Art news

Deborah Remington’s Singular Place in Art

Sat, 08 May 2021 06:06:00 +0200

I have long had an interest in three women artists who were connected to the midcentury San Francisco Renaissance, and the generation of artists and poets that emerged in and around San Francisco in the postwar years: Sonia Gechtoff (1926–2018), Jay DeFeo (1929–1989), and Deborah Remington (1930-2010).

While DeFeo has come to be regarded as a major artist, Gechtoff and Remington have not yet received their due. The fact that they have been marginalized in the art world is sadly predictable. They were independent women who had to make their way in a male-dominated art world, where their autonomy was regarded as a threat by their male peers. Though they all initially fit in with Bay Area Abstract Expressionism, particularly Clyfford Still, with whom Remington studied, they reinvented themselves and set out on radically independent paths. They have never been associated with Minimalism, Pop Art, Conceptual Art, Painterly Realism, or Color Field painting. When you don’t have a genre, you might as well be invisible.

There are signs that this is about to change for Remington, who is currently the subject of two solo exhibitions, Deborah Remington: Five Decades at Bortolami (May 1–June 12, 2021) and Deborah Remington: Early Drawings at Craig F. Starr Gallery (May 4–July 30, 2021). Together, these shows give New York viewers the first in-depth survey of her singular paintings, done over five decades, as well as offer a selection of her early, masterful drawings.

In addition to the painting retrospective that Remington has long deserved, Bortolami’s presentation of three of the five drawings from the Beinen series convinces me it is high time that a museum showcase drawings from across her entire career.

Installation view, Deborah Remington: Five Decades at Bortolami, New York (image courtesy Bortolami Gallery)

Created between 1997 and 2006, the Beinen drawings, which are done in graphite and red crayon, measure 72 by 42 inches — far larger than the early drawings, which I had previously seen (most of them no larger than 24 by 18 inches). The human scale of these drawings suggests the height and width of Remington’s reach. They are emblematic self-portraits, focused on her internal body, eventually stricken with cancer, and a prolonged encounter with her mortality.

The three Beinen drawings are in Bortolami’s smaller gallery space, which is separate from the large, sky-lit main gallery space, where paintings dated between 1964 and 2007 are exhibited. No one came into the room while I was looking at the drawings and I was very happy to be alone with them, as they are not works to be looked at, but rather to be seen slowly and deliberately.

Remington started the Beinen drawings after she was diagnosed with lung cancer in 1993 and completed them after she had one lung partially removed in 2004. She had previously been diagnosed with beast cancer, in 1980; 36 years earlier, when she was a teenager living in New Jersey, her father died from leukemia after fighting it for four years.

The subject of the drawings seems to be the body, specifically the rib cage and spine. Although I have not seen all five drawings, the three in the exhibition suggest a narrative of collapse: “Beinen III” (1998) depicts an intact, enclosed form composed of shifting, misaligned parts; “Beinen V” (2006) shows a rib cage-like form partially hidden by a gray plane that transitions from solid to transparent and recalls X-rays and lead sheets.

Deborah Remington, “Encounters” (2007), oil on canvas, 72 x 67 inches (Photo courtesy The Deborah Remington Trust and Bortolami Gallery, New York)

In the Beinen drawings, Remington’s incredibly meticulous renderings of a vulnerable skeletal structure under attack start with subtle tonal gradations, from black at the top of the paper to gray along the bottom third, defining an atmospheric abstract space in which the clearly delineated form is floating. This display of control over line and tonality seems to empower Remington to contemplate her own failing body. By employing a slow, deliberate process in which control is paramount, she shapes her passage in time, while examining the granular density of her materials, and their capacity to generate light and dark. Without denying her illness, she wants to see the flawed mortal interior body differently, not as an invulnerable or perfected form, but as art.

In “Beinen IV’ (1998), a white, outlined form descends from the orderly jumble of the curving, horizontal gray bands. The white slowly darkens into deep gray that concludes in a hoof-like shape that rests on the granular gray abstract ground. This shape — unique in Remington’s vocabulary — resembles a horse’s rear leg, and could be read as as both a spine and an oblique allusion to the Western artist Frederic Remington, of whom she is a descendant.

The 12 paintings in the exhibition were done between 1962 and 2007, and include “Encounters” (2007), the last oil painting that she completed before succumbing to cancer, as her father had more than six decades earlier.

The show documents pivotal changes and unexpected returns, as well as highlights the unique direction that Remington pursued throughout her career. “Big Red” (1962), which she made after studying calligraphy and sumi-e painting in Japan (1956–58), is a turbulent jumble of thick black strokes with yellow, orange, and blue peeking through, against a searing red ground.

Deborah Remington, “Big Red” (1962), oil on canvas, 75 x 69 inches (Photo courtesy The Deborah Remington Trust and Bortolami Gallery, New York)

At this point, it might seem as if Remington was still working her way through Abstract Expressionist gestures and her lessons with Clyfford Still, but a closer look suggests that light comes from the paint itself, marking a move away from paint-as-paint. In 1963, working with a chiaroscuro palette and different shades of red, she began to reinvent herself in the Soot and Adelphi series, both of which depict emblematic forms floating in an atmospheric space permeated by a mute light. These drawings, which are included in Deborah Remington: Early Drawings at Craig F. Starr Gallery, show how central drawing was to her practice. It forms a distinct body of work alongside her paintings.

“March” (1964), in the Bortolami show, marks Remington’s transformation into an altogether different and unique abstract painter. She has gone from thick paint to thin layers and tightly controlled gradation from white to dark gray. A slightly diminishing planar form painted a cold white leans back in space, on a right-to-left diagonal. Its edges are abutted by broad, gradient, charcoal-gray planes, with smaller planes edged in precise, flat red lines. The image strongly alludes to a kimono, especially because a black, attenuated triangle outlined in red seems to reference a sash.

In a 1973 interview with curator Paul Cummings, Remington stated that her thick, gestural paintings and her incredibly flat, thinly painted, hard-edged abstractions were “incompatible.” As Rachel Churner describes in her insightful essay, included in an exhibition brochure for Bortolami, this was a “significant understatement,” because Remington had remade herself into a completely different artist.

Deborah Remington, “March” (1964), oil on canvas, 57 1/4 x 49 1/2 inches (Photo courtesy The Deborah Remington Trust and Bortolami Gallery, New York)

As she riffs on a planar form that was likely inspired by a kimono, she becomes preoccupied with luminosity, with free-floating forms, radiant portals, and backlit presences.

In the painting “Dorset” (1972), Remington’s use of black punctuated by dazzling red and blue lines, and gradients of glowing red, may have been inspired by her familiarity with Japanese lacquer painting, but the result is unlike anything we have seen in painting before. Is the floating form, which is outlined in red, a camera or an oval mirror or both? What are the two floating forms? At once lava hot and icily cool, impenetrably dark and softly glowing, inviting and aloof, the painting is a diamond-hard compression of contradictions.

Between 1972 and 2007, Remington would change her style twice more, while always hewing to a similar palette of hot red and coal black, gradients of gray and white, and cold blue, with the addition of emerald green and deep purples. There is something mineral-like about her colors. They evoke not the earth, but the underworld.

In “Encounters” (2007), her final painting, Remington depicts two irregular floating forms, in the gray spectrum on the left and in a gradation of feverish red on the right. A spine-like structure both joins and separates the forms. In this and the Beinen drawings, Remington confronts her mortality without requiring the viewer’s sympathy. The same determination, single-mindedness, and courage that propelled her down an untrammeled path appears as steadfast as ever.

Deborah Remington: Five Decades continues at Bortolami (39 Walker Street, Manhattan) through June 12. Deborah Remington: Early Drawings continues at Craig F. Starr Gallery (5 East 73rd Street, Manhattan) though July 30.

Photographs That Bring the Past Into the Present

Sat, 08 May 2021 06:05:00 +0200

The Dutch artist Jasper de Beijer deftly utilizes game modeling software, precise drawings, and scrupulously detailed models. He has a theatrical flair, a wild imagination, and a passion for the historical research needed to construct outlandish tableaux, which he photographs with a digital camera, making small editions. While photography was once thought to capture the truth of a moment, de Beijer uses the camera elaborate the artificial. There are myriad reasons for this, all of which are folded into his work.

In 2005, during a residency in Japan, de Beijer became interested in the connections between the fantastical worlds of contemporary manga and 19th-century woodblock artists, such as Hokusai and Kuniyoshi. The result was a series of photographs collectively titled Heroes and Ghosts — de Beijer’s title was probably inspired by the exhibition catalogue Heroes & Ghosts: Japanese Prints by Kuniyoshi (1797–1861), published in 1997 to celebrate the bicentennial of Kuniyoshi’s birth.

De Beijer’s other subjects have included photographs of World War I battlefields and soldiers with disfiguring facial wounds and the building of the Crystal Palace in London in 1851. In his current exhibition, Jasper de Beijer: The Admiral’s Headache, at Asya Geisberg (April 10–May 15, 2021), the artist focused his attention on Curaçao, the former Dutch colony, where had a residency in 2017.

Jasper de Beijer, “Galjoen” (2018), C-Print, 43.31h x 43.31w inches, Edition 3 of 7 + 1AP

Close to Venezuela, the island of Curaçao was wrested from Spain by the Dutch in 1634. In 1662, the Dutch West India Company established Curaçao as the center of its Atlantic slave trade. In 1795, a slave revolt nearly toppled the Dutch rule and took more than a month to defeat. And in 1914, when oil was discovered in Venezuela, Curaçao became the site of oil refineries and a thriving shipping port. De Beijer engages with the island’s history through the historical figure of Albert Kikkert (1761–1819). According to the gallery press release:

The title The Admiral’s Headache refers to the story of Albert Kikkert, the former admiral and Governor of Curaçao in the early 1800s. Kikkert complained that the white facades of the buildings shining in the sun exacerbated his migraines, and ordered that they all be painted the bright shades typical of Curaçao’s waterfront today.

According to local legend, another reason that Kikkert might have wanted the buildings around the waterfront painted in pastel colors was because he was part owner of a paint factory. It would seem that the idea of beauty played no role in the change.

Jasper de Beijer, “Brigadier” (2019), C-Print, 39.37h x 52.76w inches, Edition 2 of 7 + 1AP

The exhibition consists of six large digital C-Prints of varying sizes, determined by the subject matter. “Bastion” (2020) is a nighttime panoramic view of walled plantation houses on hills and identical slave huts in the flat land below. It measures around 33 by 70 inches, while the square, 43 by 43-inch format of “Galjoen” (2018) calls attention to the ungainly shape of a 19th-century armed galleon.

In contrast to model makers, who are often fanatical about verisimilitude, de Beijer has no interest in achieving exact resemblance, and for good reason. Given that his subject matter often bears on the different ways the past haunts the present, the artist is trying to get at its ghostly, disturbing presence, not to pay homage to the glories of the past or become nostalgic about it.

By constructing a highly detailed world based on historical events, de Biejer gives himself permission to ponder the past through his constructions, connecting and juxtaposing unlikely things and events. In “Refinery” (C-Print, 41.75 by 67 inches, 2020), he collapses together aspects of Curaçao’s past and present. Two galleons, their sails rolled up, are anchored in the distance. Further on, we see oil storage tanks on a separate piece of land.

The water, lined with pastel buildings, water towers, and a gantry crane, extends diagonally in from the photograph’s lower left edge. As de Beijer shows us, the bulky, house-like 19th-century galleon was the forerunner of the modern container ship. He underscores this point by matching the insignia on the containers suspended from the gantry elevator with the ones stacked on the galleon’s deck.

Jasper de Beijer, “Refinery” (2020), C-Print, 41.73h x 66.93w inches, Edition 3 of 7 + 1AP

Meanwhile, the clouds floating overhead are made of paper he has manipulated to suggest volume. The clouds’ surfaces are covered with different patterns of parallel lines, which describe their topography. Parallel lines are also visible on the buildings’ pastel facades and sides.

The parallel lines evoke etching and the Golden Age of Dutch printmaking, spanning the 16th and 17th centuries, when artists such as Hendrick Goltzius and Rembrandt van Rijn flourished. By linking etching and digital photography, de Beijer reminds us that each medium was popular in its day; and both have been efficient ways to disseminate physical images in society and, in some cases, to deliver the news.

De Beijer associates galleons and oil refineries to call attention to one of the foundations of Holland’s present and past commerce and culture — its use of shipping to transport goods and slaves from one part of the world to another. The questions the artist raises, but makes no attempt to answer, include: What do you do with this legacy? Is it possible to reinvent one’s country to such an extent that it finally leaves behind the past? In America, the struggle between those who want to go back to the “good old days” and those who want to shed the past and go forward has become violent at times.

Jasper de Beijer, “Brigadier,” detail (2019), C-Print, 39.37h x 52.76w inches, Edition 2 of 7 + 1AP

In “Brigadier” (C-Print, 39.37 by 52.76 inches, 2019), de Beijer has photographed a headless figure lying on a bed that appears to be outside. The shutters on the window behind him are geometrically divided into four triangles, echoing the emblem on the containers in “Refinery.” The brigadier’s uniform and skin have been brought into clarity by the highly detailed, printed surface that de Beijer has applied to his carefully built-up volumetric form.

The fact that we see his calves, a hand, and a forearm, but that he is headless, is strange and unsettling, especially as the artist has placed a hat above the empty collar, supported by what looks like a crooked stick rising up from the back of the empty uniform. In fact, there are no faces in the photographs, only empty uniforms. “Brigadier” is downright weird, oddly funny, somewhat creepy, and unnerving.

Why can’t we see the Brigadier’s face? Is he a surrogate for one part of Dutch history, at once visible and gone? What is the present’s relationship to the past? Aren’t different nations at a crucial juncture as they try to shape and reshape their bonds with the past? These are issues that de Beijer makes visible without becoming didactic. That he moves so nimbly from one subject to another — from a refinery to a brigadier lying in bed to a night sky lit up by glowing paths culminating in explosions that reveal the land plantations and slave huts below — is what convinced me that he is a major artist whose challenging work should be better known in America.

His art is one of engagement and exploration rather than judgment and conclusion. By pulling us into his scenes, he finds a way to implicate us and perhaps even push us into contemplating the material necessities of our lives.

Jasper de Beijer: The Admiral’s Headache continues at Asya Geisberg Gallery (537B West 23rd Street, Manhattan) through May 15.

Artworks Orbiting the Thinking of Hannah Arendt

Sat, 08 May 2021 06:04:00 +0200

LONDON — In a year when much of the world as we know it has been on its knees, is it not a bold, if not almost otherworldly, move for a small gallery to devote an entire year of exhibitions to Hannah Arendt, a famous thinker whose works we all aspire to read in depth some day soon?

And why now anyway?

We might well ask.

The series is called On Hannah Arendt: Eight Proposals for Exhibition at London’s Richard Saltoun Gallery. There is no specific peg on which to hang the story. Unlike the poet Dante, whose greatness we are wildly celebrating throughout this year, she did not die almost exactly 700 years ago. Unlike the art critic John Ruskin, whose greatness we were all wildly celebrating throughout last year, she was not born a little over 200 years ago. Hannah Arendt died in 1975, recently enough for some of us to have known her.

The entire enterprise feels 100 percent high-minded, shot through with a level of dedication to the sanctity of ideas that museums can seldom afford to aspire to these days, given that they are stone broke.

The series — it is already well underway! — will involve the participation of about 40 artists, many of them already represented by the gallery, others not. There will be eight shows in all, and they will all gently orbit like small, contented satellites around a book that Arendt published in two editions, 1961 and 1968, called Between Past and Future.

She subtitled the second edition Eight Exercises in Political Thought because it is a book of intellectual exploration, a book in which the author discovers what she thinks about things by writing them down. That was her way. She was after not truth, but meaning.

Everlyn Nicodemus, “Silent Strength no 4” (1989), oil on canvas (artwork © Everlyn Nicodemus)

Why eight shows? Because that book has eight chapters, and the shows, one by one, will loosely explore the themes of those chapters. They will include such matters as these: the nature of authority; the concept of history; the modern age. And the shows are not the full extent of this gallery’s 12-months’ long commitment to the legacy of Arendt either. There also are regular, online discussion groups (you can join in too), talks, interviews and lectures, often with the active participation of Roger Berkowitz, the Academic Director of the Hannah Arendt Centre at Bard College, that bucolic campus two hours north of New York City.

What sort of a thinker was Arendt then? Although you can call her philosophical – most do, especially those who have not yet read her yet feel a pressing, deadline-driven need to define her achievements pithily (journalists, for example) — she was not really a philosopher because her work was not systematic enough. In fact, she herself denied that she was a philosopher.

She thought a lot about what we might loosely and tentatively describe as philosophical issues — the nature of truth and morality, for example — but all her musings were grounded in and conditioned by her understanding and her experience of the flux of history, everything that happens out in the world at large, often so polluted by evil human behavior.

Her ideas are always grounded in the fate of individual human beings. She was not a dealer in philosophical abstraction, in which meaning gets lost in a web of incomprehensible language. She was a German Jew, driven from her homeland in the 1930s, who prospered in the United States, that land of refuge, and the fact of her being a refugee and an exile, an escapee from atrocity, informs her writing immeasurably.

Lili Dujourie, “American Imperialism” (1972/2021), steel (artwork © Lili Dujourie)

The artists in the show are equally gender-balanced (roughly), and they are international in range. Some of the exhibitions are group shows, others solo presentations. The second of the eight shows featured the work of Peter Kennard, a British artist who describes himself as a visual historian, and its theme was the slippery nature of history, and how the concept of history is forever being invented and then re-invented. History as process, then. The third is a group show devoted to an examination of the question of authority — in whose name is it wielded? — which features paintings by Everlyn Nicodemus (Tanzania), text and fabric works by Lerato Shadi (South Africa), and two works by Lili Dujourie (Belgium).

The first of Dujourie’s two works is a small and grainy film showing her naked form turning on a bed, the second a muscular sculptural intervention – a plate of pink-painted steel, leaning against a wall, which has been painted black –that tosses a brick in the general direction of the males who dominated Minimalism. This is interesting and slightly surprising, the fact that a pugnacious feminist work has been drawn into the orbit of Arendt’s book.

The finest, most hard-hitting, and most dramatically staged work in the entire show is a text-cum-neon work by Lerato Shadi called Batho ba me (2020).She paints the opening phrase of the preamble to theUS Constitution – we the people – on the wall, and then adds, in red neon, the word “Are” at the beginning and a question mark at the end, so that the statement is transformed into a challenge demanding heart-searching self-scrutiny — on the part of ourselves, and of those we trust to govern in our name: Are We the people?

Lerato Shadi, “Batho ba me” (2020), neon, paint; edition of 1 + 1 AP (artwork © Lerato Shadi)

I have been considering the case and the person of Hannah Arendt for a few weeks now — lockdown in London meant that the first show could never actually be seen in the flesh. My homework has included reading Between Past and Future in its entirety, andup to page 57 of The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951).

