fine art writer Laura van Straaten, who filed the moving “Her Mother’s Daughter” in Town & Country about the artist Eve Biddle’ efforts to create appreciation for her mother’s work. The article instantly introduced the artist to a broad and international audience, elevating her and her contributions to art and art history.

Installation view of Eve Biddle | Mary Ann Unger: Generation, Photo: Ryan Speth. Courtesy The Mary Ann Unger Estate

The office recently suggested an encore presentation of Eve Biddle / Mary Ann Unger: Generation in a domestic, site-specific format in the family’s former loft and studio where both artists lived and worked in order to allow the estate to invite the public to view the material in an intimate setting and to hold public programs and exclusive special events. We prepared an announcement and arranged visits to the loft by writers and critics to Artforum, Art in America, Sculpture, The New York Times, and The New Yorker. A special viewing and interview was organized for Leah Triplett Harrington, resulting in a second, expansive essay and lyrical review by the critic and curator: “A Mother and Daughter Find Each Other in Art: Mary Ann Unger worked against the idea of the solitary (male) genius, creating a model of life and work that empowers artists like her daughter, Eve Biddle.”