Her Mother's DAUGHTER

Pioneering artist Mary Ann Unger died before fame found her. Now her family is taking up her cause.

- LAURA VAN STRAATEN

Tragedy often exerts a subtractive centrifugal force on a family, spinning apart and severing the bonds of those who remain. Often, but not always.

Take what happened after the ground breaking artist Mary Ann Unger died in 1998, leaving behind her husband, the photographer Geoffrey Biddle, and their daughter Eve Biddle, then 16.

“We could have dumpstered everything,” Eve says of the nearly 1,000 artworks that her mother left-behind after a 14-year battle with cancer that began when Eve was a toddler. “Looking back, that was in some ways a legitimate option, but it wasn’t for Dad. It wasn’t for me.”

Instead the duo engaged in what Eve calls a “total act of faith” that Mary Ann’s colossal sculptures, patterned watercolors, and delicate drawings “deserve attention in the art historical conversation.”

One such conversation is happening at the Whitney Museum, where Jennie Goldstein has curated “In the Balance: Between Painting and Sculpture 1965–1985,” which runs through March 23. The exhibition places Unger in context with peers whose work, like hers, danced between two- and three-dimensionality, such as Judy Chicago, Alma Thomas, and Dorothea Rockburne.

Neither Unger’s inclusion in that show nor the museum’s posthumous acquisition of six of her artworks would have happened if, several years ago, Eve hadn’t invited the Whitney to consider an artist with whose work Goldstein admits she was “unfamiliar.”