As I stalled at that page and stared ahead in my mind’s eye to the next 650 pages, I began to think about a conversation I had once had with the novelist Iris Murdoch at her home in north Oxford. The tape recorder was off. We had done the hard graft of the interview. We were chatting. I mentioned, rather tentatively, that her later books seemed to be getting longer and longer. I did not add the words that I might have added: much to their detriment, I fear, Dame Iris. Did she work with one particular editor? I ask, ever the soul of tact, on a good day. Editors? What are they for? she replied with some vehemence. I feel the same way about The Origins of Totalitarianism.

“On Hannah Arendt: Eight Proposals for an Exhibition / Proposal 3: What is Authority” at the Richard Saltoun Gallery, London: installation view with works by Everlyn Nicodemus and Lerato Shadi (artworks © the artists)

The other issue which continues to buzz around my head is the no-holds-barred idealism of this yearlong celebration of Arendt, with its wholly admirable air of educational self-advancement. In short, how the devil did they pay for it?

I decide to confront the gallery’s owner, Richard Saltoun, head-on about this. He bounces out of the back office with zest and good cheer, in blue jumper and Levis, roaring along in his slightly scuffed, off-white sneakers, the very soul of delightfully unbuttoned outspokenness — in fact, the very antithesis of those many dealers who sleep unsoundly in black-framed spectacles and dark, well cut suits.

By flipping works on the secondary market! he tells me. All the art dealers do it, even the greatest of them. Had I read a book by Philip Hook called Rogues’ Gallery (2017)? Not yet. It’s all about what dealers get up to in order to earn a living, even the ones who regard themselves as experimental and cutting-edge.

The routine is this: you show Otto Dix in the front window as that money-making Renoir leaves by the back door. That sort of thing.Dealers don’t really like to talk about such things because there’s so much snobbery abroad. If you deal on the secondary market, you are not quite pure…

The other point is this: you also deal on the secondary market in order to indulge the intellectual pleasures involved in staging a series of shows tied to Hannah Arendt. It’s rare to find a show that is about the art and not the artist, as a longtime London dealer (and alleged sexual harasser) said to him once, he tells me, suggesting that this might well be the case here. This is serious stuff, with some heavy content! he adds.

And was this series of shows the gallery’s brainchild? Had he and his team shaped it? Well, yes and no. There was a brilliant curator behind the scenes, he tells me, a man unacknowledged in the press handouts. He was the man who had suggested that the show be linked to Between Past and Future because of the nature of that book, the fact that it had eight chapters, which in turn suggested eight separate themes, and therefore eight separate exhibitions.“If I had done it on my own, it would have been full of clichés, with lots of literal referencing – maybe a portrait of Arendt by Marlene Dumas, that sort of thing.”

On Hannah Arendt: Eight Proposals for an Exhibition continues at the Richard Saltoun Gallery (41 Dover Street, London, England) through December 2021. The third proposal, What Is Authority? continues through June 6.

Required Reading

Sat, 08 May 2021 06:03:00 +0200

The more things change, the more they stay the same:

Astonishing cartoon for 1884. "The only way to prove that you have been clubbed by a policeman — photography him in the act." 1884! pic.twitter.com/8sY1htr7ew
— John Edwin Mason (@johnedwinmason) May 1, 2021

Professor Michael L. Blakey, who is a bioarchaeologist, biocultural anthropologist, and historian of science, talks to Dr. Jemima Pierre for the Black Agenda Report about the long history of the anthropological use and abuse of human remains (particularly of Black and Indigenous people) in the United States:

This science was used to create a ranking of races. From the 1830s to the 1850s, Samuel Morton, a physician and professor at the University of Pennsylvania, had a collection of 1300 skulls. He thought he could measure skulls to identify racial differences (a field called craniometry). His technique for measuring skulls included pouring mustard seeds and then lead shots (BBs) into the foramen magnum, which is the hole at the base of the skull where the central nervous system passes. But in the skull of a dead person it’s a hole. He poured this mustard seed into the hole and filled it up, filled up the calvarium, the brain case, and then poured that into a graduated cylinder. With this method, he felt he had a measured mentality and intelligence. And it was important for him to have skulls of different races and so he did.
I just want to mention that this is all in line with the European Enlightenment idea of science — about objectivity. And, let me say there are two ways of understanding objectivity. The first, I call Objectivity #1, is that one relies on the object for knowledge, evidence, material evidence. I think that is, surely, what science is, that way of knowing. But this Objectivity #1 is often confounded with Objectivity #2. Objectivity #2 is presumed neutrality, the ability to ascertain universal truths from observation. But if there is a neutral truth, we have no way of knowing that scientifically. We have no way of knowing that in terms of Objectivity #1. For example, human beings can’t imagine a way of being in every place in time to see if any truth ever lasted that long. So, the idea that we can be a neutral is like a religious idea. It’s about belief, it’s not a scientific idea. Yet, we’ve come to believe that it’s a quality of science, that scientists are neutral. That they have the magic method that takes them out of history, out of their culture out of their social background.

Nap bishop Tricia Hersey (founder of the Nap Ministry) talks to brontë velez about rest and liberation:

What came to me is that our dream space has been stolen, that there has been a theft, a complete theft. What could have happened if our ancestors had a space to rest, if they were allowed to dream. They may have received downloads from their ancestors and from God to say, “Go right, not left, and you will be free. Do this and you won’t be in slavery anymore. The button to that thing is here.” You know? These downloads that could have been given to us. Could our freedom have come quicker? I’m thinking about Harriet Tubman and her prophetic dreams, of waking up and saying, “My people are free.”
I think when we miss out on that dream space, we’re literally missing out on very important information, very important downloads and knowledge that are going to be for our benefit. I really literally believe that our path to our liberation, to really getting to the next dimension, is in dreams. It’s there. The information is waiting for us. The ancestors are like, “I wish they would just stop for a minute and lay down because I got the word for them.” They’re looking at us like grind machines and saying, “If they would lay down for a moment, I’m ready to come in through that dream space, that ancestral liminal space. I got a word, but I can’t give it to them in this dimension.” You know? If rest is another dimension, which I think it is, I think the more we go there, the more we’re going to wake up. The information is there for us.

Sindre Bangstad, writing in Africa Is a Country, considers the “impossibility of the Black intellectual”:

Discovering Hall’s Caribbean origins or migrant identity could be a shock only in a world where the mission of black intellectuals remains impossible, where being a black intellectual is unimaginable.
Gilroy makes a convincing case for the centrality of race and racism as “indispensable for coming to terms with the meaning and the politics of his intellectual work as a whole.” In Gilroy’s rendering, race is for Hall, “a constitutive power” and “a prism” through which people are “called upon” to live through “crisis conditions.” Hall is singled out as “the first academic to highlight the reproduction of racism as common sense.” As a founding figure of Cultural Studies and the Birmingham School, Hall did as Gilroy rightly notes demonstrate a particular interest in showing how the modern mass media accelerated the reproduction of racism.

Carolina Miranda writes about Maya Lin’s collaboration with Shepley Bulfinch to design Smith College’s Neilson Library:

The library’s special collections include extensive original materials related to gender equality, reproductive rights and other social justice movements, and it holds personal papers connected with figures such as Gloria Steinem, Marian Anderson and Sylvia Plath.
Neilson also represents something unique: a building designed by women for a client team of women for a public that would consist principally of women. It is architecture that quite literally centers women’s knowledge at a time in which women remain underrepresented in the field. An estimated 20% of licensed architects are women, despite the fact that they represent half of all architecture degrees earned.

An important story about how people get sucked into the cult of Trump. Writing for Mother Jones, Stepahnie Mencimer reports on the “radicalization of Simone Gold“:

Her arrest highlights the role of conservative media in fomenting an insurrection, but Gold’s personal experience also illustrates what experts on extremism have long known: Education is no defense against radicalization. “If you think of who is susceptible of extremist ideology, people tend to think it’s people who don’t have much education,” says Don Haider-Markel, a University of Kansas political science professor who has studied extremism and radicalization. “That’s not the case at all. It tends to be more middle class and upper class. Those who have spent more time educating themselves tend to think they know better than other people.”
In fact, much like the tea partiers of the Obama era, the Capitol insurrectionists were by and large an aging, middle-class mob. Researchers at the Chicago Project on Security and Threats at the University of Chicago have dug into the demographic profiles of hundreds of people charged with crimes related to the Capitol incursion. They’ve found that about 30 percent of the arrested rioters are white-collar professionals like Gold. Only about 13 percent were affiliated with traditional far-right militias or extremist groups like the Proud Boys, and only 7 percent were unemployed.

New York Post writer Laura Italiano left after a story she wrote about Vice President Kamala Harris’s children books being given to migrant children turned out to be a lie. Writing for Vanity Fair, Joe Pompeo explains the context:

The children’s-book article was conceived based on a Reuters photograph. No one I spoke to was able to confirm precisely how everything went down, but one version of the backstory is that the item began as an extended photo caption and snowballed into the ensuing shit show; another is that Italiano’s original marching orders were to look into the Reuters image. There’s a lot of sympathy for Italiano, who is highly regarded among her peers, but even sympathetic sources acknowledge that she is not blameless. (Reached on her cell, Italiano declined to comment.) Overall, people just sound really bummed about the whole thing, and about the state of the Post in general. One disenchanted staffer said, “The Post has always been a balancing act of catering to the masses and the elites. Lately, it feels as if everything is now for the masses.”

You may have been hearing about the cicada invasion we’re all awaiting in the US (every 17 years Brood X emerges in the Eastern US and this year’s we’re expecting trillions of them), but did you know about the insects’ strange biology?

Despite appearances, that individual cicada will be a swarm unto itself—the insect and a community of organisms living inside it. Their lives have been so tightly entwined that they cannot survive alone. Their fates have been so precariously interlinked that their future is uncertain. And their relationship is so unusual that when John McCutcheon first stumbled upon it in 2008, he had no idea what he had found.
… Many insects harbor beneficial bacteria called endosymbionts, which live permanently inside their cells. Cicadas usually have two—Sulcia and Hodgkinia. Between them, they produce 10 amino acids that are missing from the cicadas’ diet of plant sap. Because those amino acids are essential, so too are the bacteria. Without them, the cicadas can’t survive. The opposite is also true: Inside the cushy confines of their insect hosts, endosymbionts eventually lose the genes they’d need to exist independently. They become forever tethered to their insects, and their insects to them.

The Smithsonian posted this to correspond with the popular Mexican holiday Cinco de Mayo, which is often celebrated in the US with frozen margaritas:

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The violence against protesters in Colombia has been off the charts this week, with at least 24 dead already, so I wanted to share this small nugget of hope and resistance:

I really need U.S. twitter to hype up these girls who vogued at an anti-government protest in Bogotá, Colombia yesterday and defied orders from Colombia’s ESMAD riot police, known for their often brutal treatment of protestors. This took serious guts pic.twitter.com/MiALaLe3BG
— Alex Bare (@alexbaretv) April 29, 2021

The CIA released a creepy recruitment video, proving yet again that governments easily co-opt any language (whether it’s the peace movement — remember “peace dividends” — or, in this case, feminist) to get what they want:

this is a video made by the CIA as part of their recruitment drive. lo

Bisa Butler’s Worlds in Cut Cloth

Sat, 08 May 2021 06:02:00 +0200

CHICAGO — Bisa Butler has a great name; it has almost a rock star quality. But she wasn’t born with it. Mailissa Veronica Yamba grew up in New Jersey, the daughter of a Ghanian-born university president (at Essex County College in Newark) and a French teacher from New Orleans. She graduated from Columbia High School in 1991, married, earned undergraduate and graduate degrees in painting and art education, and taught high school art for a decade while raising her children.

The story will sound familiar to many women artists. However, Butler has recently emerged as a significant art-world presence, with her first solo museum exhibition, Bisa Butler: Portraits, currently on view at the Art Institute of Chicago. (The exhibition opened in 2020 at the Katonah Museum of Art in upstate New York.) Butler gained success, quite remarkably, through the often-marginalized medium of quilting. Yet, what might seem like an overnight success is not. Butler had been showing work for 20 years with other African American quilt artists under the auspices of the curator, writer, and artist Carolyn Mazloomi. Butler was known in these circles, but it was not until three years ago that she surmounted biases in the contemporary art world against both people of color and fiber arts.

Butler’s breakthrough happened in 2018 at an art fair, Expo Chicago. Her work, presented by Claire Oliver Gallery, sold out during the first hour of the preview. I remember running into friends at the fair who asked breathlessly, “Did you see those quilts?” When Erica Warren, the textile curator at the Art Institute of Chicago, first saw the work at Expo, she was “transfixed and astonished.” “When the works came into my view in the crowded exhibition hall,” she told me by email, “there were a few particulars that really grabbed my attention, including the vibrant colors and patterns, the discerning gazes of the portraits’ subjects, and the balance and dynamism of the figural arrangements.” The Art Institute of Chicago subsequently acquired a major work, “The Safety Patrol” (2018).

Bisa Butler, “Southside Sunday Morning” (2018) Private collection (© Bisa Butler. Photo by Margaret Fox)

The 22 quilts in Butler’s current exhibition are nothing less than dazzling. Their bold patterns undulate in delicate waves of cut cloth. You can almost hear the art museum’s doors creaking open a bit wider to invite these conventional quilts inside with their foreign vocabulary of batting, backing, stitching.

Unlike the renowned Gee’s Bend quilts, which are often aligned with canonical Modernist painters, such as Mondrian, Klee, or Stella, Butler’s work draws on the rich history of African American art: Her legacy lies with enslaved women creating embroidered quilts from scraps, her grandmother’s and mother’s needlework, Romare Bearden’s pioneering collages, AfriCOBRA’s self-fashioned aesthetics of the African Diaspora, James Van Der Zee’s studio photographs of elegant Black New Yorkers during the Harlem Renaissance, and activist artists — for instance, Faith Ringgold, whose monumental, Guernica-inspired vision of a race riot, “American People Series #20: Die,” (1967), was set in conversation with Picasso’s “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon” (1907) when the renovated Museum of Modern Art opened in 2019. It was the Gee’s Bend quilts, however, in an exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 2002, that inspired Butler, then a graduate student, to work with fabric.

The first time I glanced at Butler’s work I missed something crucial: her subjects float. When she translates early 20th-century photographs of mostly unknown individuals, she removes everything but the figure. Seated and standing individuals are left without chairs or ground. They float in an expanse of electrified fabric, proudly asserting themselves, free from the weight of cultural assumptions. They lean on nothing. Their gazes both challenge and connect with viewers as they greet us, life-sized, in radiant glory. “I hate the gaze of pity,” Butler intoned in a Juxtapoz interview.

Bisa Butler, “The Safety Patrol” (2018) Cavigga Family Trust Fund (© Bisa Butler)

Butler dresses her subjects in a riot of West African Dutch and Ghanian wax cloth to achieve “an aesthetic of presence,” as stated by Art Institute fellow Isabella Ko in the exhibition catalogue. She splices and layers these prints together until a bold, throbbing confluence of saturated color erupts; 50 pieces of cloth might constitute a single eye. Birds and airplanes soar, horses gallop, purples meet yellows, cerulean blues tango with magenta in geometric patterns, foliate designs crash into damask.

The textiles are designed and printed mostly by Vlisco, a company in the Netherlands, and then shipped to West Africa, where market women title the patterns with allegorical, descriptive monikers. “Speed Bird” suggests change, property, freedom, and transition. “I run faster than my rival,” a horse pattern, symbolizes triumph over adversaries. One pattern features a print of the shoes Michelle Obama wore during a visit to Ghana in 2009. This pattern forms the skirt of one of four female figures in “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings” (2019). Butler activates the symbolic associations of the cloth as an alternative grammar to define her subjects’ identities and aspirations.

I watched a group of three white women take in a piece called “Survivor” (2018), which addresses female genital mutilation. They discussed the technical aspects of quilting. One explained what a “long-arm” sewing machine is. They shared observations regarding the meandering lines of stitching and the way Butler layers transparent lace, silk, and tulle over opaque fabrics to create depth and shadows. They were in awe of the technical mastery of the work.

Bisa Butler, “The Princess” (2018) Collection of Bob and Jane Clark (© Bisa Butler. Photo by Margaret Fox)

Two middle-aged Black women stood, speechless, before another work. They stared, periodically shaking their heads and whispering single words: “beautiful,” “incredible.” In her book Vexy Thing: On Gender and Liberation, Princeton professor Imani Perry speaks of art that “… disrobes injury and recognizes the wounded,” an art that maps suffering as well as joy. I suspect Butler’s work not only dazzles but also heals.

Bisa Butler: Portraits continues at the Art Institute of Chicago (111 S. Michigan Avenue, Chicago, Illionois) through September 6. The exhibition was co-organized by the Katonah Museum of Art in Westchester County, New York, and curated by Michele Wije and Erica Warren.

Richard Mosse’s Photos Exoticize Disaster

Sat, 08 May 2021 06:01:00 +0200

Acclaimed photographer Richard Mosse repurposes specialized photographic processes to document humanitarian and environmental crises with aesthetic pizzazz. For his 2012 Infra series, in which he depicts the ongoing armed conflicts in the Democratic Republic of Congo, the discontinued 16mm infrared film he used, originally designed for military reconnaissance, resulted in incongruous background swathes of cotton candy pink flora. His series Incoming (2017) won the Prix Pictet, which awards photography that addresses social and environmental concerns, for its use of a body-heat detecting military surveillance camera that rendered North African and Middle Eastern refugees as glowing grayscale phantasms. Mosse’s surreal color schemes, devised to go beyond photojournalistic commonplace, walk the line between defamiliarizing and exoticizing their subjects.

His latest series, Tristes Tropiques, on view at both Chelsea locations of Jack Shainman Gallery, captures traces of Brazilian environmental crimes, particularly recent deforestation of the Amazon, with the same forensic élan. Using multispectral images taken by drones, Mosse has created vivid, borderline psychedelic, large-scale aerial maps of ecological degradation. Multispectral imaging is a technique used by scientists, militaries, and even agribusinesses to detect wavelength ranges that are invisible to the human eye; it can provide information about the presence of things such as pollution, landmines, and as-yet-unexploited natural resources. Mosse uses this technology in a spirit similar to that of eco-minded contemporaries, such as Mary Mattingly and Alice Miceli, whose recondite, self-reflexive photographic procedures are meant to highlight the medium’s ontological and environmentalist tensions.

Richard Mosse, “Burnt Pantanal II” (2020), archival pigment print, 59 x 108 1/2 inches (print)

But Tristes Tropiques’s strongest aesthetic affinities are with renowned contemporary photographer Edward Burtynsky’s dramatic aerial views of industrial landscapes. With both artists, the camera’s supra-human perspective renders the terrain a formalist jigsaw of textures, shapes, and colors. Both, too, incorporate hues — from milky waterways to neon pools of runoff — not typically considered natural. The difference is that Burtynsky’s colors are, to my knowledge, mimetic, whereas Mosse’s are assigned during post-production according to what the multispectral images have detected. Both Burtynsky’s and Mosse’s aerial landscapes elicit wonder, but in the former it derives in part from the realization that this seemingly alien terrain actually exists on earth, while in the latter, from seeing the earth as a bouquet of delirious color.

