Art Hag

Davina Semo: Reverberation | Brooklyn Bridge Park

Davina Semo: Reverberation at Brooklyn Bridge Park

Last week I finally went to check out Davina Semo’s public art piece Reverberation which debuted back in August at Brooklyn Bridge Park. Presented by the Public Art Fund, the installation features five four-foot-tall cast bronze orange bells suspended 14 feet high on Pier 1 overlooking Lower Manhattan.

In homage to the waterfront park’s maritime past, visitors are encouraged to ring the bells to “enliven the New York City waterfront and contribute to the urban soundscape,” the Park’s website states. Designed in an elongated buoy-like shape, each bell was given a unique name—Dreamer, Listener, Mother, Reflector, and Singer.

Davina Semo: Reverberation

 

Semo drilled holes through the surface of the bells, giving them individual perforated patterns that emit “subtle nuances in their tones when rung” and “create constellations of light in their darkened interiors and staccato patterns on their exterior shells,” according to publicartfund.org. Supported by a hulking frame made of industrial galvanized steel, each bell is painted in a pearlescent bright orange to mimic the “international color of urgent alarm” and draw attention to these “precarious times” marked by social unrest and a deadly pandemic.

“During this turbulent year, auditory interventions have characterized our collective experience, whether through the evening cheers for essential workers or the chanting voices of protesters demanding justice,” notes Public Art Fund curator Daniel S. Palmer. Reverberation welcomes visitors to contribute to and connect with the urban symphony by ringing the bells on “an optimistic note.”

Davina Semo: Reverberation

Davina Semo: Reverberation

Davina Semo: Reverberation

Born in Washington, D.C., Semo received a BA in Visual Arts from Brown University and her MFA from UC San Diego. The artist is currently based in San Francisco. See more of her industrial sculptures—composed with bronze, mirrors, ball bearings, chains, concrete, and more—at artsy.net or davinasemo.net.

Davina Semo: Reverberation
Brooklyn Bridge Park, Pier 1
On view from August 20, 2020 through April 18, 2021

Anne-Sophie H. Plume: Stockpile | Established Gallery

Anne-Sophie H. Plume and her painting French Can-Can, 2020

Alone and far from home during lockdown, Anne-Sophie H. Plume found solace in painting an unusual subject—the canned goods she’d stocked up on in case of a food shortage. Stockpile, the artist's first solo exhibition, showcases intimate works teeming with vulnerability and unease.

“I spent the whole pandemic wanting to leave,” the French native said. “I hated being here because I was so alone.”

Plume moved from France to New York City two and a half years ago to study at The New York Studio School. Back in France, Plume focused primarily on abstract painting, but it was at the Studio School that she discovered her love for portraiture. “Coming to that school and starting to paint from the model, I realized how much I love to paint people. I started to paint portraits.” She happily painted models—many posed inside a clawfoot tub in her studio at school—working toward her MFA exhibition, until COVID began spreading across the world.

“In France the pandemic was much worse before it hit here, so my family [told me] 'you have to go into lockdown. You have to buy a lot of food…just stock everything.' And I did,” she recalls. “My whole family [said to] buy chickpeas, canned food, rice, and pasta. In France these were in shortage because everyone [was panic buying] everything. They told me in New York it’s going to be even worse, so I bought these things.... I have so much tomato sauce, a lot of chickpeas. My mom was all about chickpeas because [they have lots of] protein. I hate chickpeas,” she said laughing.

At the start of the year, Plume was living in Williamsburg with roommates who were not taking the pandemic or health restrictions seriously. “They were bringing people in. They would go out.” Carrying on as normal, her roommates were not social distancing nor following other COVID protocols.

A friend quarantining in Ohio offered Plume her empty Manhattan apartment to stay at for a while, away from her flatmates. “At that point I was like, 'should I go back to France?'" Plume wondered. But restrictions on travel and fear of losing her spot in the MFA program convinced her to stay and accept her friend’s invitation. “I went to Manhattan and just brought all my cans and all my paint,” Plume said. “I ended up staying there a month and a half.”

The first few weeks alone at the East Side apartment were difficult, with Plume feeling lonely and isolated. Accustomed to painting people, she also found herself without a model. “I was like, ‘I want to go home. I have nothing to paint.’ I was blocked for a while and then I started to make some totems with the cans.” Struck by the variety of colors on the packaging, Plume decided to paint the stacks of cans.

Anne-Sophie H. Plume, Where Is The Can Opener, 2020

Anne-Sophie H. Plume, Can Not (left) and Time Towers (right), 2020

Anne-Sophie H. Plume, It Can Be Contained (left) and Little birds (right), 2020

Anne-Sophie H. Plume, You Can, 2020

She began experimenting with her arrangements as she considered the uncertainty of the times, piling heavy cans on top of daintier items, creating haphazardly animated displays. “I was feeling that everything was crumbling down,” she said. The perilously stacked towers symbolize “a system that has proven to be worryingly unbalanced and fragile, each element at any moment could topple the rest to the floor,” Plume states in the press release for the show.

After returning to her Williamsburg apartment for a month over the spring, Plume relocated to Park Slope in July where she continued working on her Stockpile paintings on a larger scale, adding height and bulk to leaning stacks. Her implausibly teetering towers combine anxiety with whimsy, the daringly placed cans reflect a concerted effort to persevere. Plume's actual tin towers "fell down so many times," she recalls. "When they fell, it was so frustrating." The cathartic project helped her to cope with unusual circumstances and create a poignant and empathetic series documenting her experience.

Anne-Sophie H. Plume and her paintings Small Ones At The Bottom (left), Stack Riot (right)

Anne-Sophie H. Plume: Stockpile at Established Gallery

It was about five years ago that Plume left her job in the pharmaceutical industry and spent the next couple of years immersing herself in dance and art. “I decided to try everything I never dared to try before,” she said. She found her calling in painting and initially came to NYC to take an intensive summer course at the New York Studio School in 2018. After completing the program, she was offered a scholarship for the MFA program. She is currently preparing for her Thesis Exhibition opening on December 1. Despite 2020 being a challenging year, Plume does not regret her decision to remain in New York City where she adapted and took inspiration from an unlikely source.

“I’m relieved that I did. Everybody had a tough time,” she said reflecting on the past several months. “I’ve been so lucky to be able to paint. It’s been great. I mean, I never would have thought of painting cans, ever.

Anne-Sophie H. Plume: Stockpile
Established Gallery, 75 6th Avenue, Prospect Heights, Brooklyn
Exhibition on view November 21 - December 5

Phaidra Sterlin: Esansyèl [Essential] | Brooklyn Arts Fellowship Gallery

Phaidra Sterlin and her paintings Promès c dèt 2 (left) and Mwen Toufe ("I am choking," on right)

Phaidra Sterlin’s impassioned canvases address daily life in Port-au-Prince, Haiti and confront the inequities she witnesses there. The island nation’s inability to provide its citizens with basic resources is at the heart of her exhibition Esansyèl [Essential], currently on view at Brooklyn Arts Fellowship Gallery.

“Most of my work speaks of infrastructure, social inequalities,” she explained last week as she prepared for the show. Images of lightbulbs and fuel tanks—"the things that we need as the essentials”—recur in the textural acrylic paintings she creates as a way to grapple with the injustices in her homeland. “I always say we have a responsibility, whether it’s individually or collectively, to bring about change.”

Born in New York, Sterlin’s father brought her to his native Haiti when she was an infant to be raised with the help of his family. “My mom was from the south,” she said. “[As a] white southern woman [her mother] said the reason she didn’t bring me back home was because I was black, hence I was raised in Haiti,” the artist said.

Sterlin recalls a happy childhood in Haiti, filled with “fun memories…wholesome memories.” Her summer vacations were spent in NYC visiting her physician father. In the mid ‘80s political strife in Haiti —protests to overthrow President Jean-Claude Duvalier—prompted Sterlin’s father to move her back to the Upper West Side with him when she was 14. “I felt like I was being ripped away from all the things I was beginning to enjoy,” she said of the relocation during her formative years. “At the time you just feel like you’re pulled away from everything that you know.” She “immediately became a rebel kid” and left home soon after.

She surrounded herself with friends in the arts over the years and worked alongside them in fashion, photography, and set design. “I was always painting,” she notes. About six years ago she decided to focus on her own art. “I had a 'fuck it' day,” she recalls. “I figured now is as a good time as any to just indulge myself fully. I woke up one day and [decided] I didn’t want to live life with regrets.”

“I’m going to use my voice the best way that I can…being the best me, doing what I can do best,” she decided. In order to immerse herself in the work, she moved back to Haiti, “back to when everything was wholesome.”

While she finds the country more “connected” now, thanks to the internet, with a more modern mindset, she says that the nation’s infrastructure has not improved over the years. “Structurally it’s sad to me,” she said, noting the inequalities that pervade the society. “The environment, the people’s struggles, the structure…even a question of light.” Electricity, something often taken for granted in the States, can be difficult to access in Haiti. Only a quarter of Haitians have access to electricity, according to USAID. Many Haitian residents are forced to illegally connect to the electric grid to power their homes.

“It bothered me seeing my side having electricity but I cross the street, that side does not have it. That went on throughout the country, so it was socioeconomics,” she said. A powerful series of richly layered paintings from 2019 features dozens of lightbulbs dotting unsettling canvases. The bulbs, which bear an uncanny resemblance to tiny skulls, address the country’s power problem and symbolize Sterlin’s “anger and frustration” with the inequitable distribution of resources. “That was my own way of protesting,” she says. The lightbulbs in Sterlin’s paintings are actually rechargeable bulbs the artist purchased for her own home, but at $4 each she notes that these are inaccessible to many in Haiti.

The first work in the series, Promès c dèt 1 ("a promise is a debt"), features lightbulbs on a stunning yellow background, standing in for the illumination absent from many homes. “The land being bright yet there is no light. It’s a tropical island,” Sterlin mused, noting that sustainable options such as renewal energy and solar energy are “really for the privileged when [they] should be really a standard. There’s no reason why we [all] shouldn’t have that.” Other works in the series depict the lightbulbs in black and white—a color pairing the artist finds comforting—on an angry, fiery red background, or on the blue and red of Haiti's flag, showing pride in her heritage.

Phaidra Sterlin stands beside Promès c dèt 1

Phaidra Sterlin and her paintings Promès c dèt 3 (hanging) and Promès c dèt 5 (beside her on floor)

Another large canvas featuring a grid of red cylinders against a ghostly black and white background represents the gas tanks that are commonly used to fuel cooktops in Haitian kitchens. “A lot of the people can’t afford to get that tank filled up every day to be able to cook,” Sterlin notes. The majority of Haitian households cannot afford propane and must rely on a cooking option that is harmful to both their health and the environment. “A lot of people use charcoal and now you think about charcoal, you think about deforestation,” Sterlin said of the country’s increasingly devastated forests. “The other alternative we have is [gas], so you have to have a little more cash flow to have this.” 

Sterlin hopes her evocative works will raise awareness to the injustices experienced in her homeland and elicit change. “I hope that it provokes thoughts, questions, dialogue…that then lead to actions,” she says. “Conversation starts an action.”

The artist will return to Haiti this week to prepare for an upcoming exhibit there in which she will include a tribute to her father who passed away two and half years ago. Based on Ezilí Dantor, a Haitian voodoo icon often depicted holding a child, her father will replace the female figure in the image she says, “because I was raised by my dad.”

After years of a strained relationship, Sterlin and her father made amends prior to her return to Haiti five years ago. “I have to say that when I made my decision to go to Haiti, he was one of the few people that supported it. He said, ‘Haiti is also your home and you’re going home,’” she fondly recalls.

Her father championed her art career and proudly watched its “progression and change” over the years. “As a kid I used to draw over all of his anatomy books…he knew what he had in me,” she said of her early signs of creativity. “He had hoped for a doctor but in the end, he was pleased with what he had.”

Phaidra Sterlin, Marriage Ideal

Phaidra Sterlin stands beside her painting Promès c dèt 3

Phaidra Sterlin: Esansyèl [Essential]
Brooklyn Arts Fellowship Gallery, 210 24th Street, Greenwood Heights, Brooklyn
Gallery Hours: Mon-Fri, by appointment; Saturday 12pm - 6pm; Sunday 1pm - 5pm
Exhibition on view November 20 – December 20, 2020

Janet Pedersen: Step By Step | 440 Gallery

Janet Pedersen stands beside her paintings Martha, Matisse and Me (top), Bird Dance (below), and Tree Dance (right), all 2020

In a year marked by a pandemic, health restrictions, and lockdowns, Janet Pedersen endured an additional obstacle—a painful, crippling injury. The Park Slope-based artist persevered, finding an escape through the world of dance. She created Step By Step, an alluring series of work depicting nimble movements, at a time when she herself was immobile.

