Art Hag

25th Annual Gowanus Open Studios

Saturday kicked off the 25th annual Gowanus Open Studios (GOS). Organized by Arts Gowanus, the event features more than 400 artists opening the doors of their workspaces to visitors throughout the weekend. According to artist Ellen Chuse, a participant for 21 years, GOS began in the late '90s with only a handful of artists from three buildings on the northern end of the Gowanus Canal – 295 Douglass Street, 280 Nevins Street, and 543 Union Street. The event has grown exponentially over the years with more than 100 participating venues – including shops, bars, cafes, and galleries.  

With only one free day to explore the massive event, I decided to visit large, centralized clusters of artist studios at Ti Art Studios at 183 Lorraine Street in Red Hook and 540 President Street (home to the Arts Gowanus office & Brooklyn Art Cluster Studios) in Gowanus. My socialbility still not fully recovered following the pandemic isolation, I gravitated to familiar faces but did get to chat with a few artists I'd not met before. Due to COVID, Arts Gowanus had to reinvent Open Studios last year, and hundreds of artworks were displayed in storefronts along a stretch of Atlantic Avenue. Click here, here, here, and here to see my coverage on last year's event.

See my photos from Saturday below then get yourself to Gowanus today to meet some talented local artists. More info and map at artgowanus.org.

Ti Art Studios, 183 Lorraine Street, Red Hook

Textile artist Traci Johnson outside her studio at Ti Art Studios

A recent FIT grad, textile artist Traci Johnson transformed her studio into a vivid, plushy dreamscape.

Traci Johnson in her studio.

Demarcus McGaughey (right) and friends in his studio

Recent work by Demarcus McGaughey

K Haskell's drawings and collage work document beauty within decay. The illuminated installion on their wall depicts a cancer cell.

Recent work by K Haskell

Sculptor Ward Yoshimoto creates intricate assemblages with found objects. Several of his works feature materials discovered at Dead Horse Bay.

Marlene Weisman poses with her Optimystics collages. Weisman also designed all the graphics for Gowanus Open Studios.

Natale Adgnot stands with a fascinating new installation in her studio. Check out her Chromaticism exhibit from November 2020 here.

Karen Gibbons in her studio. Read about her retrospective show, and former long-time Gowanus workspace, here. 

Feminine Rising, a recent work by Karen Gibbons.

Artwork by Ellen Chuse

Ellen Chuse at her studio in Red Hook.

540 President Street, Gowanus

Jo-ann Acey was one of several artists at 540 President whose studios flooded during Hurricane Ida. A Go Fund Me was set up to help her recoup and recover extensive losses. See my interview with Acey from November 2020 here.

Miguel Ayuso in his studio. Ayuso founded La Bodega Gallery, a popular creative/community hub in South Slope before it closed in 2020.

Midrene Lamy working on a self-portrait.

Lamy's self-portrait is a response to the COVID pandemic.

Mark the Artisan set up his art truck in the parking lot of 540 President.

Usually parked on Bedford Ave. in Williamsburg, Mark the Artisan will be in Gowanus throughout the GOS weekend. Read about his August 2021 exhibit at Established Gallery here.

Mark the Artisan at work

Mario Joyce | Unearthing Black Joy on Governors Island

ArtCrawl Harlem Executive Director Ulysses Williams and artist Mario Joyce

ArtCrawl Harlem returns to Governors Island this summer with a second artists residency program where Michael Obele, Mario Joyce, and Melissa Sutherland Moss will take turns working from a historic house at Nolan Park. Earlier this month, I visited with the season’s second artist in residence, Mario Joyce, as he was settling into his new temporary studio space.

Joyce, who will be working on Governors Island from July 24 through September 3, is so inspired by his new surroundings that he had already created a dozen works just two weeks into his residency. “It’s been so amazing,” he says of his time on the Island. “I have water behind me and then I have a big lawn and a lot of elements that remind me of the place I grew up, but I’m in this urban space.” His recent works, filled with figures enjoying the great outdoors, radiate with vitality and confidence.

Mario Joyce's work at ArtCrawl Harlem's Governors Island residency

Painting and collage works created by Mario Joyce during ArtCrawl Harlem's Governors Island residency

Painting and collage works created by Mario Joyce during ArtCrawl Harlem's Governors Island residency

On the first day of his residency, Joyce was inspired by a Black family relaxing on the lawn in front of the ArtCrawl Harlem house. “I started sketching them and that’s how the body of work started being developed. It’s been fun to watch [my work] transition as I discover new things about the space.” For the first time, he’s introduced soft pinks into his palette. “I think as I explore Black joy, it [represents] a sweetness, an innocence, and a youth that I’m bringing to the work,” he says. “I really love pink, juicy lips—like when I was a kid eating a popsicle—that summertime youth and unadulterated joy,” he adds.

Growing Up in the Heartland 

Born in Columbus, Ohio to a young single mother Joyce moved with his mother, grandmother, and siblings to a farm in rural Ohio when he was five. “It was literally in the middle of nowhere,” he recalls. “It was really hard. We were the only Black family, and as a queer Black boy in that type of space, I was really alone. I was bullied mercilessly every single day. Art, and being in the fields and crops, became part of my escape…so I associate crops, soil, and nature to peacefulness and breaking things down, unpacking things, unpacking trauma specifically.”

Early on, Joyce’s grandmother provided him with creative outlets, coloring books, watercolors, and art supplies. “She bought me all the materials that I needed. She really fueled that,” he remembers fondly. Joyce started using art to express himself. “It became my language. It was the way I communicated, drawing and creating a narrative within,” he continues. “I would talk it out. As I was drawing the figures I was creating this dialogue between the characters. I would talk to the characters. It was like playing with dolls, but I would draw it. I’ve always kept that within my work.”

