Erika Ranee grew up surrounded by art, with parents who collected Black art from the Harlem Renaissance. “So I fell in love early on, with collage,” she said during a Zoom conversation, citing the work of Romare Bearden and Bob Thompson.
But “I don’t think I made a direct connection to it, as in wanting to be an artist one day.” Instead, looking ahead to law school, she attended Wesleyan University, majoring in government. The big switch came in her senior year at the American University of Paris, when she signed up for a painting course at Parsons Paris.
“I’d never taken one before,” she said. “The professor had us doing the old-school thing, building our own canvases, using rabbit-skin glue, making our own oil paint. The whole process was fascinating.” A transatlantic phone call followed to her parents, who were supportive.
That it worked out is evident from two exhibitions now at the Arts Center at Duck Creek in Springs. “Feelings” is a solo show of 19 of her own small canvases, installed in the Little Gallery.
As if that weren’t enough to keep Ms. Ranee busy, she also, at the request of Jess Frost, Duck Creek’s founder and executive director, organized “All the Things,” an impressive show of work by six artists, on view in the John Little Barn.
Ms. Ranee’s path from Paris to Springs led first from the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan, where she received a B.F.A. in 1991, and then to the University of California, Berkeley, for an M.F.A. in 1993.
Her teachers at Visual Arts included Jack Whitten, Marilyn Minter, and Peter Halley, well-known artists all, though not by her. “But I did know who de Kooning was, and I knew who Rauschenberg was — I was in love with them.” When she started at the school, she recalled, “I was basically copying de Kooning’s ‘Women’ series.”
At Berkeley, as she began exploring Black stereotypes, her work became more sociopolitical. “I was taking the exact cartoon images from advertising, the Black face, big lips, buggy eyes, and trying to recreate my own narrative to subvert the atrocity of the images.”
In 1997, tragedy struck. “That was the year I lost my brother to random murder. We lived together at the time. That was heartbreaking, and I couldn’t get back into the studio for nine years.”
Fast-forward to 2006, when she determined to find her way back. “During those years, all of a sudden there was the internet, and there was a whole new world. So I did a lot of residencies,” starting with one at Cooper Union. She was still doing figurative work then but by 2010 she produced her first purely abstract paintings. “I knew I didn’t want to deal with the figure,” she said. “I wanted to be more free with the canvas and have fun with paint, instead of thinking about placement and narrative and researching the history.”
It took time. Finally, in 2018, there was a breakthrough solo show. “That was the first time I liked the entire show and felt confident about the work collectively.” She’d found the materials she liked, she explained; the colors she favored, the things that were staples and constituted her “language.”
“I allowed myself the freedom to work within those parameters.”
Ms. Ranee doesn’t just paint paintings, she builds them. “I’m a recycler, so right in the beginning I might use all the old paints from a previous body of work.” She fills plastic bottles with watered-down acrylic and pours them onto the canvas. “I’ll grab a color I’m feeling and I’ll just throw it down. There’s no planning.”
As the painting takes shape, she’ll add marks with oil stick or spray paint, sometimes using her opposite hand to keep the process loose. “Then I start to lay down materials. I might put a random piece of paper down, or a Post-it note from two years ago. I don’t want you to really see or find it. It’s really building thickness and history into the painting.”
Shellac is an important component, partly because it’s a preservation agent but also because it adds a rich patina to the surface.
When Ms. Ranee was in residence at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine, she was working outside and pouring the shellac when she accidentally knocked a bucket of water onto the painting. She was upset, she said, until she came back the next day and found it had formed a beautiful crust.
Now, she said, she’ll sometimes spritz water on the canvas deliberately, because the result “evokes nature to me, the land, volcanic rock, things like that.”
It takes careful viewing to read her paintings and understand what’s on top and what’s underneath, thanks in part to the layering and the variation between gestural marking and flat areas of solid color. The layers yield a complex, illusionistic space.
The Duck Creek exhibitions came about over the course of several years. Ms. Frost had seen Ms. Ranee’s work in a show, and “I kept obsessing over her and looking at her Instagram. Then I met her when she came to see a show here in 2020. We stayed in touch, and then last fall I invited her to come over and hang out.”
It was Elizabeth Hazan of Brooklyn’s Platform Project Space who suggested to Ms. Frost the idea of having an artist curate a show in the barn and have a solo show in the smaller space.
Ms. Ranee’s paintings for “Feelings” were motivated by her memories of her visits to the East End. “I started to see little moments I had, like getting lost on the back roads, or a very red sunset on a beach near my friend’s house in Sag Harbor.” One, “Langston’s Tree,” was inspired by a tree under which the poet Langston Hughes sat while visiting the Sag Harbor home of E.T. Williams, a noted collector of African-American art whose daughter Eden is a close friend of Ms. Ranee.
As for “All the Things,” when Ms. Frost asked her to organize it, “I wanted to do a show of people who go off the rectilinear format, and to delve into artists who are making paintings with unusual materials.”
One, Jeanne Reynal, was a member of the New York School who used mosaics to create, in her own words, “a contemporary and fresh look for this ancient medium.” Ms. Ranee came to Reynal’s work through Jennifer Samet, director of research at the Eric Firestone Gallery, which represents the Reynal estate.
The other artists in the show share a defiance of the conventions of painting. Rachel Eulena Williams’s “Disguised,” for example, is made from canvas, rope, and acrylic paint on a wood panel. Daniel John Gadd’s “Assembling an Octopus,” which is installed high up near the barn’s ceiling, is constructed from wood, copper, rope, mirrored glass, steel, epoxy resin, and marble.
Carl Hazlewood arrived at Duck Creek with a big roll of materials, among them roofing paper, gray fabric, and blue paper, and created an installation that takes its shape between the wall’s wooden studs.
“I think it’s wonderful how all the work responds to the barn and the integrity of the barn and the character of the barn and the patina of the barn in a thoughtful way,” said Ms. Frost. “And it wasn’t something Erika and I sat down and had a conversation about.”
In addition to the exhibitions at Duck Creek, “How Are Things on My End,” a solo show of mixed-media paintings and works on paper by Ms. Ranee, is at the Moss Arts Center at Virginia Tech University through Aug. 30.