The Burtynsky comparison illustrates how Tristes Tropiques’s fantastical colors embellish a photographic perspective already prone to aestheticization. The bottom half of the diptych “Alumina Refinery, Pará” (2020), for example, depicts an industrial compound as a venous, kidney-shaped, neon pink glob, surrounded by forestland streaked with synthetic reds and yellows. The nigh-Pointillist composition of “Burnt Eucalyptus Plantation, Rondônia” (2020) translates the titular field’s parched remains into textured twinkles of turquoise and teal. Mosse’s color choices, as over the top as my use of alliteration in the previous sentence, call attention to themselves. The question is to what end.

One answer is that Tristes Tropiques’s flashy colors expose otherwise invisible traces of environmental damage, from subterranean fires to contaminated waters. This rationale has an important pedigree in ecological thought, dating back at least to Rachel Carson’s seminal 1962 book, Silent Spring, and informing more recent ideas, such as philosopher Timothy Morton’s concept of “hyperobjects” and literary critic Rob Nixon’s concept of “slow violence.” But Tristes Tropiques’s invisible referents remain largely unspecified and the colors that represent those referents are arbitrary, both of which decisions emphasize the work’s hallucinatory surface level appearance over its underlying content.

Richard Mosse, “Submerged Forest, Rondônia” (2020), archival pigment print, 59 x 106 inches (print)

Another answer is that chromatic dislocations are part of the artist’s signature style. Mosse takes scenes that possess intrinsic humanitarian drama — an armed soldier cradling an infant; a group of refugees huddled together on a raft; an aerial view of a scorched rainforest — and torques their coloration to make the scenes even starker. In interviews, he explains that his methods are intended to sidestep cliché and provide viewers something other than stale documentary images of crisis. But that rationale undersells the impact of much straightforward documentation, such as Burtynsky’s landscapes, and also assumes — similar to how high information voters often mistakenly assume that other voters have comparably high levels of political motivation and knowledge — that viewers are as steeped in such images as the documentarians producing them.

A more complex answer is that Mosse’s efforts to avoid cliché, while thoughtful in intent and suggestive in appearance, often exoticize their subjects. At their best, Tristes Tropiques’s landscapes possess a beauty that’s sinister in its deliberate artifice, such as the fuchsia tree line that snakes around a labyrinthine feedlot in “Intensive Cattle Feedlot, Rondônia” (2020). Other times, however, an abstract, frictionless beauty predominates, as in the pleasing peninsular forms and complementary oranges and blues of “Submerged Forest, Rondônia” (2020). Even when the mood is more wary, such as the splotchy purples and pinks of “Juvencio’s Mine, Pará” (2020), the snazzy visuals tend to amplify the foreignness of atrocities Western audiences may already be inclined to understand as remote. Tristes Tropiques’s aerial perspectives only accentuate this sense of alienation.

The exhibition’s title, an allusion to anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss’s eponymous 1955 memoir, feels telling. The book has been a staple of college surveys for generations, typically taught as an important link between structuralist and poststructuralist sensibilities. When you read Tristes Tropiques beyond just anthology excerpts, the book is wildly heterogeneous, in terms of both its contents (from gritty travelogue to high academic theory) and the politics of its methodologies (rejecting certain colonialist assumptions of previous anthropologists while at the same time holding onto its own colonialist stereotypes). Just as Levi-Strauss’s book is an uneven, self-reflexive meditation on how and why our species studies itself, Mosse’s exhibition is an uneven, self-reflexive investigation of how and why our species visually documents its destructiveness. The effort helps move the conversation forward, even when it doesn’t entirely hit the mark.

Richard Mosse: Tristes Tropiques continues at Jack Shainman Gallery until May 15.

A Female Vision of Sci-Fi

Sat, 08 May 2021 06:00:00 +0200

During her relatively short life, Izumi Suzuki (1949–1986) has been many things. A keypunch operator, a bar hostess, a nude model — portrayed by controversial photographer Nobuyoshi Araki — and an actor in both pink films (a genre of Japanese sexploitation movies) and onstage. Most importantly, and throughout, she was a writer.

In 1975 Suzuki eventually published her debut short story, “The Witch’s Apprentice,” in the renowned Japanese science-fiction journal S-F Magazine. The issue, dedicated to women writers, presented a cohort of established Western authors, like Pamela Sargent, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Marion Zimmer Bradley, but it also introduced Suzuki, and novelist Yūko Yamao, to Japanese readers. From then on, Suzuki published short stories in sci-fi magazines producing an influential, albeit modest, oeuvre.

A fraction of her work finally has been translated into English. Terminal Boredom (Verso, 2021) offers a fascinating opportunity to nose dive into Suzuki’s subconscious through a selection of seven short stories translated by Polly Barton, Sam Bett, David Boyd, Daniel Joseph, Aiko Masubuchi, and Helen O’Horan.

Deeply conscious of the times in which she lived, Suzuki imbued her stories with overarching nihilism and unrest, brought about in Japan by the student protests of the 1960s and the radical revision of “women’s roles” promulgated by the Women’s Liberation Movement (known as ūman ribu, “woman lib”) in the ’70s, as well as a sharp critique of Japan’s soaring consumerism in the 1980s. Mixing in references to pop culture — the Velvet Underground’s “Heroin” is playing in a bar on a faraway planet in “That Old Seaside Club”; an alien praises his Terran girlfriend for being “the reincarnation of Brigitte Bardot” in “Forgotten” — Suzuki draws maps of future worlds. Although characterized by intergalactic conflicts, cryosleep practices to curb overpopulation, and virtual realities to battle existential dread, they are anchored in the past.

The detritus of 20th-century culture reinforces the feeling of eerie familiarity that oozes from Suzuki’s settings. Even in “Night Picnic,” for instance, whose action takes place on a planet with “a different orbital period than Earth,” the algid urban geography feels very much terrestrial.

Another singular aspect of Suzuki’s texts draws from the cultural milieu of Women’s Liberation, while simultaneously being prescient and fresh. This is Suzuki’s understanding and representation of gender, which is apparent not only in her unconventional portrayal of female characters, but also in a fluid investigation of identities. In the male-dominated sci-fi literary world, Suzuki was among the first authors to introduce a different vision of femininity, one that departed from the sexist tropes and stereotypes so abundant in the work of male writers. To do so, she appropriated the favored mode of expression in Japanese highbrow literature — the confessional, semi-autobiographical, first-person narrative that is characteristic of the shi-shōsetsu (“I-novel”) — and then contaminated it with the articulations of speculative fiction.

In her introspective, first-person stories, the world is filtered and analyzed through the eyes of her female characters. Perhaps it’s not by chance that the only story in Terminal Boredom that adopts a third-person perspective is “Night Picnic,” in which the main character is a young man and, most importantly, not a human.

Originally published in S-F Magazine in 1977, “Women and Women” exemplifies Suzuki’s revisions of gender roles. Set in the near future, the story envisions a lesbian matriarchal society in which men are confined to a ghetto and condemned to damnatio memoriae (books and films portraying them are banned). Although a gendered division of labor is purportedly a thing of the past, gender binarism is far from being obsolete. Suzuki writes:

Women live with other women. The strange thing is, one of them always does her best to emulate what we’re told masculinity was like in the old days.

While there are older women who exhibit an ample chest and a faint beard, which the narrator describes as “probably the result of some hormonal imbalance,” once shōjo (“girls”) manga become a hit among teenagers, a Takarazuka Revue-style revolution takes place. The young, gentler, charming male ideal depicted in manga becomes the girls’ new point of reference. These idealized male bodies recur in Suzuki’s other stories as well. In “That Old Seaside Club,” the narrator’s lover, Naoshi, fits the description; half human and half alien, with deep green hair, he is mostly expressionless but exudes an ethereal beauty. Naoshi could have come straight from an anime. Sol is another gorgeous, green-haired alien with violet eyes, who is caught up in diplomatic space conflicts in the anti-authoritarian story “Forgotten.”

For Suzuki, gender identities are further complicated within dreams. “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes” recounts the disastrous side effects of drugs that inspire “the joy of knowing that my own creation and the creation of the universe are intimately connected.” Reiko remembers the time she met her ex, a boy with long hair and a girlish face. In her dreams, he appears as a woman named Jane, who “can do any kind of housework,” definitely “the kind of guy who never needs to get married.” Conversely, in “You May Dream,” the narrator questions gender roles and their own identity through repeated conversations with a friend in a dream, until, eventually, they break the binary:

What was it about her that was turning me into a man? Got to be all that femininity. She’s acting like such a woman (as society defines the role, anyway) that I have to play the man just to keep the balance. What if I ran into a boy? Could I even play the part of a woman? I don’t need men here […] I’ve already got everything I need. Syzygy? Androgyny? I’m no man and I’m no woman. Who needs gender anyway? I just want to get out of this place, to be on my own.

Through a peculiarly blithe sense of despair, depictions of apathetic youths who struggle to comply with the requirements of a capitalist society, and fossilized cultural references, Suzuki creates worlds in which technology is meaninglessly called upon to patch up shattered relationships. Incapable of escaping the suffering of her own life, she committed suicide in 1986. Her suicide drastically conveys, as Suzuki notes in her last story, “Terminal Boredom”:

[…] there’s a simple way of dealing with everything that’s been weighing on you up until now. You can just tack on an illogical ending to the story, like a deus ex machina for life.

Terminal Boredom by Izumi Suzuki is published by Verso and is available online and in bookstores.

Meet the Others: Melanie Clemmons & Zak Loyd

Sat, 08 May 2021 02:42:33 +0200

The Game Changers. The Rule Breakers. The Innovators. Discover some of the fantastic emerging talent showcasing their work at The Other Art Fair.

Melanie Clemmons and Zak Loyd are both artists and educators based in Dallas, Texas.

Melanie is an assistant professor of digital/hybrid media in the Meadows School of the Arts at SMU. Her work offers a reimagined use of technology toward a calmer, softer, and more careful future. Zak is visual art technician for New Media at the University of North Texas College of Visual Art and Design. He is interested in the mystical ramifications of video art histories, post-truth culture, and pop-gnosis.

The Other Art Fair Dallas Virtual Editions will launch from May 25 -30, featuring Melanie and Zak’s unique design on the website. Learn more about their practices, and inspiration behind the piece.

Q&A with the Artists

Tell us about who you are and what you do. What is your background?

Zak – I’m Zak Loyd, an artist and educator primarily working in video, performance, and installation. I am also the visual art technician for New Media at the University of North Texas College of Visual Art and Design. As an undergraduate at UT Austin, I began playing around with analog video hardware and performing live visuals for bands. Around that time, I met Melanie and we began collaborating on live visuals, video installation, and digital art. Since then, we have lived and worked in NYC, Denver/Boulder, and are now based in Dallas.

Melanie – I’m Melanie Clemmons, also an artist and educator. I originally went to school for photography but graduated during the Great Recession, and had to improvise. I worked a lot of random jobs while keeping an art practice on the side, showing in galleries and DIY spaces as well as doing live visuals for bands and performances with Zak. Eventually we shifted into more immersive installations, both physical in galleries and museums, and virtual, on the web and in VR/XR. I’ve been teaching at SMU in Dallas, TX as an assistant professor of digital/hybrid media in the Meadows School of the Arts for the past four years.

What are the major themes you pursue in your work?

Zak – I am interested in the mystical ramifications of video art histories, post-truth culture, and pop-gnosis. I like to make people believe extraordinary things.

Melanie – I make new media artwork about the ills and joys of technology, as well as the shared space between technology, art, and magic. My work offers a reimagined use of technology toward a calmer, softer, and more careful future.

How did you first get interested in your medium and what draws you to it specifically?

Zak – As a kid, I came to know a version of the world via the glowing depths of a CRT television screen and the early web 1.0 internet. At the same time that I transitioned from a kid into an adult, TV and Internet technology transitioned from the “bulky, analog, broadcast based” to the “sleek, digital web 2.0, streaming based”. I think a lot of my work meditates on the awkwardness of this transition.

Melanie – When I graduated into the recession, I lost access to almost all resources, however I still had a laptop. I missed making physical installations so I turned to the browser space as pure potential for an installation space. In working with the web and digital technology, I am struck by being able to explore and experiment within this unique moment in human history.

How has your style and practice changed over the years?

Zak – I am both always looking forward and backward simultaneously to find tech that inspires my practice. Though the rapid pace of emergent technologies is exciting, I think it sometimes pushes some tech into obscurity before it has a chance to live. I like to seek out that newly obscure tech to inspire new work.

Melanie – Most of the stimulus for my work comes from observing internet culture and digital technology, so my practice evolves along with them, and attitudes about them.

Absolute Infinite: Where do you sit in a Lyft? – Limited Edition of 10 by Melanie Clemmons

Can you walk us through your process? How long do you spend on one work? How do you know when it’s finished?

Zak – This is a tough question. Some pieces take an hour or two, some weeks, and others inhabit the archive for years before they are unearthed, edited, and finished. Really the only similarity in workflow from piece to piece is finding a chance to work in the studio.

Melanie – My process looks a lot like the Charlie from It’s Always Sunny red-string conspiracy meme, in that I am very obsessive. Once I’ve settled on a concept (after observing, consuming, absorbing all the information I can find), I’ll figure out which medium or combination of mediums are most indicative of my concept. Then I’ll go into a hole for however long it takes to finish the piece. I usually know I’m done by the looks on people’s faces when I ask them what they think about, what I realize in that moment, is the most miniscule of details.

What was your process in developing the wallpaper image for the Dallas Virtual Editions?

Melanie created an environment in the 3D game engine Unity, and added a first person character to it so Zak could ‘walk’ around the environment and capture various tableaus and scenes. We then brought those captures into the video editing program Premiere for some post-processing polishing.

What is the best advice given to you as an artist?

Melanie – Find your community, and give back to it as much as you receive from it. As a natural hermit, learning this early on from my college professor Sybil Miller has been extraordinarily helpful.

Shop artwork by Melanie, Zak and other trailblazing artists at The Other Art Fair’s Online Studios.

Introducing The Other Art Fair Online Studios, a new online platform offering art lovers around the world access to over 800 Fair artists. The Online Studios will keep our community feeling inspired, engaged, and continue to spread joy through art.

Essential Books: 12 Illuminating Artist’s Memoirs

Sat, 08 May 2021 02:00:47 +0200

If you purchase an independently reviewed product or service through a link on our website, we may receive an affiliate commission.

Like all autobiographies, artist memoirs require two ingredients: a compelling life story and the ability to put it to paper. For lots of people, though, it seems counterintuitive that a visual artist would pick up a pen. This is nonsense, of course. Many artists can write, even if people are surprised when they do. As proof that artists are often accomplished at it, we present our choices for the best artists’ memoirs, ranging from scandalous to epic. (Price and availability current at time of publication.)

1. David Wojnarowicz, Close to the Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration
The life of David Wojnarowicz (1954–1992) would make a fascinating subject for any book. Born in suburban New Jersey and physically abused as a child by his alcoholic father, Wojnarowicz wound up in New York turning tricks as a homeless teenage hustler. In a remarkable transformation, he emerged in the late 1970s as one of the key figures of the bubbling East Village art scene. He quickly gained recognition as a firebrand activist who, in both his writing and his art, ferociously inveighed against homophobia and the resulting blind eye turned toward the AIDS epidemic, which would eventually claim his life. The disease lies at the heart of this memoir, which includes Wojnarowicz’s unflinching description of the final agonizing moments of his lover, the photographer Peter Hujar, as he succumbs to AIDS. Ultimately, Wojnarowicz’s book is a searing indictment of “this killing machine called America” that remains relevant today.
Purchase: Close to the Knives $13.39 (new) on Amazon

2. The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini
Like the spectacular golden salt cellar he created for King Francis I of France, Benvenuto Cellini (1500–1571) was a piece of work, though not in a good way. An inveterate brawler, he routinely ran into trouble for offenses ranging from embezzlement to committing sodomy with numerous partners, male and female. And, oh yes, murder: Cellini reputedly offed his brother’s killer and dispatched a rival goldsmith. As a result, he was obliged to skip town frequently, hightailing it from Florence to Sienna to Bologna to Pisa and back again to Florence before moving to Rome (which was followed by other flights to Naples and to France). In a word, Cellini was pazzo, as Italians put it. He proudly recalled these exploits and more (escaping prison, surviving an attempted poisoning by diamond dust) in the autobiography that became his principal legacy—not only for the stories it tells (often dismissed as exaggerated), but also because it offers a firsthand account of the Mannerist period in Italy.
Purchase: Autobiography $17.00 (new) on Amazon

3. Dorothea Tanning, Between Lives
In 1930, 20-year-old Dorothea Tanning left her hometown of Galesburg, Illinois, to pursue a painting career in Chicago. Five years later she arrived in New York, where a visit to MoMA’s landmark 1936 exhibition, “Fantastic Art, Dada and Surrealism,” completely changed her work. An introduction in 1941 to legendary dealer Julien Levy led to shows at Levy’s gallery and entrée into New York’s circle of émigré Surrealists—among them Max Ernst, who became smitten with the young artist. They married, and among the details found in Tanning’s memoir is her lament that she allowed her artistic career to take a back seat to his. As she admits, she was more an observer of her milieu than a star within it, but then, there was much to observe as she hobnobbed with giants of 20th-century culture such as Virgil Thompson, George Balanchine, and Dylan Thomas. In recent decades her work has been added to the art-historical cannon, but it was her autobiography that first cemented her reputation as the First Lady of Surrealism.
Purchase: Between Lives $23.90 (new) on Amazon

4. Peter McGough, I’ve Seen the Future and I’m Not Going: The Art Scene and Downtown New York in the 1980s
Peter McGough’s wry memoir of the 1980s art world focuses on his romantic and artistic partnership with David McDermott. Together, as the art duo McDermott & McGough, the pair filtered queer aesthetics through an Edwardian sensibility, one that found its fullest realization in a “time experiment” in which they dressed like Wildean dandies while eliding modern conveniences from their lives—earning them as much renown for their performative commitment as for their paintings, drawings, photographs, and installations. McGough devotes a good part of the book to McDermott, who turns out to have been the instigator behind their collaboration. At his direction, they ripped out the fixtures from the apartments they rented, replacing light bulbs with candles or gaslight and refrigerators with old-fashioned iceboxes. When they traveled, they took trains or ships (one passage here covers an Atlantic crossing on the QE2). They raked in the cash as art stars but eventually faded from view. More than just a joke, however, McDermott & McGough’s work comes off in the book as a radical satire holding up a warped mirror to the reactionary Reagan era.
Purchase: I’ve Seen the Future and I’m Not Going $21.49 (new) on Amazon

5. Mary Woronov, Swimming Underground: My Years in the Warhol Factory
This tell-all autobiography by artist and actress Mary Woronov focuses on her time at Andy Warhol’s Silver Factory, and while the picture she paints of it is always engrossing, it isn’t always pretty. Woronov, who starred in Warhol’s film Chelsea Girls, portrays the Factory as a den of sex and drugs, filled with misfits clamoring for Warhol’s attention. Andy serenely floats above it all as a sort of pope of downtown New York, issuing gnomic pronouncements while excommunicating those who fall out of his favor. Though the Factory is Andy’s studio, it’s also an outré simulacrum of Hollywood in which its marginalized habitués are encouraged to indulge illusions of superstardom. Much of this was tongue-in-cheek, but Woronov relates how many around Warhol considered the stakes to be very high indeed. Woronov doesn’t spare herself as she recounts her struggles as a meth head trying to navigate the chasm between her family and the Factory’s demimonde of desperation.
Purchase: Swimming Underground from $60.32 (new) on Amazon

