Dove Bradshaw

Bradshaw worked across artist, draftsperson, photographer, painter and sculptor. This article rests on 12 catalogued photographs, 2 published texts, 8 digitised documents and 3 scholarly references drawn from named institutional registers. Every statement below returns to a source shown in the evidence panel; where the record is silent or divided, the article says so instead of resolving it.

Dove Bradshaw studied at Boston University and Tufts University. The recorded working language is English. Places of work recorded in the authority are New York City. Work by Dove Bradshaw is recorded in the collections of Museum of Modern Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art and Art Institute of Chicago.

• Name — Dove Bradshaw • Born — September 24, 1949 • Birthplace — New York City • Field — Sculpture, installation, photography, performance, video and film • Training — The School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston / Tufts University, BFA and Fifth Year Competition; Boston University

Dove Bradshaw was born in New York City. She graduated from the College of General Studies, Boston University, and received a BFA from the Boston Museum School of Fine Arts/Tufts University. She has had residencies at: • 2011 — Niels Borch Jensen, Printmaker, Copenhagen • 2008 — Niels Borch Jensen, Printmaker, Copenhagen • 2007 — The Spirit of Discovery 1 and 2 in Trancoso, Portugal Pont-Aven School of Contemporary Art, France (teaching and resident artist) • 2006 — The Spirit of Discovery 1 and 2 in Trancoso, Portugal • 2005 — Niels Borch Jensen, Printmaker, Copenhagen • 2003 — Palazzo Durini, Bolognano, Italy • 2000–2001 — Niels Borch Jensen, Printmaker, Copenhagen Statens Vaerksteder for Kunst and Handvaerark, Gammel Dok, Copenhagen, in conjunction with exhibitions: Elements, Stalke Gallery, Copenhagen, and Anastasi Bradshaw Cage at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Roskilde, Denmark • 2000 — The Sirius Art Center, Cobh, Ireland, inaugurated outdoor sculpture court with placement of Notation II • 1995 — The Pier Arts Centre, Orkney, Scotland. Accompanying the exhibition were Contingency, Passion, 1993 and Indeterminacy, 1995 – situated in the permanent collection in the Pier Sculpture Court

Bradshaw was included in the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum's American Artists Contemplate Asia, 1860–1989, a solo exhibition at Senzatitolo Associazione Culturale, Rome, inclusion in Elements at The Chemical Heritage Museum, Philadelphia for The Year of Chemistry 2011.

She has curated four group exhibitions in memory of Sol LeWitt, ONE at Bjorn Ressle Gallery, New York, 2007, ONE More at the Esbjerg Art Museum, Esbjerg, Denmark, 2008 which was rebuilt for Thomas Rehbein Gallery, Cologne in January, 2009 and ONE, Six Americans/Six Danes Stalke Up North, Copenhagen, 2009. Anastasi, Bradshaw, Cage, Marioni, Rauschenberg, Tobey: Imitating Nature in her Manner of Operation, Sandra Gering Gallery, 1991; 8 Painters: 2005 Anastasi Bradshaw Cage Cunningham, curators: Marianne Bech and Dove Bradshaw, The University Art Museum, The University of California at San Diego; Anastasi Bradshaw Cage Cunningham, curators: Marianne Bech and Dove Bradshaw, The Bayly Museum, The University of Virginia, Charlottesville, Virginia; 2001; Anastasi, Bradshaw, Cage, curators: Marianna Bech and Dove Bradshaw, Museum of Contemporary Art, Roskilde, Denmark, Anastasi, Bradshaw, Cage, Marioni, Rauschenberg, Tobey, Sandra Gering Gallery, New York, 1990; 8 Painters:Jon Abbot, William Anastasi, Dove Bradshaw, Dana Gordon, Bruce Halpin, Carl Kielblock, Theodoros Stamos, Douglas Vogel, The Ericson Gallery, New York, 1981

Originally not conceived as art, this work began with a gift of a pair of Ring-necked Mourning doves and led to the design of their environment. The doves were given free rein of the artist's studio. A bicycle wheel was hung for a perch, with an adaptation of a Zen archer's target nailed to the floor below. The material trace of the work lay in photographs and 1969 bronze and silver casts of broken eggshells. The first exhibition was at the Boston Museum School of Fine Arts in 1969. In 1989, it opened at the Sandra Gering Gallery in New York, and then it opened at the Mattress Factory Museum, Pittsburgh in 1990, and PS1 Contemporary Art Center, New York, in 1991. This was the artist's first sound sculpture—most apparent in the PS1 exhibition. Every day, after eating and preening, one of four birds flew to each corner room-support near the ceiling. Beginning with out-of-phase rounds they gradually came into sync after three-quarters of an hour, winding their song into a hypnotic crescendo nearing the hour. A pause followed, then softly they would start again, and repeated this pattern many times.

The Contingency Series is Bradshaw's first significant body of two-dimensional work. Beginning in 1984, instead of paint she began using materials reactive to the environment. Silver, which itself is subject to air, light and humidity, became the ground; liver of sulfur the chemical agent; and metal plates, wood, paper, linen, and the wall itself the various supports. The works range in size from a three and a half inch leaf on paper to paintings five feet in height and width. The appearance and composition of these works changes over time as reactions between the materials and environment occur. The amount of chemicals used in each piece significantly affects the outcome. Black comes up faster if the solution is dense, yet if it pools, an ashy white appears, flaking at its edges. Fire seems to be the reference. With rain the works sweat—-drip lines become visible pouring from denser pools. Silver and sulfur, alchemical elements, are used because they are highly volatile. As the artist explains, the process itself could be related to photography: the silver to the emulsion, the liver of sulfur to the developer. Although without using a fixer, the exposure is open-ended.

