Slater Barron Across the Street

Wow. We were passing by the Art Exchange, or whatever they call it today, a gallery across Elm from us, and a large painting inside caught my attention:

It was five feet tall and more than three wide, which made it quite large looking from the street. It's expressive, and big. And I do what I can to make sure I bring the kids over to the gallery each time they have a new installation, no matter how weird or "ultra-modern" they may be. I like to expose the kids to the different artistic fruits that show up in our zone. 

But there were a series of these large (60"x40") pieces visible from the street as we walked by, and they were figures. This seems trivial, but trying to explain why a retrofitted ticker-tape machine that's connected to wi-fi and spitting out a constant stream of ephemeral internet chatter is capital-A Art to an eight-year-old and a four-year-old is a challenge. But they do grasp paintings of people.

Once we got inside, though, we could see that these were NOT paintings, rather they were constructed out of lint. Yes...laundry lint:

The level of feeling this artist, whose working name was Slater Barron, could achieve using different colored lint blew my mind. It's an achievement, surely.

After reading some of the literature they had on hand the picture began to fill in. Slater Barron was an artist who came to be called the Lint Lady specifically for these large scale lint pieces. They exist as a series and seem to all be named "Mother, 19XX", where each one is from a different year, mostly consecutively, like from 1983 to 1990. Her mom had Alzheimer's and they found her on the street, and maybe she'd been there for a bit. They got her into a facility that could care for her until she passed.

Slater Barron's given name was Marylou Slater, and as an artist in the 1960s and '70s, she realized that she'd never be taken seriously because of the obvious gendering of her name, so she took her husband's last name, Barron, and adopted a moniker using her last name with her husbands, so as to not be immediately dismissed.

She worked with different artistic media, worked trying to get respect for LA's art scene in the shadows of the NY scene, and tried to raise awareness for Alzheimer's research and the disease's impact on the family's of those suffering from it. Unfortunately she passed in 2020.

Here's her website if you'd like to see anything else about her. The installation will be up until January across the street, and I'd love to return.