6. Eve Babitz, Slow Days, Fast Company: The World, The Flesh, and L.A.
Not exactly an artist’s memoir—or even entirely nonfiction—Babitz’s book recalls her life as muse, groupie, and all-around party girl within the art, Hollywood, and rock orbits of 1960s and ’70s Los Angeles. Taking poetic license with the truth, Babitz’s narrative is situated in the L.A. of Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, which, in her telling, becomes a paradise of sunshine, Quaaludes, tequila, and sexual conquests. Babitz was legendary for her romantic partners, among them Jim Morrison of The Doors. But her other claim to fame—which made her a Modern art icon—was a photograph of her playing chess in the nude with a clothed Marcel Duchamp. Staged as part of Duchamp’s retrospective at the former Pasadena (now Norton Simon) Museum, and considered to be among Duchamp’s works, the image is undoubtedly sexist, but also of a piece with a period when many ambitious women relied on their good looks as well as their talent to get ahead. Babitz had more than enough of both to make for a riveting story.
Purchase: Slow Days, Fast Company $15.91 (new) on Amazon

7. Sally Mann, Hold Still: A Memoir with Photographs
Some 30 years ago, photographer Sally Mann gained recognition and notoriety with her photo collection “Immediate Family,” which, among other images, captured her children in the nude as they roamed Mann’s Virginia farm. The book triggered a tsunami of moral panic, ironically making Mann one of America’s best-known and most respected photographers. The controversy continued to color her career, which is perhaps why her autobiography hardly mentions her children at all. Still, this deep dive into her family’s history reveals Mann as a talented writer, and it is richly illustrated, though not with her original photos. Instead she uses old snapshots and other ephemera related not only to her own upbringing but also to her family’s connection to the South over the generations. Mann relays stories about her adolescence as a wild child and also explores the larger issue of race and her own white privilege. In the end, Hold Still confirms Faulkner’s adage that southerners have “no time for reading because they’re all too busy writing.”
Purchase: Hold Still $14.69 (new) on Amazon

8. Patti Smith, Just Kids
Anyone buying Patti Smith’s debut album, Horses, back in 1975 wouldn’t have known or cared that the alluring cover photo of Smith as a proto-punk androgyne was taken by Robert Mapplethorpe. Nor would they have been aware that Mapplethorpe was Smith’s boyfriend at the time, though this would wind up surprising people who came to know him as a gay artist famous for his homoerotic photographs. Smith’s memoir puts their relationship front and center, focusing on their early years together, before their respective ascents to stardom. Smith portrays the boho paradise among the ruins that were 1970s New York—living at the Chelsea Hotel (where Smith had an encounter with Salvador Dalí), hanging out at the back room of Max’s Kansas City, day-tripping to Coney Island—all recounted in vivid prose. Although Smith mentions some of her other paramours (Sam Sheppard among them), she keeps coming back to Mapplethorpe as the touchstone of her book.
Purchase: Just Kids $13.19 (new) on Amazon

9. Gordon Parks, Voices in the Mirror
A photographer, musician, writer, and director, Gordon Parks (1912–2006) won wide acclaim for his work in film, fashion, and photojournalism; he was one of the few African-Americans in those fields during the postwar era. He became the first Black photographer to work at Vogue and Life magazines and pioneered the blaxploitation movie genre with his feature film Shaft. His photos covered the wide sweep of the African American experience, documenting Harlem, the Tuskegee Airmen, and the segregated South, as well as influential figures such as Malcolm X, Muhammed Ali, and Duke Ellington. Parks recounts the rough start of his storied career when he was cut loose by his family at age 15 and left to fend for himself. He was inspired to pick up his first camera after encountering photos done for the New Deal’s Farm Security Administration by Arthur Rothstein and Dorothea Lange. He called his trusty Nikon a “weapon against poverty and racism,” and you might say that his memoir, which details his many encounters with both, serves the same purpose.
Purchase: Voices in the Mirror from $168.83 (new) on Amazon

10. Hannah Höch, Life Portrait: A Collaged Autobiography
One of the leading avant-garde figures during interwar Germany’s all too brief experiment with democracy, Hannah Höch (1889–1978) was a member of the Berlin Dada movement and was best known for dynamic collages that often dealt with Weimar-era women as they navigated an equally short period of female empowerment. It’s no surprise that she turned to her preferred medium to create Life Portrait, which is less of a book than it is an iteration of what turned out to be her last artwork. The 1973 original was a photo-collage measuring four by five feet, portraying the artist at different ages along with imagery culled from fashion, media, and African art. Also included were depictions of plants and animals, which had become a motif for Höch after the war. The book divides the collage into 38 annotated sections, with commentary on the political, social, and artistic events of five decades. A summation of Höch’s artistic concerns over the years, Life Portrait is the capstone on an extraordinary oeuvre.
Purchase: Life Portrait $38.45 (new) on Amazon

11. Sophie Calle, True Stories
Part photo-narrative, part performance art, the work of French Conceptualist Sophie Calle has always been highly self-referential, publicly exposing aspects of her private life while highlighting the banalities of everyday existence. Works such as her series “Sleepers,” in which she documents the various people who shared her bed, eventually won her selection as France’s representative at the 2007 Venice Biennale. While you could argue that Calle’s output makes the idea of a memoir redundant, True Stories pulls the various strands of her efforts into an autobiographical whole that combines photography and writing, fiction and nonfiction. Published on the occasion of Calle’s winning the prestigious Hasselblad Award in photography, the book pairs words with images across facing pages, posing the chicken-and-egg conundrum of which came first. Still, however embellished her account, Calle presents it with her signature blend of irony and confession.
Purchase: True Stories from $174.99 (new) on Amazon

12. Alison Bechdel, Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic
In this memoir-cum-graphic novel by Alison Bechdel the artist describes growing up in a Victorian house restored to immaculate, museumlike perfection thanks to her father, Bruce, an undertaker who was also a repressed gay man (or as Bechdel describes him, “a manic-depressive, closeted fag”). Bechdel’s dad could be distant, even tyrannical, and her reckoning with him is shaped by her own gay identity, a connection that serves as the crux of her book. Poignantly, Bruce was hit by a truck one week after Bechdel wrote her parents to inform them that she was a lesbian—an accident that Bechdel’s believes was actually a suicide in response to her coming out. Bechdel, who is also the author of the comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For and the coiner of the Bechdel Test (a measure of the representation of women in fiction), leavens her book with moments of warmth and sardonic humor. But what makes it ultimately relatable is that like Bechdel, we all have to deal with family fallout in one fashion or another.
Purchase: Fun Home $11.24 (new) on Amazon

The Best Student and Beginner Oil Paints for Getting to Know the Medium

Sat, 08 May 2021 00:00:02 +0200

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Oil painting can be an expensive hobby. Due to the complex, arduous processes of sourcing, grinding, and treating pigments, some paints can reach shelves with hair-raising price tags. Thankfully, you can be kind to your wallet without sacrificing too much in terms of quality. There are plenty of student-grade and hobbyist oil paints on the market that are well worth inclusion in your art arsenal. These tend to be made with easily sourced or synthetic pigments, contain more oil or fillers, and lack outstanding lightfastness. But many still handle and perform very well. Our picks below will convince you that you can indeed achieve satisfying results with budget-friendly oil paints.

ARTNEWS RECOMMENDS
Blick Artists’ Oil Paints and Sets
Affordable enough for everyday use, these are artist-grade oils that are easy for beginners to handle but carefully formulated so you’ll want to keep using them as your skills advance. The paints can be used straight from the tube, they apply smoothly, and the creamy texture is consistent across colors. Blick’s series includes 60 colors—about half of which are made from a single pigment (rather than from blended pigments, which are less predictable when mixed). Pigments are hand-ground into fine powders, and almost all are mixed with safflower oil to prevent finished works from yellowing over time (a handful are made with poppy or linseed oil).

Buy: Blick Artists’ Oil Paints and Sets $7.91–$64.79

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Winsor & Newton Winton Oil Paints and Set
In addition to being well priced, Winsor & Newton’s Winton line showcases the reliability that this longtime brand is famous for: You can buy multiple tubes of one color and they’ll be perfectly uniform. Slightly stiffer than Blick’s line, they are fantastic for learning the fundamentals of oil painting, from basic application to layering to mixing. The low cost stems from the fact that most of the paints aren’t single-pigment colors but rather blended hues, and the results have a lower pigment load and less vibrancy than pricier paints. Still, with 55 colors to choose from, this is a great line for students who want to buy a lot of paint for practice without breaking the bank.

Buy: Winsor & Newton Winton Oil Paints and Sets $4.38–$55.99

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ANOTHER GOOD CHOICE
Grumbacher Academy Oil Paints and Sets
Grumbacher’s Academy paints, like the Winton line, are designed for student use. The pigments are finely milled to yield incredibly smooth, vibrant, and highly pigmented paints that provide excellent coverage. The color line, however, is quite limited: There are just 45 choices, and almost all are blended hues. Still, these paints tend to have better tinting strength than Winton paints, and they retain their richness when mixed with mediums.

Buy: Grumbacher Academy Oil Paints and Sets $4.25–$42.59

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TOP OF THE LINE
Gamblin Artist’s Oil Paints and Sets
If you’re a beginning painter looking for a slightly nicer oil that isn’t quite professional-grade, consider Gamblin’s. These are handmade paints formulated with alkali-refined linseed oil so they are flexible, flow easily, and dry to a durable, brilliant finish. They are also good to use for pieces that demand longevity, as the oil will help slow yellowing. The buttery paint has a higher pigment concentration than others on our list, blend out beautifully, and simply feel good to work with. There is a wide range of colors to dive into, including 10 different versions of white, from cool white to radiant to titanium-zinc white.

Buy: Gamblin Artist’s Oil Paints and Sets $6.60–$141.00

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ALSO CONSIDER
Daler-Rowney Georgian Oil Colour
The paints from this British company have their drawbacks: They have relatively poor tinting strength, and they come in just 54 colors. But they’re inexpensive, and a little goes a long way in terms of coverage. These paints have a thick but softer body than comparable paints—they are quite oily—which gives them a natural, seamless flow that some artists might enjoy. These are also great paints for high-volume users, since they’re available in massive 225 ml (7.5-ounce) tubes.

Buy: Daler-Rowney Georgian Oil Paints and Sets $3.14–$22.95

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Christie’s to Auction $17 M. Bellotto Landscape Poised to Break Record

Fri, 07 May 2021 23:51:02 +0200

As the market for Old Master paintings continues to prove fertile, Christie’s will auction a potentially record-breaking landscape by Italian artist Bernardo Bellotto during it’s July 8 evening sale in London dedicated to the category. The 18th-century painting, View of Verona with the Ponte delle Navi (ca. 1745-47) depicts a view of a canal in the Italian city. Coming to auction after 50 years in private hands and secured with a guarantee, it is expected to fetch a price of £14 million–£18 million ($17 million–$25 million).

Measuring at more than 5-by-7 feet, the work was purchased by its current owner in 1971 at Christie’s for £300,000. Since 1973, it has been on long-term loan to the National Gallery of Scotland in Edinburgh.

“It is a picture that defined [Bellotto’s] artistic vision and shaped the extraordinary pan-European success he enjoyed as a topographical view painter,” Henry Pettifer, Christie’s London head of Old Masters, said in a statement. “It remains one of very last monumental canvases by the artist still in private hands.”

The painting carries a formidable provenance record dating back to 1771, having passed through the hands of members of the British noble Viscount Clifden family and a high ranking British military official before its last sale in 1971. If it reaches its low estimate, the work is poised to bring a new record for the artist. Bellotto’s current auction record is $12.7 million, set when Rome – The Forum with the Temple of Castor and Pollux (ca. 18th century) sold at Christie’s London in 2006.

The Bellotto will be sold alongside a portrait of Thomas Wentworth, 1st Earl of Strafford (around 1639-40) by Anthony Van Dyck that was once in the collection of King Charles I of England. It is estimated at £3 million–£5 million ($4.2 million–$7 million).

With a Focus on Artist Collectives, Tate Names Turner Prize Shortlist

Fri, 07 May 2021 22:54:38 +0200

Tate Britain has announced another update to its esteemed Turner Prize, which has undergone changes over the past two years and is considered the most prestigious art award in the United Kingdom.

Typically, the museum shortlists four individual artists. This year, it has instead shortlisted five artist collectives: Array Collective, Black Obsidian Sound System, Cooking Sections, Gentle/Radical, and Project Art Works.

As part of the Turner Prize, each nominated collective will present work in a joint exhibition at the Herbert Art Gallery and Museum in Coventry from September 29 , 2021, to January 12, 2022. The winning collective, which will be named on December 1, will receive £25,000 (about $35,000), and the other shortlisted groups will each get £10,000 ($14,000).

“One of the great joys of the Turner Prize is the way it captures and reflects the mood of the moment in contemporary British art,” Alex Farquharson, Tate Britain’s director and Turner Prize jury chair, said in a statement. “After a year of lockdowns when very few artists have been able to exhibit publicly, the jury has selected five outstanding collectives whose work has not only continued through the pandemic but become even more relevant as a result.”

Array Collective is a Belfast-based group whose practice extends from exhibitions to performance and protests dealing with issues affecting Northern Ireland. London-based Black Obsidian Sound System creates club nights, art installations, workshops, and more to explore “sound-system culture across the African diaspora,” according to a release. Cooking Sections, also based in London, looks at the intersections of art with food, ecology, geopolitics, and architecture.

Gentle/Radical is a coalition made up artists, community workers, performers, faith practitioners, writers, and others who look to create space for community in Cardiff and throughout Wales. Project Art Works, based in Hastings, is made up of neurodiverse artists whose art is made with, for, and by neurominorities.

In addition to Farquharson, the jury for the 2021 Turner Prize includes Aaron Cezar, director of the Delfina Foundation in London; Kim McAleese, program director at Grand Union in Birmingham; actor Russell Tovey; and Chisenhale Gallery director Zoé Whitley.

Since the Turner Prize’s inception in 1984, just a handful of collectives have been nominated. They include Art & Language in 1986, the Otolith Group in 2010, Forensic Architecture in 2018, and Assemble in 2015, which is, to date, the only collective to have won the Turner Prize.

In 2019, the four shortlisted artists—Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Helen Cammock, Oscar Murillo, and Tai Shani—sent the jury members a letter asking them not to select a single winner. “We feel strongly motivated to use the occasion of the Prize to make a collective statement in the name of commonality, multiplicity and solidarity—in art as in society,” they wrote at the time. The jury accepted their wishes. The 2020 prize was canceled because of the pandemic; instead, Tate distributed “one-off bursaries” of £10,000 ($12,500 at the time) to ten artists.

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Rarely Seen Catherine de’ Medici Portrait to Go On View in London

Fri, 07 May 2021 22:42:37 +0200

The last surviving contemporary portrait of Catherine de’ Medici, queen consort and wife of king Henry II of France, will return to its former home in London. According to a report by the Guardian, the rarely seen painting, which dates to 1561 and shows Catherine with four of her children, will go on view at Strawberry Hill House in the British capital, where it once hung with other works in the storied collection of the 18th-century writer and politician Horace Walpole.

The portrait, which was among works from Walpole’s holdings that were dispersed in an 1842 auction, has now been placed under public ownership as part of the Acceptance in Lieu scheme. The arrangement enables families to pay inheritance taxes, in whole or in part, by transferring “important works of art and heritage objects” to the public domain.

The work, attributed to the workshop of French court painter Francois Clouet, will go on permanent display in Strawberry Hill House when it reopens on May 17, according to the Art Newspaper. Located in Twickenham, the gothic revival house is was opened to the public as a museum in 2010, following a $14-million restoration effort.

Catherine was the mother of three kings of France, including Charles IX, who assumed the throne in 1560 with his mother as regent. Charles IX is shown in the portrait with his mother’s arm around him. Also depicted are his siblings the future King Henry III, Duke of Anjou; Marguerite de Valois, who would become Queen of Navarre; and François-Hercule, Duke of Anjou and Alençon.

Piece Together the Geography of the Earth and Moon in Infinite Combinations with Nervous System’s Jigsaw Puzzles

Fri, 07 May 2021 22:32:15 +0200

Earth Infinity Puzzle. All images © Nervous System, shared with permission

Longtime Colossal readers are likely familiar with Nervous System’s unmistakable jigsaws, two of which we just added to the Colossal Shop. Both Earth and Moon designs are infinity puzzles, meaning you can start exploring their expansive geographies from any spot—there’s no fixed shape, and they can be completed in thousands of arrangements. Each jigsaw also comes with whimsy pieces and is made from laser-cut birch plywood in the team’s studio in the Catskills.

Pick up the nature-inspired puzzles in the Colossal Shop, where we also have three other Nervous System designs, including a spiraling ammonite fossil, an infinite galaxy, and a unique mesmerizing geode (no two are the same!). If you’re a Colossal Member, everything is 10% off. Just use the discount code in your account.

Earth Infinity Puzzle

Moon Infinity Puzzle

Earth Infinity Puzzle

Moon Infinity Puzzle

After a Year of Isolation, Frieze New York Strikes Notes of Normalcy as Uncertainty Remains

Fri, 07 May 2021 22:16:59 +0200

The experience of going to an art fair after a year of few in-person experiences of any kind turns out to be extremely strange before it turns slightly less strange and then not strange at all over the course of just three hours. The scene at the entrance of Frieze New York on Wednesday was a bit scattered and manic, as fairgoers fumbled to show proof of vaccination or negative coronavirus tests with more than a little anxiety in the air.

Once you got inside, though, with some time to calibrate, this scaled-down edition of Frieze–held this year at The Shed (the arts venue in Hudson Yards)–felt surprisingly open and free. Hosting 67 galleries and nonprofits compared to 190 at Frieze on Randall’s Island in 2019, The Shed makes more sense than expected as a site for the fair, which runs through Sunday. Different settings on three different floors make for a variety of environments, and there’s enough space to avoid a cramped-aisle feeling between booths—all the better for attempts at social distancing, however strenuous or not.

Though some of the art displayed lacks some of the pomp and spectacle of years past, dealers seemed pleased to get back to selling their wares in person after a period that has left so many feeling dazed.

“It feels good, but it feels strange,” said Casey Kaplan, whose booth is showcasing paintings by a new addition to his gallery’s roster, Caroline Kent. “I’m trying to remember how to socialize, with a mask and a little bit of face-blindness, combined with being out of practice. It’s tricky.”

Visitors stroll the aisles.

Alexander Gray said Frieze’s timed-entry policy, which makes the crowd less a crush than a slow and steady stream, helped him ease back in. “One of the things that’s made it in some ways a soft landing is the flow of people,” said Gray, who is showing work by Melvin Edwards, Jennie C. Jones, Harmony Hammond, Lorraine O’Grady, Joan Semmel, and Valeska Soares. “It’s allowed us to have conversations without looking over our shoulder or being dragged by thirty people at once. The intimacy and scale are so right—I wish we could keep it like this.”