Pedersen broke her left ankle last November while hosting Thanksgiving dinner at home. “I stepped on it wrong, my ankle snapped and this foot was at a right angle to my leg,” she graphically recalled. After a visit to the emergency room and a two-and-a-half hour surgery, Pedersen was sent home with a surgical boot and a walker. “I was in a boot and was literally upstairs in one room for about three months…. I thought what can I do? I’m an artist, how can I bring some joy to my life?” Knowing that she had an upcoming solo exhibition at 440 Gallery, where she’s been a member for almost four years, she decided to focus on preparing for it. “I had to think of a way to engage all these things that could keep me entertained and hopeful and joyful,” she said. “It did force me to have something to get up for, aside from my family, and it gave me some joy.”

Primarily a plein air landscape painter, there was no chance of Pedersen getting outside to work as usual given the COVID lockdown and her limited mobility. Her fondness for figure drawing—which she teaches online—led her to focus on the human form instead of outdoor scenes. An avid dancer in her teens, Pedersen decided to “reach back to [her] young self where [she] really wanted to be a dancer.”  

She found inspiration in magazine photos and online videos featuring dancers from Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, Martha Graham Dance Company, Mark Morris Dance Group, and Nederlands Dans Theater. She studied the videos, froze stills of specific poses—arched backs, soaring leaps—and recreated them on canvas. “They are posed in a way that I wasn’t. I was literally in a boot and in my pajamas.”

She incorporated her plein air practice into some of the scenes, transforming the studio and stage backdrops into outdoor spaces with trees and glimpses of blue sky. “A lot of this was almost like a dance,” Pedersen mused. “I’m the partner here. I want to join in,” she said of her desire to add her own touch to what she saw on the screen. “Dance is a lot of push me, pull me, lead and follow.”

Tango features a couple dancing cheek-to-cheek in an intimate scene emphasized by the tightly cropped canvas. “It’s not the classic tango…but it was just an intimate moment and I thought 'I want to freeze-frame that,'” Pedersen notes. West Side Story centers on a figure jumping high over the heads of onlookers, “catching a breath,” according to the artist.

Janet Pedersen, Tango, 2020

Janet Pedersen, West Side Story, 2020

Janet Pedersen's Martha, Matisse and Me (top) and Bird Dance (below), both 2020

A dancer is lifted high into the air amid a thicket of trees in Bird Dance. She proudly holds her head high and extends her arms and legs behind her as if in flight. A pale figure extends an elongated arm upward while leaning toward a dance partner that Pedersen has transformed into a tree in the expressionist Tree Dance. Pedersen’s hazy images of lithe dancers are captivating. Her dreamlike acrylic paintings vibrantly celebrate “a beautiful art form” and capture the grace and spirit of the dancers.

Born and raised in a small town near Pasadena, California, Pedersen grew up in a creative family. “You can say I come from a family of artists. My grandfather was a plein air painter from Denmark,” she said. Her mother, a fiber artist, and her father, an architect, encouraged creativity in Pedersen and her two sisters.  “We always painted together and drew on location,” she recalls. “We would be in restaurants and all of us would be drawing.”

Pedersen initially considered studying dance at UC Santa Cruz but majored in film instead. She later received her BFA in illustration from ArtCenter College of Design in Pasadena. She moved to NYC in 1990 expecting to only spend a couple of years here working in editorial illustration. “I drove somebody’s car for them…from LA to New York,” she recalls, “with two portfolios and two suitcases, thinking I would be here for two years. But then I started to plant myself here. I met my husband, began friendships, and decided that Brooklyn was a pretty interesting place.”

She designed children’s books for several years which led to her illustrating dozens of titles. She later went on to write and illustrate four of her own children’s books. When she turned 50, she decided to focus on fine art. “I have done fine art in one form or another my whole life anyways,” she said of her decision to “become serious about showing [her] work and discovering who [she is] as a painter.” She took plein air workshops across the country “with oil paint and the easel” and was immediately smitten. “I was just blown away,” she says. “I thought this is what I want to do. This is what my grandfather did.”

“I didn’t get my MFA,” she continued. “I went to a number of workshops and picked up the tools of the trade and I brought them back. I remember buying a bike that I could fold up and I had my bicycle bags with my easel, my paints, and I just went one place after the other when I could…. Whenever I get a chance, I’m out with my easel and my paints.”

One of her favorite locales to paint is South Slope “because the light is more open,” she says. “I’m always seeking the light.” Other favorite spots include Windsor Terrace, Prospect Park, and Green-Wood Cemetery. “As an architect’s daughter,” Pederson also enjoys painting the built environment. “And any street corner that has a deli,” she adds. “[If] there’s a bit of color, some nice perspective, maybe a person standing there…if I can capture that in one-and-a-half to two hours, then I’ve had a good day.”

The industrial buildings and quirky side streets of Red Hook are also ideal locations for her. “It’s all the angles and the light, and I think Red Hook has a lot to offer that way,” she says. “If you can get the water in there, that’s great too, but it’s those side streets that I find really interesting.” Even after 30 years living in New York City, Pedersen notes, “I have many more scenes that I want to paint here.”

Janet Pedersen, Burlesque, 2020

janet Pedersen's Ensemble (top) and Dancer's Dance (below), both 2020

Janet Pedersen stands with Alvin Ailey Dance Co. 2 (left) and Alvin Ailey Dance Co. 3 (right), both 2020

Pedersen dispels any romantic notions one may associate with plein air artists contentedly painting on a picturesque street corner all day. “It’s never easy finding a good spot because you have this preconception that ‘If I go down to Red Hook, I know exactly what I want to paint.’ You get your gear together, you go down there…. You go set up and somebody has either thrown up there or somebody’s parked right in front of what you wanted to paint.”

Undeterred, she will keep searching for a spot with the right lighting. “Meanwhile, the clock is ticking, you’re losing the light…. If the light is not working for you this way, you turn this way and you paint what is lit. Or you step across the street and look at it from a different angle. You have to stay on top of your game and try not to be defeated,” she insists. “If it were easy all the time, I probably would become bored with it.”

She enthusiastically muses about perfect light and hues in different seasons. “In spring, everything is just so young and green, and happening. It’s dizzy. In the fall, everything is just golden. The color is like apricot. There’s a color tone that [inspires] ‘Wow! If I could catch that....'” 

During the cold winter months, Pedersen works from a studio at home, however this past winter was very different. “This last year, because of COVID, we were indoors all the time,” she notes. Despite the circumstances, she was able to stay motivated and productive.

“I think it’s important to keep working,” she says of her time healing during the lockdown. “We have pandemic. We have world events that have turned this country and the world on its side that I think we can’t turn our backs to, but we all have a responsibility to keep going and do what brings joy.”

Janet Pedersent: Step By Step
440 Gallery, 440 6th Avenue, Park Slope, Brooklyn 
Exhibition on view November 18 - January 3, 2021
Outdoor Opening Reception: Saturday, November 21, 3pm to 6pm
(Rain Date:  Nov. 22)

PSWT Artists Open Studios: Redux | Brooklyn Waterfront Artists Coalition (BWAC)

Carol Adams' sculptures (front and back left); Joyce Riley's Dawson's Creek, Meet You There, We Are All One (back wall, left to right)

The second weekend of the Park Slope Windsor Terrace Artists Open Studios: Redux at the BWAC gallery was bustling on Saturday with art lovers of all ages. The exhibition, featuring a variety of works by Arts PSWT members, serves as an alternative to the group’s annual Open Studios event, offering more room for artists and visitors to adhere to pandemic protocols.

“With COVID we were thinking of just canceling and not doing it at all,” explained Sandra Giunta, a member of Arts PSWT who helped organize the group show. “I’m a member here at BWAC so I knew the space and…I thought that this would be a great way for us to continue our Open Studios this year, in an 8,000-square-foot gallery where we could social distance.”

She proposed the idea of hosting the exhibit at BWAC in early October. The 32 participating artists joined forces to make it a reality, exhibiting an array of  painting, prints, ceramics, collage, drawings, photography, and sculpture. Each artist is given wall space or a table to showcase a selection of their work.

Sandra Giunta stands beside a display of her Corals sculptures at BWAC

Sandra Giunta, Cause and Effect 1, Cause and Effect 2

Alise Loebelsohn, Talking to Angels, Sail and Sea (top), Dots and Stars (bottom)

Works by Dara Oshin

Works by Cynthia Ruse

Paper collage portraits by Judith Eloise Hooper

Works by Robin Roi

Whereas the open studios tend to be “a much more intimate kind of event,” Giunta is happy with the expansive exhibit because it gives the artists an opportunity to see each other’s output. “When we have Open Studios at many different places, the artists don’t get to see each other’s work, so it’s something you really miss. This is giving everybody the opportunity to see all the artists' work.”

Janie Samuels, President of Arts PSWT agrees, adding that “manning our own studios” during the usual Open Studios event prevents members from visiting their colleagues at their workspaces. “What’s fabulous about this show is that…it’s the first opportunity we’ve actually had to be able to spend as much time here as a group and talk about the work as a group,” she said.

Born in upstate New York, Samuels grew up in Manhattan and received her BA from Bennington College in Vermont and her MFA from the School of Visual Arts. A member of Arts PSWT for more than ten years, Samuels works from her home opposite Green-Wood Cemetery. Her evocative drawings and paintings address immigration issues and the refugee crisis. “I’ve always been affected by how horrific, heartless, and unnecessary so much global strife is, so I try to attack those political issues on an intimate level and bring it back to something that’s humane,” she explains. “I also deal with more intimate issues, but the paintings are all about relationships.”

Janie Samuels stands with her works (left to right) Is It Safe Yet?, Lazy Summer Days, Lean On Me, and two landscapes

Janie Samuels, (clockwise from top left) In Dialogue, Helping Hands, In Hopes of a Better Life

Jonathan Blum's (with Sean Qualls) A Magical Moment (top left); Brooklyn Rabbi Blessing Flowers (bottom left); Pope Playing Bass (center);
(with Sean Qualls) The Rehearsal (top right); Pink Llama with Blue Watermelon (bottom right)

Works by Bob Hagan

Fotini Vurgaropulou, Film Reels

Works by Bernardo Justin Campoy

Phil DeSantis (left to right) Lily Pads, Crucifiction, Nathan's, Windows Reflection

Works by Heidi Yockey

Mary Cuddihee Skrill, Blue and red building (top left); Black Lives Matter wall (bottom left);
Yellow house (center); Orange building (top right); Grey buildings (bottom right)

Watercolors by Lynn Cole

Sculptures by Steve Ettlinger

A member of Arts PSWT for five years, Giunta is a resident of Windsor Terrace and works from TI Art Studios in Red Hook. Formerly a Doctor of Education in Instructional Technology and Distance Education, Giunta is a self-taught artist working in clay sculpture. She began sculpting figurative works—detailed busts and human figures—before finding inspiration in the “wonderful coral reef” along the coast of Belize. Her playful, colorful coral sculptures on display at BWAC transport visitors momentarily to a tropical beachfront, however her works carry a more pressing message. “With global warming, the reefs are being destroyed and I just want to keep everything kind of above the surface and alert people,” she said. “We have to do something about this or we’re going to lose these incredible structures.”

With dozens of artists enthusiastically showcasing their work to the steady stream of visitors throughout the weekend, the exhibition at BWAC proved to be just as popular as the annual open studios. “I didn’t know how we would do with COVID and what kind of turn-out we’d have, but I think everybody’s anxious to get out again and do things,” Giunta noted. The Arts PSWT team may make the group show a regular event on their calendar. 

“We may try to set something up where we do this once a year and we do the Open Studios once a year,” added Samuels. “This has been a wonderful event [despite] COVID. It’s given us an opportunity to show our work and what we’ve done, and it’s also given the community an opportunity to see work in a safe place.”

Park Slope Windsor Terrace Artists Open Studios: Redux has been extended through next weekend, November 21 and 22. 

Like last year, OSSAM Gallery in Park Slope serves as a central hub for the event, displaying one piece by each participating artist. See my post on the OSSAM exhibit here.

PSWT Artists Open Studios: Redux
Brooklyn Waterfront Artists Coalition, 481 Van Brunt Street (ground floor), Red Hook, Brooklyn
Saturday & Sunday (Nov. 21 & 22), noon to 6pm

Jo-Ann Acey Comes "Full Circle"

Jo-Ann Acey poses with Full Circle No. 7 and No. 6 at The Cluster Gallery in Gowanus.

You have a few days left to check out Jo-Ann Acey’s solo exhibition Full Circle at The Cluster Gallery in Gowanus. Inspired by nature and memory, the prismatic abstract works burst with buoyant circular shapes that exude energy and spontaneity.

“I just want people to feel happy or feel some sense of beauty when they look at my work,” Acey said at the gallery on Tuesday, noting that her drawings and prints document “childhood memories, good memories.”

