Born in Boston, local artist Pamela Hoss was raised on a farm in Rockland, just north of Brockton. She is the youngest of 10 children. Beyond the multitude of siblings and their parents, the farm was home to over 15,000 chickens, a goat and a bull.
Hoss’ parents encouraged creativity and let them express themselves through art — even allowing them to draw and paint on the walls of their home. Noting their enthusiasm, a family friend urged her parents to send her and two older sisters to Saturday morning classes at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.
She recalls always passing by the French impressionist Edgar Degas’ “Little Fourteen-Year-Old Dancer” as she walked to lunch in the museum.
The famed work is a bronze sculpture of a ballet dancer dressed in a satin bodice and a skirt of gauze. She squints and kicks her foot to one side. Her hands are clasped behind her back. One detractor harshly described the girl as “a sickly, gawky adolescent being made to do something she doesn’t totally want to do.”
But to my eye, it is a bold depiction of a child coming into the onset of adulthood with determination and defiance. She appears confident and serious, even in her acquiescence. She is herself and that is enough.
Hoss gravitated toward the strength of the girl’s posture and even more so, towards her thoughtful expression of introspection. Something was ignited.
She would go on to study fine arts at Southeastern Massachusetts University, in a program deeply vested in the idea that drawing was the seed and the fundamental necessity from which classical painting and sculpture could rise. Those lessons served her well.
Hoss received her BFA in 1972. She taught high school art classes for years and then attended the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University, earning an MFA in 1984. She taught at the collegiate level in a number of Boston area institutions before joining the faculty at her old alma mater SMU, which had transitioned into the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth in the late 1980s.
As an instructor, she recalled that her own undergraduate education involved a faculty that discussed drawing and practiced it with a near religious fervor, which she evoked in her own teaching style. She also speaks of “performing” in the classroom, using not only her voice but her whole body to motivate students. That sounds a little bit like dancing.
Hoss was married and became a mother. Her son Matthew is well into his mid-40s. When her marriage unraveled and her son left for college a few years later, she began attending a weekly singles night at a dance club.
There was a large dance floor where she felt free to be expressive and no one would notice her. That said, cabinet maker and furniture designer Scott Currier noticed her. He asked her to dance. They’ve been wed since 2008.
Both Currier and Hoss have rented studio space at the Hatch Street Studios for years. Out of necessity, Currier still works at Hatch, as it is large enough to house the woodworking equipment and tools that he needs to work. But Hoss now paints, draws and makes collages at their spacious historic home, not far from downtown.
Many aficionados of Hoss’ art may know her best for her decades of engaging and sometimes mystifying self-portraits. And there are her relatively recent portraits of friends, family and colleagues.
She doesn’t work from photographs, preferring to be in the presence of the model so that she can quickly respond to “shapes, colors and compositions from the gut, (to be) beyond copying.”
She asked her husband to sit for a portrait. The end result is remarkable, and it truly encompasses his essence: hard-working, gregarious, thoughtful and a wee bit mischievous.
When she finished it, she did a self-portrait. In it, she wears a bright pink blouse, surely a conscious choice, commenting on femininity and femaleness itself. She wears her mother’s costume pearl necklace, symbolizing the wisdom gained from experience.
Both the self-portrait and the painting of Currier are currently available for viewing at the Marion Art Center. Hoss is exhibiting with Kim Barry (of whom she has done a wonderful portrait of but that is sadly not on display.) “Pamela Hoss & Kim Barry, Two Painters, Two Friends” will be up until Nov. 1.
Hoss displays only a few other portraits at the MAC. One is of Lee Heald, who recently retired from her longterm role as head of AHA! There is a portrait of Linda Lavigne, the mother of a former student. Yet another is a painter, potter and former student only identified as Stephanie.
All are exquisitely rendered, as are the paintings of bouquets of flowers — rudbeckia, forget-me-nots, peonies and other blossoms. They too are portraits as Hoss manages to infuse them with character and personality.
There are self-portraits in the MAC show. But there are many more in her studio, which I recently had the good fortune to visit.
Hoss has said: “Self-portrait has always been a way for me to express myself. It has helped elucidate my life as a woman and the roles I have played as a daughter, sister, mother, wife and teacher.”
She has created large-scale multimedia works in which she appears in multitudes: as a toddler, as a third grader, as a teen, in her 20s, 30s, 40s, every decade, often in tutus and ballet slippers.
She plays with the tropes of the female trinity of Maiden, Mother and Crone and turns them upside down.
Tapping aspects of magic realism and an uncanny ability to blend parts of her past, she creates work in which her contemporary self co-exists with her kindergartener self, her pubescent self, her college girl self, her midlife crisis self and her grandmotherly self.
But don’t think that Hoss’ self-portraiture is vanity. Rather, it is much like that Degas ballerina that so inspired her — an expression of introspection.
Recently, I sat down with Hoss and we chatted for a few hours. She seemed a little diffident at age 75 and it may have been but a momentary emotional dissonance. Beyond her art itself, Hoss is well-respected and admired by the more youthful artists in the region.
I received a message from DATMA Director Lindsay Mis who wrote that Hoss’ support for what the younger generation of South Coast artists is doing is validating to her and other leaders, such as Jodi Stevens at the MAC.
Mis looks up to as Hoss one of the people who helped make the New Bedford art community what it is, and that she looks to her for guidance and critique.
Generations of artists, like generations of family, overlap and fortify each other and the community at large.
Don Wilkinson has been writing art reviews, artist profiles and cultural commentary on the South Coast for over a decade. He has been published in local newspapers and regional art magazines. He is a graduate of the Swain School of Design and the CVPA at UMass Dartmouth. Email him at dwilkinson@newbedfordlight.org.
