Fabric of the American Dream

Lifting narratives from art history and setting them in the geometrically dreamy landscape of mid-century modernist architecture, the artist Jane Richlovsky unpacks the battered and remarkably resilient American Dream. This artist's book contains full-color reproductions of Jane Richlovsky's paintings, additional photographs illuminating her process and source material, essays by art critic Jim Demetre and by the artist, and vintage personal snapshots of the patterned milieu that inform her work. A larger reproduction of "Prom Night in Tractland", hand-signed by the artist, is included as a separate insert in a sleeve inside the back cover. Richlovsky scavenges and appropriates images of happy housewives and their idealized mates and children from mid-twentieth century magazines, rearranging them into new, slightly unsettling scenarios. In the series of paintings featured in this book, she relocates Edouard Manet's oblique narratives to the cavernous modernist interiors and poolsides of midcentury American suburbia. Richlovsky paints on found, printed fabrics, leaving the patterns partially revealed as people's clothing and furniture, and integrating them seamlessly into the painted images. "Fabric of the American Dream" highlights the significance of the patterned fabrics as the literal foundation of Richlovsky's work, and makes visible the presence of pattern as it weaves through social history and bubbles up into the paintings. "In Richlovsky's paintings, mass-market decorative arts and Americana socialist realism meet at the crossroads of the satirical and the surreal," writes art critic Jim Demetre in the accompanying essay.