“I really like going back to those memories of growing up in the Mohawk Valley,” she said. Much of her work recalls "New York State and the valleys and the rivers. Even though they’re very abstract in a way, that’s where it comes from.”

Full Circle features pastel drawings and monotypes from 2016 that represent the cyclical nature of life, according to Acey. “The title is really the idea that where you start and where you go usually is like a cycle, a circle,” she said.  “There’s just something about the continuation of the circle. It doesn’t end,” she continued. “I think it’s about motion, spontaneity, and the symbol that it just keeps going.”

Acey’s work is rife with movement, with line work sweeping over richly hued shapes to indicate energy and activity. “If you really move in your work, that movement becomes part of the piece,” she says.

Jo-Ann Acey, Full Circle No. 1

Jo-Ann Acey, Full Circle No. 8 and No. 4

Jo-Ann Acey, Full Circle No. 2 and No. 3

Jo-Ann Acey, Full Circle No. 12 and No. 11

Jo-Ann Acey, Full Circle No. 9 (top) and No. 10 (below)

Jo-Ann Acey, Full Circle, installation view

In her studio—down the hallway from The Cluster Gallery—Acey works vigorously from a large table composing her works. Though loud music is not permitted at the Brooklyn Art Cluster Studios, Acey recalls listening to lots of jazz at her former workspace in Clinton Hill, absorbing the music’s “movement, spontaneity, and freedom.” “Even though my work is not directly related to dance, when I’m watching a dance performance, I just envision what the painting or the drawing will look like while I’m watching the movement of the dancers,” she notes. Her series of acrylic paintings, Swing (2018-2019), was inspired by music and dance.

Full Circle is not Acey's only series featuring a prominent geometric form. Circles can also appear in a celestial guise. “I use that circle, that red moon all the time,” she said, noting her 2017 La Luna series. “That happened because I was walking down 9th Street one night and I turned around and [saw] the biggest red moon in the sky. That just stayed with me for days.... I think that circle, that red moon reoccurs often in my work.” Acey emphasizes particular shapes in other series including squares and rectangles evoking congested cities in her Urban Landscapes and triangular points suggesting towering steeples and spires in her Dwelling series.

Acey notes that the shapes in Full Circle are not consistent. In some of the earlier pieces the circles are housed inside boxes but “as the series continued, the circles and the ovals came out of those box spaces and became much more fluid, they didn’t need to be so contained anymore.... You can go ‘full circle,’ but there’s been a lot of changes throughout that. It’s not always going to be a perfect circle. It’s not always going to be a perfect journey, but it evolves.” 

The exhibit also references Acey’s retirement five years ago which allowed her to return to her art full time. “I had recently stopped teaching, so for me it was like, ‘okay, now I’m back where I started and I’m just practicing [art].’”

Works from Jo-Ann Acey's Dwelling (left) and La Luna (right) series displayed in her Gowanus studio.

Recent works at Jo-Ann Acey's studio that will be included in an upcoming group exhibit at 440 Gallery.

Acey grew up in Utica, New York and studied painting and drawing with abstract expressionists at Daeman College in Buffalo. She then attended the University of Arizona for one year before receiving a scholarship to Texas Tech where she earned her MFA. While at Texas Tech she took part in a program that brought her to Taos, New Mexico where the vast terrain inspired her to create landscapes in addition to her abstract work. “That was a really good choice that I made,” she recalls. “I think that was a real opening up, a real freedom for me to express my work the way I wanted to, so I’ve never looked back.”

She moved to New York in the late ‘70s and immediately moved to Brooklyn. “I thought right away I was going to move to Manhattan and have a big loft in Soho, but I’ve always lived in Brooklyn,” she said. She worked at Pratt for a time, evaluating painting and drawing portfolios, before finding a position at Studio in a School which had only launched a couple of year prior. After five years of teaching visual art to public school students, she became the organization’s Program Director and supervised the teaching artists. She later moved on to the United Nations International School in Queens where she taught kindergarteners to eighth-graders for 20 years.

“To see a student who really doesn’t think that they have any drawing or painting skills and then they did the most beautiful work that you’ve ever seen…. Some of the most beautiful paintings or sculptures are done by my kindergarteners or first graders just because there’s no inhibition. I love it.”

While teaching, Acey often encountered students who doubted their drawing or painting abilities. “You break it down into shapes for them” tell them to “look at the shape, or look at the line,” she said, comparing this process to the “full circle” referenced in her show. Going back to the basics, “back to the circle and into the shape.”

Jo-Ann Acey in her studio at Brooklyn Art Cluster Studios. Pieces from her La Luna series are on the left and two of her Urban Landscapes are on the right.

“Teaching to me was a real joy,” she continued. “Towards the end though, I just felt like I need to be in my studio. If you’re teaching five days a week you can’t go to your studio….” Acey is keeping busy in her retirement and can be found at her studio every day. “The freedom to have a studio and to be able to come to it....”

Acey is currently documenting a new set of childhood memories—a series based on color and light called, The Sunny Side of the Street, after the song “my father used to sing all the time,” she said. The upbeat tune is a fitting impetus for the artist who will undoubtedly create another collection of dynamic and joyous works.

Acey will have works exhibited at 440 Gallery’s Project Space as part of the group exhibit Linked opening November 18. See more of Acey's artwork at aceyart.com.

Full Circle
The Cluster Gallery, 540 President Street, Gowanus, Brooklyn (by appointment)
Exhibition closes November 20, 2020

Gowanus Night Heron | Saturday, November 14 -- Event Canceled

UPDATE: Due to newly announced COVID restrictions limiting the size of gatherings, Gowanus Night Heron has been canceled. The team hope to hold the pop-up art event once health officials say it is safe to do so. 

For alternate plans this weekend, check out the closing reception for Natale Adgnot's Chromaticism at Established Gallery on Saturday (more here) or the Park Slope Windsor Terrace Artists Open Studios: Redux exhibtions (more here). 

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Mark your calendars! Gowanus Night Heron, a free pop-up art event, will swoop down alongside the banks of the Gowanus Canal on Saturday. The one-night-only event will feature work by 17 Brooklyn-based artists exhibited outdoors at the Rabbit Movers parking lot.

The brainchild of artist Bonnie Ralston, Gowanus Night Heron will “bring people together safely for a night of art, community, and connection,” she says. “I had passed by the Rabbit Movers lot often on my way to and from Third Avenue Clay, and was always curious about what went on there,” Ralston explains. Searching on the internet she discovered it is “this very cool moving company that supports the arts community by employing artists as movers and offering artists an affordable and unique exhibition service.” Rabbit Movers rents trucks to artists for temporary mobile exhibitions through its Art Attacks program. Ralston “fell in love with the idea...and then COVID hit.”

She finally went to visit Rabbit Movers in late September to learn more and the owners agreed to let her host her own Art Attack event right on their lot overlooking the Gowanus Canal. “The canal and its environs are a major influence on my art,” said Ralston. She often incorporates objects found on Gowanus streets into her artwork.

After securing the site, Ralston reached out to studio mate and fellow BWAC member Kasia Zurek-Doule and photographer Miska Draskoczy for help organizing the event. “I thought it was a great idea and loved the old school Gowanus DIY down-and-dirty aspect of it," Draskoczy said. “Especially in a year where we didn’t have Gowanus Open Studios and much fewer art events in the neighborhood because of COVID, it seemed like a great thing to do for the local arts community, especially being outdoors as well.”

“I love the community oriented can-do spirit of the local Gowanus arts scene,” Draskoczy continued. “Anything that gets people outside exploring funky spaces and seeing art is a great goal to me. It feels rewarding to try and help keep the offbeat spirit of arts and culture in Gowanus alive.”

While Ralston initially planned for a small event featuring six to ten artists, the response has been overwhelming, with 17 artists currently lined up. “We all just reached out to artists who we knew and thought would be comfortable with the space, the timing, and the installation,” Ralston said, noting that the site is “pretty raw.” Artwork will be displayed in wooden moving pods or trucks, she said, “the antithesis of the white cube of a traditional gallery space.”

Gowanus Night Heron will feature a selection of photography, collage, drawing, and spoken word, as well as light, video, and sound installations. Beloved Gowanus watering hole Lavender Lake will be on hand selling food and drink. “These last eight months have been hell, and having something positive to put all of that anxious energy towards has been really wonderful,” Ralston notes.

Regarding the event’s namesake, she says many Gowanus residents have never seen a night heron or even know that they exist since these native birds tend to be active at dusk. Ralston often spots black-crowned night herons fishing along the canal in the evening. “The ephemeral nature of the event aligns well with that of a heron sighting. Both are reminders that even in these uncertain times, life and art continue to flourish around us. We just need to keep our eyes and hearts open.”

Draskoczy—author of Gowanus Wild, a photo book exploring the natural side of the neighborhood—had surprisingly never seen a night heron himself until just a few weeks ago. He had just started working on the event when he had his first sighting during a movie night hosted by the Gowanus Dredgers on the canal. “Right in the middle of the climactic scene of Creature From the Black Lagoon, a beautiful night heron flew in under the screen and started yanking fish out of the canal,” he recalls. “I took it as a good omen and it doesn’t get any more Gowanus than that!”

Gowanus Night Heron
Rabbit Movers (lot), 426 President Street (at Bond), Gowanus, Brooklyn
Saturday, Nov. 14, 6pm to 9pm (rain or shine)
Masks and social-distancing are required.
Follow @gowanusnightheron for more info.

Park Slope Windsor Terrace Artists Open Studios: Redux | OSSAM Gallery

Park Slope Windsor Terrace Artists Open Studios: Redux, OSSAM Gallery

Although the annual Park Slope Windsor Terrace Artists Open Studios event cannot proceed as usual this year, the group has found an alternate way to showcase work by dozens of local artists while adhering to COVID-related health restrictions. Instead of attendees visiting individual artist studios, PSWT Artists Open Studios: Redux assembles more than 30 artists for a group exhibition taking place at two spacious venues where there is plenty of room to social distance while meeting the artists and checking out their work. Don't forget to wear a mask!

The collective of artists based in Park Slope and Windsor Terrace has hosted open studios annually since 2013. Spanning two weekends, Open Studios: Redux kicked off last Friday. Once again Ossam Gallery serves as a preview gallery, exhibiting one piece by each participating artist. Works on view include painting, prints, drawings, ceramics, sculpture, photography, and collage.

Over at the Brooklyn Waterfront Artists Coalition's (BWAC) gallery in Red Hook, the artists showcase an array of work, each with a designated table or wall space to exhibit. The artists will be on hand over the weekend to meet and greet visitors and sell their work.

Visit ArtsPSWT.com for more info and click here to see my post covering last year's PSWT Open Studios Weekend. Below are photos taken last Sunday at OSSAM Gallery. 

PSWT Artists Open Studios: Redux
OSSAM Gallery, 300 7th Street, Park Slope, Brooklyn
Friday through Sunday (Nov. 13-15), noon to 6pm

Brooklyn Waterfront Artists Coalition, 481 Van Brunt Street, Red Hook, Brooklyn
Saturday & Sunday (Nov. 14-15), noon to 6pm

Dan McDonald, 6 Over 6, mixed media

L-R: Bob Hagan, Life Goes On (25a), mixed media; Mary Cuddihee Skrill, Pink Building, acrylic on canvas

Robin Roi, Elemental, mixed media, acrylic paint, collage, dressmaking paper

L-R: Stephanie Amend, Doe Deer, oil; Dara Oshin, Fecundity, archival pigment print, glass beads, metal leaf, board; Alice Garik, Nest, gelatin silver print

L-R: Cynthia Ruse, Still, oil and mixed media on wood panel; Alise Loebelsohn, From Green to Orange, oil paint on panel

L-R: Janie Samuels, Silence Speaks, pastel on paper; Lynn Goodman, Brooklyn Parrot Flight, porcelain, glazes, gold

L-R: Stacy Bergener, Behind the Veil, mixed media on canvas; Heidi Yockey, Untitled, oil on panel

L-R: Phil Desantis, Rusty Chains, photograph; Susan Greenstein, Wave Hill, watercolor

Howard Skrill, Junipero Serra Decapitate, ink, gesso, graphite, colored pencil, pastel on watercolor paper

L-R: Raya Dukhan, Ardent, mixed media on canvas; Phyllis Gaughran, Just Before Dawn, acrylic on natsume

Luis Coig, Untitled, wood shelf and tchotchkes

L-R: Justin Campoy, in collaboration with John Lennox, Fielder's Choice (First buds must like the cold), multicolored ink and letterpress with Baskerville Type on paper; 
Lynn Cole, View From Inside, watercolor, rubber stamp

Joyce Riley, Green-Wood Cemetery, Pink Paths, oil and acrylic on wood

Kathleen Jean-Jacques, Lou, mixed media

L-R: Caryn Kreitzer, The Peace March, terracotta; Karen Jarmon, Hanukkah Menorah, ceramic and brass; Paola Corso, Blue Moon Shadows, photograph

Jonathan Blum, Sheep Thinking About Aged Gouda, monoprint

Steve Ettlinger, Sleeping Shmoo, cedar with Danish oil

Fotini Vurgaropulou, Chambers, cast glass and copper

L-R: Sandra Giunta, Coral Reminder 47, clay; Carol Adams, Irini, ceramic with terra sigilatta, underglaze, washes, glaze, metal, beads

Park Slope Windsor Terrace Artists Open Studios Redux, OSSAM Gallery

Chromaticism by Natale Adgnot | Established Gallery

Chromaticism by Natale Adgnot at Established Gallery

This is your last week to catch Chromaticism, Brooklyn-based artist Natale Adgnot’s solo exhibition showcasing dazzling three-dimensional works whose vivid colors and shapes—neatly lined slats, clusters of mushrooms, shells, and lily pads—practically leap from the gallery walls.