Joyce continues that inner dialogue today when he works on his lush, impassioned paintings that illustrate the Black experience. “When I am putting paint on the canvas, I’m really moving it around like a language. I’m verbalizing whatever I’m working through. I’m telling the story with the brush stroke…. I love slapping on the oil paint and dragging it through and mixing the colors on the canvas instead of on a palette. That’s how it comes across so excitable, [because] I’m actively speaking. It’s an internal dialogue that comes through my hand. I really give myself that freedom to tell the story,” he explains.

His evocative paintings are punctuated with vivid patterns and images seamlessly collaged into the scenes. Joyce incorporates “vintage collage materials specifically between 1965 and 1999” from books or old copies of Reader’s Digest and National Geographic, onto his canvases. “I do that for two reasons. I love the ink quality, it’s very matte, it’s very ‘60s,” he notes, adding that the specific timeframe references his grandfathers’ generation. “It’s kind of like when they were my age and coming of age and going through the same things.”

Works by Mario Joyce at ArtCrawl Harlem's residency program on Governors Island 

A work by Mario Joyce at ArtCrawl Harlem's residency program on Governors Island 

A work by Mario Joyce at ArtCrawl Harlem's residency program on Governors Island

Exploring His Roots

Joyce has been investigating his family tree since childhood, and genealogy plays an integral role in his artwork. “I research my family history and I have since I was ten years old. It was a part of breaking down traumatic experience, like who am I? Why do I look this way? The history of my own skin and DNA.”

As a child, his grandmother regularly brought him to the library where he would pore over the genealogical records. “I would look for the names of our family and I would interview aunts and uncles in other states,” he said. “I learned a lot before I was even 12 years old. I have all those records still.” 

Complementing the information he gathered from the library and relatives, Joyce also drew family photographs, copying pictures he borrowed from his great-grandmother. “After Alex Haley created the movie Roots, [my great-grandmother] created a little study and filled it with photos of our ancestors,” he says. “I would borrow them from her—I had to promise to give them back—and I would draw them. I would practice drawing my ancestors, the shapes of their faces and their noses. That comes into my practice today because as you can see…every Black male figure, is me. I’m the model…. I manipulate the physical characteristics to make alter egos of myself and they represent specific ancestors within my lineage.”

Placing his male ancestors into a contemporary context in his paintings, Joyce examines the parallels between their lives and his own. He tries to uncover “What has changed within my life?” and “What has changed within the Black experience in America?” The answers are often disappointing. “Sadly, I don’t know if it’s enough. I don’t think it’s that much, so it’s my mission to closely examine what being Black in America looks like today, right now, by looking in our past and in our DNA, which is not in history books. It’s all in our ancestry, in our grandparents’ heads, and it needs to be documented.”

Other themes that recur in Joyce’s work include vast, jewel-toned skies. “I love the sky because I grew up in the Midwest,” he says, where “you could see for miles…. It was all big sky. They were so beautiful and ever evolving. I can just keep going and keep painting them forever. It was freedom.”

Trees also figure prominently on his canvases “because I grew up with trees,” he explains. [They were] such a part of my background and I love them. I’m very comfortable with them, but also, it’s that rooted aspect. I always do my figures barefoot because I want them connected to the earth, like a free energy flow from the soles of their feet to the ancient soil.”

It was a poignant work by Joyce featuring a figure amid a forest of trees that first caught the eye of ArtCrawl Executive Director Ulysses Williams. Entitled Strange Fruit, the artist created the painting in response to the 2016 election. “When Trump got into office I was just so shocked,” Joyce recalls. “It shifted my work to something that was a little passive and straight into activism. I started with a very familiar image of a Black man being lynched and below him was a crowd that was joyously celebrating it at a picnic.”

After ruminating on the image, Joyce decided to change the narrative. “I eliminated the crowd. I took that… very seen image of a Black man hanging in the trees and I wanted to reclaim that. What I wanted to do with that was make it ours again and make that represent something different.”

Joyce recalled a hateful incident from childhood that helped influence this work. “I’ll never forget on a bus ride, I was very, very little and new to the space and it was such a rural school, you rode on the bus with high school kids,” he reflected. “There was a high school kid that sat in front of me. The windows were fogged up…and he drew a lynched man on the window and peered back at me and laughed. I knew right then…that was a way to intimidate us as Black kids…. So that image has always been, since I was five, it has always been ingrained in my mind as fear and ‘you’re less than,’ so I had to take that back.”

He revised Strange Fruit (above) not to show the figure as a victim but to honor him as a martyr. “I painted the same image but I had him ascending out of the trees and rising above,” Joyce notes. The painting illustrates “this is what we come from, something greater,” Joyce says of the moving work. “We are not reduced to being lynched in the woods. We’re something special.”

Putting Down Roots in NYC

Joyce made the big move to New York City with his husband eight years ago. “We just wanted to feel comfortable,” he says of their relocation. “I wanted to hold his hand in public. I wanted to kiss him in public…. Just to feel comfortable in your own skin is something that I don’t take for granted because I didn’t always have it.”

Sexuality and religion are themes Joyce also addresses in his deeply personal artwork. Growing up in rural Ohio, Joyce’s grandmother raised him as a Jehovah’s Witness. “My personality—growing up queer and Black—[the church] just didn’t really make sense for me,” he says. “It was further suppressing me…. It was just like you’re not supposed to be you, so be better and try to be someone else. I tried and I tried but it just didn’t work out.” Joyce decided to leave the church at 15. “It just wasn’t for me and I knew it. Some things just didn’t make sense…. I didn’t fit in to what they needed me to be.”