Gray said he was happy to be back in action in the city after spending time during lockdown in upstate New York and Palm Springs. “We become art dealers because we thrive on people’s energy,” he said. “Playing the role of educator and evangelist in front of artworks doesn’t work unless we’re with people, having conversations and making connections. The burnout of OVRs underscored that the art world is not scalable. It’s about relationships and intimacy, and that’s how it should be.”

The booth for Goodman Gallery, which operates spaces in Johannesburg, Cape Town, and London, was manned by Justin Davy, an associate director who moved to New York just before the pandemic. “It feels like a social experiment,” Davy said of the fair. “The overall feeling is one of excitement for being able to speak to people face-to-face about art again.”

But the situation in South Africa is quite different. “We’re just recovering,” he said of a dire wave of Covid-19 cases back home at the end of December. “But I think we’re in a bit of denial. Things are opening very quickly in South Africa and not many people are vaccinated.”

London’s Stephen Friedman Gallery is showing work by Sarah Ball.

Because of international travel restrictions, some dealers could not make the journey to New York, giving Frieze a decidedly domestic feel. The directors of London’s Stephen Friedman Gallery asked Alexandra Eagle, a former intern, to serve as their proxy. “I’m in constant contact with them via WhatsApp,” she said. “It’s probably really strange for them and really stressful, not knowing how everything is going.”

On the walls around Eagle were paintings by Sarah Ball, an English painter who took anonymous photos from social media, newspapers, and magazines and transformed them into arresting portraits that seem to stare a viewer down.

Figurative painting prove more affecting at the fair than usual, a sensible result of the dulling absence of people over the course of a trying year. New York’s Peter Blum Gallery has a delightful little Alex Katz painting of a woman in a white dress against a yellow background. There are beguiling portraits by Jonathan Wateridge at Nino Mier Gallery. And Marinaro has caught a lot of eyes by showing highly stylized Ridley Howard portraits of couples in various forms of embrace, which are both soothing and haunting at once.

Of the scene around him, Jamie Bayard, assistant director of Marinaro, said, “There’s an energy here. In New York there’s a lightness lately. People are eager to be out and about again, and they want to see art.”

The booth for Marinaro, with paintings by Ridley Howard and sculptures by Johannes VanDerBeek.

Despite the anxiousness at the start, the first day of Frieze settled into a state of normalcy. Hometown collectors like Agnes Gund and Glenn Fuhrman were joined by those visiting from San Francisco, like Helen Schwab, Komal Shah, and Katie Page, or Miami, like Mera Rubell. Museum directors Max Hollein (of the Metropolitan Museum of Art) and Thelma Golden (The Studio Museum in Harlem) also made appearances, as did at least one celebrity, supermodel Christy Turlington.

New York collector and film producer Debi Wisch said the toned-down fair is marked by “more engagement with the work and fewer distractions.” Bree Zucker, a director for the Mexico City/New York gallery Kurimanzutto, agreed, “It’s special to be back in a social environment that is so welcoming after of a year of isolation for everyone, on so many different levels.”

And despite things starting to feel familiar, some in attendance are more cautious than overly optimistic. Dealer David Lewis, who is showing work by Barbara Bloom, Thornton Dial, and Tomás Esson, said, “It’s starting to feel like people are getting ready, like this is the beginning of something. But I feel like Covid has taught me not to expect anything ever. I just know that the mood is shifting and people are starting to feel like reemerging, without really knowing what that will look like. I know there’s another chapter starting, I just have no idea what it will be like.”

Additional reporting by Sarah Douglas.

Street Art in the Age of Basquiat: Rammellzee is Not a Name, But an Equation

Fri, 07 May 2021 22:14:08 +0200

The following is part four of a series of interviews with key figures in Jean-Michel Basquiat’s downtown New York circle in the 1980s. The interviews were conducted in February by Museum of Fine Arts Boston curator Liz Munsell and writer and musician Greg Tate, who together curated the exhibition “Writing the Future: Basquiat and the Hip-Hop Generation,” on view at the MFA through July 25. ARTnews has published all four interviews from the series this week.

In 1985 I was working as editor/creative director on a magazine project called B.Culture for Linda Bryant’s Just Above Midtown (JAM) Gallery. By that time Rammellzee and I had become well-acquainted after I wrote the Village Voice review of “Beat Bop,” his now legendary 1983 rap music collaboration with Jean-Michel Basquiat, K-Rob and Al Diaz. Having just a few years earlier read the epic transcription writer Edit DeAk did with Ramm for Artforum, I knew his monologues about graf as interdimensional warfare were an apex of modern performance art and Black esthetic theory.

When told I was going to interview Ramm, my good friend, Warrington Hudlin, filmmaker-producer (‘House Party’) and director of the Black Filmmaker’s Foundation, asked to accompany me. Our encounter with Ramm took place in his loft studio/shrine, known as “The Battle Station” on Laight Street in Tribeca. I can’t recall if either of us posed an actual question to Ramm, but without much prompting he gave us a whirlwind two hour exegetic tour of his mind’s (and mouth’s) capacity to conjure complex theorems that blurred the lines between subway art, race and culture wars, diseased language, the illuminated calligraphy of 14th-century monks, and sculptural high-tech sonic weaponry.

Ramm changed the terms of engagement with respect to the conversation about graf or subway art by dismissing those terms and saying what we were looking at on the trains was symbolic warfare and in his forecasting art historical language was “Ikonoklast Panzerism and “Gothic Futurism.” “Ikonoklast” means symbol destroyer and “Panzer” derived from the tanks the Nazis invented, which were crucial to their success in invading Poland and France.

“Gothic Futurism” also provocatively harkened back to the Futurists of early 20th-century modernity, an art movement identified with fascistic and militaristic inclinations. As Ramm’s thinking makes clear, he viewed subway art and hiphop as a total movement representing a multidisciplinary and racialized and working-class military campaign against capitalism, Western Civ 101 and white supremacy.

Ramm saw wildstyle train writing as reclaiming, through extreme abstraction, the integrity of the alphabet—mathematical symbols related to architecture and not literary tools—from the ‘biologically diseased culture and language manipulation ’ of Western civilization. Gothic Futurism connected the work done by b-boys and b-girls in the darkness of the train yards to the calligraphy of the 14th-century monks who wrote illuminated manuscripts for the Catholic Church—calligraphy that distorted the alphabet to the point of indecipherability.

Ramm believed the monks’ knowledge had been fast forwarded through space-time to his generation of Gothic Futurists who weaponized the trains by grafting their paintings onto them. Later, once his years on the trains were done, Ramm continued the war of hiphop generated symbol versus Western language symbol though performance in his technologically enhanced battle suits. —Greg Tate

View of the exhibition “Writing the Future: Basquiat and the Hip-Hop Generation,” showing (center) a sculpture by Rammellzee.RAMMELLZEE, as told to Gregory Tate and Warrington Hudlin:

I started doing trains when I was nine years old. I was part of United Graffiti Artists, along with everybody else. I was known as Stimulation Assassination: Tagmaster Killer. I owned the entire 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5 lines. The letters, music notes and weather notes that were done down there reached a point where you didn’t need to kill a person. The piece became a weapon, the letter itself. So “fame” was the most interesting to take out. How do you know George Washington? You know him through a name. You shoot the letter on the train at the other letter and it takes out that name. So, therefore, homeboy has no identity. Why should I kill him? Let him live: He’ll just be dead anyway, because nobody will know who he is. He’ll just be a walking zombie. Don’t let him be dead. That’s the only way to do it. Because that’s what they want to do to you.

They sell your art, they sell your music and exploit it, and then all you have left is exploitation. So why don’t you at least have your own name? Give that to them and what do you have after that?

I’m still at war. I’m still busting them out. I’ve still got my originals. What they have is called a Recision Hyper. I cut open a statement of graffiti, put in my word Ikonoklast Panzerism and sew it right back up. I’ve still got my art.

I’ve got nine different markets for Ikonoklast Panzerism: The Music Note, the Atomic Note, Weather Notes, Sign Overtures, Beat Boys, Badge of Steel, mathematics and the knowledge of the square ratio envelopes with pictures of what I look like onstage and what we do on the trains. Nine different markets and they can’t touch ’em. I overstructured them.

Jean-Michel is the one they told, you must draw it this way and call it black-man folk art, when it was really white-man folk art he was doing. That’s what he draws . . . white-man folk art. He does not draw black-man folk art, because they told him what to draw. He may sell enough to live well until he dies, but what they did was label him off as a product and now he’s their product. So he’s being prostituted constantly. And now they don’t like his work anymore because it’s folk art and folk art is dead. They are going back to the tradition of oil painting. They are finished with the Picasso extensions which is what Jean-Michel’s work is.

They called us graffiti but they wouldn’t call him graffiti. And he gets as close to it as the word means-scribble-scrabble. Unreadable. Crosses out words, doesn’t spell them right, doesn’t even write the damn thing right. He doesn’t even paint well. And to paint inaccurately is scribble scrabble. You don’t draw a building so that it will fall down, and that’s what he draws, broken-down imagery.

If it wasn’t for structure you’d fall apart. Things are falling apart now. That’s why the Gothic era has returned itself. We have jumped back three years as a culture now. The music just went back three years, the painting just went back three years. If you want to do that, why not go back 300 years and you’ll find people’s entire outlook is 300 years old. We’re advanced in terms of science and technology but the attitude of the population and the control of the population is still Gothic. We still do not know what we’re doing. We still do not know how to leave this planet the right way. We’ll bring religion out in space and it’ll be stopped. Because in the 1400s the word religion was restriction on a legion.

Gothic is the architecture of the letter that was lost back in the 14th century. Supersonic jets were supposed to be made back in the 14th century. But we wanted to be human and base everything on human nature so we designed from the bird, when we could have designed off the triangle. With quantum physics you can use the triangle to get into the bird. They just dropped the nose down on the jet. Instead of doing that they could have had Delta wings, which is what they had 2000 years ago— Delta fighters. But nobody believes that anymore, do they?

You can have four alternatives to human nature—genocide, plain old socialism like bees and ants have, love and dictatorship which is what we have now, or you can have a lot of high-powered, mega-structured knowledge where everything becomes not a socialistic bee-type state but a militant state with megastructures. Like what they’re doing to the World Trade Center now. In about 10 or 15 years it can be expanded to extend all the way uptown. That’s what it should be—mass thinking, mass brain power as one unit.

Beat Boys is extremely like an opera. It can only be collaborative if you do it as a war affair. The music behind Beat Boys is extremely violent. I have a drawing of a robot launching two turntables. When you hear the sound go vamp, that’s the laser disc shooting out. It becomes sunfire.

The dancing is dodging of missiles or rockets or anything like that. If you do it right, it becomes a dance. We didn’t bring it as far as a martial art because we were fighting as a style, and not as an embellishment of personality. We could have brought it to a martial art but they brought us up out of the subways and said don’t make it so violent please. So, they stopped it, backed it up, sent it back to being a love thing again. A thing which it never should have been. Word. B-Boy culture says the rough music starts first and then you go into love. No, it’s the other way around. We leave the girls and then we go and fight just like in any regular army.

Since I was five years old I have been doing works of war. And when you do works of war you have to know about textile science. That’s because it’s chemical warfare which is the last war you’ll see before they have Sound Wars.

Ultrasonic sound wars is what they’re going to have very soon. I’ll probably be the first one to do it.

Rammellzee: Gash-o-lear, 1989.

There’s a tank I just finished building in Italy that shoots ultrasonic sound. And this joint is $400,000 worth of weaponry. It’s called a Weather Note. It’s a Metropostasizer. It controls the atmosphere. It also acts like a sundial, points out the cloud projections, then shoots the cloud. Disintegration of clouds comes from radioactivity. Microwave that shit and it puts out a sound burst that’s too thick for the atmosphere. Depending on whether or not it’s an iodine cloud, you just reverse the polarity of that shit. Ultrasonics, instead of going at a high frequency, goes at a high hum. And it gets trapped by heat and auto emissions. It’s similar to making a tornado. The faster you get and the more the ratio level goes up and everything starts gathering, the more you get a cloud that makes a sound. Not the wind being pushed around it, but the wind being pushed from within makes its own sound. Like the opposite is the eye of the hurricane. It makes no sound and everything around it does. It’s a clear day in that eye but hell all around.

People say I’m drawing sexual images as missiles. I say please. I can build this thing. If I’m shooting scum I want you to understand it’ll blow your house down. That’s a powerful type dick.

All my art and all my teachings are about Gothic Futurism, and the knowledge of how a letter aerodynamically changes into a tank. I tell people phonetic value does not apply to any letter’s structure because the sound is made by the bone structure of the human species which has nothing to do with the integer structure quality, nothing at all. The letter is an integer.

Chinese letters are carbonetic; but ours are siliconic. Arabic symbols are disease cultural chemical symbols. They cannot be armored. They cannot be Ikonoklast. They cannot be made into a vehicle in motion. I am the person who builds the weapons inside the war. Futura 2000 is a mapper further out in space looking down upon the war, writing the history as a map. Phase Two has the Carbon side of the war. I have the Silicon, and Futura is above magnifying that.

Silicon-based symbols can be moved forward and have no phonetic value. What they’re saying in Arabic equals the structure of the symbol. What we’re saying does not equal structure but the difference in values between silicon and carbon. The letter appeared from the first dimension. We didn’t put it in the first dimension. The first dimension has total power over everything because it is total electromagnetic energy. That is an integer by itself. No one controls the alpha-beta. If you drop the ‘a’ it becomes ‘alphabet.’ That’s what they did but is that total control or is that foolish control? Bigotry and the rest of that bullshit?

There’s a point where people will steal the idea of the ratio envelope, the number and the letter, and combine it together and say, since we own this, we own you. Numbers were stolen from India, brought up to the Arabic countries and they sabotaged it then. Zero was stolen from the Mayan Indians. We have this government that doesn’t want you to remember alpha-beta. They want you to remember alphabet.

We’re not going to speak their bullshit anymore. We want our own sound for the letter now. We want you to take the letter, put it in the computer, and find out the sound that emanates from that integer which is called the aura of the letter. Do that and you get ultrasonics. Then you won’t have no alpha-beta to speak. Then you have to find a letter that makes you work for it instead of the letter working for us because that’s tricknowledgy. The phonetic value is tricknowledgy because how you write double U over here and write two V’s as an integer, while in Europe you write two U’s and you’re writing double V? That’s total tricknowledgy. And it’s just because of segregation. They want to keep people in their place.

Society took us all out of the subways and told us to do canvases— their phonetic value, their tradition. After doing all of that work in the subways for eight or nine years you really don’t want to work for these people so they can just have everything and say we got it all so goodbye. What’re you gonna do, think you’re an artist? Then they want you to go back to school so you can learn how to paint the same old goddamn way? Go back to school? I am a school. I ain’t going back to that shit. No bet. I’m not going to go through their definition of pain and painting.

I got excluded from the Area club because they got the juice and they don’t need us anymore. They did it in the music just like in the art. So, what happens now is suffering and Gothic. Not knowing what’s going on and walking through the bushes.

I continue to call myself a Gothic Futurist. Gothic is the primitive architecture and futurism means mechanism. At least that’s what I read when I did read. Because I was always known for saying things before I read them and I cried later because I saw them. At a very young age I pulled words out that made me cry. Words that I thought I made up and then saw in a book. You are not supposed to come into an English class at an early age and the teacher sits you down and says you so bad, you teach. And you teach. I’ve given many a lecture that way. Rocked the entire English dictionary.

I said the letter Sigma would change after being bombarded by the aerodynamic structures of 10,000 of us in the subways over a ten-year period. That letter changed into tank because we bombarded it with a certain amount of aerodynamic knowledge in the dark. It changed into a Sigma where before it was an E. In the dark that letter moved aerodynamically and turned into a Greek letter again. Where did E go? It went into S except now that’s Summation Operator. Now summate the operation of convenience. That’s economics. Word. You listen to that and you think about it. Might make sense, might be total bullshit. You’ll find out, won’t you? But if it’s working out, don’t tell me. Might hurt my feelings. Might mean something to too many people and they might want to beat the shit out of me. They fucked Einstein’s ass up when they made that bomb. You can’t help it if science is that good and the damn fools want to make a weapon out of it.

Rammellzee: Super Robber, 1985.

Einstein played the Wizard’s Game of Fool. It’s called Planet Collision. Extreme cosmic clash. His dice was math. He liked to roll numbers. He said you can do anything you want with the word around the letter. I said, very good sir, I did–Ikonoklast Panzerism. I made something you can’t speak anymore because it didn’t have a phonetic value in the first place. And you, Einstein, should have remembered that.

You know Japanese robots unfold and become trucks? Well, this was done on the trains. We know the Japanese got this from themselves, but we did it in the subways in the dark so I’d consider us to be more original than them.

I may be curating the outside of a museum wall in Tokyo. It’ll be two towers of Panzerism with lasers that shoot and go completely around this five-block building. I’ll have two or three tanks floating like a mobile about 20 feet of the wall. I asked for about a $15,000 budget. They were turning down people who were asking for millions. Compared to that, I’m cheap and I’ll probably do better work anyway. Because I know what they’d do. Put some sticks or some other bullshit up, charge $1,500 just for materials. Then say they want a million dollars. I say, you want to go for that when you could have this and have a good time. Because I’d stand up there, boy, dressed in one of the crazy-ass costumes and do one of the def-est muh-fuckin’ Gregorian chant. China-Japanese down. I call it insect music because they call me an insect. When I’m onstage they say I look like a hornet, because I have two doo-rags, swords and I’m very exo-skeletal looking. It sounds like the beating of wings.

AnR Loves: Pilot’s Varsity Disposable Fountain Pen

Fri, 07 May 2021 22:00:26 +0200

If you purchase an independently reviewed product or service through a link on our website, we may receive an affiliate commission.

To paraphrase Obi-Wan Kenobi describing the lightsaber to Luke Skywalker in Star Wars, the fountain pen is an elegant writing implement for a more civilized age. Ballpoints, felt tips, and gel pens all have their uses, but none of them can match the fountain pen’s expressive line and analog warmth.

The first pen with an internal reservoir for ink is thought to have been been invented in the tenth century in Egypt. Mass produced versions, by then known as fountain pens, came into wide use in the 1880s and remained dominant until the 1960s, when they were displaced by ballpoint pens. Though fountain pens are still widely available at multiple price points, they’re generally thought of as luxury items (which can go for as much as $10,000) reserved for special occasions. But that doesn’t mean you have to miss out on the singular frisson of using one.

Enter the Pilot Varsity Disposable Fountain Pen, the easy-to-use option for the fountain pen curious. “Old-school artistry meets modern convenience” is the tagline for the Varsity, which indeed provides a true fountain pen feel in an affordable ($2.50–$3.00) and ready-to-go form. Tipped with a laser-engraved, medium-width, stainless steel nib, the Pilot Varsity comes already filled and features an “advanced liquid ink feed system” to ensure “consistent flowing lines.” And it does! The point glides effortlessly across the page without digging into it or getting snagged, making the writing experience comparable to that of pricier brands of fountain pen. Most important, the Pilot Varsity doesn’t smear. The ink dries almost instantly and comes in seven colors—black, blue, red, green, pink, purple, and turquoise—designated by the cap (you can get a variety pack with one of each).

