Judith Blum Reddy
This Is For You





This Is For You is part of a recent series of works of suspended canvases by Judith Blum Reddy. The process is the same for each work—-the artist applies a number of rectangular strips of varying widths on the canvas, onto which she inserts her drawings, writings, and transfers of archive and recent press images. In this work, for example, reproductions of images of concentration camps are placed alongside images of an overcrowded ship ready to capsize at sea. Around the title This Is For You, several phrases are clearly visible, announcing a critique of societies that discriminate and exclude foreigners: “All white americans are obese, Lazy and dim-witted,” “All Mexicans are Lazy and Came into America Illegally,” or “All Black People outside of the United States are Poor”.
There are many similar motifs in the artist’s work: simple forms such as emoticons, geometrical shapes and people, combined with a lexical field associated with war and conflict: railroads, walls, borders, and weapons. In this particular work, faceless characters identifiable by ethnic and/or religious attributes, face these walls, chains, and other borders. Judith Blum Reddy creates her own visual vocabulary, between the image and the written word. The gravity of the subjects she tackles contrasts with the simplicity of the visual forms she employs. Her powerful work renders these subjects accessible, guiding and pacing the viewing and reading of the work to, as she states, in the center of her canvas, ” Facing History [Face à l’histoire]”.
Born in 1943, in New York as the daughter of Jewish Austrian refugees, Judith Blum Reddy collaborated in the early 1970s with the Franco-Turkish artist Nil Yalter on several works. In 1974, she moved to Fluxus House, founded by George Maciunas and which hosted Fluxus members such as Yoko Ono, Philip Glass, Nam June Paik and her partner, Indian artist Krishna Reddy. Judith Blum Reddy’s work is rooted in her obsession for maps and lists. The absurd and the self-critical are essential components of her oeuvre and intermixed with a preoccupation of humanity, structured by classification, numeration, and organization of different elements.