A Betty Ragan Retrospective

“Between Michigan and State,” photo collage by Betty Sapp Ragan, courtesy Tahoma Unitarian Universalist Congregation.

Published in the Weekly Volcano, June 16, 2016

“Uptown Broadway Angel,” hand-colored photo collage by Betty Sapp Ragan, courtesy Tahoma Unitarian Universalist Congregation.

Betty Sapp Ragan passed away a year ago. She was an excellent artist, and she left behind an impressive body of work, a lot of which is now being shown in an exhibition of photo collages and prints at the Mary Bozeman Gallery in the Tahoma Unitarian Universalist Congregation.

Curated by Patty McPhee, the show consists of some 32 works in the main auditorium and a few of her larger works in separate rooms. The art is arranged in generally chronological order beginning with a few prints and drawings from roughly 1985. Few of the works are dated, but McPhee says the bulk of them are from what Ragan called her “button down series,” works with feminist themes done in the 1990s. Two of the larger works are photo collages with intricate shading in colored pencils, and there are two of her latest works— paintings of landscapes with architectural structures. I reviewed an exhibition of this series in September of 2015, writing:  “Painted are the scenes where the buildings were, are, should be, or might have been located. The colors are bright and sunny with a predominance of blue. Everything is painted with precise detail but softly focused, like a cross between photo-realist paintings and pastel drawings. The buildings themselves are digital prints of architectural drawings, mostly black and white line drawings that are collaged into the paintings.”

All of the smaller photo collages depict women’s dresses either on mannequins or hangers, positioned within architectural structures. The dresses stand in for the women who may have worn them. They are stiff and formal dresses from bygone eras. They tend to be far too large for the settings — windows or archways or pedestals on baroque buildings — as if the women are giants, and the button-down formality of the dresses combined with the positioning within the buildings creates a feeling of imprisonment; locked within their clothes and within what is expected of women. Further intensifying this feeling of imprisonment is the fact that the mannequins are always headless and armless.

The earliest painting in this show is “In the Gazebo,” a photo collage of dresses inside a building: one giant dress inside an archway and a procession of smaller dresses marching forward.

“Chambored Oval Window” is an outsized dress within an oval window. All that is visible is the midsection with six large buttons. Above the window is a sculpted face flanked by leaf designs that form arms for the woman made up of the sculpted face and the dress in the window as the body. It becomes almost surrealistic and ominous.

Many of the other works, such as “Raitt Hall,” Cathedral Apartments in San Francisco,” and “Rialto Apartments” repeat this theme of an outsized bodice inside a window or other framing device. Semi-transparent blouses are also a repeated theme, as in “Between State and Michigan” with its transparent white blouse with polka dots that reverberate nicely with the intricate scrollwork framing the window.

Ragan took all of the photos of dresses and of buildings, the bulk of which are in Chicago. She cut out the dresses and meticulously collaged them into the photos of buildings. It is almost impossible to tell they are actual collages and not digitally manipulated images. If you look very closely from just the right angle, you can sometimes see the edges of paper, which she colored to match the sections where they were pasted in.

All of the art is for sale by silent auction and is priced ludicrously cheap, with bids starting as low as $10. All proceeds to go toward upgrading the lighting and hanging system for the gallery. McPhee said the low bid prices are based on the executor of Ragan’s estate’s desire that the works have homes.

Tahoma Unitarian Universalist Congregation, South 56th and L Street, Tacoma. Open most days but it is best to contact Patty McPhee at 206-919-4938 to make sure someone is there.