Today, Joyce is a certified genealogist through Boston University’s Genealogy Studies Program and is currently delving into his father’s lineage since his dad and mother recently “rekindled their relationship from when they were teenagers.” Joyce explains that they “never really fell out of love and finally made it work.” Older and wiser, they married three years ago, allowing Joyce to build a relationship with his father. “It just keeps evolving, the story keeps going,” he says of his family history.

Joyce’s paternal side of the family hail from the Deep South in Alabama, “what’s called the Black Belt,” according to the artist, where he says investigating his roots is challenging. “When I do genealogical research in the South, it is really hard...I don’t think they destroyed records—they just didn’t care about Black people,” he says, so record keeping was lax.

When studying his mother’s roots in North Carolina and Virginia, he discovered that some of her ancestors were slaves but “most of them were free people of color,” Joyce says. “I can only trace those roots back to 1660 because they weren’t really slaves, they were indentured servants, so they got their freedom after a lifetime of labor and then they bought land. These are things that I don’t think people know. They don’t know that there are African Americans who have been free since the 1660s,” he notes.

Each day, as Joyce travels via ferry to Governors Island, he is reminded of the country’s history of slavery. The pier in lower Manhattan where he catches the ferry “sold Black bodies” centuries ago, he adds. “And I think about the fact that I’m on a ferry with this amazing opportunity as an artist. This isn’t something that my ancestors would have been able to do. They would have been on the auction block.”

Works by Mario Joyce at ArtCrawl Harlem's residency program on Governors Island 

A detail of a work created by Mario Joyce on Governors Island 

Mario Joyce's studio space on Governors Island 

Art and Activism

Boundaries & Connections: Art and Activism is the theme of this year’s ArtCrawl Harlem residency. “I think just by being Black and alive in America is its own activism. Just mentally surviving.” Joyce says when asked how he plans to interpret the theme. “I’m exploring the soil and how deep and rich that is [as well as] the genealogy of the soil that Black Americans worked through the generations and how I grew up.”

ArtCrawl Harlem Executive Director Ulysses Williams is pleasantly surprised with the direction that the artists in residence are taking. “In my head I’m thinking they’re going to be doing stories about people in the street and things like that,” he said. “What’s so interesting is that [Joyce] along with Michael Obele [this year’s first artist in residence]—they decided to honor people with the images that they’re creating, remember people…leave a legacy along with the story. Whatever I was thinking, they totally wiped the slate and just made it so personal.”

“As our generation, we’re sick of it,” Joyce added. “We’re sick of seeing these classic images of protests…we keep seeing them and we’re not getting what we need fast enough. We’re just people. We’re just Americans. This isn’t that hard and yet it’s such a challenge.”

“But I have to smile. I have to feel joy. That is a huge part of being Black,” he continues. “I don’t sit around [with my family] and talk about how sad I am about being Black in America. We laugh. We eat. It’s very real. It’s a real existence. We’re just people like everybody else in this country, and I want to show that, but I also want you to know this is what happened…and if it makes you uncomfortable, maybe think about that.”

Hyper-realist portraitist Michael Obele preceded Joyce at ArtCrawl Harlem’s Governors Island residency this summer. Following Joyce’s residency at Nolan Park, multidisciplinary artist Melissa Sutherland Moss will work from the house September 3 through October 17. Works by all three artists will be exhibited at the house during the last two weeks of October.

Selected by a five-person jury, the three artists represent the diversity of the Black experience in America. “They all represent a certain portion of the diaspora,” Williams says, noting that Joyce hails from Ohio, Obele from Lagos, Nigeria, and Sutherland Moss has roots in Costa Rica. 

“We got along immediately,” Joyce notes of the tight-knit group. “We are all so supportive. It was like a brother- and sisterhood immediately.”

Two hyper-realist portraits by Michael Obele (left) and collages by Melissa Sutherland Moss (right)

ArtCrawl Harlem's 2021 Artists in Residence: Mario Joyce, Melissa Sutherland Moss, and Michael Obele. Photo courtesy of ArtCrawl Harlem

ArtCrawl Harlem's Executive Director Ulysses Williams and artist Mario Joyce

Be sure to visit the ArtCrawl Harlem 2021 Artist Residency house at 4B Nolan Park before Governors Island closes for the season on October 31. Learn more about ArtCrawl Harlem’s 2021 Artist Residency Program and the three artists at artcrawlharlem.org.

Read about ArtCrawl Harlem's inaugural 2020 Artist Residency at Governors Island here.

Art Over Time | Celebrating Senior Artists

Symphony of Colors by Victoria Cowles, on view at Art Over Time

A new exhibition in Red Hook is shifting the spotlight from au courant young artists onto their more mature peers. The Brooklyn Waterfront Artists Coalition [BWAC] presents Art Over Time, a monumental showcase of works created by 70 artists over the age of 65.

“As I’ve aged it’s become abundantly clear that the art world tends to focus on the young, the new, the innovative,” said artist Susan Handwerker who co-curated the exhibit with fellow BWAC member Sandra Forrest. “Whatever you haven’t seen before, that’s what’s going to be the next big thing. And that’s great because we need newness and we need innovation, but then there are the rest of us who bring depth and experience and perspective to forms and techniques that we’ve been practicing for a very long time, and we tend to get overlooked.”

Born and raised in Brooklyn, Handwerker attended art school in Toronto and Vancouver and remained in Canada after graduating. After marrying and starting a family, she returned to NYC in the mid-80s and taught art in public high schools until her retirement in 2012.

Handwerker creates painted clay sculptures from her studio in Gowanus. “I’ve almost always made figurative work in clay with a fairly feminist approach content-wise,” she explained. In the early 80s, while doing research for a solo show centered on death and transformation, Handwerker found several images of boats “referencing the way different cultures deal with death.” She began sculpting a series of boats. “That was the original impetus,” she recalled. “Then just before COVID I started to make boats again,” she added, but now her works focus on climate change and migration. One of her three works included in the exhibit, Fish For Home, Blue, was influenced by Southeast Asian fishing boats and addresses the Rohingya refugee crisis in Myanmar.

