More than 200 postcard-size paintings of hearts, most of them red or pink, hang from strings in Beth Reitmeyer’s richly colorful installation With Love, part of a show with the same title opening tonight at Zg; hearts made of pipe cleaners cover the walls. Reitmeyer, some of whose other exhibits have involved giving her work away and who’s hoping here to “spread affection from one viewer to the next,” is inviting people to take one of the small paintings as a “valentine for a friend or loved one.” She asks only that the person who takes the painting write on a blank card “what’s endearing about the recipient, why they’re worthy of love,” and leave it in place of the one taken. In another room she’s showing 12 larger paintings, for which the card works served as studies, and these are for sale.
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When Reitmeyer was growing up in Kentucky, her mother sewed clothes for her and her sisters; they got teased for their unfashionable skirts in “crazy” floral patterns. “It was a big deal when my mother finally bought me a pair of jeans in seventh grade,” Reitmeyer says. “She would also cut a piece of chicken to make it look like a chicken, like with carrots for legs, and dye our milk different colors. My family didn’t have a lot of money, so if you wanted a toy you made it. I dug up clay to make a whole farm with animals.” That was good practice, she says, for learning to see everyday materials in new ways. Reitmeyer, who lives in Evanston, was shocked when her mother was diagnosed in 2001 with ovarian cancer. She traveled home to see her as often as her job as a photo researcher permitted, and she stopped making art. When her mom died two years later, Reitmeyer says, she was “out of practice” and not ready emotionally to make large paintings, so she started doing one of these cardlike sketches each day, hoping for a Valentine’s show at which she would offer them free.
