Art news

July 2021 Review Roundup

Sun, 01 Aug 2021 10:14:08 +0200

Below are the artbooks and supplies featured in March 2021.

Books

Product reviews

Online courses

Youtube videos

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It’s Okay Not to Be Okay, and It Always Has Been. We Get It Better Now.

Sun, 01 Aug 2021 01:39:49 +0200

You don’t need to be an empath to feel the collective weight of turmoil from the recent past right up to today. Life is always stressful; lately, the dial is on full blast for too long. You know the reasons why and that there are heated disagreements on virtually each of them. Today, it’s easier […]

The post It’s Okay Not to Be Okay, and It Always Has Been. We Get It Better Now. appeared first on Art Marketing News | Prosperous Ideas for Artists.

How do your recent sales compare to other artists?

Sat, 31 Jul 2021 22:17:38 +0200

To view results of the survey, click here.

The post How do your recent sales compare to other artists? appeared first on RedDotBlog.

Eye Candy for Today: Whistler etching, Fumette

Sat, 31 Jul 2021 21:08:04 +0200

Fumette, James Abbott McNeill Whistler, etching, roughly 6 x 4″ (16 x 11 cm)

Link is to zoomable version on Google Art Project, original of this version of the print is in the Smithsonian’s Freer Gallery.

You can see other versions of the print in the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Art Institute of Chicago.

In this portrayal of his mistress Heloise — who was known as “Fumette” because of her temper — Whistler has brought his considerable etching skills to a study of value contrasts, darks against lights and lights against darks in her clothing and in the framing of her face by her dark hair.

I particularly love how loose and casual his hatching appears in the lower areas of the skirt.

Whistler created a number of etchings of Fumette, some of which you can also see on the site of the Freer Gallery.

Perfect Your Pottery With the Best Tool Sets for Ceramics

Sat, 31 Jul 2021 17:57:32 +0200

Pottery making requires more than just a wheel and a block of clay. To shape your vessels, imprint them with creative etched designs, and trim rims so they’re perfectly even, you’re going to need some tools. The most commonly used implements in ceramics are ribbon tools, which are used to cut away clay; ribs, for perfecting your pot’s shape; needle tools, for piercing and etching; and molding tools, which come with a range of head shapes to create a variety of contours. Whether you’re looking for implements of one particular type or are in the market for a fuller array of tools that includes extras like sponges and an apron, we’ve got you covered. Browse our roundup of the best sets below.

Achieve Amazing Feats of Clay With the Best Needle Tools for Ceramics

Sat, 31 Jul 2021 17:38:46 +0200

Necessary for etching, trimming, cutting, incising, scoring, and piercing clay, a needle tool is a must-have for any ceramicist—professional or recreational, beginner or advanced. Needle tools come in many forms. If you want to reduce hand strain, look for a product with a rubber grip, or if you want a more traditional model, go with an all-steel option or a tool with a wooden handle. Let us help you make a good choice: Browse our roundup of the best needle tools below.

Add Luster to Your Handknits With the Best Silk and Silk-Blend Yarns

Sat, 31 Jul 2021 17:26:50 +0200

Silk is a coveted fabric for its smooth, luxurious feel. Unfortunately, it can be a difficult material to work with because of its tendency to slip and its lack of give. For those reasons, many yarns that include silk are blended with more forgiving fibers like wool. With the right combination, a silk-blend yarn can provide a perfect marriage between the lustrous sheen and drape of silk and the elasticity of another material. Our picks below will help you find the best silk-blend yarn for your project, be it knitting, crocheting, weaving, felting, or something else entirely.

Get a Grip With the Best Needle-Nose Pliers

Sat, 31 Jul 2021 16:20:55 +0200

For many artists and hobbyists, there comes a time when a project demands close-in work with difficult-to-manage materials. Manipulating jewelry wire, for example, or monofilament line by hand can be frustratingly hard to do. That’s when having a pair of needle-nose pliers (also called long-nose pliers) becomes essential. As the name implies, this tool tapers to a fine point, allowing you to firmly grab stuff that would otherwise be inaccessible. But how to choose one that’s right for you? You’ll find the answer below in our top five picks of the best needle-nose pliers out there.

Artful Weekend July 31-August 1

Sat, 31 Jul 2021 16:03:38 +0200

Welcome to Artful Weekend, our guide to fun and interesting ways to enjoy art in person or virtually.

This weekend: July shows at the League; East Baltimore in photos at the Smithsonian; Joy in Convergence at Studio Gallery; and We Can’t Predict Tomorrow at Arlington Arts Center.

July 2021 Open Exhibit

“Merlion and Cub,” by Veronica Barker-Barzel, is among the Honorable Mention recipients in our July Open Exhibit.

Our July Open Exhibit, juried by painter and printmaker Toni-Lee Sangastiano, is now on view! Open exhibits are a great way to view the breath of mediums and styles of our member artists. This month’s show features four works of printmaking: John Gosling’s pastoral linocut Shenandoah Mountain, Bath County, Virginia; David Mann’s victual spread etched in Milk and Honey; Bridget Murphy’s dessert landscape etching Pool View, Carefree, AZ; and Veronica Barker-Barzel’s whimsical print Merlion and Cub (the latter are among this months honorable mentions). Also on view are two particularly unique sculptural pieces: David Alfuth’s Cabinet of Curiosity No. 14 overflows with, well, curiosities—in interesting shapes and forms; and Brian Kirk’s welded steel Beetle, with bright red dots and requisite bug-eyed gaze, is an absolute charmer. See it in-person in the Gallery, through Sunday, August 8, or view it online.

Yasmin Bussiere: Eastern Light

“Origins” by Yasmin Bussiere; mixed media

Mixed media artist Yasmin Bussiere works with metallic paints, pens, acrylics and oil pastels to fuse grandiose landscapes with spiritual reflections. Eastern Light, her solo exhibit, celebrates the beauty of the Central Asian landscape and is inspired by her memories living and traveling across the continent. Her work is organic, instinctive and transportive. Listen to Bussiere speak about her show here. Read more about her and Eastern Light here.

Joan Clark Netherwood, Ribbon-cutting for section eight houses on Duncan Street, renovated through HUD. Butchers Hill., 1979, gelatin silver print.

In 1976, to celebrate the bicentennial of the country’s founding, the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) launched a multi-year program of photography surveys in communities across the United States to capture a visual record of a changing nation. Of the more than 70 projects funded by the NEA, the East Baltimore Survey was unique for having been conceived, led and carried out by women photographers—Elinor Cahn, Joan Clark Netherwood and Linda Rich, who photographed a cross-section of its residences and businesses, celebrating its traditions while also acknowledging its many challenges. Their photos comprise Welcome Home: A Portrait of East Baltimore 1975-1980; on view through January 12, 2022 at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, 8th and G Streets, NW.

Joy in Convergence

Collage of works from Joy in Convergence, clockwise from top left: Gary Anthes, Jennifer Duncan, Bob Burgess, Gordon Binder, Langley Spurlock, Sally Kauffman

Studio Gallery presents Joy in Convergence, a group exhibit that reflects on the challenges of the past year with an optimistic and hopeful eye to the future. It features works by 26 area artists in an array of mediums including paintings, photography, and sculpture. View it online, or at Studio Gallery through August 14; 2108 R Street, NW

We Can’t Predict Tomorrow

Bahar Yürükoğlu, still from “IYKYK”, 2021

We Can’t Predict Tomorrow, at Arlington Arts Center, is a hopeful glimpse into the unexpected ways nine artists approached the relentless tumult of the COVID-19 global pandemic. In sculpture, photography, installation, drawing, and painting, the works reveal themes that have taken on a heightened urgency under the duress of the prolonged quarantine and isolation in the U.S.: issues of social justice, climate change, and the intense longing for sanctuary, community, and shared experiences; on view through August 28, 3550 Wilson Boulevard, Arlington, VA.

Enjoy the weekend!

The post Artful Weekend July 31-August 1 appeared first on The Art League.

Book Review: Affinity Photo Workbook

Sat, 31 Jul 2021 10:18:43 +0200

This is an excellent book for learning the ins and outs of Affinity Photo in great detail. The book is packed with step-by-step tutorials that you can follow along. You'll learn about the different tools and what they can do. Learning by doing is just easier and more enjoyable compared to scrolling through the Affinity help and technical manual.

The last few pages are perforated pages with keyboard shortcuts. You can remove those pages and stick them nearby for reference.

This book is quite pricey at US $49.99 but it's worth the money for the content, and it's also worth supporting the company Serif who is the publisher of the book simply because they are giving Adobe competition.

This book was published in 2017 but is still relevant today because the user interface and tools haven't changed significantly. If you want a book that's more recently, check out Affinity Photo Manual I and Affinity Photo Manual II both published in 2020 and authored by Frank Walters.

Affinity Photo Workbook is available at Amazon (US | CA | UK | DE | FR | IT | ES | JP | CN) and Book Depository

Visit Amazon to check out more reviews.

If you buy from the links, I get a little commission that helps me get more books to feature.

Required Reading

Sat, 31 Jul 2021 06:07:00 +0200

This survivor of the mass shooting at Stoneman Douglas High School says his own father has been indoctrinated by QAnon conspiracies about the tragedy. David Gilbert corroborated the story, first posted on a Reddit channel for family members and friends of QAnon supporters. It’s heartbreaking:

[…] Bill also had to deal with his father’s daily accusations that the shooting was a hoax and that the shooter, Bill, and all his classmates were paid pawns in a grand conspiracy orchestrated by some shadowy force.
Bill had worked hard to get over his survivor’s guilt after the shooting, but for the past five months, his own father has been triggering it all over again.
“He’ll say stuff like this straight to my face whenever he’s drinking: ‘You’re a real piece of work to be able to sit here and act like nothing ever happened if it wasn’t a hoax. Shame on you for being part of it and putting your family through it too,” Bill said in an anonymous post on Reddit last week.

Madison Moore’s Atlantic essay on the pandemic’s influence on queer sex lives is worth a read:

Part of the reason queer sex thrives online is because of the internet’s covert nature. Prior to the web’s easy anonymity, queer people had to seek sly ways to court sex in front of other people without being detected. The hanky code of the ’70s and ’80s, an elaborate system of discreet communication wherein people put different colored hankerchiefs in their right or left pockets to indicate sexual interests, allowed queer people to speak about kink in plain sight without words. Craigslist, which most people know as a place to find an apartment or a piece of furniture, was for many queer people a vibrant place to find sex before the Fight Online Sex Trafficking and Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Acts of 2018. The list of ways to hook up goes on: sultry personal ads in the back pages of gay publications such as XY and Têtu, dating sites such as Grindr, and now, the Zoom sex parties of the coronavirus era.