Moving in Waves by Susan Handwerker

Fishing For Home, Blue by Susan Handwerker

A member of BWAC since the 90s, Handwerker currently serves as co-president for the non-profit organization. Art Over Time celebrates “the work of older artists and recognizes the people who have these extended careers,” she notes. “What I should have titled this show was ‘The Triumph of Art Over Time’ because that’s really my intention. That’s really what I want people to take away, that there is important contemporary vibrant work being done by people into their senior years and [they should] not to be overlooked.”

A perfect example of a lifelong artist whose extensive oeuvre demands attention is 93-year-old Bernette Rudolph of Park Slope, Brooklyn. “I have been wanting to feature and honor some of our much older [BWAC] members,” Handwerker said of the mini-retrospective. “People love her work and it’s time she was recognized.” A rear corner of the BWAC exhibition space is dedicated to Rudolph's work over the decades.

Left to right: Hera, Sea Horse,  Antelope Man, Mermaid Riding a Sea Horse by Bernette Rudolph

Diana of Ephesus #1 and #2 by Bernette Rudolph

Left to right: Owl Lady, Looking At You, Wise Woman, Bunny Lady (above), Pearls Abound, Fish Face by Bernette Rudolph

Archway by Bernette Rudolph

Rolled Paper Art #2, #1, #3 by Bernette Rudolph

While she works primarily with wood, both fine wood and found pieces, Rudolph masterfully transforms various materials— paper, varnish, beads, shells, animal figurines—into delightful treasures. Unwilling to sit idly during a hospital stay last year, Rudolph rolled, folded, and transformed pieces of paper into enchanting sculptures. “She’s my hero,” Handwerker says.

Charlotta Kotik—a former curator of Contemporary Art at the Brooklyn Museum—served as the juror for Art Over Time. Along with the age requirement, the criteria for submissions included a narrative explaining how each artist arrived at this stage of their career. “We wanted to know how did [they] get here from there, from wherever [they] started, whether it was in youth or...a second career,” Handwerker explained. “The work itself is wonderful…and having the backstory is so enriching.”

On Her Mind (foreground) and Double Dare (rear) by Leah Poller

Ice Writing: River I by Ellen Alt

Oil Spill by Diane Miller

A Man by Nina Hellman

Opposites Abstract by Joe Banish

Clinton Hill Red Green, 1 on 1 (above), Six Over Six (below) by Daniel McDonald

Pandemic Series #2 by Michael Padwee

Memories - Coke Case (foreground) by Renee Radenberg; Do You Want to Meet at My Place? (rear) by Elizabeth Casquiero

Andy Warhol in China by Hui Tian

Infinity (foreground) by Ray Katz; Table of Contents (top) and Freud's Sister - A Collection of Short Love Stories (bottom) by Kenneth Ricci

Left to right: Blue's Note (top) and Basta (bottom) by Steven Nedboy; Noon and Nocturne by Virginia Sharkey

BWAC received more than 100 submissions from across the country for the juried exhibit. Kotik selected the top three artists:

• Mixed media works by Victoria Cowles of Potomac, Maryland;
• A pair of intricate sculptures composed of found materials by Ronald Gonzalez of Johnson City, New York;
• Elegant paper relief collages by Judith Eloise Hooper of Brooklyn, New York.

Cowles’ winning work embodies the exhibit’s theme, according to Handwerker. “Tory Cowles…does exemplify how innovative people are. If you’re an artist you’re an artist no matter what, no matter how old you are.” Learn more about Art Over Time at bwac.org.

Otherwise Engaged and Then by Judith Eloise Hooper

Head #1 by Ronald Gonzalez

Head #3 by Ronald Gonzalez

Dark Tapestry by Victoria Cowles

Art Over Time
Brooklyn Waterfront Artists Coalition (BWAC)
481 Van Brunt Street, Door #7, Red Hook, Brooklyn
Exhibition on view July 10 through August 15, Saturdays & Sundays from 1pm – 6pm
Closing party on August 15 will include a joint celebration with the concurrent Coney Island exhibit (on second floor) and feature magic shows and performances.

Marlene Weisman | Life in 3D

Marlene Weisman holds her Super Deep 3D Collage 'Cosmic Desert' (2020)

You may need to do a little dance when looking at Marlene Weisman’s Super Deep 3D Lenticular Collages, shifting your stance to examine the many layers that appear to waver and transform right before your eyes.

“It’s John Waters meets Robert Rauschenberg with a little Cy Twombly thrown in there,” Weisman said of her mind-blowing collages, currently on view in her exhibit Life in 3D at Blue Table Post. Composed with kitschy lenticular images (prints that appear to move when viewed from various angles), her Super Deep 3D series blends Waters’ camp aesthetics, Rauschenberg’s use of found objects, and Twombly’s signature scribbles.

Weisman recalled finding a trove of tacky lenticular images at a 99-cent store about three years ago. “I was mesmerized and I said, ‘how can I use these?’” After experimenting with the hypnotic images, layering pieces onto existing traditional collage works, she discovered that some of the lenticular prints were slightly transparent. “You can see type through the images.” She then began scratching windows onto the prints, removing portions of the images to reveal text and images underneath that she either creates or clips out of books, magazines, atlases, and advertisements.

“It all starts as kitsch images—puppies, landscapes, all kinds of camp images—which I take out of context and then work through destructive practices,” she explained. “Some of them look like something you’d see in nature and some of them are pure abstraction, fantasy, or science fiction.”

