The Pre-Analytics Baseball Paintings of Margie Lawrence
Inherent in these works is the suspicion that the game used to be more culturally significant, a stronger means of common experience, more straightforward with greater characters: Is this just a fluke of collective memory?
By Daniel Gauss
In a new group summer show at Victor Armendariz Gallery in Chicago, you can find the riveting baseball-related work of Margie Lawrence (https://margielawrence.com). This is not a show of iconic sports images (although there may be a few), but more of an examination of how we transition to and from golden ages of public memory, how shared memories of unquestioned great achievements can trigger the intense emotions developing closeness or unity and how baseball used to pervade our lives much more in America as a type of common language, experience and iconography. It is baseball before the ages of analytics and steroids, when managers used their experience and guts to make decisions and, perhaps, when we were just not able to learn of any sinful deeds among our heroes.
Lawrence’s work seems to often be about the figures whose personalities, intensity, values, work-ethic, charm and grace often made them more compelling…