For the Los Angeles Times, Anh Do delved into the history of anti-Asian racism in California, particularly a horrifying arson in Antioch’s Chinatown, which decimated the community of immigrants (many of whom had already been driven out of town by racist threats). The fires left behind a secret system of tunnels, built by Chinatown residents to allow movement in spite of laws that prohibited Chinese folks from walking outside after sundown. It’s a ghastly history, for which the City Council and recently appointed mayor have now apologized:

When the Palace Hotel was demolished in 1926 to make way for a new theater, a section of the Chinese tunnels was uncovered, according to the [Antioch Historical Society].
The tunnel remnants, in the basements of Reign and other downtown businesses, including a cafe, are a reminder of the hard lives that Chinese immigrants led long ago.
“Customers are drinking coffee and tea in the same room where people hid from their fellow residents. Imagine that,” said May Hong, a Chinese American secretary from San Jose who visited Antioch after reading about the city’s apology online. “When I told my relatives about the earlier discrimination, they were grateful to hear that public leaders are taking steps to say sorry.”

Simone Biles stepped back from the women’s team competition at the 2020 Olympics to preserve her mental health, and many are commending her for considering her best interests in the face of extreme pressure:

“I think it’s high time that athletes start putting their physical and mental health ahead of the sort of arbitrary ideas of national greatness,” said Faye Linda Wachs, professor of sociology at California State Polytechnic University.
Many people consider it an “honor to represent your country” in the Olympics, Wachs said, but athletes are people who have earned their achievements and have the right to withdraw from competition like any worker, especially when the safety risks are high.

Luciana Alvarado, the first gymnast to represent Costa Rica at the Olympics, ended her performance with a nod to the Black Lives Matter movement, raising her fist and taking a knee.

Read about the problem with carbon offsets (and how they’re going up in smoke), explained by Dharna Noor for Gizmodo:

Offset projects allow polluting corporations to purchase credits for carbon sequestered by those projects so that corporations can continue polluting. In the U.S., the majority of offsets are based on reforestation. All kinds of highly polluting businesses, from cryptocurrency businesses to energy giants, favor these schemes. Yet the issues with these forest offset programs are manifold. Globally, projects have displaced Indigenous populations who use forests, to make space to plant trees. They also do not undo pollution and can, in fact, lead to increased emissions.
California began its forest offsets program in 2013 and it now constitutes a major part the state’s strategy for reducing climate pollution. Yet an April report from CarbonPlan, ProPublica, and MIT Technology Review found that because of crucial mathematical errors in accounting, the scheme has actually increased greenhouse gas emissions. The authors estimate that nearly 30% of the offsets in the program are overvalued for the amount of carbon they sequester.
Wildfires take that problem from bad to worse. When they burn, trees release all the carbon they’ve removed from the atmosphere over their lifetimes.

A study by the Urban Institute posits that the US poverty rate will be cut nearly in half as a result of increased government aid during the pandemic. The New York Times breaks it down:

While poverty has fallen most among children, its retreat is remarkably broad: It has dropped among Americans who are white, Black, Latino and Asian, and among Americans of every age group and residents of every state.
[…] The Biden administration has started making monthly payments to most families with children through an expansion of the child tax credit. Democrats want to make the yearlong effort permanent, which would reduce child poverty on a continuing basis by giving their families an income guarantee.

For the Rolling Stone, EJ Dickson interviewed dommes contributing to global vaccination efforts by requiring their subs to be vaccinated:

[…] the dommes I spoke with didn’t see instituting vaccine requirements as a political issue at all, or even an ethical one; rather, they see it both as a self-protective measure (indeed, most sex workers are independent contractors, and thus risk having to pay exorbitant amounts for health care out-of-pocket if they get sick). It’s also a concrete way to measure subs’ devotion. “Someone who’s in service to us should respect our boundaries,” says Daddy An Li, a domme based in Los Angeles who requires proof of vaccination from subs. “Either you want to serve us and you respect us, or you don’t.”

Frito-Lay workers have been speaking out against horrifying conditions in their workplace and the consequences of speaking out against such a huge corporation:

EXCLUSIVE: Frito-Lay worker Brandon Ingram was severely electrocuted on the job, disabled and denied medical care.

Now Brandon, his wife, and children are being stalked and secretly filmed by company agents.

This is the most disturbing Frito-Lay story we’ve covered. pic.twitter.com/1bNixsckEt
— More Perfect Union (@MorePerfectUS) July 26, 2021

Garrett Bradley is set to direct a film adaptation of Octavia E. Butler’s Parable of the Sower, distributed by A24. Also, HBO has ordered a pilot script based on Butler’s Fledgling, written by Sonya Winton-Odamtten and Jonathan I. Kidd and to be executive produced by Issa Rae and JJ Abrams.
Paralympians will now receive equal pay to their Olympian counterparts.
Lastly, have you watched Lil Nas X’s “Industry Baby” today?

Required Reading is published every Saturday, and it is comprised of a short list of art-related links to long-form articles, videos, blog posts, or photo essays worth a second look.

Jon Pylypchuk’s Chorus of Loss

Sat, 31 Jul 2021 06:06:00 +0200

In 2020, as COVID-19 death tolls rose exponentially worldwide, Jon Pylypchuk faced a separate loss, the unexpected death of a close friend, unrelated to COVID. He responded by making ghosts. For several months Pylypchuk fashioned men’s briefs, ski masks, socks, and other clothing and fabric scraps into rudimentary faces (pareidolia, a recurring motif in his work) and cast them in bronze.

These “ghosts” are the subject of What have we missed, his seventh solo show at Friedrich Petzel Gallery. The sculptures inhabit the gallery’s Upper East Side location, mounted on white pedestals and walls. The installation, which allows breathing room between the artworks, and the converted townhouse location, cultivate a somber atmosphere that emphasizes the solitude inherent in mourning, the fact that both individual and collective grief are experienced as solitary.

Installation view, Jon Pylypchuk: What have we missed, Petzel, 2021 (courtesy the artist and Petzel, New York; photo: Jason Mandella)

Fittingly, each ghost is individual. Pylypchuk, whose first foray into bronze was in 2008, used the ghosts to experiment with the medium, resulting in a range of shapes, textures, and patinas, from elongated forms with the glossy finish of liquid mercury to stretched and disfigured undershirts with darkened copper surfaces, to gleaming chainmail or matte green. Over the course of several months he made dozens; in addition to those at Petzel, a handful are in a group show, The New Age of Bronze (June 27–August 21, 2021), at Fredric Snitzer Gallery in Miami, and others remain at his home just outside of Los Angeles.

The press release for What have we missed states, “The sculptures attempt to assure a memory does not fade, to make someone or something exist again in repeated representation.” By Pylypchuk’s own admission, death has pervaded his life; as a child he experienced the deaths of elderly relatives and anxiety about his parents’ mortality. Death has appeared in his art as an adversary, an inevitability, a creeping terror, and a promise. Deterioration is prefigured in the wood, glue, and fabric scraps that comprise much of his artwork.

In this context, the ghosts seem almost inevitable — a chorus of loss that spans a lifetime, and an echo of collective grief. Pylypchuk said by email, “My original thought was they were one individual but I have come to realize it was an individual but also all of us.”

Jon Pylypchuk’s ghost sculptures in the desert, Southern California (courtesy the artist and Petzel, New York; photo: Joshua White)

Pylypchuk’s decision to use bronze preceded his friend’s death — early in 2020 he had started a bronze edition and he had been contemplating the possibilities of the medium. The loss invokes its associations with commemoration, yet the ghosts refuse any facade of quietude. The original materials are twisted into expressions of anger, bafflement, supplication, or sorrow, sometimes comically, other times so viscerally that they’re startling.

In one, the contorted form takes on the appearance of a gargoyle with gaping eyeholes, its gnarled arms flailing, two twigs jutting out from its head like horns; green corrosion splotches stain its gray surface. Another resembles the talking trees in The Wizard of Oz, with a long, crooked nose that evokes the Wicked Witch of the West. A particularly plaintive work pairs two ghostly forms, both with a deep charcoal-gray patina, in a pieta (“Untitled (pieta),” 2020).

Jon Pylypchuk, “Untitled” (2020), bronze, 11 x 7 x 4.5 inches (courtesy the artist and Petzel, New York; photo: Jason Mandella)

Pylypchuk’s art has always been deeply engaged with the most painful parts of life, those that human beings tend to push aside or deny in order to get by. Encountering the ghosts in their sometimes funny, sometimes pitiful presence is something like experiencing the comedy of life and tragedy of death all at once. “I feel like the expressions were there,” he explained. “I just squeezed them out. The way the things were knit I think directed the ability to make the expressions without tearing or cutting. In some cases I did tear or cut them.” It was “hard for me to not emerge with my heart on my sleeve,” he added.

The ghosts’ vivid emotions are both a reflection of the anguish of loss and an assertion of their difference from us. This gap between identification and alienation parallels the sense of being simultaneously within and outside of oneself that can accompany the grieving process. Pylypchuk does little to anthropomorphize the ghosts. He lets viewers see themselves or loved ones in things that are often still recognizable; the most uncanny effect of the work may be identifying with a face and then seeing an empty ski mask or the frayed edges of a terrycloth towel.

Installation view, Jon Pylypchuk: What have we missed, Petzel, 2021 (courtesy the artist and Petzel, New York; photo: Jason Mandella)

Over the years, his ragtag animal and humanoid parade has reenacted all manner of human drama. Paradoxically, the nonhuman appearances that separate them from us also mirror our illusions and delusions about ourselves. For I Know I’ll Never Love This Way Again at Nino Mier Gallery in Los Angeles (May 15–June 19, 2021), another solo show of bronze sculptures this year, Pylypchuk used the medium to comment on mortality and the body’s degeneration through age and bad habits. The exhibition featured bronze versions of his humanoid cigarettes, originally made of found materials and poured concrete, some with light bulbs for eyes.

In 2021, the cigarettes were drinking and smoking, and wallowing in an emotional morass or making futile attempts at self-improvement — all against the backdrop of the year’s sociopolitical and health crises. In this case, the grandeur of bronze chafed against their rusted exteriors and the weight of rumpled bodies on stick legs — the weight of their mortality.

Jon Pylypchuk’s ghost sculptures in the desert, Southern California (courtesy the artist and Petzel, New York; photo: Joshua White)

In some ways, the ghosts share more with Pylypchuk’s 2008 bronze sculptures, in particular the epic, life-sized “Untitled (Bronze Elephants),” which I described at the time as “bear[ing] the crushing weight of immortality.” The artist stated, “Permanence was totally in my head — making my impermanent friend permanent. Or at least trying to.”

Before the exhibition Pylypchuk traveled to the Southern California desert with the ghosts, where photographer Joshua White documented them amid the indigenous flora and nestled in ramshackle structures and abandoned vans. The discrepancy between the illusion of life and the reality of the object that the gallery context underscores is diminished in the desert, where the ghosts converge with the natural world, their creatural character animated by the alien landscape. In nature, as in White’s photographs or even in Pylypchuk’s verdant backyard (where I saw them), what’s most evident is their strange and irreplaceable singularity.

