Artist's Reception RSVP
BALTIMORE – Gormley Gallery at Notre Dame of Maryland University is pleased to present Orange Crush, a solo exhibition by Baltimore-based artist Suzy Kopf.
The exhibition will be on display beginning Tuesday, September 6 and continuing through Friday, October 7. Kopf will be on campus for an Artist’s Reception on Saturday, September 17 from 4 to 6 p.m., and she will hold a Gallery Talk on Friday, September 23 from 11 a.m. to 12 p.m.
In her research-based art practice, Kopf focuses on unpacking hidden history within aspects of everyday American leisure culture. The subject of this new body of work is citrus, a staple of middle-class western diets since the 1920s that has come to symbolize the bounty of America’s past as an agricultural nation. It functions as a shorthand for vacation, in part because it is primarily grown in the two largest sunshine-destination states, Florida and California.
Today incorporated on everything from shampoo bottles to pool floats, imagery of oranges and lemons are associated with beauty and above all else, pleasure. Kopf’s watercolors, collage work, digital illustrations, ceramics and site-specific vinyl installations explore this mythology erected by advertising, contrasting facade with fact, sometimes within a single work.
Underneath the pleasant veneer built throughout the first half of the twentieth century by the groundbreaking advertising acumen of the Southern California Fruit Exchange (which renamed itself Sunkist in 1952), there are many complexities to ponder. As a research fellow at the Hagley Museum of Industry in July of 2021, Kopf made new connections between the growth of entire towns in California and Florida and advertisements aimed at potential new residents using altered photos of “orange girls” picking fruit and lifting their skirts suggestively to hold their harvest. Presented alongside some period pieces collected by the artist, the works in this exhibition are the summation of two years of research into a single subject that touches many others.
It remains striking that this industry is based entirely around plants that are indigenous to Asia, which struggle to survive in the North American climate and suffer tremendously under the changing conditions of our warming planet, cracking, greening and decaying on the trees as a result. Today, whole fruit is mostly imported from Africa and the Southern Hemisphere, yet in the U.S. oranges remain a three-billion-dollar industry, primarily because of orange juice, a product that was initially invented to use up unattractive, bruised fruit unfit for sale.
Kopf asks viewers to contemplate that running alongside the symbolic and cultural impact of citrus are the human and ecological costs of this industry, which throughout its existence has relied on low-cost immigrant labor, including Kopf’s own family, who worked as migrant fruit pickers during the Great Depression. Perhaps even less discussed is the application of poison (which began in the 1880s with arsenic and continues today), applied directly to a food product to combat bacteria and insects. In 2021, to little fanfare, the EPA approved for use on citrus the cancer-causing pesticide aldicarb, which the World Health Organization has classified "highly dangerous," and the antibiotic streptomycin, which if overused in the environment limits its effectiveness at fighting bacteria in a medical setting.
Kopf leaves us to examine the absences in our knowledge base about our food and the artifice that 20th century advertising planted that continues to thrive unpruned.
Exhibition research and art work production supported by the Maryland Institute College of Art and the Hagley Museum & Library. Some historical imagery in this exhibition appears courtesy of the Hagley Museum & Library.
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