The exhibit features three ongoing series by Adgnot. Her Sketchbook series began in 2013 when the artist found herself disillusioned with her day job. She picked up a sketchbook and challenged herself to create a sketch a day for 30 days. She enjoyed the creative stimulation so much, she’s continued the daily activity for seven years and has since filled 700 books with black and white ink drawings. 

“When I start a sketch I have no idea what I’m going to get,” Adgnot explains. “My whole process is really about putting something down that’s a seed—whether it be a check mark that just feels good physically to make, something that matches the music I’m listening to, the seam on somebody’s purse that I see on the subway, or an object that I find on the ground in a forest—I put down an initial mark.” After putting down that first mark, she then sets rules for herself in completing that particular piece, the only constants being that the drawing must be done in black and white, with no pencil, and on a small page. “Just go directly with the pen. No color, no going back.” She says the activity is similar to a crossword puzzle for her.  “I apply those rules for the duration of the sketch and see what comes out." 

L-R: Natale Adgnot's Untitled (book 29 sketch 11), 2019; Dispersion Triptych, 2020; Untitled (book 29 sketch 21),  2019

L-R: Natale Adgnot's Untitled (book 20 sketch 17), 2016; Untitled (book 22 sketch 08), 2016; Untitled (book 17 sketch 08), 2015; Pencil Shavings, 2020

Natale Adgnot, Pencil Shavings (detail), 2020

L-R: Natale Adgnot's Untitled (book 23, sketch 02), 2017; Untitled (book 26, sketch 17), 2017; Untitled (book 27, sketch 05), 2018

After working on these sketches consistently for five years, Adgnot says she wanted to take them to another level by creating “a series that had more presence than sketches but retained the same starkness,” so she decided to “bring two-dimensional drawings up to the third dimension.” This series of black and white sculptures called Drawings in Three Dimensions combine her sketchbook drawings with an unexpected material.

The artist had been fascinated with the Shrinky Dinks her daughter played with and wanted to incorporate the morphing material into her work. “There was something inherently graphic and attractive to me about the Shrinky Dinks,” she recalls of the polystyrene plastic that shrinks in size but becomes thicker and harder when baked. The artist collected the scraps her daughter cut out and created shapes and jewelry for herself. She then learned that she could purchase blank artist-grade sheets of the material.

Adgnot draws delicate patterns on the translucent Shrinky Dink material before baking it. When it comes out of the oven she must work quickly while the material is still pliable. She has mere seconds to form the pieces into geometric or flora-like shapes. She then attaches the pieces onto a painted birch panel in intricate dynamic patterns, some suggesting spiraling motion or whirling leaves. These works are not to be viewed from a stationary position. Exciting new discoveries—discreet details, gold enameled edges—can be found in the sculptures when viewed up close and from various vantage points.

Natale Adgnot, Blades of Grass Square, 2020

Natale Adgnot, Scales, 2020

Natale Adgnot, Scales (seen from below), 2020

Natale Adgnot, Tooth Circle, 2020

Natale Adgnot, Tooth Circle (side view), 2020

 

Natale Adgnot, Hemming Square, 2020

Raised in Texas, Adgnot studied graphic design and photography at Sam Houston State University. Shortly after graduating she moved to Paris for ten years where she met her husband and initially worked in graphic design. She later studied haute couture and interned at Chanel and for Felipe Oliveira Baptista. “What I didn’t realize at the time was that when I was working in fashion, I was actually honing my sculptor’s mind,” she says. “I had been such a two-dimensional artist and designer for all those years that making these three-dimensional pieces for the runway—I was actually making pieces out of horse skin and foam and wire—they were really sculptural pieces…and that’s kind of what primed me to later on become a sculptor.”

It was while Adgnot and her family were living in Japan between 2015 and 2018 that she began her Drawings in Three Dimensions series. Since living space there tends to be small and landlords restrict hammering nails into walls to hang art, she had to work on a small scale and create diminutive “objects that people could put on their bookcases,” producing more than "a hundred sculptures that were smaller than a foot by a foot."

It was only at the start of this year that she began working on a larger scale. “Adding scale was a huge step for me,” she says. “This year I started going to three-feet by four-feet. Later in the year I went to four-feet by five-feet.” Having crossed another touchstone in her practice, she’s decided to challenge herself again. “I’ve gone to three dimensions. I’ve gone larger scale. What’s the next logical step? It’s color,” said said.

“When the pandemic hit it became almost inevitable that I had to [add color] because it was almost like fighting against the drab grimness of the year,” she explains of her most recent series, Chromatics. “I ended up choosing the most fluorescent, in-your-face colors. I didn’t want it to be in-between. It’s either black and white or it’s color in your face,” she said of her vibrant palette. For these works, Adgnot paints her substrates in shocking hues. She dips the plastic pieces in matching paint and hangs them to dry or covers them entirely in acrylic paint, creating a textural surface as they shrink in the oven. The vivid hues add an eye-popping exuberance to these pieces.

Natale Adgnot, Klein-set Half-moons, 2020

Natale Adgnot, Reflex-set Pixels, 2020

Natale Adgnot, Atomic-set Polypore, 2020

Natale Adgnot, Atomic-set Polypore (view from below), 2020

Clockwise from top left: Natale Adgnot's Atomic Nymphaea; Reflex Alignment; Klein Origami; Infrarouge Verticals; Reflex Lunaria; Klein Lamellae 2, all 2020

The musical term chromaticism—"the way musicians add color to their music”—inspired the title of her exhibition. Combining the black keys of a piano—the five chromatic tones—with the white keys of C major, musicians can play the full chromatic scale of 12 tones per octave, adding nuance and emotion to a composition. “They use it for…these really strong emotions that really can’t be evoked with the more basics parts of the scale,” Adgnot explains. “I thought it was a perfect metaphor for what I’ve been doing where I started out with these two-dimensional black and white works, brought them up to the third dimension, and then finally adding color into the mix, like filling in the black keys between the white keys.”

According to the artist, the last work she completed for this exhibition, Reflex Dispersion, “best exemplifies” all three of her series. It features elements of her black and white sketchbook drawings, the three-dimensionality of her monochromatic sculptures, and a surprise burst of color. “When you stand directly in front of it…it almost looks like lines on a white page, so that’s very much like the Drawings in Three Dimensions, but then as you come to the side, you discover this really bright fluorescent yellow where the details meet the substrate.” As with her other sculptures, the work reveals different scenes and experiences when viewed from different angles. “I wanted to have two different approaches with the color,” Adgnot says. “I want it to either be in-your-face color or color that you just discover as you move around it.”

Natale Adgnot, Reflex Dispersion, 2020

Natale Adgnot, Reflex Dispersion (side view), 2020

Natale Adgnot stands beside her work Dispersion Triptych, 2020

Chromaticism by Natale Adgnot at Established Gallery

“There’s something satisfying about discovering something in an artwork that’s not readily obvious. If you come up to the piece, at first glance from the front, you see that it’s three-dimensional, but it’s only when you move around that you discover there’s this whole other experience with the bright, bright color,” she said, noting “the joy of discovering” her work embodies. “When you take the time to look at things from other perspectives you can discover that there are several truths. I know it’s cliché but the truth is, there’s something that’s pleasurable about discovering that your initial understanding is not completely right. We like to be tricked.”

Chromaticism by Natale Adgnot
Established Gallery, 75 6th Avenue, Prospect Heights, Brooklyn
Closing reception: Saturday, November 14, 2pm to 5pm

Gowanus Reflection | Documenting A Changing Neighborhood

Gowanus Reflection: View from Carroll Street bridge, December 2013

The spring-like weather this weekend will be perfect for a Gowanus scavenger hunt! The husband-and-wife filmmaking team behind the documentary Gowanus Current have taken ten stills out of their hundreds of hours of footage and posted them at the original locations throughout the neighborhood where they were shot.

Jamie Courville and Chris Reynolds began filming Gowanus Current in 2013, documenting the rapid transformation of the former industrial district, from the demolition of old factory buildings to the construction of new luxury residences, a Whole Foods, and numerous hotels, bars, and restaurants. At the center of the neighborhood is the Gowanus Canal, a 1.8-mile-long toxic body of water designated a Superfund Site by the Environmental Protection Agency in 2010. With the agency’s cleanup of the polluted waterway finally beginning along with the impending rezoning of Gowanus—which will bring with it thousands of new residents, more commercial space and taller buildings—this once gritty neighborhood will soon become a very different place.

The Brooklyn-based couple were living in Gowanus when they started the film and witnessed firsthand the gentrification of the neighborhood, seeing longtime businesses close and residents move out, they told Brownstoner in 2014. They’ve attended countless city meetings in the neighborhood and documented various local events, like the environmental activist swimming the fetid canal in 2015. They also interviewed community members and even set up a phone line for neighbors to call and leave their personal stories about Gowanus.

Gowanus Reflection: Southeast corner of Union and Nevins, October 2013

Gowanus Reflection: Public Place site, March 2014

View from photo Gowanus Reflection: Public Place site, March 2014

Gowanus Reflection: Burns Brothers coal pockets demolitions, April 2014

When completed Gowanus Current will show “the neighborhood becoming an entertainment destination, losing artists and small manufacturers, and entering an era of increasing community awareness,” the filmmakers state on their website. “Neighborhood icons like the beloved Kentile sign are dismantled, while new landmarks like the 700-unit 365 Bond apartments gradually rise up. In the wake of the transformative rezoning plan, local groups struggle to have their needs addressed. This film will continue to explore the changes to the community as these mounting conflicts finally reach their resolution with the city’s decision on rezoning in the coming months.”

Their outdoor photo exhibit, Gowanus Reflection, will be on display from October 29 through November 11. The framed 8 x 11-inch prints, mounted onto sign posts and fences, offer a sneak peek of the in-progress film. “In some cases, they reflect a dramatic remaking of the landscape. In others, the changes are more subtle,” the filmmakers wrote in a Facebook post. The couple welcomes feedback on the photos on their website where you can also find a map of the photo locations. Visit gowanuscurrent.com to learn more.

View from photo Gowanus Reflection: Kentile Floors sign, June 2014

Gowanus Reflection: Gowanus Dredgers boat house, February 2014

View from photo Gowanus Reflection: Gowanus Dredgers boat house, February 2014

Gowanus Reflection
Various locations across Gowanus, Brooklyn
On view through November 11, 2020

John Edmonds: A Sidelong Glance | Brooklyn Museum

John Edmonds, Two Spirits, 2019

The Brooklyn Museum presents John Edmonds: A Sidelong Glance, the Brooklyn-based photographer’s first solo museum exhibition. Edmonds’ intimate photos, featuring friends from his creative circle as well as still lifes of African artwork, examine Black queer experiences and identity.

Originally from Washington, DC, the 31-year-old artist earned his BFA from Corcoran School of Art & Design and an MFA in Photography from Yale University. His portraits of friends, lovers, and sometimes strangers, explore “identity, community, and desire,” according to the artist's website. His early work includes The "Du-Rag Series," featuring candid shots of men and women donning the headwear on the streets of his Crown Height neighborhood, he said in an interview for Another Man. These photos soon led to his portraiture work which combines elements of Black American culture with references to religious paintings and modernist photography.

A Sidelong Glance features three groups of recent work. The first includes portraits of friends from the NYC creative community posing with African masks and sculptures borrowed from a Brooklyn collector. Many of his models gaze at or grasp the objects to illustrate “the reception of African art in the United States and Europe that has been conditioned by the legacies of colonialism,” according to the museum. “I was drawn to the objects because of how they were stylized and how that stylizing spoke to a wider view of an ‘African’ vernacular of Black homes in America,” Edmunds stated.

