Beyond Times Square, Jane Dickson’s Other Oeuvre

Jane Dixon with Baroque Chairoplane, 2005–21, Oil stick on linen. Photo by Jamie Lubetkin

Jane Dickson’s five-decade artistic odyssey has come to be defined by the essential body of work she created while living at the intersection of 43rd Street and 8th Avenue, in a loft that offered her an unsparing view of the carnival of sex work, drugs, and violence that were the accepted currency on the streets of late 20th-century Times Square. And it’s easy to see how this definition took hold, what with her iconic depictions of the pathetic wanderings of thrill-seeking Johns, the promises rendered in neon – XXX Movies, Live Nude – and the dreamlike glow of the entryway to the venerable Peep Land.

For all she witnessed and recorded at that address, Dickson’s oeuvre long-ago evolved like the neighborhood itself, eventually transcending Times Square and what it once was. But as her peregrinations led her afield of her midtown fountainhead—exploring carnivals, casinos, and quotidian suburban neighborhoods among other places—she never ventured far from the vertiginous intersection of danger and desire.

Almost 50 years after she arrived on 43rd Street and two decades after she quit it, Dickson’s non-Times Square work is drawing new attention. And it’s about time. Wonder Wheel, a solo show devoted exclusively to paintings of fairground scenes, opened July 9 at Karma in New York’s East Village; her stunning Heading in – Lincoln Tunnel 3 is on display at the Whitney through next January; and she was tapped to create a monumental sculpture that will greet travelers arriving at JFK Airport’s new Terminal 6 when it opens next year.

A viewer considers, Coney Island Spin Ride Astroland, 2007 Oil stick on linen. Photo by Jamie Lubetkin

At 72, Dickson is philosophical about her time documenting the city’s underbelly in all its sweaty glory. “I got a job designing animations on the first digital light board in Times Square in 1978,” Dickson told Whitehot. “I worked the night shift on weekends. There was a lot to observe and to ponder there and I started to paint what I saw,” she said. 

Dickson’s move to Times Square coincided with the ignition of New York’s rampageous 1980s art scene. Ascending to the vanguard of that heady movement as a member of Collaborative Projects Inc. (Colab), she helped organize the landmark exhibitions The Times Square Show and Real Estate Show. Soon, her artist’s gaze would expand beyond Times Square, drawing her to street fairs and carnivals and to the forever circus of Coney Island. At these locations, Dickson would find a different set of subjects eager to satisfy a different set of desires. 

 “I drew street fairs like San Genaro in Little Italy where I had a studio too. Both sites (the street fairs and Times Square) are commercial responses to universal human desires for food, sex, validation, exhilaration, companionship in the crowd or at least distraction from one’s own life and problems. We are moths to the flame,” she said.

In announcing the opening of Wonder Wheel, Karma said the show features works created since 2004 that focus, like much of Dickson’s work, on “the interrelation of desire—deferred or briefly fulfilled—and entertainment.” Even as some of the works are new, they are borne ceaselessly back in time by Dickson’s reliance on her photo archives for inspiration and her use of vinyl salvaged in the 1980s as a substrate. 

Left to right, Dickson's huband, filmmaker Charlie Ahearn; photographer Janette Beckman; and sculptor John Ahearn at the opening of Wonder Wheel.

Baroque Chairoplane, an oil stick on linen piece created over 16 years beginning in 2005, is a centerpiece of Wonder Wheel, and it perfectly captures the tensions that permeate Dickson’s studied takes on desire, danger and satisfaction. In this work, the chair-o-plane is a glowing dynamo of centrifugal force that escorts its two dozen riders on a terrifying dance in defiance of gravity and death, with no sign of cables securing them. For the riders, and for those on the ground watching, the exercise makes good on its promise of temporary escape from the constraints of the laws of ordinary existence.

“I have explored this subject with acrylic on blue synthetic felt and with oil-stick on coarse linen,” Dickson said of the works in Wonder Wheel, which feature her signature use of non-traditional media. “Both materials contribute to the otherworldly dreaminess I got from the carnival rides at night,” she said.

“Jane’s work has been described as ‘cinematic’ and with good reason," said Gary Lichtenstein, the master printer who has collaborated with Dickson on a series of projects over the years, including a newly released print of The Odeon, which depicts the scene outside the iconic Tribeca eatery. “Jane’s creative sense invites spontaneity but never relinquishes control. Both elements work in parallel in the prints that are extensions of Jane’s paintings,” he said.

“She has, like, a sensibility that really says New York to me,” Jannette Beckman, the renowned hip-hop photographer, said while examining the work at Dickson’s Karma opening the other night. “I'm a huge fan of Jane’s work and I'm always happy to see it get the recognition it deserves. I think it's so beautiful, the textures are extraordinary,” she said. 

Jane Dickson, Heading in – Lincoln Tunnel 3, 2003, oil on Astro Turf

Meanwhile, a couple of miles east of Karma at the Whitney, Dickson’s 2003 oil-on-AstroTurf piece Heading in – Lincoln Tunnel 3 is capturing outsized attention as part of the museum’s Shifting Landscapes exhibition. The piece depicts traffic heading into the tunnel that connects Manhattan and New Jersey, a mundane subject to be sure. But leveraging her signature alchemy of unconventional materials and psychological drama, Dickson transforms the scene into one loaded with both potential and foreboding.

The tunnel's dramatic perspective pulls the viewer forward into darkness; the red taillights ahead suggest both guidance and warning—a visual echo of the carnival lights and neon signs that fascinate Dickson elsewhere.

Jane Dickson discusses the casting of her monumental bronze medallion for JFK Airport at ART Research Enterprises in Lancaster, PA. The project is being documented by Meerkat Media. Photo by Charlie Ahearn.

Last weekend Dickson and her filmmaker husband Charlie Ahearn were far from the electricity of Times Square, sleeping in a caboose 85 miles due west of Philadelphia in Lancaster, Pa. They were there to look in on one of Dickson’s most ambitious works, a monumental bronze medallion that will be among the first things travelers see when they arrive at JFK airport’s new Terminal 6.

Dickson is not supposed to talk about the design for the medallion, she’s signed some kind of nondisclosure form, but the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which is conducting the $4.2 billion T6 project, has said the thing is going to be huge: 14-feet in diameter. 

When completed and installed it will be Dickson’s most enduring public legacy, an apt monument to the city she has spent decades chronicling in her paintings. At the same time, though, it also reflects how Dickson’s oeuvre has evolved since her Times Square period. She said she expects that to continue.

 “I am examining the contemporary American landscape, pondering how specific places evoke certain feelings,” she said. “I come from the Midwest and while I was first recognized for urban scenes, I also wanted to record America’s heartland of big skies, strip malls and highways.”

Wonder Wheel runs through Sept. 6 at Karma, 22 East 2nd Street. Heading in – Lincoln Tunnel 3 is on display as part of the Whitney’s Shifting Landscapes exhibition though Jan. 25. The medallion will be on display at JFK’s new Terminal 6 when it opens next year.