Design wise, the Varsity features the rounded barrel of a classic fountain pen but adds subtle Pop art notes like a shirt pocket clip that resembles an exclamation mark, and a harlequin pattern along the barrel. Smooth and lightweight, the Pilot Varsity fits effortlessly in your hand. Though it is disposable, it’s made with 43% recycled plastic. (And if that isn’t sustainable enough, Pilot offers the refillable, metal-bodied Metropolitan at around $20.) The Varsity is perfect for fountain pen beginners and especially as an anywhere, anytime option for folks who might want to leave their Mont Blanc safe at home.

Antwaun Sargent’s Vision for the New Talent Issue

Fri, 07 May 2021 21:36:40 +0200

In a new video interview about the New Talent issue, Antwaun Sargent reflects that even “as things have grown more diverse, as our idea of the artist has expanded, our notions of who gets to write about art have not.” Sargent took the opportunity as guest editor to cultivate rigorous yet accessible writing about art. As he details in his editor’s letter, many types of art criticism already exist “in comments sections of social media posts, DMs, group chats”—not only among established white critics.

A.i.A.’s New Talent issue offers projects by artists, essays by an international group of Black writers and critics—among them, Jasmine Sanders, Nkgopoleng Moloi, Alexandra Bell, Jessica Lynne, Jordan Carter, Emmanuel Iduma, and Connor Garel—and letters from five young curators who consider the future of the museum. Sargent notes that curators’ voices are often “not showing up in this very public debate” about who defines art and culture in major institutions. Also commissioned were conversations between pairs of artists: painter Amy Sherald and photographer Tyler Mitchell discuss new American imagery, while playwright Jeremy O. Harris and painter Jonathan Lyndon Chase discuss queer Black art and their shared love of anime.

As Sargent writes in his letter, “the robust and diverse range of approaches in this issue” is a critical part of the future of art that we must start considering and cultivating now. He also spoke about the issue on our ongoing podcast series Artelligence. During the months of May and June, A.i.A. will feature content from the New Talent issue online.

This Folded Paper Book Opens Up to Reveal 31 Layered Storage Compartments

Fri, 07 May 2021 20:17:04 +0200

Tuck away your coins and small mementos for safekeeping in this nested storage book. Comprised of 31 compartments, the design features layers of folds, meaning that the 16 flowers on top and the pockets supporting them open up to reveal small compartments that vary in size. Originally, the paper books, which are called zhen xian bao, were used to hold thread and other embroidery materials—this article dives into the history behind the traditional Chinese practice—and would unroll in multiples from a single binding. Watch the tutorial above for folding basics, and check out the written companion for instructions on scaling up the design to 127 pockets.

https://fuckyeahchinesefashion.tumblr.com/post/646278082813165568/this-thing-is-called-%E7%99%BE%E5%AE%9D%E5%A4%B9bai-bao-jiathe-chinese

Join Art on the Majestic Redwoods Photo Retreat!

Fri, 07 May 2021 20:06:47 +0200

The redwoods, once seen, leave a mark or create a vision that stays with you always.

— John Steinbeck

Space is still available to join me on our Majestic Redwoods Photography Retreat, taking place at the end of this month! Come along and make some new friends who share your love of photography in one of the most iconic forests in all the world, where these trees – some a millennia old – tower over the beautiful California coast.

Of course this is an ART WOLFE workshop, so while we will line up and grab the token travel shots that exclaim, “I was here!” along with all the other tourists – we will go much much deeper in exploring this land – the same land that has drawn explorers and naturalists throughout history to it’s unique and massive canopy over the centuries. From the forest to the coast, we will mine this location for opportunities to set our photography apart from the pack, enhancing your creative eye with lessons that will serve you no matter the subject.

Space is limited and these workshops tend to fill up quickly the closer we get – don’t wait too long to sign up and miss out! Of course, all of my workshops are Covid compliant, and your health, safety, and enjoyment of our time together is top of mind.

Hope to see you on my Majestic Redwoods Photo Retreat!

The Best Vine and Willow Charcoal for New Effects on the Page

Fri, 07 May 2021 20:00:49 +0200

If you purchase an independently reviewed product or service through a link on our website, we may receive an affiliate commission.

Softer than compressed charcoal but generally more brittle as well, willow charcoal and vine charcoal are especially useful for sketching as their marks can be erased with ease. These lightweight sticks are similar—and some brands confusingly describe their products as both—but vine and willow have distinct qualities that make them suited for different types of projects. Willow charcoal, which is made from carbonized natural willow branches, is darker and more forgiving and can produce a range of tones; vine charcoal, made by burning grapevines, comes in shades of gray and is slightly harder. You may want to experiment with both to see which you prefer, and our picks can help you sort through the many options available.

ARTNEWS RECOMMENDS
Coates Willow Charcoal
To many artists, the name Coate is synonymous with high-quality willow. Since the 1960s, the P. H. Coate family has been cultivating the shrub in the fertile land of southwest England’s Somerset Levels and producing drawing charcoal following a painstaking process that takes three days. The resulting 6¼-inch-long rods are free of impurities so they feel velvety smooth and produce a deep black color. They are sold in five sizes, from thin (2 to 3 millimeters) to the charmingly named “tree stick” size (roughly 20 millimeters), which is available by the piece. You can also buy a set of 30 assorted pieces that provides a good, basic array for creating both fine and broad lines. Don’t expect them all to look the same: Due to the Coate process, each stick is unique, but they all will give you beautiful marks with distinct texture and softness.

Buy: Coates Premium Artist's Willow Charcoal $4.21–$7.24

Buy it

WE ALSO LIKE
Grumbacher Vine Charcoal
Although this is vine charcoal, Grumbacher’s product has a natural feel similar to Coates’, with slight variations in the pieces you’ll receive. Each is made by burning hand-selected grapevines at high temperature, and the results come in a range of light to dark grays that maintain their hue regardless of pressure. Free of grit, the sticks are available in just one size but four hardness levels, including extra soft, and are packaged in sets of three. The sticks are very light and brittle, requiring a gentle pressure at most, and can be used to create gorgeous tones for sketching or for underdrawings.
Buy: Grumbacher Vine Charcoal $4.58

ANOTHER GOOD CHOICE
Winsor & Newton Artists’ Charcoal Packs
Winsor & Newton sells both vine and willow sticks available in packs of three or a dozen and in a range of sizes. These sticks are carefully selected for uniformity and lack of imperfections, then baked to achieve further consistency of body. The resulting charcoal pieces have the same texture throughout so they lay down marks with uniform intensity. The vine charcoal in particular glides across the page to produce very smooth, rich lines that blend very well. The willow can be used to achieve both gentle grays and deep blacks with little effort, and the thin sticks excel at detail work.

Buy: Winsor & Newton Vine & Willow Charcoal Packs $2.72–$9.99

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STUDENTS’ CHOICE
General’s Willow Sketching Charcoal
This set is a great choice for those who are new to willow charcoal. It includes five sticks in a nice assortment of sizes to cover all bases: two thin (3 to 4 millimeters), two medium (5 to 6 millimeters) and one thick (7 to 9 millimeters). Also included is a kneaded eraser that you can use not only for correcting your work but also for experimentation with lightening, highlighting, and other subtractive techniques. The sticks are made of pure willow grown in England, then burned and processed to lay down rich black lines.
Buy: General’s Willow Sketching Charcoal $9.89

ALSO CONSIDER
Conté à Paris Natural Charcoal
These high-quality willow charcoal sticks offer satisfyingly smooth coverage in a soft-medium grade. They lay down rich and dense strokes but also respond well to pressure so you can achieve more subtle, pale grays. This is another good set to purchase if you prefer to draw with uniform charcoal, as pieces are carefully selected for consistency. The packs of five are available in two thicknesses (6 and 11 millimeter). While round sticks are available, Conté also offers a more unusual square-ended version too.

Buy: Conté à Paris Natural Charcoal $4.49

Buy it

NOSEBLEED

Fri, 07 May 2021 20:00:00 +0200

A KALTBLUT exclusive. Photography by Darren Black. Art Direction, Model, and Poem by Charlie Parker. Art Direction, Fashion, …

Mural Arts Philadelphia and Mural Arts Institute Present Arts + Environmental Justice Symposium

Fri, 07 May 2021 20:00:00 +0200

From May 17 through May 21, Mural Arts Philadelphia is hosting the Arts + Environmental Justice Symposium. This week-long series of free virtual events takes a look at transformative work happening at the intersection of arts, community-based cultural practice, and environmental justice. The COVID-19 pandemic has further stressed the communities already grappling with acute climate and environmental crises, both economically and in terms of inequitable healthcare access and outcomes. The conversations and workshops at the symposium will explore how creative people and practices are helping us meet the challenges of this moment.

To register, visit muralarts.org/events.

Speakers include but are not limited to Judith LeBlanc (Native Organizers Alliance), Michelle Mascarenhas-Swan (Movement Generation), Philadelphia City Councilmember Kendra Brooks, Emma Robbins (Navajo Water Project), Carlton Turner (Sipp Culture), the UK-based artists behind the newly debuted film Bank Job, Dr. Catherine Garoupa White (Central Valley Air Quality Coalition), Esteban Kelly (US Federation of Worker Cooperatives), and Laura Zabel (Springboard for the Arts).

Spirits Welcome: Beverly Buchanan at Andrew Edlin

Fri, 07 May 2021 19:55:12 +0200

During the six years since Beverly Buchanan’s first solo show at Andrew Edlin (she died in 2015, just after her debut there), the artist’s work has been folded into broader discourses about outsider art and resistance politics, largely thanks to her showing at the Brooklyn Museum and the Studio Museum in Harlem. Her second solo exhibition at the gallery, “Shacks and Legends, 1985–2011,” offers an opportunity to revisit her renderings of houses—inspired by those built by rural-dwelling African-Americans. The body of work includes dollhouse-size maquettes and colorful drawings of shacks, photographs of some of the actual homes and their inhabitants, and the titular “legends,” stories Buchanan recollected or invented about the residents.

Buchanan is often miscategorized as an “outsider artist,” likely because of her interest in folk art aesthetics and her having turned to art as a second career. She was raised in South Carolina, where, as a child, she accompanied her adoptive father—dean of agriculture at South Carolina State College, a historically Black institution—on trips to tenant farms. After working as a public health educator in New Jersey, Buchanan enrolled at the Art Students League of New York in the early 1970s and created Post-Minimal sculptures and drawings that memorialized urban decay. In 1977, she moved to Georgia, where she embarked on a series of public artworks that marked sites of racial injustice with gravestone-like mounds of concrete or tabby, a mixture of materials including lime, sand, and shells that was used in the region until the mid-nineteenth century. Her shack works, begun in the mid-’80s, honor the history of Southern vernacular architecture through a type of field study.

Even if Buchanan didn’t fit the profile herself, folk artists were a motivating force of her later work. In this exhibition, the large drawing Blue Sky Shack (1988) functions as a manifesto. To the left of an illustration of two buildings, rendered in slashes of oil pastel, Buchanan has penned a statement about the evolution of her work: “As a Southern artist, I found that I was interested in the work of folk artists and . . . discovered that some of my ideas about returning to a ‘simple’ uncomplicated look in my own work, were shared with them.” She cites the artist Nellie Mae Rowe (1900–1982) as an inspiration, noting that her home “was engulfed in a magic forest of her work. Every surface of her work had a mark from her hand.” Buchanan saw her works as “attempts to celebrate the spirit of the shack dwellers,” who expressed their creative innovation in their home design, gardens, and everyday rituals.

Beverly Buchanan, Orangeburg County Family House, 1993, paint, sharpie, garland, necklace, wood chips, bark, buttons, bottle caps, license plate, film canister, thumbtacks, clay pot, glass bottle, thread and glue on wood, 14 ¼ by 14 ¾ by 10 ½ inches.

This selection of Buchanan’s shack works reflects an organic evolution in her formal process. In the mid-1980s, she favored expressionistically painted rectangular forms reminiscent of the tobacco barns of her native North Carolina. Her structures from the later ’80s and ’90s faithfully emulate details such as broken windows, tin roofs, and burned wood. In a series from 2008, responding to a hurricane that damaged homes in Florida, Buchanan adopted a neon palette, rendering light and shade in broad, bright strokes. While the sculptural details suggest serious reflection on specific sociopolitical conditions, Buchanan’s trademark sense of humor and awe comes through in the legends. A 1991 legend for Miss Mary’s House, not on view but accessible through a QR code, ends on a mystical note. After visiting Mary’s “imposing fortress,” Buchanan “left with the understanding of silenced secrets and a prophecy: ‘You’ll be famous long before you die.’ When is that, went unanswered.”

Buchanan’s architectural homages are conceptually linked with her “spirit jars”—an interpretation of the folk art form of “memory jugs” usually left on graves. Six of these compressed assemblages, which often include figurines, shells, and home decor, are exhibited in an adjoining gallery with work by Abigail DeVille. Only one shack on view shares the jars’ bric-a-brac aesthetic: Orangeburg County Family House (1993). The miniature wooden building is adorned with buttons, bottle caps, a wooden figure of a Black woman raising her fist, and a 1969 South Carolina license plate. On the surface, Buchanan has scribbled the names of people from her hometown. Like the artist’s public artworks of the early ’80s, and in light of her participation in lunch-counter protests in the early ’60s, this piece suggests a hidden subtext: civil rights activism. Some of the names displayed here as if on a memorial—Davis, Hildebrand, Thomas—match those of people injured in the Orangeburg Massacre of 1968, in which police shot anti-segregation protesters on the South Carolina State College campus. A small spirit jar sits inside the structure. One can barely make out two words scrawled on it: “not magic.”

Seen and Overheard at Frieze New York

Fri, 07 May 2021 19:03:45 +0200

All comics by Susan Coyne for Hyperallergic, 2021

Frieze New York continues through May 9 at the Shed (545 West 30th Street, Hudson Yards, Manhattan).

Martin Across Spring/Summer 2021

Fri, 07 May 2021 18:00:00 +0200

Designer Martin Across presents his new Spring/Summer 2021 collection. A journey of self-discovery and transformation. Founded in 2019, …

An artist’s guide to writing successful applications

Fri, 07 May 2021 17:58:01 +0200

Whether for a grant, a residency or an exhibition opportunity, open calls can serve as excellent prompts that give structure and deadlines to an otherwise self-directed work schedule. What’s more, these opportunities open up possibilities of exposure, networking and access to important resources (from prize money to mentorship), or simply the time and platform to carry a project through to completion. So how can you maximise your chances of success? We provide our top tips on how to write artist applications for open calls, opportunities and competitions.

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Where to find opportunities?

The first step in any application process is finding the opportunities themselves. Whilst local newspapers, noticeboards, word of mouth and online research are all perfectly viable, newsletters are by far the most efficient. Subscribing to artist bulletins like ArtWeb’s monthly newsletter can cut your search time in half as you’ll receive curated lists of new opportunities straight to your inbox.

Make a plan

Forward planning is both time and cost effective. Applications can be time consuming, so it’s important to be selective in the ones you apply for. At the start of each month, set aside a full day dedicated to seeking relevant opportunities. Make a list, before picking a handful of the most suitable, and plot them out in your calendar. This allows you time to factor in your other responsibilities and busy working periods. You should aim for no more than three a month — it’s better to submit two well-considered applications than twenty slap-dash efforts.

Dedicate one day per month to sourcing opportunities.
Be selective: choose one to three opportunities per month.
Plot deadlines out in a calendar to avoid schedule clashes.

Research

An obvious rule of thumb, though often overlooked, is to read all the conditions before you apply. Be aware of the qualifying factors (i.e., Does this opportunity have an age limit? Is it targeted exclusively at students?) Don’t waste your time, or the judges, by applying for something that you are ineligible for. When calculating if an opportunity is right for you, and thereby worth applying for, there are multiple factors to consider.

Firstly, you may want to look at the panel of judges and the winners of previous years. If they are all figurative painters, and your work is predominantly abstract sculpture, you may be more successful elsewhere. You could also research the funder to make sure your submission is matched to their interests and needs.

Next, calculate the costs involved, not just the entry fee but that of travel, storage or framing solutions your application may incur. Does the potential gain outweigh the financial hit? (Note: Generally, the most reputable organisations offering artist opportunities do not require an entry fee.)

Finally, don’t be afraid to ask questions! If you have any doubts about the specifications, don’t hesitate to send the organisers a polite email asking for clarification, but make sure you do so well before the deadline.

Read the conditions carefully.
Look at the panel of selectors and the work of previous winners and shortlisted entries.
Consider the overall pros/cons.
Don’t be afraid to ask questions.

Putting pen to paper

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As always, avoid jargon. Write in clear, direct sentences that can be understood easily. Good writing should not require a PhD in order to decipher the message. With any application, there are six words to keep in mind: Who, what, why, where, when and how. Specifically:

Who are you, and how are you suitable for this opportunity?
What is your work about?
Why are you proposing this particular project?
Where will it take place?
When are your deadlines for each part of the project (research, studio, installation, presentation)?
How will you achieve this and how will it contribute to your wider artistic and professional goals?

Make sure these questions are covered in the body of your answers. I find it particularly useful to approach the first draft as freely as possible, editing it down with a critical eye after that fact. As Hemmingway famously said, “The only kind of writing is rewriting.” When you’re happy with the application, ask a friend to look over it, and have them summarise your proposal to ensure it is easily understood.

Avoid jargon.
Edit, edit, edit!
Ask for feedback.

Submit clear and considered images

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Even the most eloquent applications must be backed up with high-quality images. After all, these are opportunities for visual artists! Consider the format specifications, as well as the scale and medium of accepted work, and submit images per the requirements. Choose the pieces that are best suited to the brief, and photograph your work in a room with plenty of natural light, with a good-quality smartphone or DSLR camera. 2D work should be mounted on a wall and photographed head-on, whilst a plinth is ideal for 3D work, ensuring a plain background. Remember, judges have to delve through hundreds of images, so make sure yours stands out for all the right reasons.

Submit high-quality images.
Choose work that suits the brief.
Aim for natural light, straight angles and neutral backgrounds.

What next?

The selection process can vary from a couple of weeks to a few months. You’ll usually be given a timeframe of when to expect the results, so be patient, and email for an update only if the panel has substantially exceeded their preliminary timeframe. If you are selected, congratulations! But don’t fret if you miss out—the application game is a law of averages, and rejection is part of even the most illustrious art careers. The writing process is a valuable opportunity in itself, allowing you to clarify and reflect on your aims. What’s more, you’re enabling your work to be seen by individuals you may not otherwise have access to. A number of artists have been discovered through open call submission processes; could you be next?

Gold for the Gods: Rare 1,500-Year-Old Pendants Found in Norse Ritual Hoard

Fri, 07 May 2021 17:11:04 +0200

Beneath clay soil in a field in southeastern Norway, archaeologists have uncovered seven gold pendants known as bracteates, Science Norway reports. It is the only such find in the last 70 years, and is an “incredibly rare” votive hoard, according to the three archaeologists heading the project: Jessica Leigh McGraw, Margrete Figenschou Simonsen, and Magne Samdal, all from the University of Oslo Museum of Cultural History.