John Edmonds, Tête de Femme (Portrait of Ladin), 2018

John Edmonds, Female Nude, 2019

John Edmonds, Collapse, 2019

In Tête de Femme (Portrait of Ladin), a young woman with her head propped on a table poses next to an elaborate African mask, emulating Man Ray’s Noire et blanche in which a white model poses with a mask from Côte d’Ivoire. Unlike Man Ray’s model, the woman in Edmonds’ portrait has her eyes open and stares directly at the viewer. The model’s confident gaze suggests a reclamation of the artwork from Man Ray's photo.

A shirtless figure seated before a Kuba cloth wears a large-beaked mask in Two Spirits. The Ge Gon (male spirit) mask from Liberia is traditionally worn during masquerade performances. The double exposure image gives the surreal appearance of two masks. According to the artist this portrait “calls and echoes the sentiments of Ibeji” a spirit that represents a pair of twins—a reference to the model’s gender-fluidity.

John Edmonds, Anatolli & Collection, 2019

John Edmonds, Untitled (Light Passing over Ja'Tovia and Senufo), 2019

The second series of images features models interacting with Edmonds’ personal collection of African artwork which includes a mix of both religious objects and commercial pieces to question “what makes or who deems an object ‘authentic.’” 

Anatolli & Collection features a man staring intently at a selection of sculptures from the artist’s collection. “Anatolli gazes upon these sculptures as he himself is gazed upon by Edmonds and the viewer, rendering him a parallel object of desire,” the wall text reads.

John Edmonds, Untitled (Marion & Yaure Mask), 2020

John Edmonds, Untitled (Ellison Collection), 2020

For the third group of images, the Brooklyn Museum gave Edmonds access to its Arts of Africa collection, including objects donated to the institution in 2015 by the estate of Ralph Ellison, the author of the 1952 novel Invisible Man. 

Shot in the Brooklyn Museum’s Beaux-Art Court, a man dressed in black admires a Yaure mask once owned by Ellison in Untitled (Marion & Yaure Mask). Unlike Edmonds' earlier works in which his models engage with the objects, this model sits at a distance from the artwork to illustrate “barriers created by art history and its institutions.”

Edmonds’ elegant and evocative photographs pay tribute to African arts while revising art history narratives by incorporating his experience as a young Black artist. His work was included in the 2019 Whitney Biennial. Edmonds was also the recipient of the inaugural UOVO Prize for emerging artists in Brooklyn. A Sidelong Glance is presented as part of that prize along with a $25,000 cash grant and the installation of a 50 x 50-foot mural of Edmonds’ 2019 photo Whose Hands? on the façade of UOVO’s Bushwick facility.

John Edmonds: A Sidelong Glance
Brooklyn Museum, 200 Eastern Parkway, Prospect Heights, Brooklyn
Exhibition on view through August 8, 2021

Jeffrey Gibson: When Fire Is Applied to a Stone It Cracks | Brooklyn Museum

Charles Cary Rumsey, The Dying Indian, circa 1904, and Study for Buffalo Hunt Freeze, Manhattan Bridge, 1912-15;  John Little Sun Murie, I'm Gonna Run With Every Minute I Can Borrow moccasins (on sculpture), 2019;  Jeffrey Gibson, I'm Gonna Run With Every Minute I Can Borrow mural, 2019.
A selection of moccasins from the Brooklyn Museum's Collection is displayed in front.

For his current show at the Brooklyn Museum artist Jeffrey Gibson exhibits a selection of his recent multidisciplinary works alongside an array of Native American objects from the museum's collection. When Fire Is Applied to a Stone It Cracks features Gibson’s kaleidoscopic paintings and murals, sculptures, and garments juxtaposed with ceramics, headdresses, and beadwork created by Indigenous artists, as well as works depicting Native Americans made by non-Native artists.

Born in Colorado and based in Hudson, New York, Gibson is of Choctaw and Cherokee descent. He incorporates into his work traditional Native American materials and practices (e.g., beadwork, metal jingles, animal hides) to challenge perceptions of Native American artwork and to address the erasure of Indigenous art from Western history. He received a MacArthur Foundation genius grant in 2019. 

Visitors entering the exhibit are met by Charles Cary Rumsey’s life-sized bronze, Dying Indian (circa 1904), set against a dizzying rainbow-colored mural by Gibson. According to the artist, the sculpture is a prime example of how many late 19th- and early 20th-century non-Native artists represented the “decline and eventual end of Native American civilizations.” In the wall text Gibson states that these artworks “have always saddened and perplexed me because I have never understood why some people celebrate these sculptures while I have found them offensive since I was a child.” Gibson collaborated with John Murie to create a pair of the latter's signature beaded moccasins to adorn the statue’s feet. Lyrics borrowed from the Roberta Flack song See You Then are meticulously beaded onto the footwear, reading, “I’m Gonna Run With Every Minute I Can Borrow.”

Two other sculptures by non-Native American artists—one of Chief Blackbird and another of an Indian Warrior—are displayed on either side of Gibson’s I Don’t Belong To You – You Don’t Belong To Me. “These sculptures present images of Native people that are idealized in the mind of the maker either for the objectification of their beauty or their demise,” the artist states.

L-R: Alexander Phimister Proctor, Chief Blackbird Ogalalla (Oglala) Sioux, modeled 1903, cast 1907: Jeffrey Gibson, I Don't Belong to You—You Don't Belong to Me, 2016;  Adolph Alexander Weinman, Indian Warrior, 1898

Jeffrey Gibson: When Fire Is Applied to a Stone It Cracks installation view

Jeffrey Gibson, When Fire Is Applied to a Stone It Cracks, 2019

Jeffrey Gibson, All I Wanted, All I Needed, 2019

An adjacent gallery exhibits Gibson’s dynamic paintings on hide or canvas, a beaded punching bag, and three garments inspired by Ghost Dance ceremonies wherein Paiute dancers wore “self-made ghost shirts” that they believed would deflect “white man’s bullets.” The gallery also displays various examples of Native American beadwork as well as two traditional headdresses. The feathered headdress represents the “romanticized Indian” in mainstream media, according to the artist. Young Native American men from the Plains section of the United States (the central expanse from Texas to the Dakotas) added feathers to their headpieces after demonstrating an act of courage or performing a good deed, taking years to accumulate the plumage to complete a full headdress.

The Tsimshian headdress, from the northwest coast, is worn by leaders during gift-giving celebrations to symbolize prestige and “showcase acts of generosity.” Gibson’s two interpretations of headdresses appear more like helmets, encasing the wearer's head in a protective shell. All of the headwear exhibited “symbolize strength” according to the museum, “but one represents strength in the form of protection while the other is in the form of the protector.”

L-R: War Bonnet from the Plains region and Tsimshian headdress from the Northwestern Coast

Top, L-R: Jeffrey Gibson's People Like Us, 2018;  Tribes File Suit To Protect Bears Ears, 2018; A Wag A Wit A Witness; 2018
Below, L-R: Jeffrey Gibson's Oceana, 2018 and Peace, 2018

Jeffrey Gibson, Peace, 2018

Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) artist,  Beaded Bag,  circa 1850s-60s

Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) artist, Beaded Bag, early 20th century

Jeffrey Gibson, Mound Builder, 2013

Jeffrey Gibson, Speak To Me In Your Way So That I Can Hear You, 2015

The third gallery focuses on items from the Brooklyn Museum’s Archives including a tipi liner covered in illustrations by the Lakota member, Rain-In-The-Face, who documented his life on the swath of cotton. This gallery questions the museum’s Native American collection assembled by Stewart Culin, Curator of Ethnology for the institution from 1903 to 1929. Gibson and historian Dr. Christian Ayne Crouch, who collaborated on this exhibit, argue that while the objects showcase “Indigenous subjects and culture," they also suggest a vanishing culture, “the exclusion and erasure of indigenous histories and stories that had been fundamental to the narratives that institutions promote.” The tipi liner that documents Rain-In-The-Face's history is, according to Dr. Crouch, both an art object and archival piece that "invites us to bring a new approach to recover Native agency, presence, and voice in the Museum archive and in the collections."

Jeffrey Gibson, Whose World Is This? It's Yours It's Mine, 2019
The stained glass work's title is a modified Nas lyric from the 1994 song "The World is Yours"

Grete Mannheim,  Navajo Mother and Baby, Arizona, 1952

Jeffrey Gibson: When Fire Is Applied to a Stone It Cracks installation view

Jeffrey Gibson, Power!, 2018

Rain-In-The-Face, Tipi Liner, 1850-89

Southwest water jars from the Brooklyn Museum Collection

Charles Cary Rumsey, The Dying Indian, circa 1904, and Study for Buffalo Hunt Freeze, Manhattan Bridge, 1912-15; John Little Sun Murie, I'm Gonna Run With Every Minute I Can Borrow moccasins (on sculpture), 2019; Jeffrey Gibson, I'm Gonna Run With Every Minute I Can Borrow mural, 2019

“When fire is applied to a stone it cracks” is an Irish proverb, Gibson explains, adding that it reflects his desire for museum-goers to abandon their preconceived notions when looking at historical objects. “I read ‘fire’ in this quote to describe the innovative making, use of materials, transformative techniques, and the survivalist ethic of Indigenous people. Our use of new and different materials to make things that support ourselves and our communities in the ‘fire’ that continues to break open the static and antiquated ideas regarding who we are and what we are capable of.”

Through the exhibition and his artwork, Gibson demonstrates the “continuity and endurance of Indigenous communities and artists.” Don’t miss this fascinating exhibit that showcases overlooked Native American artwork while reviving it in meaningful and innovative ways.

Jeffrey Gibson: When Fire Is Applied to a Stone It Cracks
Brooklyn Museum, 200 Eastern Parkway, Prospect Heights, Brooklyn
Exhibition on view through January 10, 2021

Studio 54: Night Magic | Brooklyn Museum

Studio 54: Night Magic exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum

This is your last week to check out the Brooklyn Museum’s massive Studio 54: Night Magic exhibition chronicling the legendary nightclub’s three years of glamour, disco, and debauchery. On view are 650 objects documenting the venue’s history including photos, film, music, architectural plans, design sketches, ephemera, and lots of fabulous ‘70s era fashion.

Founded by two Brooklyn natives who met while attending Syracuse University, Ian Schrager and Steve Rubell, the club was housed in a former opera house at 254 West 54th Street. The Gallo Opera House, constructed in 1927, later became the WPA Federal Music Theatre, then the New Yorker Theatre in the 1930s. CBS took over the building in 1943, recording television shows such as What’s My Line?, The $64,000 Question, Password, and Captain Kangaroo from the vast network’s 52nd studio, Studio 52. In 1966, according to the Brooklyn Museum, the Velvet Underground recorded their first album in the same building. In 1977, Schrager, Rubell, and Jack Dushey, a business partner, leased 254 W 54th Street for their nightclub, dubbing it Studio 54 in reference to the street address.

The businessmen assembled an innovative creative team who worked for months to transform the space, incorporating the original theatrical architecture with luxe décor that accommodated evolving, elaborate sets and state-of-the-art sound and kinetic lighting systems. In lieu of disco balls and lit-up dance floors, which they considered outdated at the time, they hired set designers Richie Williamson and Dean Janoff to create the iconic Moon and Spoon graphic—an eight-foot wide crescent moon with a row of blinking lights leading from a coke spoon up to its nose. The moon adorned the back wall of the club as a cheeky wink to “the popularity of cocaine,” according to the museum.

Studio 54: Night Magic exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum

FIorucci Skirt, Antonio Lopez and Juan Ramos,1977

Fiorucci Ribbon Skirt, Antonio Lopez and Juan Ramos,1977, remade 2019

Studio 54 VIP Complimentary Drinks tIcket. Gil Lesser designed the club's deco-style logo.

L-R: Fiorucci Blouse, Antonio Lopez and Juan Ramos, 1977; Dress, Stephen Burrows, 1978; Pleated Gold Lame Gown, Zandra Rhodes, 1977.
Model Pat Cleveland dances in the Rhodes gown at Studio 54 in the Guy Marineau photo (1977) above the display.

The Moon and Spoon with Planets, designed by Richie Williamson and Dean Janoff

L-R (bottom): Halter, worn by Liza Minnelli, circa 1979; Evening Ensemble worn by Elizabeth Taylor at the Academy Awards, 1976; Dress worn by Liza Minnelli, 1978; (top) White silk and sequin ensemble worn by Liza Minnelli, 1977, all designed by Halston.

Bianca Jagger,  May 2, 1977,  photo by Rose Hartman

L-R: Sarong Gown, Halston, 1977;  Low-Back Slip Mio and Ruffle Skirt,  Norma Kamali, 1977; Super Flare Dress, Norma Kamali, 1977

Brooke Shields and Mariel Hemingway at Studio 54, 1977,  photo by Adam Scull

Studio 54 with Balloons, 1978,  photo by Tod Papageorge

Western Union Mailgram from The Andy Warhol Museum collection

Elizabeth Taylor, Halston, and Bianca Jagger at Taylor's birthday party,  March 6, 1978,  photo by Allan Tannenbaum

Two pairs of Halston metallic sandals worn by Elizabeth Taylor to events at Studio 54 in 1978.

