Norma Jean Squires Art

06/05/2023

Passageways, 62 x 106 in, Acrylic, oil stick and letters. 1994.

06/04/2023

Norma Jean Squires was born in New Market, Toronto, Canada on February 15, 1931. Her mother was 16 years old when she gave birth to her. Norma was raised by a great uncle and great aunt in very humble circumstances. She only met her mother once when she was 4 years old. She remembered a big fancy white car pulling up to where she lived and seeing her 20 year old mother with her boyfriend. Then they drove away. In 1954 she came to the United States with her acoustic guitar in hand and began her adventures in New York City.

06/04/2023

Sevillanas, 30” X 30”, acrylic on wood board, c. 2007.

06/03/2023

06/03/2023

Norma Jean entered The Cooper Union in New York City in the late 1950's. I have highlighted some of her extraordinary sculptures in a previous post. At The Cooper Union she continued to develop her painting skills. Attached are some of her painting of that era. The painting called Easels was a 15 minute exercise she completed as a student at Cooper Union. She was creating in a cool muted Abstract style in the first three photos. The motifs in these young paintings would make a reappearance years later after her move to Los Angeles but with much more vibrant colors. I have included some other paintings from the period. She was very prolific and these are hardly exhaustive of her production from the period. We are fortunate to have some of these still in inventory. I have also included a flyer from one of her first exhibitions and a photograph of an installation of her work from 1962.

06/02/2023

Celebrating native Torontonian Norma Jean Squires’ extraordinary body of work. A 60 year legacy in visual arts: sculpture, painting, collage.

05/31/2023

Norma Jean Squires landed in New York in 1953-54 with dreams of a folk music career but soon her attention turned to art. She joined The Art Student League in New York and started exploring sculpture, a medium that would be her main mode of artistic expression until the mid-60's.

05/30/2023

Paper mache. Another example of Norma Jean's extraordinary ability to work in multiple mediums.