In The Gift of Death (1992), Jacques Derrida, analyzing the work of other philosophers, writes: “Death is very much that which nobody else can undergo or confront in my place. My irreplaceability is therefore conferred, delivered, ‘given,’ one can say, by death.”

Jon Pylypchuk’s ghost sculptures in the desert, Southern California (courtesy the artist and Petzel, New York; photo: Joshua White)

Jon Pylypchuk: What have we missed continues at Friedrich Petzel Gallery (35 East 67th Street, Manhattan) through August 6.

An Asian Artist’s Isolation in New York

Sat, 31 Jul 2021 06:05:00 +0200

I first met Yuri Yuan in June 2018 at the opening of Alex Katz–Grass and Trees at Gray Warehouse in Chicago. I was there because I had written the catalogue essay and was invited to be in a conversation with Ivy Wilson about the work. The next time I talked to Yuan was this past spring on Zoom; she was one of a small group of MFA students at Columbia whose work I had been invited to critique. During our meeting, she told me she was going to have a gallery show of her paintings and I said I would go. This past week I went to see her debut exhibition, Yuri Yuan: River Flows in You at Alexander Berggruen (July 21–August 31, 2021).

Yuan is working her way through her inspirations, which include Vilhelm Hammershøi, Lois Dodd, Alex Katz, and Matthew Wong, all of whom I have written about. What struck me about the work I saw in the Zoom critique were the views she was depicting, which usually focused on an urban scene occupied by a single female figure who is turned away from the viewer. What I could not tell was the scale of the paintings and the physical presence of the paint. All of the painters she was thinking about had a sense of touch and an interest in light, but that does not come across digitally.

The 10 paintings in the exhibition can be divided into two groups. Four paintings, all measuring 14 by 11 inches, are dominated by a moody palette of blues. The other six paintings range in size, from the diptych “Night Lily” (2021), which has two stacked panels and measures 28 by 11 inches, to “Norwegian Wood” (2020), which measures 6 feet by nearly 7 feet.

Installation view, Yuri Yuan: A River Flows in You at Alexander Berggruen, New York

In “Norwegian Wood,” a black-haired woman in a belted brown trench coat with an orange-red scarf is in the immediate foreground, cropped by the painting’s bottom edge, her back facing the viewer. She is standing before a frozen pond surrounded by a high snow bank, which forms a kind of proscenium starting in the lower left corner and culminating in the upper right-hand corner. Light snow is rendered as soft daubs of paint across the surface.

The pond’s frozen surface is green; what we see are the reflections of upside-down trees in full foliage, depicted as thinly painted clouds of green with faint, vertical strokes suggesting tree trunks. Also extending down is the reflection of a young man wearing a black coat, with brown hair, his facial features undefined. That gap between the woman standing in wintry weather and the reflection imprisoned in the frozen green world of a dream could easily have toppled over into romantic melodrama, but it didn’t.

What does come across in the painting is Yuan’s sense of the isolation that is an inescapable feature of her daily life, which she simultaneously examines and holds at bay through the act of painting. It is interesting that she aligns herself with the emotional coolness of Dodd and Katz, while dealing with a loaded subject, which I would say is basic to an immigrant’s experience of America, beginning with a sense of extreme dislocation.

Yuri Yuan, “Puddle” (2021), oil on canvas, 48 x 36 inches

I think that sense of solitude was exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic and the lockdown imposed on New Yorkers, not to mention the implicit and explicit racism that became a big part of every Asian’s daily life in America, and the consequent apprehension that accompanied each excursion into the city. Yuan’s “A Train” (2021) is emblematic of the sense of necessary seclusion that permeated everyday life during past year.

In the painting we see part of a row of orange subway seats opposite us, the one directly across from us empty. Tucked in the curved, right-hand corner of the streaked gray window above the seat is the reflection of a young masked woman.

The painting’s composition establishes that we are seeing our own masked reflection in the window: a bodiless, largely featureless face. On the subway seat to the left of the empty one, beneath the reflection, we see part of a gray cloth bag or purse, cropped by the painting’s left edge. On the right is a vertical post with an elliptical opening for passengers to hold onto.

Yuri Yuan, “City of Trauma” (2021), oil on canvas, 30 x 40 inches

Ever since I moved to New York City in the mid-1970s, I have heard that Edward Hopper’s views are emblematic of the malaise of urban living, most likely because the Whitney Museum of American Art was bequeathed more than 3,000 works by his widow when she died in 1968. Hopper’s figures were white; they lived in a segregated world, traces of which are still with us.

In Hopper’s “Chop Suey” (1929), the four patrons in the Chinese restaurant are white. While Hopper depicts two women eating, which represents a societal change and a new freedom for women, particularly for those living in a city, we should also recognize that there are no Asians in this or any other Hopper painting; they are invisible in his visual world.

In “A Train,” Yuan gets to a moment of melancholy and vulnerability, a common Hopper theme, but her subject is a young, nondescript, anonymous Asian female. That strikes me as true to the artist’s everyday experience and therefore important for a whole host of reasons. The painting is understated, but it signals a significant shift in consciousness.

Yuri Yuan, Blue Series (2021), oil on board, 14 x 11 inches each

Yuan is part of a generation of emerging and mid-career Asian women artists that the art world has not yet recognized, as it has in the case of their white and, to a lesser extent, Black counterparts.

This is why I was also touched by group of four paintings done in saturated shades of blue, collectively titled Blue Series, as well as the larger, mostly blue paintings “City of Trauma” (2021) and “Night Lily” (2021). Yuan’s palette clearly alludes to the work of Matthew Wong, who committed suicide at the age of 35, after completing the work for his exhibition Matthew Wong: Blue at Karma (November 8, 2019–January 5, 2020), which I reviewed. Yuan’s embrace of another contemporary Chinese painter, who happened to have died young, underscores the particularities of a rich art history that is separate from American art and goes back at least as far as Yasuo Kuniyoshi (1889–1953), Yun Gee (1906–1963), and Isamu Noguchi (1904–1988).

The strongest of the four small paintings is “Blue Series: Avocado Plant” (2021). The subject is a homely avocado plant, the pit held by the mouth of a jar. A root grows down into the jar and green, leafy branch emerges out. They are considered novelty plants, as they are fairly easy to grow and take care of. You might call it an urban pastime. In picking this mundane subject, and bathing the plant in blue light, Yuan again gets to a moment of wistfulness. At the same time, the plant symbolizes persistence, which signifies Yuan’s own determination. A lot is going on in the artist’s work. In the best pieces, the merging of subject, paint, color, and light snaps into place; then the painting begins singing a sweetly mournful tune.

Yuri Yuan: River Flows in You continues at Alexander Berggruen (1018 Madison Avenue, 3rd Floor, Upper East Side, Manhattan) through August 31.

A Photographer Captures the Collective Fatigue of the Welfare State

Sat, 31 Jul 2021 06:04:00 +0200

It has been well over 30 years since Margaret Thatcher declared that society does not exist; that in fact, only individuals and their families do. Thatcher’s words, spoken in 1987, have since taken on a definitive, almost epochal, place in recent history (and appropriately so), as they neatly sum up the rationality of neoliberal governance which she, along with Ronald Reagan in the United States, was so critical in solidifying. By the mid-1980s, Thatcher’s Conservative government, deeply fearful of inflation, had instituted spending cuts to education, public housing, healthcare, and unemployment benefits, while at the same time dramatically lowering corporate and income tax rates. The welfare state was a destructive liability, they cautioned, and needed to be brought under budgetary control for the long-term prosperity of the country.

If people can no longer rely upon their government to support them in times of uncertainty and need, then what is to stop the disintegration of social solidarity and, in its place, the rise of a vicious war of an all-against-all mentality? The question of what “society” really meant anymore, if anything, became an ideological fight being waged by politicians. The effects of that fight being waged at all are what Paul Graham described in his self-published 1986 monograph Beyond Caring, which has now been reissued by MACK.

Paul Graham, “Father and Son, Stepney DHSS, East London, 1985” from Beyond Caring (MACK, 2021) (Courtesy the artist and MACK)

The photographs in Beyond Caring were taken between 1984 and ’85 as Graham, denied official permission to do so, visited dozens of social security and unemployment offices across Britain. With spending cuts to these services already in effect, what Graham saw was a welfare system straining to keep up with a dramatic increase in claims relative to its budgetary and infrastructural capacity. As Steven Cooper and Anne Hollows of the Welfare Benefits Resources Network state in the book’s original introductory text, which is reproduced here, the welfare system in Britain was established after World War II with a projection that it would provide assistance to around 600,000 people. By the time Graham visited these offices, over 10 million people were relying upon some form of welfare for their basic living needs.

It is unsurprising, then, that a persistent feature of Graham’s photographs is the way they describe the act of waiting as a common, and alienating, condition. In truth, waiting is all that seems to “happen” in the photographs, unsurprisingly so. The staff at these offices were paid little more than the amounts being paid to claimants, and the funds that were allocated by the Department of Health and Social Security (DHSS) to address the dysfunction amounted to little more than minor cosmetic repairs to the dilapidated facilities, leaving claimants with only the pretense of meaningful recourse.

Paul Graham, “Waiting Room, Poplar DHSS, East London, 1985” from Beyond Caring (MACK, 2021) (Courtesy the artist and MACK)

From the first image in the book’s sequence we see the recurring motifs of bodies slouched or contorted in pursuit of durable comfort; eyes staring blankly beyond the frame; minds that seem deliberately vacated. Though Cooper and Hollows note in the introduction that incidents of violence by claimants towards both the DHSS staff and fellow claimants rose sharply during this period, such events are absent from Graham’s photographs: they are less about drama than duration. In place of confrontation they show us collective fatigue.

As an exercise in photojournalism, Beyond Caring was and still is an oblique and suggestive work. Eschewing the dictates of social documentary, with its guiding principle that photography should bring awareness to the failings of a society so that they can be rectified (Lewis Hine being the paragon of this practice), Graham’s photographs refrain from directing blame or accusation: they expose no single bad actor, no abusive boss or petty tyrant. Instead, the emphasis is dispersed, the argument fragmentary; what is at issue is a systemic failing and the indignity it imposes upon individuals. This is not to say, of course, that such failings and injustices have no primary source — this was Thatcher’s Britain, after all. But Graham’s images provide a view of these cruelties packaged in a bureaucratic facade of cold indifference and, at times, plain absurdity.