Studio 54 guest list from April 7, 1978

Steve Rubell, Liza Minnelli, Bianca Jagger, and Andy Warhol, April 1978, photo by Roxanne Lowit

Fashion Designer Issey Miyake and Fashion Editor Diana Vreeland, 1978,  photo by Adam Scull

When Studio 54 debuted on April 26, 1977, the club instantly became a Mecca for revelers from all walks of life, or as the museum puts it “people from different sexual, sociopolitical, and financial strata.” Preceding the onslaught of the AIDS epidemic, the club offered a place to experience “sexual, gender, and creative liberation, where every patron could feel like a star,” according to the press release. The venue was a late-night playground for the biggest celebrities of the day, from movie and television stars, artists, models, singers, dancers, rock stars, writers, fashion designers, and many more.

Despite its success—with desperate mobs trying to get past the doormen each night—shady business operations led to police raids of the venue which eventually landed Schrager and Rubell in prison briefly for tax evasion. (President Obama granted Schrager a full pardon in 2017.) The two were locked up in February 1980 and Studio 54 was sold in May of that year, with Schrager and Rubell staying on as consultants. The last hurrah they helped organize was a "Busby Berkeley-inspired" Sweet 16 birthday party for Calvin Klein’s daughter in October 1982. The pair went on to open another popular nightclub, the Palladium, as well as boutique NYC hotels including the Royalton and The Paramount.

Anton Perich's photos of Jerry Hall and Patti Hansen, 1978, and his "machine paintings" of the images

Clockwise from top left: Two Men on Couch, circa 1978; Untitled, circa 1978; Untitled, circa 1978; and Untitled, circa 1978  all by Anton Perich

Velvet, Lamé, and Rhinestone Dress,  Zandra Rhodes, circa 1979

L-R: Dress (Look 9), 1979 and Dress, 1978, both Zandra Rhodes;  Dress (purple silk charmeuse), circa 1976-79, and Dress (from "Romantic Chiffon" Collection), 1974, both  Giorgio di Sant'Angelo; V-Neck Blouse, 1979, Kenny Bonavitacola

Donna Summer Sings, April 26, 1979,  photo by Allan Tannenbaum

Red Balloons, Valentine's Day 1979, photo by Dustin Pittman

Halloween 1978, photo by Hasse Persson

L-R: Top, 1978, Gauntlet Gloves, 1978, and Hooded Catsuit, 1978 all designed by Larry LeGaspi; Wrap Jumpsuit, 1979, Kenny Bonavitacola; Asymmetrical Catsuit, 1978,  Larry LeGaspi

Studio 54, acrylic and silkscreen ink on linen, 1978, Andy Warhol

Bulgari Sapphire Sautoir worn by Elizabeth Taylor to Studio 54 on May 21, 1979. Richard Burton gave Taylor the 62-carat Burmese sapphire necklace for her 40th birthday.

L-R: Norma Kamali's Sleeping Bag Coats circa 1979 and 2019 (silver), Silver Lame Parachute Dresses 2020 (top) and Slinky Dress (pink jersey), 1977, remade 2019:
Zandra Rhodes' pleated lame dress, 2019

Heavy Stud Thong Slip Mio Swimsuit, 2019, Norma Kamali; Powernet and rhinestone dress, 1991, Giorgio di Sant'Angelo and Martin Price

Studio 54 Jeans by Norma Kamali (men's and two pairs of women's), 1980, and a pair of Calvin Klein jeans

Rubell contracted HIV and passed away from AIDS related illnesses in 1989. Schrager has continued his success as a hotelier, launching the Delano in Miami, the Mondrian in Los Angeles, and more recently Public in NYC’s Lower East Side.

Though only open for 33 months, Studio 54 has had an indelible influence on pop culture and sets an imposingly high bar for nightclubs and party promoters today. Do the hustle over to the Brooklyn Museum and be transported back to the extravagance of this boogie wonderland!

Studio 54: Night Magic
Brooklyn Museum, 200 Eastern Parkway, Prospect Heights, Brooklyn
Closing November 8, 2020
Tickets: $20

Celebrating the Harlem Renaissance Centennial on Governors Island

Art Crawl Harlem's artist-in-residence Demarcus McGaughey at his Governors Island studio.

For the past four weeks artist Demarcus McGaughey has been working from one of the historic houses on Governors Island’s Colonial Row. One of two artists selected for the inaugural Art Crawl Harlem artist-in-residency program, McGaughey is creating a new series of exuberant mixed media portraits that celebrate the centennial of the Harlem Renaissance.

During this “golden age in African American culture,” Harlem became an epicenter of Black art, literature, music, dance, fashion, and more. McGaughey and Ricky Day, his fellow artist-in-residence, are creating works that focus on the theme Boundaries and Connections: The Other Side of Us, reflecting on the past 100 years of the NYC neighborhood—“from the 1918 pandemic and ‘The Great Migration’ which preceded the Harlem Renaissance when Black people moved to the north seeking opportunity and changing the economic and cultural fabric of America to the Black Lives Movement and COVID-19 pandemic,” according to Art Crawl Harlem.

“This year is celebrating the centennial of Harlem, a hundred years is the other side of us and how do we track and trace that history as it relates to today and where we’re at,” said Ulysses Williams, Executive Director of Art Crawl Harlem. “You have to consider the past as it relates to who we are now.”

Williams says that McGaughey embodies that theme, “being a man from Texas with a dream in New York. He came here with that dream and he’s making it his reality.”

“In the 1920s African Americans moved, they migrated from different states to Harlem and Harlem became this place of refuge, freedom, talent, and culture, a place to be expressive,” McGaughey noted. “For me those individuals created the life that they wanted.”

A metallic canvas with the handwritten message, “Create Your Life,” welcomes visitors as they step through the front door of the artist’s temporary studio. McGaughey, who also works as a life coach, uses this mantra regularly. “I always tell my clients ‘you can create your life,’ and I always say we all have something special and it’s our responsibility to use our gifts to empower the world,” he said during a preview of his works-in-progress on Tuesday. “It’s meant to be like a mirror, a reflection piece,” he said of the work composed of plaster, mirror-effect paint, and resin. “A mirror to look at and be able to see yourself but then think about the life that you want to create.”

Create Your Life by Demarcus McGaughey. Photo: Nathan Haselby

The Artist

Originally from Dallas, Texas, McGaughey received his Bachelor of Arts degree from Prairie View A&M University. He moved to NYC 15 years ago and worked in graphic design until his friend, Saundra Heath, co-founder of the Heath Gallery in Harlem, challenged him to take up painting five years ago. He accepted the challenge and has not looked back, creating vibrant pop art pieces and portraits of celebrities and friends.

The series he is currently completing on Governors Island combines pop art and portraiture while merging old Harlem with new Harlem. He started by selecting six models—five transplants to Harlem and one native—interviewing them, photographing them, then painting them on a collage of vintage images of bustling Harlem streets. “I wanted to know their experience…their relationship with Harlem, why they gravitated to Harlem, and what is it that they love about Harlem,” he said.

“The factor everyone was really excited about, really spoke about, was the connections…connections to other people and the culture of Harlem,” he noted. Each of his subjects relayed stories of a neighborhood that exudes a sense of community. “They can walk out their door and they can see someone they know.”

Harlem's New Generation

In his portrait of Steve, an actor and educator who “migrated from Atlanta,” McGaughey painted a confident young man wearing a t-shirt declaring, “I am powerful, passionate, creative.” McGaughey requested that each of his subjects wear clothing that “represents Harlem to them, [is] something they would like to be remembered in,” or something that shows them at their best.

The facade of the legendary Apollo Theater can be seen behind Steve, a reflection of the aspiring actor’s dream. Like many newcomers to the city, Steve did not know where he was going to live when he first arrived, so McGaughey also included a “rooms to let” sign in the background. Steve now resides in the Harlem apartment where his grandmother once lived.

Demarcus McGaughey's portrait of Steve (WIP). Photo: Nathan Haselby

Demarcus McGaughey's portrait of Jamar (WIP)

A cool, mysterious figure takes a swig from a plastic cup in McGaughey’s portrait of Jamar. When the Brooklyn-based McGaughey moved to NYC 15 years ago, he spent his first year in Harlem where he constantly encountered Jamar out and about. “To me he’s that guy you see at every Harlem event. He’s like an ambassador of Harlem…everyone knows Jamar.” An entrepreneur and host of the Happy Harlem Hour tour, Jamar is “a person who knows how to make things happen,” according to the artist. “For me he’s a symbol of hope. He symbolizes ‘if you can make it in New York, you can make it anywhere.’”

“Amber has been a dancer, actress, singer her entire life,” McGaughey said of the Dallas native who relocated to Harlem to study dance at Juilliard. “I’ve known Amber since she was a baby. I went to church with her.” Dressed in a flowing regal purple dress with white flowers in her hair, Amber strikes a seductive pose on McGaughey’s canvas. “When I thought of Amber I thought of the Cotton Club,” the artist said. An image of the famous venue’s marquee and a poster of Duke Ellington and his orchestra appear in the backdrop of Amber’s portrait. “She just embodies the Harlem Renaissance to me,” McGaughey said of the performer, “creating your life. Coming here to use your gifts and your talents.”

Standing proudly with long blond braids cascading over her left shoulder, Hollis stares intensely at the viewer. The only portrait-sitter born and raised in Harlem, Hollis is a playwright and the daughter of Heath Gallery owners Thomas and Saundra Heath—the same Saundra whom McGaughey credits for his art career. In the portrait, Hollis wears a chambray shirt adorned with streaks of red, pink, and white painted by her father. “She wanted to be remembered in her dad’s art,” McGaughey noted. “I feel like I’m painting two portraits in one, because it’s her dad’s art and her dad’s creation, his daughter.”

Hollis also wears a pair of oversized gold hoop earrings. “As a child her mom would not let her wear those door-knocker earrings,” he added, “so to see her as this grown, powerful, Black woman, she now gets to wear the earrings…. To me she’s just a beautiful Amazon goddess, very confident, very strong.”

McGaughey has two more portraits to paint, one of Ashley, a celebrity makeup artist, and another of Reginald, an assistant pastor of The Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem. Once all six of the 36 x 48 inch portraits are complete and displayed side-by-side, a heartbeat running through the center of each background—an ECG-like line within the collaged images—will connect the Harlemites.

Demarcus McGaughey's portrait of Amber (WIP). Photo: Nathan Haselby

Demarcus McGaughey's portrait of Hollis (WIP). Photo: Nathan Haselby

Art Crawl Harlem

An educational arts non-profit, Art Crawl Harlem was founded in 2008 by gallery-owner Averlyn Archer and event organizer Jacqueline Orange. The pair produced a guided trolley tour of Harlem introducing neighbors and visitors to Harlem artists, galleries, and cultural institutions, according to Williams, who joined the organization in January 2019.

Originally from Jersey City, Williams fell under the spell of Harlem himself years ago. He recalls sitting in the backseat of his uncle’s car as a child. “My Uncle Abraham drove down 125th Street… Something just pulled me to Harlem, so to live here so many years later it was a dream come true. It’s where I’ve always wanted to be.”

After being accepted for the Governors Island residency program, Williams had just a few weeks this summer to organize and find artists for Art Crawl Harlem’s inaugural event on the island. Before McGaughey arrived, photographer Ricky Day worked in the space and Lisa DuBois, a curator at Harlem's X Gallery, exhibited a public installation on the back porch of the house in September.

Demarcus McGaughey's studio on Governors Island. Photo: Nathan Haselby

Demarcus McGaughey's inspiration board

Art Crawl Harlem's Executive Director Ulysses Williams and artist-in-residence Demarcus McGaughey on Governors Island. McGaughey's painting of Spiderman and Stan Lee is displayed on the mantel. Photo: Nathan Haselby

“This has been a wonderful opportunity,” McGaughey said of his experience on Governors Island. “There are so many different beautiful pockets and so much history here. McGaughey first visited the island last year. Wandering around, wondering what to do on the bucolic former military base, he discovered the historic houses surrounding Nolan Park, many filled with artists and exhibits. “Wow, they have artists here!” he recalled. Recently back from his first-ever residency in Barcelona, McGaughey was trying to figure out what he wanted to do next. “I remember standing in front of one of the homes saying, ‘I will be an artist-in-residence on Governors Island one day.’ And I walked away. Then a year later, I’m actually here.”

“It was that intention as well as his work,” Williams said of his decision to select McGaughey for the residency program. “I love the fact that he’s an African American Pop Artist and his Black muses are really superheroes to me. He allows them to come alive. There’s a back story, there’s a movement. I think this residency gave him an opportunity to work on a series of comprehensive works that the audience can harken back to.”