Marlene Weisman | Life in 3D: (top, left to right) Juvenile Heart (2018), Women in Danger (2018). Below are two recent Super Deep 3D Lenticular Collages by Weisman.

Forest for the Trees (2021), Geometric in Nature (2019) by Marlene Weisman

On Time (2019) by Marlene Weisman

Marlene Weisman | Life in 3D: (clockwise from top left) Now What? (2019), Portrait of the Artist (2019), Glam Rock (Reed, Pop, Johansen) (2019)

Portrait of the Artist (2019) by Marlene Weisman

Weisman titled the series Super Deep because “it brings you ‘super deep’ into the work” to discover the dreamlike figures, objects, and settings inhabiting the depths of her collages. The works give a “nod to the history of kinetic art,” according to the artist, since they create the illusion of movement and encourage viewers to move around and engage with the pieces.

Born in Brooklyn, Weisman grew up in Queens before her family relocated to Long Island in her teens. She studied graphic design at SUNY College at Buffalo, where she happily discovered a “great music scene” and started a fanzine with a friend. “I listen to a lot of glam rock when I work,” she says. “I love the energy—Bowie, T. Rex, Roxy Music…”

The music-lover moved straight to New York City after graduation and fulfilled her dream of working in the music industry, creating graphics for Stiff America Records and venues including Area, Danceteria, and Peppermint Lounge. Weisman’s work was also featured in two exhibits curated by Keith Haring that showcased Xerox Transfer Art.

“I was lucky enough to be part of the whole early ‘80s scene in New York,” she says. “I got to have the ultimate New York creative experience. I don’t think people today have had that. We would live on nothing. It was unbelievable.”

Weisman landed a plum position from 1988 to 1995 on the in-house design team for Saturday Night Live, creating on-air graphics and skit props for seven seasons. Demanding work schedules kept her from her art practice for several years until she signed up for a collage workshop in 2013. “When I was trained as a graphic designer it was a very hands-on craft and there was a lot of cutting and pasting,” she notes on the correlation between her design and visual art practices. “That whole cut-and-paste sensibility is really ingrained in me. I love it,” she continued. “The cut and paste, composition, and design, I really think it’s all one thing. I think that it’s just how you see the world.”

Ebb and Flow (2019) by Marlene Weisman. Below left is a recent Super Deep 3D Lenticular Collage by Weisman.

Marlene Weisman's Optimystics collages (left to right) Climatica (2021) and Global Conversation (2021).
"I created these as the new administration came in. I felt like there was such hope when the former administration went out, and Biden went in," Weisman said of her recent mixed media collage series. "I felt like science was back, reason was back, and empathy was back. I was kind of ebullient and optimistic about the future."

Marlene Weisman's Optimystics collage titled Holy Gumballs (2021)

Some earlier works by Weisman are also on view at Blue Table Post. (Left to right) Mod Shopper (2018) and her Pop Art Punchboard assemblage titled 170 Winners (2018)

Weisman moved to Brooklyn about 15 years ago and currently works from Ti Art Studios in Red Hook. “What I love is this art community in Brooklyn,” she said. “I love knowing the other artists. I love sharing the work. I love the feedback. I love going to other people’s shows. It’s so important.”

Weisman planned on debuting her Super Deep 3D Collages at The Other Art Fair in April 2020, but the pandemic shuttered the event, forcing it to take place digitally. The dimensionality of Weisman’s works are better viewed in person and do not translate well online, so she was thrilled when Blue Table Post’s founder, Oliver Lief, reached out to her. “These pieces are very hard to show online so I was so happy to have an opportunity to show them at Blue Table Post.” The post-production studio in Boerum Hill, Brooklyn regularly exhibits work by local artists. Weisman's Life in 3D opened in June.

Blue Table serves as “a place where the artist community and different filmmaking communities can meet and get to know each other,” Lief said. Though he typically attends the annual Arts Gowanus Open Studio events—as well as last year’s Atlantic Avenue Art Walk—to find artists to exhibit, Lief discovered Weisman online. “I was looking for someone…just digging on the internet and was just struck by the first images I saw [of her work],” he said. “The layering, colors…some of the themes in her work are really fun.”

Fragile by Marlene Weisman (2018)

Otherworldly Buster (2021) by Marlene Weisman

Influenced by Surrealism, Dadaism, Pop Art, Strategic Vandalism, psychedelic art, and more, Weisman’s vibrant, playful works are packed with artifice in myriad layers of hallucinogenic, otherworldly scenes. “It never ceases to surprise me to see the interaction between the layers,” the artist says. “I’m attempting to redefine collage for the 21st century.”

See more of Marlene Weisman's work at the artist's website and on Instagram @marleneweisman.

Marlene Weisman | Life in 3D
Blue Table Post, 67 Dean Street (between Smith & Boerum Pl), Boerum Hill, BK
To schedule a viewing of the exhibit, email [email protected].
Exhibit on view through mid-August.

Karen Gibbons | Gowanus Retrospective

Karen Gibbons in her studio at 280 Nevins Street.

After nearly 30 years, Karen Gibbons is saying farewell to her Gowanus studio with an exhibition and courtyard party this weekend. Showcasing work created in the 1980s and 1990s, Gowanus Retrospective includes drawings, paintings, sculptures, photographs, and collage works inspired by the rapidly changing Brooklyn neighborhood.

“All of these things were done when I was new to this space,” Gibbons said on Wednesday during a preview of her show. Gowanus inspired Gibbons “with lots of interesting wires, antennas, and shapes that you don’t see in other places.” The neighborhood also provided her with an endless supply of materials she’d find on the streets and incorporate into her artwork, such as springs, a plastic floor mat, construction materials, “detritus of life in Gowanus,” according to the artist.

