Lasch 2023

About the exhibition

Meredith Ward Fine Art is pleased to present Pat Lasch: The Legend of Pope Joan, on view from March 17th through April 27th, 2023. The show will feature twelve of the artist’s most recent works, including a series of sumptuous vestments created primarily with acrylic paint for the mythical Pope Joan. Also on view will be acrylic and eggshell panels that incorporate the language of crochet and a beaded hairwork installation. This is Lasch’s fourth show at the gallery.

Lasch’s Pope Joan series explores the medieval legend of a female pope. The scholarly and ambitious Pope Joan was able to disguise her biological identity until giving birth in the streets of Rome. Lasch’s series is inspired by her Roman Catholic upbringing and 1980s residency in Rome after being awarded the prestigious Rome Prize. Through her deep engagement with materiality and  the ornate pageantry of the Catholic Church, Lasch has created elaborate papal vestments, slippers and a mitre for a future Pope Joan II, reviving the legend for a modern audience. Her current practice continues to draw on her substantial body of groundbreaking feminist work, which examines the social systems and rituals that underpin modern society.

Pat Lasch has been producing provocative work for almost four decades. Born in New York City in 1944, the daughter of a seamstress and pastry chef, Lasch was tutored by her father in the art of pastry decoration. She honors these skills in her masterful manipulation of acrylic paint. Art historian Grant Klarich Johnson writes, “Since the 1970s, Lasch’s unabashedly beautiful formal citations have evoked the props of familial ceremonies and the heirlooms carried from one generation to another…Unafraid of sentiment, Lasch’s practice embraces a sense of autobiography and private life as a universally stirring and politicized theme…” (With Pleasure: Pattern and Decoration in American Art 1972–1985 (2019), The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, p. 292). The artist continues to engage with questions of tradition and ritual, aging and ancestry, and gender-based labor in her most recent work.

Read more about Lasch here.

Listen to Lasch’s lively discussion with the National Academy of Design about the exhibition.