Williams notes that McGaughey’s artwork is reminiscent of Harlem Renaissance portrait photographer James VanDerZee. “It’s inspirational as well,” he adds. “He’s picked dynamic figures, diverse figures…an entrepreneur, a dancer, someone in faith,” members of a new generation of talented Black Americans who, like their predecessors a hundred years ago, moved to the iconic neighborhood to realize their dreams and create their lives.

Visit Demarcus McGaughey on Governors Island until October 31 or tune in to a virtual studio tour with him on Saturday, October 31 at noon. Go to artcrawlharlem.com to learn more.

The final works by both artists-in-residence, Demarcus McGaughey and Ricky Day, will be exhibited at the Kente Royal Gallery in May 2021.

And the celebration of the Harlem Renaissance Centennial will continue in December when Art Crawl Harlem presents Fire and Soul: Harlem 100, featuring visual art, poetry, and spoken word performances. Click here to learn more or to submit a proposal.

Made by Ellie | Hand-Knit Monsters Take A Bite Out of Trump

Ellie d'Eustachio, Eat the Monsters #9, 2020

Over the past few months adults and children alike have delighted in discovering colorful knit creatures devouring Donald Trump across the city. Artist Ellie d’Eustachio began this public art series, Eat the Monsters, to bring some humor and cheer into our lives during a challenging year.

Frustrated with the Trump administration and social injustice, including the separation of families at the border and police violence, d’Eustachio needed a creative release. “It just felt like no matter what I did, nothing would help, but I wanted to express my fury without being super violent so I put up an octopus,” she explained at the opening of her debut exhibit on Saturday. The work featured a knit Trump entangled in the tentacle of a giant pink cephalopod. She followed that with a dinosaur feasting on the president and the series grew to include a menagerie of woolen creatures comically chomping on the Commander in Chief.

“I tried to choose these animals that could potentially be monsters in our eyes but have them not being the monster in the picture—Donald Trump being the monster,” d’Eustachio noted. According to the artist, the series addresses “what we think monsters are and who really is the monster in our lives. It’s not actually about Donald Trump” but about the entire “administration, the patriarchy, and racism…. More than just one person is a monster, and getting rid of Trump is not going to fix the situation.” she noted. “It’s just very easy to knit a Donald Trump.”

Her little orange figures with wispy yellow hair are so arresting that many of the knit presidents have been taken from her public art pieces. “In the last couple of months, people have been stealing just the Donald Trump off of all my art, and even when I go and put another Donald Trump up, they’ll often steal it again,” she said. A work she installed at Grand Army Plaza in August—a pink crab with the president in its claw—had its Trump likeness stolen just weeks later. That piece, Eat the Monsters #3, is included in the current exhibit, complete with a new Trump. “Someone is either a critic or really likes it, I don’t know. Someone might have a shrine of Donald Trump somewhere,” she mused.

Ellie d'Eustachio's Lady, Eat the Monsters #11, Tiger, Eat the Monsters #12, all 2020

Ellie d'Eustachio, Eat the Monsters #10

Ellie d'Eustachio, Eat the Monsters #8

Raised near Washington, DC, d’Eustachio received her BFA from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. Always creative, she took up knitting at the age of five. “My mom and my grandmother don’t knit, but my great grandmother was such an incredible knitter that they really wanted someone [in the family] to knit, so my mom learned a very basic knit stitch just to teach me,” she recalled. Today, she sells knitting patterns and has had items produced by an organic children’s clothing company.

She installed her first public art piece in her Flatbush neighborhood two years ago because she felt uneasy walking past the dark yard of a vacant lot late at night. "I knit this huge lion with a smile on its face and flowers and put it on the fence,” she said. “Every night when I walked home at 1am, there was this big lion there. It made it a lot better.”

“I didn’t really think of it as art right away, and I didn’t really think of it as valid street art because it’s not graffiti,” she said of her early works. “I think sometimes [knitting is] not taken as an art form because women do it and you also don’t learn it at an art school, you learn it in your home,” she continued. “It should be an art. Folk art is an art form.”

“I’m realizing more and more that I want to stand up for knitting as an art form because I think it goes hand-in-hand with protest art,” she continued. “It’s a very feminine craft and because of that it’s also a great way to kind of stand up to the man with it. It’s a great protest form because it comes from the home, so it’s an art form of the people.”

Ellie d'Eustachio, Eat the Monsters #11, 2020

Ellie d'Eustachio, Eat the Monsters #12, 2020

Photo of Ellie d'Eustachio's wolf on Union Street taken Jan. 29, 2020.

After debuting her cheerful lion in Flatbush, d’Eustachio began hanging various inspirational messages and charming critters throughout the city, including a wolf, whose gaping mouth is about to swallow the diamond-shaped window of a construction barrier. “I really like site-specific art,” she said. “Through the window you could see the skyline…. I walked by it for a whole month before I made the wolf. I was like it needs something eating it!” The wolf hung at the site of a former gas station on Union Street for weeks until one day it disappeared. “Every single staple was carefully picked out and the wolf was gone,” d’Eustachio said. “Someone came and adopted it, I guess.”

The artist takes the disappearance of her works in stride. “You make public art and you put it out into the world. I feel you can’t get too grumpy about people taking it,” she said. “I’d rather it get stolen and enjoyed, maybe not immediately, but a couple of weeks in. If someone steals it then it’s going to live in a good home,” she said, adding that after a few months the works begin to get worn by the elements anyway.

For her current show, the Gowanus Dredgers Canoe Club gave d’Eustachio a hand in installing an eight-foot-long pink alligator “victoriously devouring Donald Trump” along the Carroll Street Bridge, not far from the Dredgers' boathouse where the exhibit is on view. As a small team in a canoe installed the piece, a woman passing “just burst into laughter,” d’Eustachio said. “This is why public art is so important, especially during the pandemic.”

She hopes all of the works in her exhibit evoke a similar response and inspire people to take action. “I think laughter is really important right now,” d’Eustachio said. “I also think anyone can eat the monsters…. Speaking out right now is incredibly important.... I think the takeaway message would be that everyone can go home and eat the monsters in their lives.”

Ellie d'Eustachio's 8-foot pink alligator takes a bite of Trump by the Carroll Street Bridge, Gowanus

Drawings by Ellie d'Eustachio on view at the Gowanus Dredgers Canoe Club Boathouse

Ellie d'Eustachio stands beside her knit artworks Eat the Monsters #7, #3, and #6 during the opening reception for her exhibit Made by Ellie. The center work was originally installed at Grand Army Plaza across from Prospect Park.

Made by Ellie
Gowanus Dredgers Canoe Club Boathouse, 165 2nd Street, Gowanus, Brooklyn
On view from Oct. 24 through Nov. 29, 2020 (see gowanusdredgers.org for hours)

A series of programs will accompany the Made by Ellie exhibit in the coming weeks. If you missed the opening reception on Saturday, check out the Dia de los Muertos celebration happening this Friday (Oct. 30) where d’Eustachio will collaborate on a community ofrenda. More info here.

Transparent as Glass? | An Exhibit Of Glasswork at Brooklyn Waterfront Artists Coalition

Brian McSherry, Right of Publicity

This is your last weekend to check out Transparent as Glass?, an international juried glass exhibition on view at the Brooklyn Waterfront Artists Coalition (BWAC) gallery in Red Hook. The show was juried by Michael Endo, co-director of High Desert Observatory, a studio/gallery/education center in the Mojave Desert that focuses on sustainable arts. Queens-based glass artist Renée Radenberg curated the show. The exhibit showcases several remarkable and unexpected designs that magnify the transparency, luminosity, and depth intrinsic to glass. From vessels, sculptures, portraits, neons, and even a reproduction of a full-size loom, the artworks range from delicate to dense, with some surfaces resembling ice, metal, porcelain, or marble.

“This exhibition will illustrate for the public the complete range of glass-making art in the twenty-first century,” curator Radenberg said in a statement on the BWAC website. Increasing awareness of glasswork and the artists who create it is her mission, according to the artist’s website.

Transparent as Glass? features work by nearly 40 artists. See some highlights below.

Transparent as Glass? installation view, Christopher Giordano, In Bloom (front)

Renée Radenberg, Memories-Lunch Box

Caitlin Vitalo, Pillow Talk

(L-R) Jennifer Hecker, Diptych and Tiffany Hill, Corvus

Christine Barney, GWB EZ Pass 

Anna de villemejane, Le baiser 

Graham Caldwell, Untitled

(L-R) Graham Caldwell, Lacuna and Christopher Giordano, Uovo

Stephen Brucker, Social Disorder 

James Ronner, A Paperclip: An International Symbol of Solidarity also used by Macgyver

Kenny Litwack, Large Diane

Maia Stern, Loom 

Head over to Red Hook this weekend to catch this incredible collection of glass art before it closes. While you're there, check out Current(s), the Brooklyn Waterfront Artists Coalition's Fall 2020 Member Exhibition, and Black & White 2020, an exhibit that addresses race, politics, and the pandemic.

Transparent as Glass?
Brooklyn Waterfront Artists Coalition, 481 Van Brunt Street, Door #7, Red Hook
On view September 26 – October 25, Saturday & Sunday, 1pm to 6pm

440 Gallery Group Exhibition At NU Hotel

440 Gallery artists Jo-Ann Acey, Ellen Chuse, and Karen Gibbons at the group exhibition at NU Hotel

As part of the Arts Gowanus on Atlantic Ave event that opened last weekend, ten artists from 440 Gallery are exhibiting their work at NU Hotel. Painting, collage, print, and mixed media works will be on view on the ground level of the hotel, brightening up the public spaces, through December 19.

Due to the pandemic, Arts Gowanus organized a 1.5-mile socially-distanced art walk along Atlantic Avenue in place of the organization's annual open studios event. With only two weeks to coordinate the show, each of the artists from the Park Slope collective contributed three pieces, creating an eclectic yet harmonious selection of work. “At 440 we’ve noticed that we have a kind of magical synergy that if we just call for people to bring work, we find a way to hang it that they complement each other,” said Karen Gibbons, a longtime 440 Gallery member who oversaw the project.

Originally from Pennsylvania, Gibbons studied painting at Pratt. She has worked with paint and sculpture and currently creates two-dimensional mixed media collages, including her trio of Goddess works on view—Lakshmi, Care, and Blue Madonna—surreal, multilayered depictions of the Virgin Mary composed using acrylic, graphite and bits of prints and photos.

(L-R) Robin Roi, For All The Rooms I’ve Ever Loved; Richard Barnet, If This; Ellen Chuse, In The Beginning; Karen Gibbons, Lakshmi; Jo-Ann Acey, City Beat #2; Gail Flanery, New Distance; Janet Pedersen, Zoom Muse

(Clockwise from top left) Robin Roi, Niblo’s Garden; Ellen Chuse, Heavenly Bodies; Robin Roi, Double Vision

(L-R) Jo-Ann Acey, City Beat #1; Richard Barnet, Boat Angels; Karen Gibbons, Care; Richard Barnet, Ten Sculpture Sketches; Ellen Chuse, Jewell II

Joining Gibbons in welcoming visitors to the exhibit at NU Hotel on Saturday was fellow 440 member Ellen Chuse. Raised in Philadelphia, Chuse studied at the Philadelphia College of Art (now University of the Arts) and received her MFA from Queens College CUNY. Formerly a sculptor, Chuse now creates vibrant acrylic abstracts of seemingly morphing shapes, such as Heavenly Bodies, Jewel II, and In The Beginning. “I’m really interested in ambiguity of scale and I like people to bring their own frame of reference to things,” she explained. “It has a meaning for me, but I like the meaning to maybe resonate on a lot of different levels and not be too specific."

Gibbons and Chuse shared a studio space for twenty years at 280 Nevins Street in Gowanus. Gibbons had been at the loft building for 30 years. After the recent sale of the building, the two relocated to TI Art Studios in Red Hook earlier this year. The two were excited that the TI facility was added to the Gowanus Open Studios map and were looking forward to participating from their new workspaces this year. “I miss that interaction with people, but this is the next best thing and it’s also amazing to be able to make anything happen in this time of the pandemic,” said Chuse.

“I feel really lucky that we have this nice space,” Gibbons said. “Hopefully next year we’ll be back to that.” Gibbons notably has “the distinction of being one of the few people that’s been in every single one” of the 24 annual Gowanus Open Studios!

“People don’t realize that it goes back,” said Chuse, who has participated in the event since 2000 and volunteered on the organizing committee from 2001 to 2005. “When I came on there were like 35 artists,” she recalled. “It was 295 Douglass, 543 Union, 280 Nevins, and maybe a scattering of other people. It was all located in that sort of north end of Gowanus and it grew and grew and grew.” More than 400 local artists participated in last year’s Gowanus Open Studios.