Paul Graham, “Baby, DHSS Office, Birmingham, 1984” from Beyond Caring (MACK, 2021) (Courtesy the artist and MACK)

What exposition the book contains is in the introductory texts: the original, by Cooper and Hollows, followed by a 1986 one from Graham, and, in this new edition, a concluding one from him as well. In both he expresses that his intent was not to construct a polemic in the documentary style that was still practiced widely in Britain at that time, specifically in the context of magazine and print circulation. Graham, like other young British photographers, such as Martin Parr and Nick Waplington, made the uncommon decision to shoot in color, which was still considered the preserve of commercial and fashion photography and thus unsuitable for the gravity of social documentary.

Looking at these photographs today, it’s clear that the poetic effects specific to color film make Graham’s treatment of his subject matter so descriptively resonant. What is crucial in these photographs is that they capture the delirious and almost dystopian color palette of these facilities. The pinks and reds that saturate the benches, along with the bright blues, lemon yellows, and sickly fluorescent greens that pop from the walls and overhead lighting all seem to invoke a psychic atmosphere terribly at odds with the sobering misfortune they effectively stage. Design choices that were likely meant to soften the dullness of a bureaucratic exchange have, in these photographs, taken on the tone of a sardonic joke.

Paul Graham, “Waiting Room, Southwark DHSS, South London, 1984” from Beyond Caring (MACK, 2021) (Courtesy the artist and MACK)

The strain of wry humor that Graham weaves throughout the book works to great effect. Where other artists might have been relentlessly dour, he includes minor keys of farce and absurdity, as when, in the concluding image, an official poster states optimistically that plenty of jobs are available, and that one should not be deterred from trying to obtain employment. On the heels of the 31 prior images, which show varying degrees of malaise and frustration, the poster seems to sum up the situation rather astutely: from the standpoint of the Thatcher administration, this is how social services are supposed to work. Put differently, the breakdown of basic functionality of these services is a feature, not a bug, of new policy; they are meant to make access and usage more difficult, not less.

Although Graham has spoken of his desire to avoid outright polemic, a stance clear enough in the pictures, it’s difficult to look at this work today and not see the full force of condemnation being levied against a government’s deliberate abandonment of its citizens. With that anger simmering just below the surface, in part because it seems so obvious, Graham is able to describe the people in these offices not as archetypal victims of a state indifferent to their plight, but instead as individuals with great specificity who, in spite of their shared circumstance, seem totally apart from one another.

The book’s sequencing reinforces this as it so often follows the most dense and compact images with spaces that seem cavernously empty. In many cases, the people Graham photographs with his low-angled camera sit or stand as though the experience of time passing were all that was left to them. That they appear destined to pass that time alone, and without redress, underscores the precision with which Graham captured the magnitude of change that was unfolding, and which would signal the ever-greater precarity of social services in the decades to come. The legacy of this withering away of the state’s capacity to meaningfully address its citizens’ material needs can be felt most acutely right now, in each passing day, as the performative optimism of our political class seems fully counterbalanced by the collective realization that, when the next crisis arrives, we may not be able to count on those we have elected to help us.

Paul Graham, “Man Filling in Form, Dole Office, Liverpool, 1984” from Beyond Caring (MACK, 2021) (Courtesy the artist and MACK)

Beyond Caring by Paul Graham is published by MACK Books.

Together in Peace and Protest

Sat, 31 Jul 2021 06:03:00 +0200

LEXINGTON, Ky — Created during a year that most spent in relative isolation, the seven paintings in Dianna Settles: Olly Olly Oxen Free at Institute 193 (open through today) assert the importance of congregation and touch to our shared human existence. With one (physically) small exception, the works depict people interacting with each other, sometimes as a pair, but more often as a group: a gathering of friends in a living room, a handful of bathers at a Korean spa, a crowd of protesters clashing with police. Indeed, not all of the scenes Settles recreates are pleasant, but that seems to be the point: for better or worse, we are undeniably yoked in our collective experience of being human.

Settles paints not from life but from memory; her works are highly composed reconstructions of personal experiences, of which her own figure forms an integral part, her gaze frequently directed at the viewer. In “We must exist more and heavier // we are learning discipline everyday, bench pressing, jiu-jitsu training, training for our future study” (2021), she portrays seven people in a living room, casually seated on sofas or the floor, around herself and another person, interlocked in a jiu-jitsu hold on a lapis lazuli-colored mat with circular markings denoting the practice area. Two others stand outside the first-floor window, their arms resting lazily on the sill or propping up a bored visage, looking not at the wrestlers but at us. In fact, none of the characters in this scene seem to be focused on the action, reinforcing the idea that Settles is more interested in capturing the essence of a time and place than in the verity of a singular event.

Dianna Settles, “The warm and hot baths’ insistence on our porosity: confine your measure to the boundary of the sky (water is the only one who knows what has always been)” (2021), acrylic and colored pencil on panel, 32 x 48 inches (courtesy the artist and Institute 193)

Settles devotes her attention to both text and texture, using colored pencil to make painstakingly minute marks over the acrylic paint. In the aforementioned painting, one can easily read the logo on a shirt pocket, the spines of books stacked on the floor (for instance, Kaneko Fumiko’s The Prison Memoirs of a Japanese Woman), and the scrawled handwriting on a drawing on the back wall (“WE MUST ALL EXTEND TO EACH OTHER IN THIS GAME”). Faces and bodies are relatively flat, but the tattoos that adorn them are replicated in exquisite detail, as are the decorative elements on ceramic mugs and patterned fabrics. Such choices seem to play on the peculiar nature of nostalgia, in which we can easily and vividly recall specific items from our memories — a grandmother’s wingback chair or the cut-glass dish in which she kept hard candies — even as faces begin to fade and dates and places get jumbled and blurred.

In the vertically oriented “Deep stretching, deep pulling, deep sweating, deep breathing ( A feeling that at moments hinted at rivers running backwards )” (2021), Settles and a smaller cohort gather in the massage room of Jeju Spa, a traditional Korean bathhouse (jjimjilbang) outside of Atlanta, Georgia, where she currently lives. Clad in the spa’s cotton orange pajamas, the eight young adults lounge on citron-colored hemp mats surrounded by pink salt-stone walls; some sleep, others stretch; one stands and presses a foot into another’s back to give a massage. A monitor playing a Korean television show is reflected in a circular mirror on the wall.

Dianna Settles, “Deep stretching, deep pulling, deep sweating, deep breathing (A feeling that at moments hinted at rivers running backwards)” (2021), acrylic and colored pencil on panel, 32 x 24 inches (courtesy the artist and Institute 193)

A curious silence pervades all of the works: the figures are physically close, yet none engage in conversation, and two of the men actually direct their attention toward the viewers who exist outside of the painting. The focus is not the interior lives of any of the tattooed individuals, but the larger communal experience — a tableau of the social rituals of a particular demographic and place.

The orange hue of the pajamas is replicated in another vertical work of the same size — “Sometimes it feels like it is over and it’s not. Sometimes it feels like it has just begun and it’s over.” (2021) — only it is a prison uniform, worn by the artist while a police officer fills out an arrest report on a clipboard. Both jail and spa have their own intake rituals, including a specified wardrobe that marks one as part of the institution, if only temporarily. While the two entities are radically different in their functions, Settles suggests that both are sites of human interaction with processes that require us to play defined roles — be it guard, inmate, patron, or employee — that often divide us rather than emphasize our common humanity.

Dianna Settles, “Sometimes it feels like it is over and it’s not. Sometimes it feels like it has just begun and it’s over.” (2021), acrylic and colored pencil on panel with poplar, 32 x 24 inches (courtesy the artist and Institute 193)

Settles makes the comparison more forcibly with “Nothing is not borrowed & hunger doesn’t compromise together we made this place together we can leave it” (2021), the largest work in the show. The work combines two panels — one portraying her arrest at a protest and the other depicting a small delegation of women at Jeju Spa — in a single wood frame with pyrographed illustrations of flora native to Georgia. In the first panel, police physically overwhelm the protesters and use the force of their bodies to make arrests; in the second, pairs of women scrub each other’s naked bodies (seshin is the notoriously vigorous Korean exfoliating process). Physicality and the body permeate both peace and protest.

By juxtaposing these two scenes and surrounding them with images of plants and flowers — elements of the natural world that exist beyond human struggle — Settles contains them within a broader narrative of time and nature. However fresh and raw incidents of state oppression might feel, such scenes have played out again and again throughout history. But so, too, have instances of compassion and nurturing, and we have all been involved in each to some degree. By situating herself within these situations, Settles simultaneously gains distance from them and, with it, a complex and nuanced perspective.

Dianna Settles, “Nothing is not borrowed & hunger doesn’t compromise together we made this place together we can leave it” (2021), acrylic and colored pencil on panel with poplar, 44 x 76 inches (courtesy the artist and Institute 193)

Dianna Settles: Olly Olly Oxen Free continues at Institute 193 (193 North Limestone Street, Lexington, Kentucky) through July 31.

In Henry Taylor’s Paintings, the Past Bleeds Into the Present

Sat, 31 Jul 2021 06:02:00 +0200

SOUTHAMPTON — Disappeared, but a tiger showed up, later, Henry Taylor’s solo exhibition at Hauser & Wirth’s spacious two-story Hamptons gallery, features six history paintings (all 2018) and three sculptures. The large paintings, from his Jockeys and Caddies series, are based upon archival photographs of country clubs and horse races. Three are horizontal, three vertical, and each is between one and a half and three meters high or wide. Using diluted acrylics (and sometimes charcoal), Taylor paints in muted greens and browns, with some solid whites — luscious, cooling colors when you enter the white-walled gallery on a hot summer day. The faces of his subjects often are almost featureless. The backgrounds and foregrounds of landscapes are blurred, and brown paint drip down the canvas in thin lines. The caddies at the country clubs were required to wear white suits and green caps, which accounts for some of Taylor’s palette. With one exception, these paintings depict the social gatherings surrounding these sports, but not the actual activities of golf or horse racing.

One painting is based upon an 1893 photograph of a once-celebrated Black jockey, Anthony Hamilton, sitting on “Pickpocket,” in his green and white racing silks. Another shows Calvin Peete at the 1981 US Open. When he made his debut he was only the second Black golfer ever to play in the Masters. (Lee Elder was the first.) Before that time, the life shown here was, of course, strictly segregated. Black jockeys, who had dominated horse racing, disappeared by the early 1920s. According to the show’s press release, the Augusta National Gold Club in Georgia, which was exclusively white, traditionally had an unwritten rule requiring players to employ local caddies, all of them Black.

Installation view, Henry Taylor: Disappeared, but a tiger showed up, later, Hauser & Wirth Southampton, 2021 (© Henry Taylor. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth. Photo: Lance Brewer)

The exhibition title alludes to Tiger Woods. In 1997, he was the first person of African heritage to win a major golf tournament. He won at Augusta then and again in 2019. It’s revealing that the full name of one well-known caddie has been lost, a favorite caddie of a top golfer, Gene Sarazen, here shown in a photograph from 1936. The world of the excluded Black men who are shown in the photographs has mostly disappeared. And “that,” Taylor has said (quoted in the press release), “was enough reason for me to paint them.”