Works by Karen Gibbons from the 1980s: 'Mountain Spring' (foreground) is composed of objects the artist found in Gowanus. The sculpture evokes "this feeling of surface that is very heavy if you look at it in one way, and then if you look at it in another way, it could be a like a cloud."

Paintings inspired by the Gowanus landscape hang above a sculpture wrapped in a plastic floor mat suggesting "a continuous walkway that you can’t actually walk on." Gibbons described the piece as "a portrait of depression."

Gibbons' Gowanus landscapes (front room) and the works in the rear were created in the 1980s. The sculptures were produced in the 1990s.

Originally from Pennsylvania, Gibbons moved to NYC where she studied at Pratt and earned her MFA in painting from Hunter College. While a student at Hunter, Gibbons and her husband spotted an advertisement for a four-story industrial building at 280 Nevins Street that housed a stuffed animal factory on the first floor and studio spaces on the upper levels. “It said ‘air-conditioned building near BAM,’” she recalled. “We drove by and said ‘this is not near BAM and that building is not air-conditioned.” The couple eventually went back to check out the building and were “blown away with the amount of space.” In 1984 they moved in, sharing studio space until a dance studio on the second floor became available in the early ‘90s. Gibbons took over the lease for the vast studio and has worked there until this year.

The new space allowed Gibbons to create large-scale sculptures and a series of paintings inspired by the Gowanus landscape. “What interests me is the sky and the buildings,” Gibbons said. “The neighborhood is unusual in that there’s so much sky.” Created in the ‘80s, the paintings illustrate the interactions between the buildings and the sky. They do not represent any specific local landmarks. “They’re more like creatures created from the inspiration of the buildings,” she said of the works. A series of black-and-white photographs also captures glimpses of architectural details around Gowanus—rooftops, smokestacks, and cornices—all seen under those expansive skies.

Gowanus Retrospective by Karen Gibbons

A series of black-and-white photos shot by Karen Gibbons in the 1980s.

Gowanus Retrospective by Karen Gibbons

Looking out of her studio windows inspired Gibbons to create a series of charming paintings featuring pigeons, bestowing grace upon these typically humble creatures. Embodying two of her passions, nature and urban life, the birds share similarities to humans, the artist insists. “We’re like pigeons in a way that we travel in groups and are sort of oblivious to our surroundings. They’re very city creatures.”

In 2019, after years of changing hands, 280 Nevins Street was sold to a developer who plans to convert the building into luxury condos—another sign of gentrification in an area facing the threat of a massive rezoning. “The neighborhood was really kind of dead,” Gibbons recalled of her early years in Gowanus when drugs and prostitution were the area’s main trades. “A lot of the industries were not here.”

“It was just quiet,” Gibbons said of the now bustling neighborhood. “Before, on weekends, nobody walked on Union Street. I would tell people, ‘We’re right by the Union Street Bridge,’ and they would say, ‘Where is that?’ Now I say, ‘We’re near Ample Hills.’” Gibbons began noticing changes in the area about ten years ago, when the Green Building first started hosting weddings and events. “We started seeing people in wedding gowns taking pictures on the bridge…. We were like, ‘this is the end.’”

Collage paintings by Karen Gibbons

A group of work from the 1980s on display at Gowanus Retrospective

Sculptures by Karen Gibbons. 'Mother Tree' (foreground) was inspired by a picture Gibbons' daughter drew in the 1990s.

To prepare for the impending closure of her Nevins Street workspace, Gibbons moved to Red Hook’s TI Art Studios in December 2019. At 350 square feet, her new studio is significantly smaller than her longtime Gowanus space, so the artist needs to pare down. Anyone who purchases a ticket to Gowanus Retrospective will take home a piece of Gibbons’ artwork! What’s more, a majority of the proceeds from ticket sales will go to Arts Gowanus, the non-profit organization that hosts the much-loved Gowanus Open Studios every year.

“I realized that part of what made this studio so vital was having an open studio every year that I could count on,” Gibbons said of the organization. “Also with all the changes in Gowanus and Arts Gowanus’ working to make sure the artists still have a place here, I felt like it was a great match.” Though she might have missed the very first Gowanus Open Studios event, Gibbons believes she “might have participated in every single one.”

While her new studio may be much smaller, it has not slowed Gibbons’ productivity. She had a solo show at 440 Gallery and was part of a group show with the gallery in late 2020. Earlier this year she had a solo show at Sweet Lorraine Gallery. “Now with a different studio and different perspective with the neighborhood changing, my work is changing too,” Gibbons said. “We’ll see where it goes.” When asked whether Red Hook inspires her in the same way Gowanus does, she replied. “Somewhat. It’s quirky and there’s still sky.”

Learn more about Karen Gibbons at karengibbonsart.com.

Karen Gibbons | Gowanus Retrospective
Saturday, June 12, 4pm-8pm (Rain date: June 19)
280 Nevins Street, Gowanus
Ticket prices: $25, $40, $60, $100, $300
See some of the artwork available at each price point at artsgowanus.org.
Purchase tickets here.

Art Crawl Harlem Presents Fire & Soul: 100 Years of Harlem at Kente Royal Gallery

Art Crawl Harlem Presents Fire & Soul: 100 Years of Harlem at Kente Royal Gallery

Head uptown to celebrate the centennial of the Harlem Renaissance with Fire & Soul: 100 Years of Harlem. Presented by Art Crawl Harlem at Kente Royal Gallery, this sweeping group exhibition features a vibrant array of work by 18 artists influenced by the iconic neighborhood.

The Harlem Renaissance emerged in the wake of the 1918 influenza pandemic and The Great Migration which brought an influx of Black Americans from the South in search of opportunity. “A movement translating the joy, pain, resilience, and brilliance of Black people. A rising up of sons, daughters, fathers, and mothers. A celebration of artistry, individuality, and community,” according to the Art Crawl Harlem website.

