preface by Duncan Christy contributions by Allison Rudnick and Kat Lee interviewer Anna Hammond
The Artist Book Foundation, 2024 Cloth: 978-1-7329864-6-6 | eISBN: 979-8-9872280-0-5 Library of Congress Classification ND237.H6625H63 2023 Dewey Decimal Classification 759.13
ABOUT THIS BOOK | AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY | TOC | EXCERPT
ABOUT THIS BOOK
Daniel Hodermarsky (1924–1999) was the son of Slovak immigrants who emigrated from Hačava to settle and work in the coal fields of Pennsylvania and later in the auto-manufacturing industries of Ohio. He served in World War II on the Western front and was awarded two presidential citations, two Croix de Guerre, and one combat star. He returned home with severe and persistent posttraumatic stress disorder that left an indelible mark on his life and art.
Hodermarsky had a distinguished teaching career at the Cleveland Institute of Art from 1957 to 1969. Throughout the 1960s, he taught in Cleveland's public schools and started an art program for inner-city youth under the Federal Title 3 Act to promote integration through arts education. From 1969 to 1989 he taught at Deerfield Academy in western Massachusetts, founding its art department and serving for several years as department chair and director of the school's Hilson Gallery (now the von Auersperg Gallery). He mentored notable artists, including Stephen Hannock and Michael Tracy.
Throughout his career, Hodermarsky's work embraced both the representational and the abstract. His early works experimented with new media (such as Dayglo paint) and new styles such as Op Art and performance. In the 1970s and beyond, he engaged landscape—rural, urban, and imaginary—wherein he explored the interplay of terrain (land or water, horizon, and sky). The human figure—Slovak farmers, wounded or dismembered soldiers, and mythical and historical figures—were among his favorite subjects. He was fascinated by how age, human nature, and personality combine to create the physical form. His eclectic themes mirror his own unique complexities and experiences. Later in his career, he focused on abstract works that reflect the intricate spaces of both his psyche and shared human experience.
A deeply spiritual man with a strong religious faith, Hodermarsky's abstract paintings ask the existential questions that have challenged humankind across millennia. By showing us his own experience of these great mysteries, his art underscores life's abiding beauty. Over his long career of interpreting the world in which he lived, Hodermarsky invites us to inhabit a realm filled with joy, reverence, and passion.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY
Duncan Christy is a creative writer, editor, playwright, musician, and content producer for traditional and digital media, and live performance. Allison Rudnick is Associate Curator for the Department of Drawings and Prints at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and is responsible for the visual culture and ephemera collection. Kat Lee, a registered drama therapist, is a specialized clinician who works at the intersection of creative arts therapies and trauma, helping clients to re-story traumatic experiences in their own voices and through creative processes. Anna Hammond is the founder and CEO of Matriark, which addresses the crises of food waste and food insecurity. She was the executive director of the Sylvia Center in New York City, a nonprofit that teaches the connection between food and health through nutrition-focused, culinary-based training. She also served as deputy director of Yale University's art gallery.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Contents: 9 Foreword. How He Hovers in Our Consciousness | Duncan Christy: 11 A Humanist Vision: The Art of Daniel Hodermarsky | Allison Rudnick, MPhil: 15 Painting the Unspeakable | Kat Lee, MA, RDT-BCT, LCAT: 37 Plates: 49 Paintings: 50 Watercolors: 104 Drawings: 134 Giving Lead: Interviews with Michael Tracy and Stephen Hannock | Anna Hammond: 149 Acknowledgments: 159 Chronology: 163 Awards, Collections, and Commissions: 168 Selected Group and Solo Exhibitions: 169 Bibliography: 174 Index: 177 Copyright Page: 180
EXCERPT
As the son of working-class Slovakian immigrants, Daniel Hodermarsky’s navigation of social contexts—from corporate settings to educational institutions to the art world—was shaped by his identity as a blue-collar, second-generation American. While aspects of Hodermarsky’s identity enabled him to achieve professional stability and, to some degree, be assimilated into predominantly white elite environments, his ethnic and socioeconomic background simultaneously cast him as “other.” The complexities embedded in his life experience endowed him with an acute sensitivity to societal behaviors and structures that he deployed as an artistic tool, and the time he spent on the front lines during World War II only augmented his empathetic disposition. In 1975, nearly fifteen years before Deerfield Academy transitioned from an all-boys student body to a coeducational academy, Hodermarsky, who had recently become the founding chair of the art department, wrote a letter to the school’s newspaper addressing troubling behavior on the part of a few male students. One had abandoned his date at a social affair while another had mocked a fellow student for his homosexuality. Hodermarsky’s letter is an incisive social commentary on sexism, bigotry, and “manliness” that, according to him, should not be measured by one’s sexuality or physical strength but by one’s character. The letter ends with an appeal: “Your humanity is the most important function in life. Nurture it. Be a human being.”