“As far as the Gowanus artist community growing so much, it is a really great feeling to know there’s energy and support around and that you’re not the only one toiling away trying to make this happen,” said Gibbons. “And the fact that Johnny [Thornton] could put this together in a few weeks is really incredible. It speaks to the energy and the commitment of the artists involved.”

“It’s a hard time to feel community…. I mean online connection is online connection, but really seeing people, and that’s what I think is extraordinary,” Chuse said of this year’s socially-distanced substitute event. “To come here, it’s like I’m actually engaged in the concrete real world, and that is so important for me at the moment…. We both got [to TI Art Studios] then everything shut down. We know we’re part of a community of 120 artists, but we haven’t seen any of them, so this is an opportunity to open up and re-engage.”

(L-R) Janet Pedersen, Wind Dance; Janet Pedersen, Romeo and Juliet (two on top); Fred Bendheim, Spring; Amy Weil, Waiting For Spring; Karen Gibbons, Blue Madonna; Fred Bendheim, Space

Susan Greenstein, Mexican Garden (top); Amy Weil, Eye Candy (bottom)

Janet Pedersen, Wind Dance; Janet Pedersen, Romeo and Juliet (two on top); Fred Bendheim, Spring (bottom); Amy Weil, Waiting For Spring (right)

440 Gallery Group Exhibition is on view at NU Hotel, 85 Smith Street, Brooklyn, through December 19. Learn more about the Arts Gowanus on Atlantic Ave Art Walk at artgowanus.org.

Also, visit 440 Gallery at 440 6th Avenue in Park Slope where Gail Flanery: Harmonies is currently on view and That’s How The Light Gets In, featuring work by Susan Greenstein, Joy Makon, Caitlin Miller, and David Stock, is in the gallery’s Project Space. Visit 440gallery.com to learn more.

See my post from February on 440 Gallery's 15th Anniversary Members Show here.

Tamara Staples | New Video Portraits Explore Light And Memory

Photographer Tamara Staples debuted a new four-channel video work during the Arts Gowanus on Atlantic Ave opening over the weekend. A stack of four televisions display her intimate “moving portraits,” examining the power of lighting and questioning our sense of memory.

“Time and memory are at the heart of this work,” according to the artist. “The video captures the ever-changing content of our faces and demands the viewer to mistrust any static images ever experienced. In a sense, it proves the uncertainty of all our judgements.”

“I’ve always been fascinated by how lighting can really create a personality and change how quickly we see…or just make generalizations about [people], from making them look more feminine or more masculine, younger or older…the lighting is everything,” Staples said on Saturday.

The project—three years in the making—began with Staples designing a special crank-operated light which a friend in the film industry built for her. Staples filmed her models for about two minutes each, hand-cranking the light to make it circle around each subjects’ head. As the light revolves, it increases the brightness or casts shadows on each models’ face, seeming to instantly transform their expressions, dispositions, and features. The mesmerizing effects may make some viewers wonder at times if they are still looking at the same person! See an excerpt at the artist's website. 

“As I started to crank, it’s as if everything disappears the moment the light moves away from [a face],” Staples said. Seeing these rapid transitions led her to think about identity and “how we are often wrong when we think we can identify someone.” She began to question our ability to remember someone’s appearance based on “little snippets” or quick glimpses. Our brains are “geared to short-term thinking and we’re not really able to recognize people the way we think we are,” she argues.

Staples shot more than 20 models of diverse ages and backgrounds. She experimented with various expressions, tried adding movement, and tried shooting some in black and white. Approximately a dozen models are featured in the final work which runs on a 22-minute loop on four unsynchronized television screens.

Staples worked with an editor over the summer to cut the hours of footage, capturing the “best frames, the best lighting, or the expression for that moment.” She also manipulated the speed of the videos during the editing stage. “Some are slowed down…because some people are maybe moving a little quickly and it’s disconcerting. I wanted it all to be much slower so that you’re really getting the nooks and crannies of their faces.”

Staples studied photography at the University of Florida and lived in Chicago before moving to Brooklyn in 1999. Based in South Slope, she has participated in five Gowanus Open Studios. “I love having that stream of people…. As an artist it’s great to have that rotating crop of enthusiastic art lovers because we can talk about the work,” she said. “As an artist you kind of know what you’re doing, but you’re not quite sure, you have to talk it out.” She thinks this year’s alternate event—the socially-distanced art walk—is “brilliant,” noting “people are really coming down, they’re dying to see artwork. We’re all missing that, so I am thrilled.”

Tamara Staples' video installation on view at Out Of The Closet, 475 Atlantic Avenue, Brooklyn. Photo courtesy of the artist.

Tamara Staples’ video portraits are on view at Out Of The Closet, 475 Atlantic Avenue, until November 1, 2020 as part of the Arts Gowanus on Atlantic Ave Art Walk. Learn more about the event at artsgowanus.org. Go to tamarastaplesfineartphotography.com for more about the artist.
[Note: Due to the sun, the best time to see Staples’ installation is after 4pm.]

Eye Smile You Smile | Public Art Spreads Joy on Atlantic Ave

Artist Miguel Ayuso with his wife Beth and their daughters Max and Lola.

Dozens of smiling faces greet passersby from a construction barricade on the northwest corner of Atlantic Avenue and Hoyt Street where artist Miguel Ayuso has installed his public art piece, Eye Smile You Smile. Inspired by the face coverings worn to prevent the spread of coronavirus, Ayuso has exhibited a series of side-by-side portraits of participating New Yorkers—one with a face covering and one without—to reveal their hidden smiles.

“Now that we are in quarantine, we are wearing these masks [for] the purpose of caring for ourselves but also for each other,” explained Ayuso on Saturday during the opening of Arts Gowanus on Atlantic Ave. “All in a sudden [the masks] became something more aesthetic, like an art statement or a fashion statement… What we’re missing are the smiles which, when we care for somebody, are something we wish to see. My idea with this installation is to show that those smiles are still there.”

Ayuso first requested two photos from volunteers—with mask and without—in late April. Participants were asked to smile in both images. He debuted Eye Smile You Smile in May in the window of his gallery La Bodega. Johnny Thornton, the Executive Director of Arts Gowanus, invited Ayuso to recreate the installation for the Arts Gowanus on Atlantic Ave event. “I think it was a good idea because when I did it at La Bodega, it was the very beginning of the pandemic, and even though it was accessible to the public, not a lot of people were going out, so this is a better opportunity to show it again, now that we are a little bit more relaxed,” Ayuso said. The artist also enjoyed revisiting the project because this time around he was able to work on a larger scale, creating 11 x 17 inch portraits instead of the 4 x 7 inch images he previously displayed. 

Thornton was formerly the Gallery Director at La Bodega, a beloved art gallery and community space in South Slope. Due to the pandemic, Ayuso was forced to permanently shutter the space in June after three years. Even without a physical location, Ayuso is carrying on La Bodega’s mission of offering “cultural artistic activities” to the community. He hosted several of the venue’s popular figure drawing sessions at Prospect Park over the summer and is trying to continue those “in a safe way” as the days get shorter and colder. While Ayuso hopes to open another brick-and-mortar location in the future, he says right now he’s “regrouping to see what the next step is going to be.”

    La Catrina Enmascarada on view at Betty Bakery, 448 Atlantic Avenue

Detail of Miguel Ayuso's Eye Smile You Smile on view at Atlantic Avenue & Hoyt Street

Head over to Betty Bakery at 448 Atlantic Avenue to see a another work by Ayuso, a vibrant reinterpretation of José Guadalupe Posada’s iconic Dia de los Muertos image La Calavera Catrina. According to Ayuso, Posada’s illustration of a well-dressed skeleton represents a wealthy woman. “The idea is to show that we are all going to the same place after this life, no matter how much money we have here or how our life was here. We all go to the same end,” he said.

Ayuso’s La Catrina Enmascarada wears a face mask to echo Posada’s original message of unity. “It doesn’t matter who you are, everybody has to wear the masks. We’re all going through the same thing,” Ayuso said. “This is temporary and at some point, we are going to stop wearing these masks and the smiles are going to start coming back slowly.”

Miguel Ayuso’s Eye Smile You Smile is located at the northwest corner of Atlantic Avenue & Hoyt Street and La Catrina Enmascarada at Betty Bakery, 448 Atlantic Avenue, Brooklyn. Both works are part of the Arts Gowanus on Atlantic Ave Art Walk, on view through November 1, 2020. Learn more about the event at artsgowanus.org. Follow Miguel Ayuso at @themexiyorker.

 

Upcycling | A Group Exhibit that Transforms Trash into Treasure

Upcycling is on view at 357 Atlantic Avenue through November 1

As part of the massive Arts Gowanus on Atlantic Ave event that opened this past weekend, six Brooklyn-based artists are exhibiting works created with discarded materials. Upcycling, on display in the window of the bright blue vacant storefront at 357 Atlantic Avenue, wonderfully demonstrates art composed with items that otherwise would have wound up in a landfill.

“Upcycling is all about taking things that have been discarded or unwanted and transferring them or translating them into something with more purpose and more value,” explained Park Slope-based artist Tracy Penn on Saturday afternoon. Penn, who curated the Upcycling exhibit, uses discarded produce bags to create “misaligned” grid-like impressions in her textural encaustic paintings.

Unable to host its popular Open Studios event this year due to the pandemic, Arts Gowanus joined the Atlantic Avenue Business Improvement District to present a socially-distanced, self-guided art walk, exhibiting work by Brooklyn-based artists in the windows of 65 participating storefronts along 1.5 miles of Atlantic Avenue, spanning 4th Avenue to Hicks Street. When the organization announced an open call for submissions for the event, Penn quickly sent her idea of “featuring artists who work with upcycled materials.” 

“Most of my work uses upcycled material and it’s something that I’ve really embraced in terms of the idea of transformation, of taking something that’s been discarded and transforming it into something new,” Penn said. “I’ve always cared about the environment…this is environmentally friendly, but more because of the value added by using these materials and creating something more.”

Six Artists Featured in Upcycling

Along with Penn’s recent encaustic piece, Stronger By the Minute, other works showcased in Upcycling include an aggressive rooster puppet by Manju Shandler created with a cast plastic rooster head, spray foam, mesh, toothpicks, tulle, ostrich feathers, and glass beads, and Mark Anthony McLeod’s pair of dapper figures whose grinning faces are illuminated by the flashes of old-school Instamatic cameras.

Dara Oshin's Nesting, The Gatherer, and Belief, all 2018; Manju Shandler's Cock n Guf 1, 2016

Ward Yoshimoto, You Talk Out Your Ass With a Forked Tongue, 2016; Mark Anthony McLeod's LEVELS and SELF CARE IS, both 2020

Marlene Weisman, Saved Souls No. 18 Gamila Gavini, Seamstress, 2018

A trio from Dara Oshin’s Nest series combines her abstract egg images with both natural and man-made found objects including seeds, two-dollar bills, chains, and dryer lint tucked into small drawers. Four works from Marlene Weisman’s Saved Souls series juxtapose antique tintype images with ephemera and found objects such as newspaper clippings, dice, buttons, and jewelry. And three pieces commenting on the 2016 election from a series by Ward Yoshimoto feature found objects, many unearthed at Dead Horse Bay, including pig figurines, fencing material, doll heads, and trophies.

More About the Curator

A graduate of Boston University, Penn has “always circled the drain” of creativity, working in photography and interior design and toiling in marketing and advertising for years in “art related industries.” She took the leap to fully focus on her own artwork three years ago.

A regular participant of Gowanus Open Studios, Penn misses the camaraderie normally sparked by the event but found this weekend’s substitute art walk inspiring. “It’s usually a very social time for us…we see other people’s work and we have events where we get together in preparation, and I missed that, the community of other artists. We connect online but it’s not the same as being together, so it’s been so nice just being here today and people walking by and seeing old friends,” she said.

Tracy Penn at 357 Atlantic Avenue standing next to her work Stronger By the Minute, 2020

She also enjoyed watching kids “connect to” and recognize some of the materials in the artworks, like the trophies and the cameras, and talking to them about upcycling. “This mom was saying to her kid, ‘We’ve got so many old trophies lying around at home.’ The idea that you can repurpose something and create something better. We don’t always have to buy new,” Penn noted. “We can take what’s there already and create things that are beautiful, interesting, and thought provoking.”

All of the work featured in Arts Gowanus on Atlantic Ave will be on display through November 1. Stop by and support local artists and small businesses during these challenging times. Go to artsgowanus.org for a map and a list of participating artists.

With the sunny skies on Saturday afternoon casting a glare (or shadows) on the storefront windows, my photos sadly don’t do the artwork justice. Check out the Arts Gowanus page on Artsy for better images of the works.

Upcycling
357 Atlantic Avenue (between Bond & Hoyt)
On view as part of the Arts Gowanus Art Walk on Atlantic Ave through Nov, 1,2020