Beating the Rug by Ann Toebbe

Rental Property by Ann Toebbe

My experiences in New York and at Yale University cast my family's home and lifestyle in a different light: a pragmatic, mundane (and rather flat) sense of beauty, unburdened by high ideas or refinements of style. The combination of my earlier working-class tastes and the later-acquired, intensely cosmopolitan awareness of style has shaped who I am as a painter.

— Ann Toebbe

When I first read Ann's statement about her work, I was struck by its forthrightness, and was perhaps a little uneasy about how unapologetic it was. But there was also some serious pattern recognition. At its heart, Ann’s work is about reconciling her adult self—urbane, sophisticated and in possession of an advanced degree from a prestigious MFA program—with her decidedly more humble Midwestern roots. As a girl from Queens who got dumped into the very cosmopolitan populace of Stuyvesant High School in the 80s, I can totally identify.

Beating the Rug and Rental Property being our fourth and fifth editions with Ann, I’ve had a lot of conversations about her practice, both with the team and with collectors here on 20x200 and elsewhere. Throughout, I've been surprised (and yes, pleased!) by how hackle-raising this brutal honesty has been to others. In frankly stating her discomfort with bringing denizens of her art-centric citified existence back into the fold of the Midwest's humble, less sophisticated comforts, it appears that Ms. Toebbe pushes a lot of buttons.

In the spirit of that aforementioned frankness, I call bullsh*t. I mean, who hasn't been made uncomfortable by family members' differences at one time or another? My mind immediately bounces to the families of many of our Presidents—Jimmy Carter's brother Billy; Barack Obama's recently-charged-with-a-DUI uncle; and then there's Arkansas-born, Oxford-educated Bill "Bubba" Clinton, who's a living testament to balancing a humble past with a high-minded present. Perhaps it’s because I see Ann's work as being very deeply American, but one could argue that aspirational reinvention is one of the pillars of our culture, after all.

We're all striving, but nobody wants to get caught doing it. Ann? She doesn't care, which makes me like her more. But what makes me like her, and her work, most is how lovingly she embraces all of it. Her process—painstakingly detailed and invoking the quintessentially American craft, quilting—honors everything that she's deeply ambivalent about, ultimately elevating all involved.

— Jen