Edgar Degas and Théodore Géricault painted horses with their jockeys. Now, however, horse racing is not a major artistic subject. And what artist, apart from LeRoy Neiman, has portrayed golfers? Racial discrimination, however, is an essential subject to address, in art and beyond. Yet it’s difficult for a contemporary American history painter of any race or background, working from photographs, to deal with racial discrimination without falling into journalistic cliches, repeating what many of us already know all too well.

Henry Taylor, “THE LAST SUPPER” (2018), acrylic and charcoal on canvas, 66 x 125 1/4 x 1 1/2 inches (© Henry Taylor. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth. Photo: Ken Adlard)

Painting normally makes its subject present, showing what appears here and now even when that subject is visibly historical. But since the development of color photography, muted color and sepia tone have been used to depict the past, as has black and white film in modern cinema. By working from old photographs and employing his diluted browns and greens, Taylor adapts this technique: his paintings show the past as it bleeds through into the present, inflecting our current experience.

One remarkable painting, “HUSH NOW . . . you won,” depicts white golfer Ben Crenshaw in 1995 collapsing into the arms of his Black caddie, Carl Jackson, after winning the Masters Tournament. (These titles, which seem to vocalize the thoughts of the caddies, are listed on the gallery website but not on the checklist, almost as if they were privileged information.) And in “We was watching him, but they really was watching us,” a group of Black caddies surrounds Arnold Palmer. In both of these paintings, the Black men are visible (and, in the former, clearly valued), but they are in strictly subordinate, although essential, roles.

Henry Taylor, “HUSH NOW… you won…” (2018), acrylic on canvas, 88 x 66 x 1 1/2 inches (© Henry Taylor. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth. Photo: Ken Adlard)

With his chosen images, Taylor emphasizes that golf and horse racing, though exclusively activities for privileged white men, depended on the support of men who were almost invariably Black — and, in many cases, the racial hierarchy was a deliberate act of subordination by the white country clubs. The jockey and caddie, while close to the action, do not occupy center stage.

Although this world of segregation and exclusion has disappeared, its racial discrimination still casts an unmistakable shadow on the present. Taylor also underscores the unsettling sociopolitical associations of these sports, which remain the domain of white privilege despite the success of a handful of Black athletes.

The decision to hold the show at the gallery’s Hamptons location adds another sinister level to the bucolic scenes. For a present-day Hamptons audience, they reveal the barriers needed to sustain this American system of racial exclusion, which is all too clear in these paintings. Our present-day world of privileged leisure, like that shown in Taylor’s paintings, depends upon a (somewhat different) system of economic inequalities, which Tiger’s triumph has not abolished. Seeing Taylor’s paintings is a little like viewing Antoine Watteau’s fetes gallants as accompanied by a Marxist social history of the old regime that lays bare the support necessary to maintain this marvelous world of privilege. No girls or women there, either. But that’s another story.

Henry Taylor, “Untitled” (2018), acrylic on canvas, 66 x 88 x 1 1/2 inches (© Henry Taylor. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth. Photo: Ken Adlard)

Henry Taylor: Disappeared, but a tiger showed up, later continues at Hauser & Wirth Southampton (9 Main Street, Southampton, New York) through August 1.

The Feminist Power of Beauty

Sat, 31 Jul 2021 06:00:00 +0200

LOS ANGELES — I was recently on the East Coast for the first time in years, and I was stunned by the emerald landscape. Everywhere I looked, verdant trees towered, the likes of which simply do not exist where I live in Southern California. What Los Angeles has is the exoticism of desert plants, which defy imagination with their varied hues and surprising adaptations. Strong Blossoming Thing Forever, Sarah Ann Weber’s current exhibition at Anat Ebgi in Culver City, is a profusion of flora that evokes a coral reef on land, conjured in a color palette rich and tender, never blasting out its notes. The show includes works in paint and colored pencil, on either panel or paper. Female figures appear among the vegetation, featureless nudes whose empty forms are either blank or filled with leaves, vines, and flowers.

Weber’s floral landscape work emerged for the first time in 2017, at the now-closed Club Pro. At the time I was arrested by the energy in her packed, jungle-like overgrowths, more phantasmagoric than real. While you will not find any of Weber’s flowers in a field guide, she tells me they are inspired by frequent hikes around Los Angeles. Growing up in Chicago, she developed a love for the landscape by visiting the Fullersburg Woods with her family, where they would ride bicycles or hike in the summer and cross-country ski in the winter. The turning point was a trip to France that Weber took in 2016, where she did a lot of plein air sketching in parks. After returning to California, she brought those drawings to the studio and worked them over in color pencil, arriving at the visual language she continues to explore today.

Sarah Ann Weber, Sarah Ann Weber, “A dreamful ease” (detail)

Weber deftly uses her hallucinatory plant forms to orchestrate scintillating color relationships. In “A dreamful ease” (all works 2021), radiating gray vines descend from the central top border, shifting to a subtle blue at their edges, glowing against the sunset hues of the oil paint wash underneath. On the right side of this composition, a large bush formed by purple brushstrokes is festooned with lemon-yellow flowers, green leaves, pale blue water droplets, and pink and red dotted flower or leaf shapes. She fills her pictures with these fantasies, building up a rambunctious and captivating landscape.

Weber’s art has a confectionary quality, which turns out to have a delightful backstory. Her parents own a bakery in Chicago, a family business started by her grandfather in 1930 (her parents met at the bakery, in fact). Weber’s earliest aesthetic experiences are rooted in cake decorating, with its bright palette, rainbow spray, and sugar flowers. The first time I visited her studio, some five years ago, she was making work in fondant on glass, a literal response to her youth at the bakery. “Petals from blown roses” showcases her penchant for abundant profusions of flowers, in this case divided roughly into quadrants by hue: red and pink in the upper right, light and dark purples in the upper left, a range of blues in the bottom left, and greens dominating the bottom right.

Sarah Ann Weber, “Petals from blown roses” (2021), colored pencil on Arches paper, 50 x 38 inches

Given her liberal use of pastels and floral imagery, it’s possible to imagine Weber’s work being dismissed as saccharine, but I suspect that what such a critique really means is too feminine, in the stereotypical sense of femininity: delicate and beautiful. Back in 1993, critic Dave Hickey wrote The Invisible Dragon, a series of essays attacking what he identified as a reigning taboo against beauty in the late 20th century. Hickey needn’t have worried. Nearly three decades later, visual pleasure has not been choked off by the theoretical focus of conceptualism, nor by the postmodern dematerialization of the object. Nevertheless, beauty remains an uncomfortable territory for many contemporary artists, which makes the boldness of Weber’s aesthetics all the more compelling.

While the beauty taboo Hickey railed against is surely linked to America’s puritanical inclinations, it may really have been just another attempt to shut women out of fine art. In his 2017 book The Wild Children of William Blake, art critic John Yau (an editor of Hyperallergic Weekend) observed that the death of painting was conveniently declared in the 1980s, just as women were increasingly making themselves known as painters. Women were leaders in the contemporaneous Pattern and Decoration movement, which embraced beauty, using floral imagery to make a point about claiming for art all things considered feminine.

Sarah Ann Weber, “Petals from blown roses” (detail)

The DNA of Pattern and Decoration is evident in Weber’s paintings and drawings, as is her interest in tapestry, another category historically associated with women. “Return no more” shows the influence of tapestry in her work, its shallow space receding as the eye ascends from the bottom to the top.

The feminist underpinnings of Weber’s work go further. Female figures alone populate these oneiric gardens, and their poses are not naturalistic but rigidly classical. Weber explained to me that she sources her figures (and sometimes her compositions) from canonical paintings such as Botticelli’s “Birth of Venus,” as well as art nouveau fairy tale illustration. The figures embody such cliches as the damsel in distress and the succubus, stereotypes that Weber says she’s had to deal with throughout her life and now seeks to reclaim. Through her paintings and drawings, she wrestles with the twin inheritances of art history and sexism.

To my eye, the figures are stiffly rendered and look pasted in, injecting an awkward note of frozen rationality into an otherwise unadulterated flow of psychic wilderness. Yet Weber has put them there for a reason, hinted at by the titles of the works, all mashups of lines from 19th-century poet Alfred Tennyson’s “The Lotos-Eaters” (1832). Tennyson’s poem retells a passage from Homer’s Odyssey, in which sailors are trapped on an island by its magical flowers and fruit; they become passive and helpless in a deadly paradise. Weber’s Edenic worlds are fatal to men just as the pitcher plant kills through seduction: her paintings assert the strength and power in conventional notions of femininity.

In most of the works, the female figures appear on the shore of a pond, lake, or stream. Looking at them I imagine myself as Actaeon stumbling upon the graceful Artemis bathing among her attendants. I will be turned into a stag, prey to my own hounds.

Sarah Ann Weber, “Return no more” (2021), oil and colored pencil on panel, 72 x 96 inches

Sarah Ann Weber: Strong Blossoming Thing Forever continues at Anat Ebgi (2660 South La Cienega Blvd., Los Angeles, California) through July 31.

Interview: The Sketchbook Project Needs Help After Its Brooklyn Collection Grows to 55,000 Globally Submitted Books

Fri, 30 Jul 2021 23:13:56 +0200

Fifteen years ago, Steven Peterman launched The Sketchbook Project, an ongoing initiative he discusses in a new interview with Colossal editor-in-chief Christopher Jobson. The project, which gathers sketchbooks filled with artwork and stories from people around the globe, has since grown into the Brooklyn Art Library, and today, that collection boasts approximately 55,000 submissions.

The physical collection is an incredible creative resource. There is so much artwork from varying skill levels and artists of all ages, but there are also stories, secrets, hopes, and fears that create a magical exchange between the participant who created the book and the reader who is viewing it in person.

In the conversation supported by Colossal Members, Peterman talks about the challenges of maintaining the collection and its robust community during the COVID-19 pandemic and what’s on the horizon for the project as it changes its funding model.

Sculptures in Showers, Paintings Above Toilets: Moments From the Felix Art Fair

Fri, 30 Jul 2021 21:56:55 +0200

LOS ANGELES — Los Angeles galleries are having their moment at this year’s Felix Art Fair. For its third iteration held at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel, organizers decided to scale down and feature 29 galleries (compared to 40 and 60 in previous years) and most of them are local.

After checking in, and showing proof of vaccine or a negative COVID test, masked attendees are able to weave in and out of poolside cabanas while hotel guests tan and swim. Placing art pieces on the walls and in crevices of hotel rooms, rather than typical white walls, makes for a much more interactive experience. Sculptures are placed in the shower, paintings hang above toilets, and even wooden closets become display boxes.