These paintings deal with themes of perishability and change. They consist of various chemicals, powdered pigments, ink, and varnish poured and dripped on the canvas. As a Danish reviewer wrote, “What the elements will do to one another only time will tell. The fusion between the materials is the essential – [like] the fusion between culture and nature. Bradshaw facilitates it, but after that, the work is out of her hands. It is nature that takes over."

The Notation sculptures consist of copper or bronze cubes or prisms set on marble or limestone and left outdoors to weather. Smaller indoor versions were assisted with ammonium chloride copper sulfate to prompt a bleed.

The Material/Immaterial Stones, made in Denmark, coupled local spring and aged calcstone and produced a white bleed on a dark stone.

Radio Rocks are made up of three different kinds of stones each piled into cairns that in Neolithic times were used as astronomical markers. Bradshaw's cairns, in addition to recalling their ancient use, focus on the aspect of sound by functioning as multi-directional antennas. In each of these sculptures there are three radios designed to receive frequencies from three different zones. On top of one is a pyrite mixer designed to receive live emissions from Jupiter transmitted via a dedicated line from the radio telescope at Pisgah Astronomical Research Institute in Rosman, North Carolina. On one side, a galena mixer picked up a world-band short wave. On the other hand, a receiver developed by the satellite industry drew live microwaves identified as echoes of the Big Bang. The other two cairns featured fluorite, tourmaline and hematite, acting as non-linear mixers, were computer programmed to attract random local and world-band frequencies. The hematite mixer continuously channeled Weather Radio. Levels of all the radios were set at a murmur. The outer space sounds invoke celestial harmonies that from the quieter time of Pythagoras have been referred to as the “Music of the Spheres.”

Six Continents at the 6th Gwangju Biennale, Gwangju, South Korea, 2006 consists of six sculptures made from salt taken from each continent, funnels and water. The various salts, colored by minerals from each locale, react differently when subjected to water. Each sculpture is made of a 150-pound salt mound placed under a suspended funnel, each calibrated to release 7 drops per minute. The salt comes from: • Antarctica: white salt from McMurdo Bay • Africa: gray salt from Egypt • Australia: brown salt from Western Australia • Eurasia: ivory salt from Gwangju, South Korea • North America: green salt from the Dominican Republic • South America: pink salt from Chile The work premiered at Larry Becker Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, 2005 and traveled to SolwayJones, Los Angeles later that year.

Dove Bradshaw was born on 24 September 1949 in New York City. Bradshaw held the nationality of United States. Bradshaw was educated at Boston University and Tufts University. Bradshaw worked as artist, draftsperson, photographer and painter, and the authority record catalogues a further 1 occupations under the same name, among them sculptor. Bradshaw worked in New York City. Bradshaw worked in English.

Inspiration from the work of composer John Cage, Bradshaw’s work explores the interaction between natural forces and artistic materials, often incorporating elements of chance. Her 1969 installation Plein Air involved bicycle wheels and floor-mounted targets in a setting that included mourning doves. Her practice utilizes materials that are sensitive to environmental factors, such as weather and atmospheric changes. These include salt, stone, acetone, mercury, and sulfur, which undergo gradual transformations through natural processes like erosion and chemical reactions. In 1976, Bradshaw placed a wall label beside a fire hose at the Metropolitan Museum of Art as part of a work titled Performance. The museum later issued an official postcard related to the piece, and the label was added to the museum’s permanent collection in 2007. Bradshaw has been associated with the Process and Art/Science Movements, creating works such as Contingency Paintings that respond to atmospheric conditions and sculptures that document material transformations over time.

After Bradshaw's environmentally reactive works which were the two-dimensional Contingency Series, she searched for a way to make sculptures that would be similarly reactive, but would also change shape. The first work was a relief, a wall-embedded copper bar titled Passion. It was treated with acetic acid, which left a running stain down the wall. The first outdoor version (1995) was set in the exterior wall of the Pier Art Center, Stromness, Orkney, Scotland. The island atmosphere greatly assisted a natural bleed.

The Indeterminacy Stones, begun in 1994, consisted of a chunk of pyrite, set atop a piece of marble, and then left outdoors to weather. The pyrite transformed into limonite when exposed to the elements, leaving a permanent iron rust stain. It may take less than ten years or over a century to dissolve depending on composition and environment. For the first exhibition of these works at Sandra Gering Gallery, New York, 1995, three boulders were gathered—one flat, one vertical, one wedge-shaped. Ann Barclay Morgan, writing about work in Sculpture Magazine, commented “…the action of “bleeding”…could be seen as the female life-force in the process of being released. The transformation into the deep-colored limonite lends a sensuous quality to the marble....Bradshaw's use of Vermont marble [also] had intriguing implications. This material appears to embody a freeing from the confining notion of purity, emblematic of Carrara marble, toward the reality of life suggested by the veining of the marble itself, calling to mind the arteries of the human body that become more visible with age.”

An early survey, Works 1969–1984 was shown at Syracuse University, Utica, New York in 1984. Bradshaw has had three mid-career exhibitions: Dove Bradshaw 1988–1998 at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Dove Bradshaw, Form formlessness, 1969–2003 at City University of New York; and Time Matters 1969–2008 at the Pierre Menard Gallery, Cambridge, Massachusetts. She is represented in the permanent collections of numerous museums in America and Europe, including one in Russia. She also regularly exhibits internationally.