When I encountered Lumin Wakoa’s paintings at Deanna Evans Projects in 2021, I was struck by the way her scumbled paint mapped out forms that seemed to be melting and dissolving into each other. As a result her spaces were indeterminate, I noted then, apparently depicting places both earthly and underwater, from observed reality and from the imagination. I don’t think we had started much of a dialogue by then but soon we began having studio visits, and I came to understand that her painting was at least partly about how we see, the subjectivity of perception, and how she could capture that in paint.
By the time Lumin asked me to write the press release for her solo show Alive at Harper’s Apartment in 2022, her investigation of perception seemed all the clearer. In her studio in front of canvases like Knockouts in Full Bloom (2022), we talked about how her brush marks opened onto paths for the eye within the painting, creating a dynamism and sense of liveliness that accorded with the show’s title. Lumin had several books on Henri Matisse in the studio, and we discussed an article by Yve-Alain Bois, “On Matisse: The Blinding,” in which Bois, following Leo Steinberg, uses metaphors like expansion and circulation to analyze visual forces on the surface of Matisse’s paintings such as Le bonheur de vivre (1905–6). The press release for Alive drew inspiration from Bois, following a broadly formalist approach that holds both for the plein air works and the skeleton paintings that Lumin made simultaneously.
What I didn’t fully appreciate then was that Lumin’s investigation of perception—the way things look—did not exclude a concurrent exploration of emotion. She had mentioned the unusual proximity of death in her life experience. Until recently, however, I didn’t understand the skeletons as symbols through which Lumin processed a range of feeling not simply related to death (though that is true too) but also to the profound and even disarming dimensions of being alive. Her stores of emotion regarding life and death (was it wonder, awe, gratitude, frustration, or a more straightforward means of processing without naming?) are evident in the whole body of work. To me this combination of recording subjective expression through dynamic mark making coupled with an acknowledgement of profound emotion recalls the figure of Vincent van Gogh (on whose work Lumin also kept a catalogue in her studio and whose painting she knew from the Guggenheim Museum). The elder artist is held up in art history for incorporating emotional response through color and brushwork in paintings that record the surrounding landscape. Like van Gogh, Lumin tackled both of these freighted strands of modern painting with the highest level of ambition.
The contributions to this tribute chart first steps toward paths of interpretation on Lumin’s work—from mark making, the plein air tradition, feminism, abstraction, and labor politics, to motherhood and Lumin’s take on contemporary painting. It is an honor to contribute to her legacy by editing this collection, which establishes a fuller literature that Lumin’s longer lifetime would have far exceeded.