Ann Agee emerged from the prestigious MFA program at Yale University in 1986 − but not making videos or exploring some other of-the-moment medium. She worked in clay, and what’s more she made genre figures of various sorts, wildly different from the political, personal or formal production of her classmates. She is still intransigent.
Her summer 2021 exhibition at P.P.O.W. was titled “Madonna of the Girl Child” and consisted of 66 hand-built constructions representing a pregnant woman or, more often, a woman with a naked female child. They were presented on a high platform that filled the center of the gallery’s first room, making a field of figures ranging from about 8 inches to 40 inches in height. A single figure in the gallery’s street-level window, (2021), was larger yet at 48 inches. The congregation offered certain similarities: the figures are constructed of slabs, either glazed earthenware or colored porcelain;