Only the wealthiest and highest-status individuals would be able to afford such lavish offerings to the gods. “There is little doubt that these were items connected to aristocratic communities within a Germanic elite in Scandinavia,” the archaeologists explained.

Gold bracteates were common during the Migration Period, between the 4th and 6th century C.E. The pendants, thin coin-like pieces usually worn as jewelry, were based on Roman medallions—but with a distinct Norse twist. Instead of Roman emperors, the bracteates featured Norse gods and stylized animal figures.

Both C-type and D-type bracteates were found in the votive hoard. C-type bracteates show a large person with defined hair riding on the back of a horse—often interpreted as a representation of the Norse god Odin. D-type bracteates appeared later in the 6th century C.E. and depict stylized animals.

Researchers are not yet clear whether the hoard was buried before or after the Fimbul winter, a period from 536–540 C.E. when volcanic eruptions filled the sky with ash. The sun didn’t shine for over a year, and there were crop failures and mass starvation. But ritual gold sacrifices do appear to have increased in the 6th century. “The Gods needed pleasing,” the archaeologists explain. “In a time of bad years and insecurities, people may have felt a heightened need to try and avoid dangers and seek protection.” The team will continue to study their findings.

Karl Wirsum, Hairy Who Artist with Eccentric Style, Has Died at 81

Fri, 07 May 2021 17:07:31 +0200

Karl Wirsum, a member of Chicago’s Hairy Who group of the 1960s whose art envisioned a madcap universe unto itself, has died at 81. Dealer Derek Eller, whose New York gallery represents Wirsum alongside Chicago’s Corbett vs. Dempsey, said that he died of cardiac arrest.

“It has been an enormous privilege to work with such a talented, important, and influential artist,” the gallery wrote in a statement posted to Instagram.

Wirsum was part of a crop of Chicago artists that emerged in the 1960s and produced work informed equally by mass media, pop culture, and non-Western art. Known as the Chicago Imagists, they relied on figuration at a time when abstract painting was still considered to the most important mode for art-making in the U.S.

In 1966, a group known as the Hairy Who formed when Don Baum organized an exhibition of their work at the Hyde Park Art Center in Chicago. Its six members included Jim Falconer, Art Green, Gladys Nilsson, Jim Nutt, and Suellen Rocca; Wirsum wasn’t a part of the collective until Baum included him in the show. Wirsum lent the group its name during a discussion about a Chicago radio program led by art critic Harry Bouras. Upon hearing this, Wirsum asked, “Harry who?”

The art of the Hairy Who members is “not ironic, but neither is it solemn,” curator Dan Nadel wrote in the catalogue for a 2015 exhibition about the group’s publications at the Hyde Park Art Centre. “It is warm but not sentimental, immaculately crafted but not cold. It is art that embraces mundane realities, wet sexuality, fantastic realities, and a hard-edged spirituality. It asks for nothing from the viewer, makes no special cases, and yet is not against or for anything.”

Karl Wirsum, Unmixedly at Ease, 2004.

While the methods used by the Hairy Who artists dovetailed with the ones relied upon by Pop artists, the Chicago Imagists differed in at least one key respect: they never appropriated material. “They were staying too close to the initial point of inspiration,” Wirsum told Hyperallergic in 2015. “I liked things that were more inventive.”

Wirsum’s art took its cues from a wide range of sources, from comic books to Jean Dubuffet’s art brut paintings. In his 1968 painting Screamin’ Jay Hawkins (1968), now owned by the Art Institute of Chicago, the titular musician is imagined as a robot-like being whose body pulses with yellow bolts and seems to emanate light. His beady eyes look more like those of a lizard, and his legs are partially orange and blue with green leg hair. At his head are two green birds that clash with the maroon background. The painting thrums with an electric intensity that animates much of Wirsum’s art of the era.

Works such as these have turned Wirsum into something of a hometown hero in Chicago. “Karl Wirsum is an art star,” the Chicago Reader wrote in 2017. “The low-key member of the Hairy Who—the 1960s art group nestled inside the Chicago Imagists movement—would probably balk at this characterization, and the art market may not have rewarded him as such, but he is one of our homegrown treasures.”

Karl Wirsum was born in Chicago in 1939. When he was nine years old, both of his parents were killed in a car crash. While in the hospital as a child, he began to draw, and a nurse suggested that he might take up a career as an artist. Sights witnessed on the city’s Maxwell Street, where blues musicians often performed, later informed his art. In 1957, he enrolled at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Karl Wirsum, Great Skates III, 1976.

While there, Wirsum took classes with art historians Kathleen Blackshear and Whitney Halstead. Because of their courses, he grew interested in Egyptian art, New Guinean art, Surrealism, and Dada. Then, when he graduated the school, he went to Mexico with artists Ed Paschke and Bert Phillips, and furthered a fascination with folk art of the country.

During the ’70s, after the Hairy Who disbanded in 1969, Wirsum pushed his experiments even further, relying on new materials like styrofoam, out of which he fashioned busts for his cartoon-like figures. And for a series called “Alien Dating Service,” he painted on acetate, so that the work reflected light. Marionettes also became a recurring element in his work. Briefly during the ’70s, he moved to California. Then, finding the state “too pizzazzy,” he came back to Chicago, where he remained for the rest of his career, teaching painting and drawing at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

A force appears to enliven Wirsum’s art, though it is often difficult to describe what it is. “There’s some kind of strong magic that we can’t explain,” Wirsum said in his Hyperallergic interview. “I don’t have a belief in any divine being or anything of that nature, but there are mysterious things that happen and I feel that being a creator you link up in some way to another realm of reality that is not part of the everyday. And I feel a commitment to these things that’s not based on fame or fortune. It goes beyond the material into this other realm, which could be described as spiritual.”

Eric Nash’s “All Along The Way” at KP Projects.Currently on view...

Fri, 07 May 2021 17:03:23 +0200

Eric Nash’s “All Along The Way” at KP Projects.

Currently on view at KP Projects in Los Angeles, California is artist Eric Nash’s incredible solo exhibition of new drawings, “All Along the Way.”

“In my own art, Los Angeles has been a longtime subject matter where I curate, focus on, edit down, and elevate the ordinary to the iconic through my drawing process. I take thousands of source photographs all over the city, at all hours, to find those special images that while seemingly commonplace are somehow quintessentially Los Angeles. My proclivity toward solitary or noir imagery is enhanced by the dense properties of charcoal which goes from deep black to grays to the white of the paper and is reminiscent of classic black and white photography. David Lynch, the multimedia artist, defines this noir aesthetic. For the past year and a half, as the KCRW Los Angeles radio station weather reporter, Mr. Lynch takes the humdrum LA weather report and elevates it into a moody, magnetic, and visceral 60 second experience with key words and tonal inflections that mimic Haiku.

In this simple act, the ordinary becomes extraordinary. At the end of each report, Lynch ends by saying: So, we’re going to continue on, and I wish no matter what the weather is, I wish for all of you blue skies and golden sunshine internally all along the way.

This inspiring and multilayered statement is so completely and essentially “LA”. The key element was my directive for this show’s title, mood and imagery. I sought out and documented the things we all see and feel "all along the way” in our daily commutes, road trips, and daily meditations.” - Eric Nash

Be sure to follow Supersonic Art on Instagram!

These Are the Best Spray Fixatives to Stabilize Your Chalk and Charcoal Drawings

Fri, 07 May 2021 16:50:32 +0200

If you purchase an independently reviewed product or service through a link on our website, we may receive an affiliate commission.

Protect your charcoal, chalk, graphite, and pastel drawings, and more, by using a fixative spray. Although even the best will result in some degree of color shift, these sprays are valued for their ability to keep surfaces from smudging, fading, flaking, and discoloring. There are two basic types of fixative, regular and workable. If your piece is not quite finished but you still want some smudge protection, or if you intend to layer individually fixed media, go with a workable fixative. This holds your medium to the paper but allows you to still make small adjustments in shading, erasing, and blurring. Regular fixative, on the other hand, holds your medium firmly in place, preserving your artwork without the need for glass. No matter which fixative you choose, don’t forget to spray in a ventilated area and, even better, wear a mask. Get your fixative fix by browsing our roundup of the best products. below.

ARTNEWS RECOMMENDS
Winsor & Newton Artists’ Fixative
This workable fixative is an excellent choice for artists who work in graphite, pastel, pencil, and chalk. It offers great smudge and dust protection after you spray over a layer, drying quite rapidly so you can lay down the next layer. Each press of the pump releases a relatively light spray of formula, which helps to prevent pigment color from diminishing, and also adds a subtle tooth to maintain the workability of the surface. You can add as many as a dozen layers on a single piece. Plus, while all fixatives have a chemical smell, this one is less intense than others.

Buy: Winsor & Newton Artists’ Fixative $12.06

Buy it

WE ALSO LIKE
Lascaux Fine Art Fixative
This is one of the most gentle workable fixatives on the market. It excels at maintaining color, especially lighter hues, whites, and highlights. It also dries very quickly to an attractive, flat matte finish. Because of its gentleness, however, it does not offer the best protection: While the spray will keep pigments in place and provide good water resistance, colors can still be smudged if rubbed.

Buy: Lascaux Fine Art Fixative $22.14

Buy it

ANOTHER GOOD CHOICE
Grumbacher Final Fixative
Unlike the fixatives above, this spray from Grumbacher is permanent. A non-yellowing coating available in either a gloss or a matte formula, it can be applied to drawings in dry media like graphite, pastel, and charcoal, as well as to photographs, collages, and ceramics. When using with pastels, it’s best to apply this in several light coats rather than one heavy layer so you don’t risk dissolving your colors.

Buy: Grumbacher Final Fixative $16.50

Buy it

MOST ARCHIVAL
Sennelier HC10 Universal Fixative
This is an incredibly powerful fixative consisting of an acrylic resin that’s 10 times more concentrated than most other formulas on the market. With outstanding lightfastness and water resistance, it offers the highest level of protection for diverse artworks including pastels, watercolors, inks, charcoal, acrylics, photographs, and decoupage. It’s also suitable as an adhesive or as a primer for surfaces such as wood, canvas, glass, and porcelain. Results can be displayed indoors or out. We also like the can design, which features a swivel nozzle that can produce either a horizontal or a vertical spray pattern. Although this fixative is non-yellowing, we advise testing it first because of its strength.

Buy: Sennelier HC10 Universal Fixative $22.91

Buy it

ALSO CONSIDER
Krylon Workable Fixatif Spray
Krylon’s fixative is classic product. It goes on clear and will not alter the original color nor add a varnish to dry media such as pencil, chalk, pastel, and charcoal. Acid free and archival, this spray will protect your work from yellowing, wrinkling, and smudging, though it’s not as fade-resistant as Sennelier’s spray. The workable formula allows flexibility in layering in-progress pieces and correcting nearly completed ones. You can even erase through the coating to make more substantial revisions to your art. For best results, let the fixative dry for 30 minutes after spraying before resuming your work.
Buy: Krylon Workable Fixatif Spray $15.56

Discarded Technology and Branded Trash Are Stacked into Dystopian Structures in Alvaro Naddeo’s Paintings

Fri, 07 May 2021 16:44:27 +0200

Behind each one of Alvaro Naddeo’s watercolor paintings is an imagined character who’s built a rickety shopping cart structure or gathered waste materials for a tiny, mobile dwelling. “I believe they are strong people, resilient, and survivalists,” the Brazilian artist tells Colossal. “They use creativity to overcome obstacles and adapt to any situation they are put in. So in a way, both of them, characters and discarded objects, are proof that there’s value in everything if you know where to look for it.”

Evoking an alternative universe in a state of ruin, Naddeo (previously) renders ramshackle structures and vehicles—which only span a few inches—made primarily of outdated technology, rusted carts and frames, and a plethora of branded materials: a Marlboro sign props up an upper level, a Coca-Cola panel offers protection from the elements, and logoed posters and stickers cover almost every surface. By fashioning these relics anew, the artist speaks to consumerism and the waste it generates, a concern that dovetails with a focus on income and wealth inequalities. He explains:

The gap between rich and poor continues to incessantly grow and it seems like nothing can’t stop it. That’s the harsh and important message of my work, but this message comes wrapped in a nice and warm blanket of nostalgia and the beauty of the composition. This warmth makes up for the harshness of the subject matter.

Currently living and working in Los Angeles, Naddeo is involved in a few group shows in the coming months, including at Beinart and Outre galleries in Melbourne and A. Hurd Gallery in Albuquerque. He’s also preparing for two solo exhibitions next year, which will be at Thinkspace in Los Angeles and at Beinart. Until then, check out his Instagram for glimpses of his process and a larger collection of his dystopian paintings.

“Die Hard” (2018), watercolor on paper, 12 x 12 inches

“Mad as Hell” (2020), watercolor on paper, 20 x 20 inches

Left: “Ghosts,” watercolor on paper, 12 x 24 inches. Right: “Yes, Please,” watercolor on paper, 12 x 24 inches

“Mil Grau” (2020), watercolor on paper, 14 x18 inches

Focus on: Alex Terrón

Fri, 07 May 2021 16:30:00 +0200

Alex Terrón is an illustrator based in Barcelona, Spain. Alex is a multidisciplinary artist, illustrations, zines, and more …

The Epic Banal

Fri, 07 May 2021 16:08:12 +0200

Amy Sherald: A Midsummer Afternoon Dream, 2020, oil on canvas, 106 by 101 inches.

Tyler Mitchell and Amy Sherald—two Atlanta-born, New York–based artists—both capture everyday joy in their images of Black Americans. Recurring motifs in Mitchell’s photographs, installations, and videos include outdoor space and fashionable friends. Sherald, a painter, shares similar motifs: her colorful paintings with pastel palettes show Black people enjoying American moments, their skin painted in grayscale, the backgrounds and outfits flat. Both are best known for high-profile portrait commissions: in 2018 Mitchell became the first Black photographer to have a work grace the cover of Vogue. That shot of Beyoncé was followed, more recently, by a portrait of Kamala Harris for the same publication. Michelle Obama commissioned Amy Sherald to paint her portrait, and last year Vanity Fair asked Sherald to paint Breonna Taylor for a cover too. Below, the artists discuss the influence of the South on their work, and how they navigate art versus commercial projects. —Eds.

Amy Sherald: Precious jewels by the sea, 2019, oil on canvas, 120 by 108 inches.

TYLER MITCHELL: Amy, we spoke before about finding freedom and making your own moments of joy. I think of Precious jewels by the sea [2019]—your painting of two couples at the beach, showing the men standing with the women on their shoulders—as a moment that you constructed. My work is also constructed, but viewers don’t necessarily know that when they see a boy flying a kite in a park [as in Untitled (Kite), 2019]. You told me you made that beach image with a camera first and then painted it. Can you talk more about that process?

AMY SHERALD: For me, a painting starts in the viewfinder. It’s embarrassing to admit it, but I don’t really know how to use a camera: don’t ask me about aperture or f-stops or whatever. I just put it on automatic, and try to shoot at eleven o’clock, or two o’clock, when I know the light will be good. The camera is basically my sketchbook; the photographs themselves aren’t really special. If you saw them, you might say, “You’re going to make a painting out of this?”

I do with a paintbrush what you do with a camera: in the end, I think we create a similar sensation. There’s the weight of history, but mostly there’s freshness and lightness. I’m not trying to replace the narrative of historical trauma, but I do want to shift into something different for us now. I want to make space for all the things our mothers didn’t see themselves doing. I take my kids to Martha’s Vineyard because I want them to see us living in these houses and walking on these beaches. For me, those are truly American moments, and that’s exactly what I want to document, because [pictures of Black people doing these things are] what’s missing in the American painting canon.

Tyler Mitchell: Untitled (Kite), 2019, pigment print, 50 by 40 inches.

MITCHELL: We’re both also thinking about outdoor space alongside interior worlds. I think of outdoor scenes as a way to explore Black folks simply existing in public space—that’s what I was getting at with my installation Idyllic Space [2019], which included Astroturf, a white picket fence, and a video of Georgia boys enjoying the outdoors. The video is projected on the ceiling. I see it as a radical gesture to show young Black folks enjoying public space.

SHERALD: I wonder if being from the South has something to do with our shared interest in leisure.

MITCHELL: Our moms know each other in Atlanta!

SHERALD: Yeah! I don’t think my work would be what it is had I not grown up in the South, then left Atlanta for grad school, and then moved back with more knowledge of who I am. Once I was home, I spent a year not making anything, trying to figure out what I wanted to make. The first five paintings I made after that period were almost like a journal: coming back as an adult, I realized how much the South influenced who I am—for good and for bad.

MITCHELL: I relate to that. The most clarifying times for me and my work occurred when I was abroad. That’s when I started to think back on the complicated dimensions of the Southern experience: it’s easier to see it when you’re not there. I made Boys of Walthamstow [2018] in England, but I was thinking of Georgia. . . . Those British marshes had willow trees that almost looked like Savannah willows.

My feelings toward the South aren’t necessarily good or bad. The South involves this mix of welcoming and warmth, as well as estrangement. People will invite you onto their porch to have tea, but there’s also a lot of gossiping around the neighborhood. I experienced feelings of alienation throughout my upbringing, but also feelings of amazing freedom as a middle-class person who grew up around lots of green space. Most people have a hyper urban image when they visualize Atlanta, though Atlanta is actually the US city with the most green space per person. So when I ask myself, “What does the South look like?” for me, it’s very green.

How did you develop your signature style?

Tyler Mitchell: Untitled (Walthamstow Frolick), 2018.

SHERALD: The story of why I paint my figures gray has evolved over the years. I’m not trying to take race out of the conversation, I’m just trying to highlight an interiority. In hindsight, I realize that I was avoiding painting people into a corner, where they’d have to exist in some universal way. I don’t want the conversation around my work to be solely about identity.

At first, I considered my work fantastical. But later I realized, though I’m painting moments I constructed, they are moments that do exist: I’m not totally making it up.

I love seeing young people engage with your posts on Instagram: one comment read “have you ever frolicked before?” and it just made me smile. I don’t think my mom, who was born in 1935, was thinking about frolicking while growing up in Mobile, Alabama. She just wanted to make it home without getting snatched up by a Klan mob.

MITCHELL: And your mom’s story isn’t depicted in your paintings, but it’s definitely the backdrop of the work. We’re both out to reclaim these small moments of everyday joy, which is so important because generations before us weren’t necessarily able to.

SHERALD: For me, it’s also about replacing the imagery that we see.

MITCHELL: I also find that both my pictures and your paintings leave so much open to viewers, who bring their own experience to the portrait. Often, your figures aren’t just individuals, but archetypes: they stand for something bigger.

In response to my work, especially the installation Laundry Line [2020], I get a lot of “I used to have that shirt!” or “teal used to be my favorite color!” I wonder if you have a fun story of someone enthusiastically identifying with your painting.

SHERALD: At an opening of mine in 2015, a young woman and her daughter came in—they were looking at one of the paintings and the daughter said, “I see my grandmother.” She had never seen a portrait of a Black person in a gallery before. I was reminded, this is why
I do what I do.