Fire & Soul commemorates this influential movement in Black history during another pandemic, celebrating the “the majesty of Black life” a century ago, today, and looking ahead to the future. The artwork showcased in the exhibit examines “the varying identities and impacts of Black people as it intersects American culture, from The Great Migration to immigration, music, sexuality and gender identity, politics, religion, public health, education, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the pursuit of freedom and everyday life.”

Fire & Soul curators Nakia Hicks, Ulysses Williams, Executive Director of Art Crawl Harlem, and Dodji Gbedemah, owner of Kente Royal Gallery, received an overwhelming response when the call for submissions launched for the exhibit early last month. “We knew it was going to be an important exhibit, but…considering COVID and everything that’s been going on this year, we didn’t know that the interest was going to be that big. We were pleasantly surprised,” Gbedemah said last week at the gallery.

“We were heartbroken that we couldn’t include everyone,” he added. “We wanted to have all of them because they were all wonderful pieces.”

Featuring painting, photography, collage, sculpture, digital art, and textile art, the exhibit features longtime Harlem stalwarts such as Thomas Heath, artist and owner of Heath Gallery, and Rudy Collins, a photographer who has documented the neighborhood for decades. “He’s a true Harlemite,” Gbedemah said of Collins. “Not only was he born here in Harlem, lived here his whole life, but he took a lot of pictures of Harlem, especially of the architecture and personalities and all kinds of people who came through here. He’s seen it all.”

WIlliam Daniels, Falcon-Warrior Totem, Butterfly Totem, Bird Totem; Dominick Williams; Mario Joyce Belyusar, Matrilineal I

Mario Joyce Belyusar, Patriarchy, Matrilineal I, Matriarch

Thomas Heath, Caravan (top), Kings Crown (below)

Taeesha M., We the People, Warrior Prose; Ricky Day, A Day and A Park, Malcolm and MIke, Baldwin and The Bishop; Rudy Collins, Harlem is Art, Ladies Day in Harlem, Happy Birthday Daddy, Black Sup-Her Hero

Guy Stanley Philoche, Aubrey W., Saba F.

Demarcus McGaughey, State of Mind, Mind of a King; Sade Boyewa El, Faces of Harlem Series

“The Harlem Renaissance [included] poets, musicians, writers, painters, and dancers,” exclaims Gbedemah. “It was an explosion of artistic expression.” Fire & Soul serves as an “ode to the Harlem Renaissance and beyond,” he continued. “Yes, the Harlem Renaissance happened a hundred years ago but what happened in the hundred years that followed? And what’s going to happen in the next hundred years?”

Khalid Sabree vividly illustrates Harlem’s musical history linking two hometown genres in Jazz Iz Hio Hop Iz Jazz while a fiery orange canvas proudly declares The New Harlem Renaissance, a nod to today’s thriving creative community showcased at this exhibit.

Harlem-based textile artist William Daniels upholds the African American tradition of quilt-making. “He is one of the few male African American quilters,” Gbedemah notes. “In the African American tradition, there’s been a lot of quilters since slavery but the majority of them have been women.” Daniels’ three black, white, and red panels perfectly combine the time-honored craft with a modern graphic aesthetic.

Anthony Boone’s monochromatic sculptural works darkly stand out in the gallery filled with brightly hued works. Black Butterfly represents “Black women and their beauty,” Gbedemah explains, while a closer look of Ma’ Dear reveals a woman feeding an infant, a haunting representation of wet nurses or “Black women feeding white babies,” he adds.

Matrilineal I, a portrait of Mario Joyce Belyusar’s mother, traces the artist’s African American lineage through her womb. Belyusar further explores his roots by incorporating vintage family photos in Patriarchy and Matriarch.

Daryl Daniels’ intimate works focus on everyday New Yorkers riding public transportation. Far From Home, her painting of a young boy curled up on a bus seat pensively staring out the window, is a touching and familiar sight. “We’ve all been there, riding with our parent and looking at the beauty of New York City,” Gbedemah says of the work. “A young person experiencing the city.”

Daryl Daniels, (clockwise from top left) Divine RIght II, Butterflies, Windows to the Soul, Far from Home; Sean Patrick Watters, Harlem Black Series: Pose, Black Sabrina, Andre J. Superstar

Mark McLeod,  What Would Jackie Do

Mark McLeod, Blue Heals All

Karim Chambers, Nina Simone and Miles Davis

Khalid Sabree (KHA-Tees), SunRa + Sun Raised, Jazz Iz Hio Hop Iz Jazz, The New Harlem Renaissance; Demarcus McGaughey, State of Mind, Mind of a King; Sade Boyewa El, Faces of Harlem Series

Art Crawl Harlem's Ulysses Williams and Kente Royal Gallery's Dodji Gbedemah

The message of the exhibition is hope, according to Gbedemah. “Maybe it’s a coincidence that we have another pandemic,” he said. “Every time society goes through such a drastic period, we come out of it with an explosion of creativity, business, and prosperity.” Fire & Soul: 100 Years of Harlem is an outstanding homage to a storied NYC neighborhood that will inspire pride and optimism. “We might be going through a tough time right now but 2021 is around the corner.” Learn more at artcrawlharlem.com.

Art Crawl Harlem Presents Fire & Soul: 100 Years of Harlem
Kente Royal Gallery, 2373 Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard, Harlem
Exhibition on view December 3, 2020 through January 3, 2021
Gallery Hours: Wed. – Fri. 2pm to 8pm; Sat. & Sun. 12pm to 8pm; Mon. & Tue. closed
Visitors must follow social distancing protocol. Reservations are encouraged. RSVP here.

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

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

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.