At Charlie James Gallery, busts by John Ahearn hang on indoor and outdoor walls as if taking part in patrons’ conversations. Other works include paintings by Gabriella Sanchez and two cake sculptures by Patrick Martinez which honor slain Chicano journalist Ruben Salazar and abolitionist Frederick Douglass.

Patrick Martinez at Charlie James Gallery

A few hotel rooms over, Inglewood-based Residency Art Gallery highlights Black and Brown artists like the Perez Bros, Jonah Elijah, and Yvette Mayorga, among others, whose work explores migration, militarization, gender, labor, and race.

Chris Sharp Gallery features a single artist: Los Angeles-based Indigenous artist Ishi Glinsky who makes sculptures of cartoon characters using resin inlay techniques common in Indigenous jewelry-making practices. The use of these popular figures is in conversation with “Zunitoons,” which are made by the members of the Zuni nation and sell mostly to tourists in the Southwest.

One particular stand out is Gavlak Gallery featuring sculptures by Kim Dacres made of interwoven tire strips, and the Afro-futurist, glittering tapestries of April Bey.

Like most art fairs, there’s an exclusive air about it, with tickets selling at an unfriendly $75. But if you get a chance to see it, you’ll get a window into the wide-ranging and effervescent Los Angeles art scene.

Jonathan Wateridge at Nino Mier Gallery
Kristen Morgin at Marc Selwyn Fine Art

Sam Anderson at Tanya Leighton

Ishi Glinsky at Christ Sharp

April Bay and Kim Dacres at Gavlak Gallery

Lenz Geerk at Roberts Projects

Glen Wilson at Various Small Fires

Jonny Negron at Chateau Shatto

Sarah Ann Weber and Amanda Wall at Anat Ebgi Gallery

Greg Ito at Anat Ebgi Gallery

Ed Ruscha hangs above the bed art at Gagosian

Veronica Fernandez, The Perez Bros., Jonah Elijah, and Yvette Mayorga at Residency Art Gallery

John Ahearn at Charlie James Gallery

Fabian Guerrero at Residency Art Gallery

The Felix Art Fair continues at the Hollywood Roosevelt (7000 Hollywood Boulevard, Hollywood, Los Angeles) through Sunday, August 1.

#FollowFriday – Join the PhotoPXL Community!

Fri, 30 Jul 2021 21:30:09 +0200

Happy Follow Friday! This week my good friend and fellow adventurer Kevin Raber was kind enough to share his thoughts on Pathways to Creativity with the community on his photography resource website PhotoPXL. Kevin also interviewed me about the series – it’s all there in the article!

There are so many places out there with information about photography that it’s hard to know which ones are authentic, and which ones are simple rabbit-holes of advertisements. Communities such as Kevin’s created out of simple passion for the medium are truly the best place to go to see what real people are doing, what they think, and where they are going.

It’s for that reason I highly recommend you hop over to PhotoPXL and add them to the favorites list on your preferred browser! Not only does Kevin give unbiased reviews of the gear he uses and shout-outs to his friends in the photography world like yours truly, there is also a growing community of photographers here sharing their photos and exchanging tips, advice and kudos in an interactive forum – check it out and get signed up today!

Have a great weekend!

Fourth Suicide at Hudson Yards Vessel May Shutter the Site Permanently

Fri, 30 Jul 2021 21:05:39 +0200

A 14-year-old jumped to his death Thursday afternoon, July 29, from the Vessel in Manhattan’s Hudson Yards. The teenage boy became the fourth to die by suicide at Thomas Heatherwick’s 150-foot spiral staircase since it opened in March of 2019. The site was closed once again to the public, just two months after it reopened with new safety regulations. It had been closed since January after two suicide incidents occurred at the site within one month. Steven Ross, the billionaire developer of Hudson Yards, told the Daily Beast that the tourist attraction may never be opened again.

The New York Police Department (NYPD) said that the teenager was found in front of the Vessel around 1pm and was pronounced dead at the scene. He had leapt off the structure’s eighth floor while visiting Hudson Yards with members of his New Jersey family. The family witnessed the tragedy as it occurred, police told the Daily News.

Despite warnings by architects and recurrent pleas from the community, the Hudson Yards developer Related Companies has persistently ignored demands to raise the height of the structure’s guard rails, which are about waist-high. In May, the company reopened the controversial site with new safety measures, chief among which was to require visitors to enter with at least one companion and changing its free admission policy to $10 per ticket. The company said that it had also tripled its security staff and trained it for suicide prevention in addition to posting signage discouraging suicide and offering help for people in distress.

“We are heartbroken by this tragedy, and our thoughts are with the family of the young person who lost their life,” a Hudson Yards spokesperson said in a statement to the press. “We are conducting a full investigation. The Vessel is currently closed.”

“We thought we did everything that would really prevent this,” Ross said in an interview with the Daily Beast yesterday. “It’s hard to really fathom how something like that could happen. But you know, I feel terrible for the family.”

Lowell D. Kern, chairman of Manhattan’s Community Board 4, has urged the developers to redesign the Vessel’s barriers since the first suicide at the site in February of 2020.

“This was entirely preventable,” he told the New York Times after yesterday’s tragedy.

“The community board has advised Related that the only surefire way to prevent this from happening is to raise the height of the barriers on the Vessel,” Kern added. “We sincerely hope that this time Related will take all this to heart.”

Related Companies and Heatherwick Studio have not responded to Hyperallergic’s requests for comment.

Guardians of Paradise: An Intimate Short Film Peers into Life in Burma

Fri, 30 Jul 2021 20:40:28 +0200

Comprised of footage shot between 2018 and 2020, “Guardians of Paradise” offers an intimate and sensitive glimpse at Burmese life. The short film shows children at play on docks, a fisherman as he pulls in his net, and others as they practice religious rituals in an attentive look at the joyful, trying, and mundane moments.

Directed by Ivan Maria Friedman of the Lausanne, Switzerland-based studio Maya Pictures with music by Max Richter, “Guardian’s of Paradise” is a small window into the Southeast Asian country prior to the February 1 miliary coup, which was prompted by unfounded claims of voter fraud following the election of National League for Democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi. “In a moment where they need international attention the most, this work wishes to portray the uniqueness of the Burmese culture, as well as to bear witness of their incredible strength, whose true power lies in compassion, gracefulness, true generosity, and human dignity,” Friedman says.

See more candid photos and footage from the filmmaker’s visits on Instagram.

Actuaciones: Las tarjetas de gabinete y la formación de la fotografía moderna, 1870–1900

Fri, 30 Jul 2021 19:56:50 +0200

Actuaciones: Las tarjetas de gabinete y la formación de la fotografía moderna, 1870–1900 akwong Fri, 07/30/2021 - 10:56

This exhibition was organized by the Amon Carter Museum of American Art.

All exhibitions at LACMA are underwritten by the LACMA Exhibition Fund. Major annual support is provided by Meredith and David Kaplan, with generous annual funding from Terry and Lionel Bell, Kevin J. Chen, Louise and Brad Edgerton, Edgerton Foundation, Emily and Teddy Greenspan, Marilyn B. and Calvin B. Gross, Mary and Daniel James, David Lloyd and Kimberly Steward, Kelsey Lee Offield, Mr. and Mrs. Anthony and Lee Shaw, Lenore and Richard Wayne, Marietta Wu and Thomas Yamamoto, and The Kenneth T. and Eileen L. Norris Foundation.

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Cuando las tarjetas de gabinete se introdujeron en los Estados Unidos en 1866, resolvieron un problema. La fotografía se había convertido en algo cotidiano en la cultura visual, pero los fotógrafos tenían dificultades para generar negocio: la mayoría de la gente consideraba el medio simplemente una herramienta para documentar la apariencia, y solo se hacían uno o dos retratos a lo largo de su vida. El reto consistía en crear una nueva moda que animara a la gente a visitar los estudios de retratos con más frecuencia. Las tarjetas de gabinete fueron la respuesta: los estadounidenses podían hacer estos retratos baratos para conmemorar hitos importantes, como nacimientos, matrimonios y muertes, y también para documentar momentos más ordinarios, desde logros profesionales hasta actividades de ocio.

Las tarjetas de gabinete pueden parecer pequeñas para los estándares actuales, pero con un tamaño similar al de las pantallas de los teléfonos móviles, eran tres veces más grandes que el formato predominante, la carte de visite. De repente, las expresiones faciales, la ropa y el entorno de los modelos eran mucho más visibles. Aunque la mayoría de la gente se limitaba a colocarse ante la cámara, algunos aprovechaban el espacio adicional que ofrecían las tarjetas para lucirse, expresar su personalidad y crear relatos divertidos. Algunos incluso experimentaron con la credibilidad fotográfica al organizar sesiones que les mostraban dos o más veces en una sola imagen.

A medida que la gente se iba sintiendo cómoda con la fotografía, estaba más dispuesta a gastar unos cuantos dólares en retratos de sí mismos en diferentes aspectos y actitudes. Los álbumes familiares eran fuentes de entretenimiento, y a finales de siglo, los estadounidenses estaban preparados para la llegada de la instantánea.

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Acting Out: Cabinet Cards and the Making of Modern Photography, 1870–1900

Fri, 30 Jul 2021 19:56:50 +0200

Acting Out: Cabinet Cards and the Making of Modern Photography, 1870–1900 akwong Fri, 07/30/2021 - 10:56

This exhibition was organized by the Amon Carter Museum of American Art.

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When cabinet cards were introduced in the United States in 1866, they solved a problem. Photography had become commonplace in visual culture, but photographers were struggling to generate business: most people thought of the medium merely as a tool for documenting appearance, and had only one or two portraits made over the course of their lifetimes. The challenge was to build a new fad to encourage people to visit portrait studios more often. Cabinet cards were the answer: Americans could have these inexpensive portraits made to mark major milestones, such as births, marriages, and deaths, and also to document more ordinary moments, from professional achievements to leisure activities.

Cabinet cards may seem small by today’s standards, but at about the size of mobile phone screens, they were three times larger than the prevailing format, the carte de visite. Suddenly, sitters’ facial expressions, clothing, and surroundings were far more visible. Though most people still simply positioned themselves before the camera, some took advantage of the additional space the cards afforded to show off, express their personalities, and create playful narratives. Some even experimented with photographic believability, appearing in “trick” compositions that replicated a sitter two or more times in a single image.

As people became comfortable with photography, they were more willing to spend a few dollars on portrayals of themselves in various guises and attitudes. Family albums were sources of entertainment, and by the turn of the century Americans were primed for the arrival of the snapshot.

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Pillado en el acto

Fri, 30 Jul 2021 19:56:50 +0200

Pillado en el acto akwong Fri, 07/30/2021 - 10:56

Tombstone

Para 1860, veinte años después de la introducción de la fotografía en los Estados Unidos, la mayoría de los pueblos tenían al menos un estudio fotográfico profesional. La Ciudad de Nueva York tenía más de cien. Sin embargo, para mucha gente, hacerse un retrato era una tarea ardua. Había que mantener las poses durante al menos cinco segundos. La sensibilidad al azul de las emulsiones que registraban la luz hacía que la ropa y los tonos de la piel aparecieran moteados. No era posible proyectar una sonrisa relajada.