MITCHELL: We’re both depicting these moments that are devoid of the stereotypical narrative so often imposed on the Black figure in images. I’ve started to think about my work via this phrase I borrowed from my friend RaMell Ross, who made the amazing documentary Hale County This Morning, This Evening [2018], a loose, wandering, poetic film about a county in Alabama. Anyway, he uses this term “the epic banal,” and for me, epic banality is simply about existence—it’s about just being and finding those moments of joy.

Tyler Mitchell: Untitled (Alton’s Eyes), 2016.

SHERALD: I absolutely agree with that. You say “I can make you feel good” [the title of your show at the International Center of Photography in New York], and I say, come to the work to see a reflection of yourself. That is love; it’s an embrace, and it has a positive psychological effect. Hopefully, it replaces some of those traumatic memories that we carry around. I didn’t go through all the things that my mother went through, but I feel as though I absorbed some of it. And on social media, you see it all the time. That’s just not healthy for any of us.

I’ve had conversations with artists who feel as if their work has to create teaching moments about history and our struggle. But I wonder, when do we breathe? There has to be room for a range of experiences, because if there isn’t, how do we evolve? Your work touches on that as well.

SHERALD: Between us, we’ve made portraits of, arguably, the two most popular women in the world! [Painting Michelle Obama] was career defining, and I don’t mind that. But I also don’t want my previous work to be completely erased. My life didn’t start the moment I painted Michelle, and yours didn’t start the moment you photographed Beyoncé. The media made it seem like nothing happened until I turned forty-two, but I’d been working really hard for a long time, and it’s important to me that young artists hear about that struggle. These commissions didn’t randomly land in our laps while we were sitting around doing nothing. How did you feel about just being more visible all of a sudden?

MITCHELL: I’m more of a behind-the-camera person, so I had to grapple with that attention. Photographing Beyoncé definitely gave me more resources to extend to my circle of collaborators. I have a background in filmmaking, and often think of myself as basically a director. It’s not just capturing the images, but also creating a recipe, and bringing together the right team and things to make the image happen. This visibility has helped me form teams that I really want to keep around, and it’s given me more tools to bring into the rest of my practice.

SHERALD: People often ask me if painting Michelle changed my work. And I tell them, Michelle is an extraordinary American and an extraordinary Black woman—as are many of the people in my paintings.
The only difference is that she’s well-known.

I received some criticism because so many people had their own vision of Michelle. I didn’t respond to most of it, but one woman emailed me, saying, “I really wished that you had painted her brown.” I felt snarky and replied, “when you become first lady, you can pick who you want to paint you. But Michelle Obama picked me.”

MITCHELL: Right, we’re still bringing our signature styles and our voices: these commissions are one part of a larger body of work. When I photographed Beyoncé, I decided to photograph her using the same techniques I would with any of my close friends.

SHERALD: For me, the visibility took some getting used to. It’s easier living in New York than it was in Baltimore. Just the other day, my partner commented that it’s really nice to be able to go to the grocery store and not be stopped five times. It did impact our day at times. . . . A lot of people wanted to take a picture or say hi.

All in all, it’s been a blessing. And it’s come with numerous opportunities. I especially adore the opportunity to be a role model for young kids who want to be an artist. Young Amy was guided by the art of white men. That’s fine. I had the vision, and I was born to do this, regardless of whether or not I saw anybody like me painting. I’m happy that things will be different for the next generation. I’m really embracing that part of my role.

MITCHELL: Yeah, I’ve been hoping to take that magazine world visibility and shift it toward other parts of my work: experiencing a packed opening for my show at ICP was amazing.

Do you make distinctions between commercial work you’ve done for magazines and your artwork?

SHERALD: It depends. I don’t think of my painting of Breonna Taylor as an art piece. It’s not a piece of fine art that’s dealing with conversations about figuration and composition: it’s something that I made to codify this historical moment, and in honor of all the lives that were lost—specifically, the Black women we lost to police brutality. It belongs in a history museum as much as it does an art museum.

MITCHELL: Actually, I do think that there are conversations to be had about your formal decisions. The blue in that painting elicits so many emotions.

SHERALD: It’s really the commodification of the Breonna Taylor painting that made me consider taking it away from the art world. In the end, it was jointly acquired by the National Museum of African American History and Culture and the Speed Art Museum in Louisville.

What about you, are you drawing distinctions?

MITCHELL: I actually started working in the editorial and commercial field first. I didn’t go to art school, and [New York University] didn’t really put an emphasis on museums or the art world. I just focused on making images that I wanted to make. But who’s to say that those images can’t operate in different contexts? When I see a large print, it has a different impact than when I see it in a magazine. Those distinctions are more specific to photography than painting.

Tell me about your new work.

SHERALD: I always feel like it’s hard to talk about my work right after I finish it. But I named [my latest Hauser & Wirth] show “The Great American Fact,” after a nineteenth-century essay by a Black educator named Anna Julia Cooper. As American as apple pie [2020] is an image of a Black couple in front of a house in the suburbs with a white picket fence. They’re hanging out near their convertible. The woman has on a Barbie T-shirt, a pink skirt, doorknocker earrings, and these rainbow flamingo sunglasses. The gentleman has on a denim jacket, a white T-shirt, khaki pants, and Chuck Taylors.

When I first saw the model I used, I knew immediately that I wanted her to be a Barbie and with her Ken: I wanted to replace that iconic imagerwy with something else. It’s not a teaching moment, it’s a more covert statement about leisure and pleasure. It’s a very American moment, something every child needs to see. That epic banality you mentioned is a perfect way to describe it.

MITCHELL: I appreciate all the thought you put into their outfits. Clothing choices are definitely a big part of both our bodies of work.

SHERALD: Sometimes I lie in bed at night just looking at clothes for my paintings, whether on eBay or the runway.

MITCHELL: Black folks definitely understand the importance of wearing our finest clothes to any photo shoot. I think about that rich understanding of fashion a lot.

SHERALD: It was really photography that brought me into portraiture, more so than painting. Deborah Willis’s book The Black Female Body: A Photographic History [2002], and later the documentary Through a Lens Darkly: Black Photographers and the Emergence of a People [2014], reaffirmed everything that I was thinking and doing. I don’t see images like mine coming from the lineage of European painting: when the camera was invented, we eventually were able to become authors of our own narratives and, like you said, show up all dressed up. We got to say, “this is how I want to be represented and this is how I want to be seen.”

Tell me about your new work too!

MITCHELL: Every year, the Gordon Parks Foundation selects two fellows to have exhibitions at their gallery Upstate. This time they chose me and [painter] Nina Chanel Abney. My show i

Mikael B’s Latest Exhibition in Los Angeles Presents Genre-Bending Works

Fri, 07 May 2021 16:00:18 +0200

Los Angeles is home to a wide variety of art, welcoming the conventional and the unconventional alike. A city whose culture seeks out the new and exciting in every field, L.A. is the perfect place for Danish urban contemporary artist Mikael B’s newest solo exhibition, “Flow State.” This genre-bending collection of works, on display at Maddox Gallery, simultaneously explores, juxtaposes, and reconciles the three worlds of abstract expressionism, geometric abstraction, and surrealism in Mikael’s signature idiom employing chiefly spray paint on canvas.

At the May 1 opening reception, avid fans and gallery enthusiasts gathered—in respectfully distanced groups—at the West Hollywood space to be among the first to witness the display of this cohesive collection. Viewers entering the space were engulfed in the world of Flow State, the classic white-cube gallery having been transformed by walls coated in vinyl with a 3D effect. In Mikael’s futuristic abstract vision, the dark depth of the walls produced a striking contrast with the brightness of his artworks. Colors and geometric shapes flow organically into one another, not so much interrupted by the space between the works but rather complemented by it, echoing the mental and physical process behind the creation and the experience of art.

In taking creative control of every available surface, Mikael brings three years of preparation and experimentation to life, creating an undeniably commanding presence. From the vibrant geometric shapes on one side to the shimmering abstract creations on the other, there is always something to draw your eye.

Swing Symphony (foreground) is the first free-standing non-geometric bronze sculpture from Mikael B, with a weight of more than 400 pounds.

At the very front of the space sits his first freestanding nongeometric bronze sculpture, which, at more than 400 pounds, is a heroic feat. It’s no surprise that his first foray in this medium is so large a work, considering his ambition and the show’s mission. An artist with one foot in the contemporary art world and the other in the world of graffiti, Mikael describes the exhibition as “an experiment with the tangible and intangible world. It’s a mental state of complete absorption in what one does, how the pieces were created and how the pieces are to be looked at. ‘Flow State’ revolves entirely around a transformation in one’s sense of time.”

Flow has always played a huge part in Mikael B’s work. He is an artist who embodies flexibility and adaptability, sometimes creating from a clear plan and sometimes letting the art take him wherever it may, but always aware of the state of mind required to create. The secret to Mikael B’s creative prowess lies in his determination never to be too comfortable. By switching up his process, influences, and environment, while staying true to his own unique style, Mikael remains in a constant state of reinvention and experimentation: a flow state.

“‘Flow State’ revolves entirely around a transformation in one’s sense of time,” Mikael B said. The show will be open to the public until May 31 at Maddox Gallery in Los Angeles and is accessible as a digital exhibition.

This mental state birthed the works displayed on the walls of Maddox Gallery, all of which demonstrate Mikael B’s commitment to creating outside the boundaries of conventional contemporary art or graffiti. As a self-described outsider, Mikael B is constantly breaking through barriers, operating between genres and carving his own path. In this collection we see the outsider identity in practice, inviting us to be in that liminal space with him.

Flow State is an immersive Los Angeles experience, but just as Mikael is not limited to a single genre, process, or style, partaking in the pleasure of the exhibition is not limited to the physical confines of the West Hollywood gallery. From now until May 31, people all over the world can view the work online. Take the opportunity to enter Mikael B’s “Flow State” this month. It offers an exciting and surprisingly serene respite from the stresses of the last year, with safe viewing options whether you visit the gallery or view it online.

Follow Mikael B on Instagram and Facebook. Works available to purchase can be found here.

Interpol Releases Art-Theft App, Frank Gehry’s Philadelphia Museum of Art Renovation is Done, and More: Morning Links from May 7, 2021

Fri, 07 May 2021 15:52:35 +0200

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The Headlines

INTERPOL, THE INTERNATIONAL CRIMINAL POLICE ORGANIZATION, has gone into the app business. The group’s new ID-Art app lets users upload photographs of artworks, which are then checked against its database of stolen pieces via image-recognition technology, Forbes reports. (Sounds like a fun way to kill some time at an art fair.) If there’s a match, a pop-up apparently lets you notify the authorities. This things has some serious functionality: It can also be used to create a private inventory of work (to make reporting easier in the event of theft), and it can be used to help highlight at-risk heritage sites. Interpol said that, during the app’s testing phase, Italian Carabinieri used it to identify two stolen statues that were available for sale online.

A HOT TREND: ARTWORKS BEING DESTROYED as part of various NFT schemes. Reuters reports that the British street artist Nathan Murdoch recently painted a giant mural, took a photo of it, then covered it with paint. His plan: sell it as a print (on eBay) and as an NFT. (The print seems like a bit of a hedge, but never mind.) A few days ago, the crypto king Brock Pierce also burned a Domingo Zapata painting (with the permission of the artist), making a video that will become an NFT. (Page Six has the full story, and an image of the fire.) And then there was the bizarre effort to sell an NFT of a Basquiat drawing with the buyer given the (almost certainly illegal) invitation to destroy it. The artist’s estate foiled that. These seem like signs of a healthy culture.

The Digest

After four years of construction, Frank Gehry’s renovation and expansion of the Philadelphia Museum of Art opens to the pubic today. [Designboom]

Emergency grants of $1,000 are being offered to New York City–based artists with disabilities by the New York Foundation for the Arts. [The New York Times]

And New York City is creating a $25 million program to commission artists to create works throughout the five boroughs. The City Artist Corps, as it is being called, aims to generate 1,500 jobs. [The New York Times]

It’s a big moment for the artist and musician Lonnie Holley, who has two shows in the Hamptons, and who just joined the powerhouse Blum & Poe gallery. [The New York Times]

Artist Adriana Varejão, who currently has a show of her sumptuous, and sometimes discomforting, paintings at Gagosian in New York, discussed her work, meat, and her Oscar Niemeyer–designed home in Rio de Janeiro in a new interview. [Wallpaper]

A new exhibition about Napoleon has gone on view in a museum that is part of the Waterloo Memorial in Belgium, and it includes the bathtub he used in exile on Saint Helena “for between an hour and an hour-and-a-half” each day, according to an organizer. Wednesday was the 200th anniversary of the French emperor’s death. [AFP/ArtDaily]

The Kicker

SOME PEOPLE THINK IT WAS A BAD IDEA for the town of Noto, Japan, to spend about $274,000 in pandemic stimulus on a giant squid sculpture, with the aim of attracting tourists and highlighting its local fishing industry, Reuters reports. The ARTnews take: the sculpture is captivating, squid is delicious, and given the amount of press this faux controversy has generated, Noto is now on the map!

Thank you for reading. We’ll see you on Monday.

I Don't Think Instagram is Good For Artists

Fri, 07 May 2021 15:47:06 +0200

I can relate to all the points UK illustrator Holly Exley said about using Instagram as an artist.

Watch this and leave a comment on her Youtube page to let us know what you think.

Exclusive Mixtape: Platida

Fri, 07 May 2021 15:00:00 +0200

Emerging artist Platida greets the weekend with her meandering mixtape exploring the waves of emotions encountered during the …

Featured Artist Richard S. Johnson

Fri, 07 May 2021 13:00:51 +0200

Artist Richard S. Johnson shares a collection of dynamic figurative paintings filled with energy, light and movement. Visit his website to view more of his portfolio.

“Arise” oil, 48″ x 36″

I was born in Chicago to an artistic family. My uncle Claude was an illustrator during the golden age of illustration and I was fascinated by his work.

“Capture” oil, 48″ x 48″

My earliest reminiscences are of pouring through Charles Dana Gibson, N.C. Wyeth and John Singer Sargent books on rainy afternoons. While still in grade school, I won a scholarship to the Art Institute of Chicago where I got to see all of their collection of Sargent paintings and really study them. I later attended the American Academy of Art. Upon graduation I began a career as an illustrator.

“Inner Journey” oil, 36″ x 24″

Being an illustrator is great training for an artist. You need to master your skills and learn how to make decisions effectively because you are on a deadline and every illustration has to work.

“Golden Dreams” oil, 36″ x 18″

In the late nineties, the illustration world was changing—everything moved online. This forced me to change as well. I had to figure out who I was as an artist and what I would do next.

“Next to Me” oil, 36″ x 18″

I have always loved the human figure. The ability to not only have the skill to render the figure accurately but to be able to tell a story within that painting is my goal when painting. This is what made the artists I admired so powerful. Gibson could explain a woman’s whole attitude by the way she waved her hand or tilted her head. Sargent opened a whole world of information about the people he painted, their standing in society, their personality, their world view. It was in the eyes of their subjects and the way that they stood. It is not enough to be accurate. You must capture what is real in the people you paint.

“We All Fall Down” oil, 48″ x 48″

I have painted many things from still lifes to landscapes to seascapes, but I am always drawn back to the human figure. People are so fascinating to me. I want my audience to have a conversation with me and say, “Yes, that is how youth feels.” or “That is just how sunlight flows over the skin” or “I can just imagine what she is thinking.”

“Joy” oil, 36″ x 48″

My most current paintings are of dancers. I love their physicality and how they convey emotion through their movements.

“Touching Ground” oil, 48″ x 48″

During this season of Covid, I especially find them to be energizing and stimulating. I deeply connect with their desire to communicate using their talents.

“Summer Gardner” oil, 24″ x 36″

Over the years my style has become looser and more abstract as I attempt to hear what my subject matter is saying to me. I try not to impose an idea onto the image, but to let the image speak for itself. Many times, I am surprised by what other people “hear” in my paintings. It delights me that I could give a voice to my paintings that reaches beyond me.

Artist Richard S. Johnson invites you to follow him on Facebook.

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The post Featured Artist Richard S. Johnson appeared first on Artsy Shark.

I haven’t slept for days

Fri, 07 May 2021 13:00:00 +0200

A KALTBLUT exclusive. Photography by Laura Meijueiro. Model is Marta Toba. Stylist is Miriam Otero. Make up by …

Photographer Spotlight: Rochelle Marie Adam

Fri, 07 May 2021 11:34:02 +0200

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Q&A with the Artists

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What are the major themes you pursue in your work?

How did you first get interested in your medium and what draws you to it specifically?

How has your style and practice changed over the years?

Can you walk us through your process? How long do you spend on one work? How do you know when it’s finished?

What was your process in developing the wallpaper image for the Dallas Virtual Editions?

What is the best advice given to you as an artist?

Essential Books: 12 Illuminating Artist’s Memoirs

The Best Student and Beginner Oil Paints for Getting to Know the Medium

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With a Focus on Artist Collectives, Tate Names Turner Prize Shortlist

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Rarely Seen Catherine de’ Medici Portrait to Go On View in London

Piece Together the Geography of the Earth and Moon in Infinite Combinations with Nervous System’s Jigsaw Puzzles

After a Year of Isolation, Frieze New York Strikes Notes of Normalcy as Uncertainty Remains

Street Art in the Age of Basquiat: Rammellzee is Not a Name, But an Equation

AnR Loves: Pilot’s Varsity Disposable Fountain Pen

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NOSEBLEED

Mural Arts Philadelphia and Mural Arts Institute Present Arts + Environmental Justice Symposium

Spirits Welcome: Beverly Buchanan at Andrew Edlin

Seen and Overheard at Frieze New York

Martin Across Spring/Summer 2021

An artist’s guide to writing successful applications

Where to find opportunities?

Make a plan

Research

Putting pen to paper

Submit clear and considered images

What next?

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Karl Wirsum, Hairy Who Artist with Eccentric Style, Has Died at 81

Eric Nash’s “All Along The Way” at KP Projects.Currently on view...

Eric Nash’s “All Along The Way” at KP Projects.

These Are the Best Spray Fixatives to Stabilize Your Chalk and Charcoal Drawings

Discarded Technology and Branded Trash Are Stacked into Dystopian Structures in Alvaro Naddeo’s Paintings

Focus on: Alex Terrón

The Epic Banal

Mikael B’s Latest Exhibition in Los Angeles Presents Genre-Bending Works

Interpol Releases Art-Theft App, Frank Gehry’s Philadelphia Museum of Art Renovation is Done, and More: Morning Links from May 7, 2021

The Headlines

The Digest

The Kicker

I Don't Think Instagram is Good For Artists

Tags:

Exclusive Mixtape: Platida

Featured Artist Richard S. Johnson

Artist Richard S. Johnson shares a collection of dynamic figurative paintings filled with energy, light and movement. Visit his website to view more of his portfolio.

Want to stay current on cutting edge business articles from Artsy Shark, plus artist features, and an invitation to the next Call for Artists? Subscribe to our twice-monthly Updates, and get a free e-book on Where to Sell Art Online right now!

I haven’t slept for days

Photographer Spotlight: Rochelle Marie Adam