By DARLA MCCAMMON
Director, Lakeland Art Association

Researching information for each week’s Art in Action column is time consuming but it can also be fascinating. I was looking for our third subject in famous women artists and wanted to focus on an artist that was an American.

I could not pass up the artist in the list I found who had the name “Squeak Carnwath.” The name Squeak called me to investigate her. I found an interesting person in that search. Carnwath was born in 1947 and is still alive and I am embarrassed to admit I had not known of her before now because she has many accomplishments to her credit—internationally as well as within the United States. But I found no information about how she acquired the name “Squeak.”

Carnwath was born in 1947 in Abington, Pennsylvania. After high school she traveled and studied art in Greece, Illinois and Vermont. She graduated with her MFA degree from California College of Arts and Crafts in 1977. She received a visual arts fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and continued to receive awards and recognition from that point in her career. Carnwath currently lives in Oakland California and taught art at the University of California, Berkeley beginning in 1982. Still nothing about that name “Squeak.”

Her work will not appeal to all viewers, but it has received accolades around the world. The best way I can describe it is to say her work is large in scale and includes many abstract forms on which she often will superimpose written text, brushed on with a paint brush.

Her work has gone through some changes over the years and now is more loose and fluid but still contains symbols and textural elements that overarch everything on the canvas. But so far I found nothing where she explained the name “Squeak.”

Throughout the years she has painted, Carnwath has remained loyal to her practice of inserting text in her work, be it a phone number, a name, a poem, or something humorous. She stresses that she enjoys painting the shapes of words in addition to conveying their meaning. If you are in San Francisco you will find her work in the San Francisco Fine Arts Museum and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. But neither museum explains the name “Squeak.”

In the end I kept searching and finally found a student newsletter in which the student attended a lecture by Squeak Carnwath. His explanation? “Is her name really Squeak? Well, yes…and no. She was born premature, and, for lack of a better name, her parents called her ‘Pipsqueak.’ Her birth certificate reads Shirley, a name she and her mother hated. Consequently, she has always answered to Squeak; it is on credit cards, tax returns and driver’s license.” Mystery solved.

Upcoming and Current Events:

• The John Streeter exhibit opens at Warsaw City Hall Gallery on Sept. 25. Visit 8 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. daily.
• Adult and Children Workshops always available. Call (574) 594-9950 for information.
• Honeywell photography competition opens Oct. 1.
• The Robert Hudson Fall Equinox exhibit will open Sept. 26. Contact his studio at roberthudson.com for information on attending.
• LAA is located at 107 N. First St. Pierceton, or www.lakelandartassociation.org, or on Facebook. Contact your author/artist Darla at [email protected] with questions.