Aparece Napoleon Sarony (1821-1896). Este enérgico autopromotor estableció un negocio de gran éxito como fotógrafo de las estrellas entre 1866 y mediados de la década de 1890, utilizando la tarjeta de gabinete como medio. Prestando especial atención a la iluminación y al atrezzo, y aprovechando la capacidad de la cámara para fingir la inmediatez, retrataba a los actores como si estuvieran pillados en el momento o en plena actuación. Su nueva forma de concebir la fotografía influyó en los profesionales de todo el país, y contribuyó a transformar el acto de sentarse para ser retratado en una experiencia informal y lúdica.

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Caught in the Act

Fri, 30 Jul 2021 19:56:50 +0200

Caught in the Act akwong Fri, 07/30/2021 - 10:56

Tombstone

By 1860, twenty years after photography was introduced in America, most towns had at least one professional photography studio. New York City had more than one hundred. Still, for many people, getting a portrait made was a chore. Poses had to be held for at least five seconds. The blue sensitivity of the light-registering emulsions meant that clothing and skin tones appeared mottled. Projecting a relaxed smile was out of the question.

Enter Napoleon Sarony (1821–1896). An energetic self-promoter, he operated a hugely successful business as a photographer to the stars between 1866 and the mid-1890s, using the cabinet card as his medium. By paying careful attention to lighting and props, and by taking advantage of the camera’s ability to fake immediacy, he depicted actors as if they were caught in the moment or in mid-performance. His new way of thinking about photography influenced practitioners across the nation, helping transform the act of sitting for one’s portrait into an informal, playful experience.

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Self-portrait, c. 1885

Fri, 30 Jul 2021 19:56:50 +0200

Self-portrait, c. 1885 akwong Fri, 07/30/2021 - 10:56

Photographer Napoleon Sarony wholeheartedly embraced the role of debonair eccentric. He adorned the outside of his studio with his name in letters that were several feet high, and he often strolled down Broadway wearing his signature fez and an elaborate uniform of his own making. His outsized personality and ability to convey an atmosphere of immediacy in his images made him New York City’s most heralded and sought-after portrait photographer throughout the second half of the nineteenth century.

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Napoleon Sarony, New York, New York
Self-portrait, c. 1885
Albumen silver print
Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin

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Dos niñas, 1864

Fri, 30 Jul 2021 19:56:50 +0200

Dos niñas, 1864 akwong Fri, 07/30/2021 - 10:56

A principios de la década de 1860, los estadounidenses coleccionaban e intercambiaban ampliamente las cartes de visite, o “tarjetas de visita”. Las dejaban en las entradas de las casas para anunciar sus visitas, las enviaban por correo y las guardaban en álbumes con ranuras especiales. Aunque el pequeño formato de las tarjetas limitaba su capacidad para transmitir detalles o emociones, su inmediatez visual transmitía una profunda experiencia de conexión. Desgraciadamente, al poco tiempo de su introducción, un exceso de oferta de cartes de visite hizo que el mercado fotográfico cayera en picado.

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Fotógrafo desconocido
Dos niñas, 1864
Impresión de plata de albúmina (carte de visite)
Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, Texas

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Two girls, 1864

Fri, 30 Jul 2021 19:56:50 +0200

Two girls, 1864 akwong Fri, 07/30/2021 - 10:56

In the early 1860s, Americans collected and shared cartes de visite, or “calling cards,” widely. They left them in home entryways to announce their visits, sent them through the mail, and saved them in specially slotted albums Although the cards’ small size limited their ability to convey details or emotions, their visual immediacy delivered a deeply felt sense of connection. Unfortunately, within a short time of their introduction, an oversupply of cartes de visite sent the photography market into a financial tailspin.

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Unknown photographer
Two girls, 1864
Albumen silver print (carte de visite)
Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, Texas

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Clara Morris, c. 1876

Fri, 30 Jul 2021 19:56:50 +0200

Clara Morris, c. 1876 akwong Fri, 07/30/2021 - 10:56

A dancer turned actor, Clara Morris was widely heralded in the early 1870s for her ability to convey the emotional and psychological depth of her stage characters. She visited Napoleon Sarony’s portrait studio as part of a strategy to broaden her fan base and thereby gain more control over her career.

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Napoleon Sarony, New York, New York
Clara Morris, c. 1876
Albumen silver print
Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, Texas

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Autorretrato, c. 1885

Fri, 30 Jul 2021 19:56:50 +0200

Autorretrato, c. 1885 akwong Fri, 07/30/2021 - 10:56

El fotógrafo Napoleon Sarony adoptó con entusiasmo el papel de excéntrico de alta alcurnia. Adornó el exterior de su estudio con su nombre en letras de varios metros de altura, y a menudo se paseaba por Broadway con su característico fez y un elaborado uniforme de su propia cosecha. Su personalidad extravagante y su capacidad de transmitir una atmósfera de inmediatez en sus imágenes lo convirtieron en el fotógrafo de retratos más aclamado y solicitado de la Ciudad de Nueva York durante la segunda mitad del siglo XIX.

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Napoleon Sarony, Nueva York, Nueva York
Autorretrato, c. 1885
Impresión de plata de albúmina
Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin

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Lotta Crabtree, c. 1870

Fri, 30 Jul 2021 19:56:50 +0200

Lotta Crabtree, c. 1870 akwong Fri, 07/30/2021 - 10:56

Lotta Crabtree was a well-established star touring with her own company when she asked Napoleon Sarony to create this promotional portrait. Mirroring her theatrical persona, she poses in her popular guise as an innocent but—paradoxically—knowing ingenue.

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Napoleon Sarony, New York, New York
Lotta Crabtree, c. 1870
Albumen silver print
Museum of the City of New York, gift of Mrs. F. S. Haslett, 1953

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Geneviève Ward, c. 1875

Fri, 30 Jul 2021 19:56:50 +0200

Geneviève Ward, c. 1875 akwong Fri, 07/30/2021 - 10:56

La actuación era la profesión secundaria de Geneviève Ward; su carrera como cantante de ópera se vio truncada cuando la difteria destruyó su capacidad vocal. Tenía tanto talento que, cuando Napoleon Sarony hizo este retrato de ella, ya aparecía en obras escritas expresamente para ella.

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Napoleon Sarony, Nueva York, Nueva York
Geneviève Ward, c. 1875
Impresión de plata de albúmina
Museum of the City of New York, donación de la Señorita Mary F. Hackley, 1934

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Geneviève Ward, c. 1875

Fri, 30 Jul 2021 19:56:50 +0200

Geneviève Ward, c. 1875 akwong Fri, 07/30/2021 - 10:56

Acting was Geneviève Ward’s back-up profession; her career as an opera singer was cut short when diphtheria destroyed her singing voice. She was so talented that by the time Napoleon Sarony made this portrait of her, she was appearing in plays written expressly for her.

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Napoleon Sarony, New York, New York
Geneviève Ward, c. 1875
Albumen silver print
Museum of the City of New York, gift of Miss Mary F. Hackley, 1934

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William H. Crane, finales del siglo XIX

Fri, 30 Jul 2021 19:56:50 +0200

William H. Crane, finales del siglo XIX akwong Fri, 07/30/2021 - 10:56

Benjamin J. Falk observó el éxito financiero y popular de Napoleon Sarony y comenzó a fotografiar a los actores en 1877. Influido por la capacidad de su predecesor de transmitir la instantaneidad, pero resistiéndose a pagar los derechos de patente necesarios para acceder a los soportes mecánicos de Sarony, Falk fue uno de los primeros en adoptar la nueva tecnología de la iluminación eléctrica.

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Benjamin J. Falk, Nueva York, Nueva York
William H. Crane, finales del siglo XIX
Impresión de plata de albúmina
Museum of the City of New York, Collection on Broadway Productions

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William H. Crane, late 19th century

Fri, 30 Jul 2021 19:56:50 +0200

William H. Crane, late 19th century akwong Fri, 07/30/2021 - 10:56

Benjamin J. Falk took note of Napoleon Sarony’s financial and popular success and began photographing actors in 1877. Influenced by his predecessor’s ability to convey instantaneity but resistant to paying the patent fees needed to access Sarony’s mechanical supports, he became an early adopter of the new technology of electric lighting.

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Benjamin J. Falk, New York, New York
William H. Crane, late 19th century
Albumen silver print
Museum of the City of New York, Collection on Broadway Productions

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Jeffreys Lewis y Emily Rigl en Exiliados (Exiles), 1880s

Fri, 30 Jul 2021 19:56:50 +0200

Jeffreys Lewis y Emily Rigl en Exiliados (Exiles), 1880s akwong Fri, 07/30/2021 - 10:56

José María Mora nació en el seno de una de las familias más ricas de Cuba y se formó como pintor. El levantamiento cubano de 1868 lo obligó a huir a Nueva York, donde se convirtió en retocador para Napoleon Sarony y acabó abriendo su propio estudio. Para diferenciarse del resto del sector, Mora afirmaba que podía ofrecer a sus clientes un mayor número y variedad de fondos que cualquier otro fotógrafo en activo. Retocó este retrato para sugerir la caída de nieve, pero tuvo cuidado de no ocultar los rostros de sus dos clientes.

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José María Mora, Nueva York, Nueva York
Jeffreys Lewis y Emily Rigl en Exiliados (Exiles), 1880s
Impresión de plata de albúmina
Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin

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Jeffreys Lewis and Emily Rigl in Exiles, 1880s

Fri, 30 Jul 2021 19:56:50 +0200

Jeffreys Lewis and Emily Rigl in Exiles, 1880s akwong Fri, 07/30/2021 - 10:56

José María Mora was born into one of the wealthiest families in Cuba and trained to be a painter. The Cuban uprising of 1868 forced him to flee to New York, where he became a retoucher for Napoleon Sarony and eventually opened his own studio. To set himself apart from the rest of the trade, Mora claimed he could offer his sitters a greater number and variety of backdrops than any other working photographer. He retouched this portrait to suggest snow falling, but was careful not to obscure the faces of his two clients.

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José María Mora, New York, New York
Jeffreys Lewis and Emily Rigl in Exiles, 1880s
Albumen silver print
Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin

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Fanny Davenport, c. 1870

Fri, 30 Jul 2021 19:56:50 +0200

Fanny Davenport, c. 1870 akwong Fri, 07/30/2021 - 10:56

Nacida en Londres a una familia teatral, Fanny Davenport había establecido su reputación en el escenario como el personaje Lady Gay Spanker en la farsa Garantía de Londres (London Assurance) poco antes de que se tomó esta fotografía. Aquí, Napoleon Sarony la muestra interpretando el personaje, posando ante un fuego de chimenea cuidadosamente pintado.

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Napoleon Sarony, Nueva York, Nueva York
Fanny Davenport, c. 1870
Impresión de plata de albúmina
Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, Texas

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Fanny Davenport, c. 1870

Fri, 30 Jul 2021 19:56:50 +0200

Fanny Davenport, c. 1870 akwong Fri, 07/30/2021 - 10:56

Born in London to a theatrical family, Fanny Davenport had established her stage reputation as the character Lady Gay Spanker in the farce London Assurance shortly before this photograph was taken. Here, Napoleon Sarony shows her in character, posed before a carefully painted-in hearth fire.

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Napoleon Sarony, New York, New York
Fanny Davenport, c. 1870
Albumen silver print
Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, Texas

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Clara Morris, c. 1876

Fri, 30 Jul 2021 19:56:50 +0200

Clara Morris, c. 1876 akwong Fri, 07/30/2021 - 10:56

Clara Morris, bailarina convertida en actriz, fue ampliamente alabada a principios de la década de 1870 por su capacidad de transmitir la profundidad emocional y psicológica de sus personajes escénicos. Visitó el estudio de retratos de Napoleon Sarony como parte de una estrategia para ampliar su base de admiradores y, de este modo, obtener mayor control sobre su carrera.

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Napoleon Sarony, Nueva York, Nueva York
Clara Morris, c. 1876
Impresión de plata de albúmina
Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, Texas

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Abrazadera de cabeza del estudio del fotógrafo, antes de 1900

Fri, 30 Jul 2021 19:56:50 +0200

Abrazadera de cabeza del estudio del fotógrafo, antes de 1900 akwong Fri, 07/30/2021 - 10:56

Hasta la década de 1890, cuando se generalizó el uso de la luz eléctrica, las exposiciones en estudio solían durar entre cinco y diez segundos. Para mantener inmóviles a los retratados, los fotógrafos solían apuntalarlos por detrás con abrazaderas para la cabeza cuidadosamente ocultas. Napoleon Sarony, considerado el padre de la fotografía artística en los Estados Unidos, adoptó la medida adicional de utilizar soportes de hierro ajustables para sujetar los brazos y las piernas extendidas de sus sujetos.

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Abrazadera de cabeza del estudio del fotógrafo, antes de 1900
Hierro
Archivos del Amon Carter Museum of American Art

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Photographer’s studio head clamp, before 1900

Fri, 30 Jul 2021 19:56:50 +0200

Photographer’s studio head clamp, before 1900 akwong Fri, 07/30/2021 - 10:56

Until the 1890s, when electric light became more widely used, studio exposures were generally five to ten seconds. To keep sitters still, photographers often propped them from behind with carefully hidden head clamps. Napoleon Sarony, widely considered the father of artistic photography in America, took the extra step of using adjustable iron supports to hold the outstretched arms and legs of his subjects.

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Photographer’s studio head clamp, before 1900
Iron
Amon Carter Museum of American Art Archives

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Fondo del estudio del fotógrafo, c. 1913

Fri, 30 Jul 2021 19:56:50 +0200

Fondo del estudio del fotógrafo, c. 1913 akwong Fri, 07/30/2021 - 10:56

El formato más grande y la proporción más amplia de las tarjetas de gabinete dieron lugar a una moda de fondos elaborados, y los pintores los producían por miles a bajo precio. Aunque este lienzo fue pintado poco después del apogeo de las tarjetas de gabinete, refleja los pintorescos escenarios campestres que eran populares durante toda la época de las tarjetas de gabinete. Con este telón de fondo, los modelos tenían la opción de posar dentro de un salón o en un patio. El pintor añadió líneas horizontales en la vista exterior para indicar una ligera humedad en el aire.

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Ross L. Fitch, Chicago, Illinois
Fondo del estudio del fotógrafo, c. 1913
Pigmento con aglutinante sobre lienzo
Archivos del Amon Carter Museum of American Art

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Photographer’s studio backdrop, c. 1913

Fri, 30 Jul 2021 19:56:50 +0200

Photographer’s studio backdrop, c. 1913 akwong Fri, 07/30/2021 - 10:56

The larger size and wider proportion of cabinet cards led to a vogue for elaborate backdrops, and painters churned them out cheaply by the thousands. Although this canvas was painted shortly after the heyday of the cabinet card, it reflects the picturesque country settings that were popular throughout the cabinet-card era. With this backdrop, sitters had the option of posing inside a drawing room or out on a porch. The painter added horizontal lines across the outside view to convey a slight humidity in the air.

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Ross L. Fitch, Chicago, Illinois
Photographer’s studio backdrop, c. 1913
Pigment with binder on canvas
Amon Carter Museum of American Art Archives

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Lotta Crabtree, c. 1870

Fri, 30 Jul 2021 19:56:50 +0200

Lotta Crabtree, c. 1870 akwong Fri, 07/30/2021 - 10:56

Lotta Crabtree era una estrella bien establecida que estaba de gira con su propia compañía cuando le pidió a Napoleon Sarony que creara este retrato promocional. Como reflejo de su personaje teatral, posa con su popular apariencia de inocente pero paradójicamente conocedora ingenua.

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Napoleon Sarony, Nueva York, Nueva York
Lotta Crabtree, c. 1870
Impresión de plata de albúmina
Museum of the City of New York, donación de la Sra. F. S. Haslett, 1953

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Retrato de tarjeta de gabinete, c. 1867

Fri, 30 Jul 2021 19:56:50 +0200

Retrato de tarjeta de gabinete, c. 1867 akwong Fri, 07/30/2021 - 10:56

Las tarjetas de gabinete, tres veces más grandes que las cartes de visite, ofrecían a los fotógrafos la posibilidad de captar detalles faciales e incluir a los retratados en entornos más elaborados, aunque la mayoría de los fotógrafos tardaron en comprender estas nuevas oportunidades. Al principio, los fotógrafos trataban las tarjetas de gabinete como si fueran simples cartes de visite de dimensiones superiores, y seguían rodeando a sus modelos con mucho espacio y un par de accesorios.

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Fotógrafo desconocido
Retrato de tarjeta de gabinete, c. 1867
Impresión de plata de albúmina
Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, Texas

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Cabinet card portrait, c. 1867

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Cabinet card portrait, c. 1867 akwong Fri, 07/30/2021 - 10:56

Three times larger than cartes de visite, cabinet cards offered photographers the ability to convey facial details and embed sitters in more elaborate settings, yet most photographers were slow to understand these new opportunities. Initially, photographers treated cabinet cards as if they were simply oversized cartes de visite, and continued to surround their sitters with lots of space and a couple of props.

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Unknown photographer
Cabinet card portrait, c. 1867
Albumen silver print
Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, Texas

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El oficio

Fri, 30 Jul 2021 19:56:50 +0200

El oficio akwong Fri, 07/30/2021 - 10:56

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El gran reto al que se enfrentaban los fotógrafos en la segunda mitad del siglo XIX no era atraer a los clientes, sino conseguir que volvieran. Las tarjetas de gabinete, baratas y vendidas por docenas, resolvieron ese problema y consolidaron el papel central de la fotografía en la vida de la clase media.

La mayoría de los fotógrafos, especialmente los de los pueblos pequeños, conseguían su clientela al ofrecer una gama de fondos y la oportunidad de elegir entre una amplia variedad de revestimientos. En las bases de los anversos de las tarjetas ponían sus nombres y la ubicación de sus estudios, y llenaban los reversos de las tarjetas con autopromoción. Aunque algunos clientes se quejaban de esta publicidad, lo cierto es que creaba y mantenía el negocio.

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The Trade

Fri, 30 Jul 2021 19:56:50 +0200

The Trade akwong Fri, 07/30/2021 - 10:56

Tombstone

The great challenge for photographers in the latter half of the nineteenth century was not to attract customers, but to get them to return. Inexpensive and sold by the dozen, cabinet cards solved that problem, solidifying photography’s central place in middle-class life.

Most photographers, especially those in small towns, built their clienteles by offering an array of backdrops and the opportunity to select from a wide range of overlays. They emblazoned the bases of their card fronts with their names and studio locations and filled the card backs with self-promotion. Though some customers complained about this advertising, it effectively built and sustained businesses.

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Achieve Amazing Feats of Clay With the Best Needle Tools for Ceramics

Add Luster to Your Handknits With the Best Silk and Silk-Blend Yarns

Get a Grip With the Best Needle-Nose Pliers

Artful Weekend July 31-August 1

This weekend: July shows at the League; East Baltimore in photos at the Smithsonian; Joy in Convergence at Studio Gallery; and We Can’t Predict Tomorrow at Arlington Arts Center.

July 2021 Open Exhibit

Yasmin Bussiere: Eastern Light

Welcome Home: A Portrait of East Baltimore, 1975–1980

Joy in Convergence

We Can’t Predict Tomorrow

Book Review: Affinity Photo Workbook

Tags:

Required Reading

Jon Pylypchuk’s Chorus of Loss

An Asian Artist’s Isolation in New York

A Photographer Captures the Collective Fatigue of the Welfare State

Together in Peace and Protest

In Henry Taylor’s Paintings, the Past Bleeds Into the Present

The Feminist Power of Beauty

Interview: The Sketchbook Project Needs Help After Its Brooklyn Collection Grows to 55,000 Globally Submitted Books

Sculptures in Showers, Paintings Above Toilets: Moments From the Felix Art Fair

#FollowFriday – Join the PhotoPXL Community!

Fourth Suicide at Hudson Yards Vessel May Shutter the Site Permanently

Guardians of Paradise: An Intimate Short Film Peers into Life in Burma

Actuaciones: Las tarjetas de gabinete y la formación de la fotografía moderna, 1870–1900

Acting Out: Cabinet Cards and the Making of Modern Photography, 1870–1900

Pillado en el acto

Caught in the Act

Self-portrait, c. 1885

Dos niñas, 1864

Two girls, 1864

Clara Morris, c. 1876

Autorretrato, c. 1885

Lotta Crabtree, c. 1870

Geneviève Ward, c. 1875

Geneviève Ward, c. 1875

William H. Crane, finales del siglo XIX

William H. Crane, late 19th century

Jeffreys Lewis y Emily Rigl en Exiliados (Exiles), 1880s

Jeffreys Lewis and Emily Rigl in Exiles, 1880s

Fanny Davenport, c. 1870

Fanny Davenport, c. 1870

Clara Morris, c. 1876

Abrazadera de cabeza del estudio del fotógrafo, antes de 1900

Photographer’s studio head clamp, before 1900

Fondo del estudio del fotógrafo, c. 1913

Photographer’s studio backdrop, c. 1913

Lotta Crabtree, c. 1870

Retrato de tarjeta de gabinete, c. 1867

Cabinet card portrait, c. 1867

El oficio

The Trade