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

 

Support New York: Online Exhibit Helps Artists & Healthcare Workers

Support artists and help supply personal protection equipment (PPE) to healthcare workers by purchasing artwork from Support New York, an online exhibition launching on Wednesday, April 29.

Support New York flyer (Designed by: Matt Barteluce)

Organized by artist and printmaker Kirsten Flaherty, the fundraiser will feature nearly 150 works by artists from all across the country. "During this uncertain time, and while our government assistance has been lacking, the artist community has come together to assist those New Yorkers in need," Flaherty said in an email. "Featuring over 100 artworks including [pieces by] Natalie Frank, James Rosenquist, April Gornik, and others, all proceeds will be split between the contributing artist and N95 For NYC, an organization which purchases and delivers personal protective equipment to healthcare professionals and hospital staff battling COVID-19."

The artwork includes paintings, prints, drawings, and more, with prices starting at $25 and going up to $7,500 for a Rosenquist lithograph. Flaherty, who is contributing at least one of her signature mezzotints, notes that most of the available works are priced below $500.

James Rosenquist, "Stars and Stripes ST.II", 2004, Lithograph (44" x 30"). Printed and published by Derriere L'Etoile Studios, NY. (Image courtesy of Derriere L'Etoile Studios, NY)

"The response from artists has been fantastic," she said. "It's really an indication of the kindness of the artist community—both in New York and across the states." She received more than 200 submissions for the exhibit, including work from England and Iran.

Flaherty first learned about N95 For NYC in Artforum where she read that the group’s two founders, Hansi Liao and Echo He, are Pace Gallery staffers. Flaherty, who works at Pace Prints, contacted He to offer her assistance. "It was an easy decision to reach out…and begin planning for this online exhibition," she said.

Fifty percent of the proceeds from each sale will go to the artist and 45% will be donated to N95 For NYC. The remaining 5% will go toward operational expenses.

Support New York is not Flaherty's first fundraiser. The artist has been organizing fundraising exhibitions since 2016 to aid non-profit organizations including the ACLU, City Harvest, the International Refugee Assistance Project, Sean Casey Animal Rescue, and VOCAL-NY.

Visit the Support NY section of Flaherty's website to view the available artwork. The exhibition will be online from Wednesday, April 29 (7pm) through Sunday, May 10 (10pm).

440 Gallery: 15th Anniversary Members Show

Park Slope’s 440 Gallery celebrates its 15th anniversary with a group exhibit showcasing work by all 15 members of the artist collective.

"15": 440 Gallery Members Show (l-r) Nancy Lunsford, Star of Bethlehem, 2006; Ellen Chuse, Floating: Gold, 2019; Janet Pedersen, Night Sky 1, 2019; Karen Gibbons, Common Ground, 2019

The space opened at 440 6th Avenue in January 2005 as a pop-up exhibiting artists from co-founder Nancy Lunsford’s weekly figure drawing workshops. Following the success of the month-long show, Lunsford and co-founder Shanee Epstein decided to keep the storefront going as an artist-run gallery.

"We’ve had 20 to 25 members over the 15 years," Gallery Director Amy Williams said last Friday. Williams joined 440 14 years ago and notes that many of the artists on the current roster have been with the collective for nearly 10 years. Along with having designated duties at the gallery, each member pays dues which go toward rent, utilities, insurance, and other operating costs. "Everybody is really invested in making sure the gallery is successful," she added.

"15": 440 Gallery Members Show (l-r) Shanee Epstein, By the Sea, 2009; Amy Weil, Loopy and Falling Petals, both 2020; Susan Greenstein, Highline Silver and Trastevere, both 2019; Doris Rodriguez, Ancestors, 2017. Jo-Ann Acey's By the Sea, 2018, is partially seen in the rear project room.

Nancy Lunsford, Star of Bethlehem, 2006

Each artist has a solo exhibition in 440’s main gallery every two years and is included in a three-person show in the venue's rear project space at least once a year. "It’s a real community of artists and we really value each other," Williams said. While Lunsford and Epstein review portfolios and oversee new members, all other decisions at the gallery are made as a group during regular monthly meetings. "It’s a very democratic system," according to Williams. "We vote on everything."

Williams joined 440 Gallery in 2006 after submitting artwork for the annual Small Works Show. In 2016, "after 10 years and six solo shows," she decided to leave and explore new opportunities. A couple of months later, Lunsford and Epstein offered Williams the Director position to oversee the sales, marketing, and administrative duties at the gallery. "I’m still here four years later," she notes.

Susan Greenstein's Highline Silver, 2019 and Trastevere, 2019

Doris Rodriguez, Ancestors, 2017

Upon accepting the role Williams introduced monthly programming at the space, including jazz performances, poetry readings, and artist talks. "I wanted to make this gallery a destination in the community for culture beyond visual art," she explained. Williams added that the talks are "a great way to engage with the community" and offer visitors the opportunity to ask questions about the art for "a deeper understanding of what [they] are looking at." The next artist talk on Sunday, Feb. 23 will feature 440 Gallery’s two founders, Nancy Lunsford and Shanee Epstein. The pair will discuss the gallery’s successful 15-year run as well as the work they selected to showcase in the current anniversary exhibition.

"15": 440 Gallery Members Show (l-r) Joy Makon, All Overgrowth is Comic, 2016; Gail Flanery, Blue Avens, 2019

"15": 440 Gallery Members Show (l-r) Janet Pedersen, Night Sky 1, 2019; Karen Gibbons, Common Ground, 2019; Janet Pedersen, Blue Vase, 2019

15 Years at 440 features a piece or two by each artist and includes an array of collage, encaustic, print, painting, and photography. The two founders contributed older works: Epstein’s 2009 By the Sea is a mixed-media piece and Lunsford’s 2006 Star of Bethlehem is an elaborate quilt pattern composed of pages from magazines, military images, and Arabic and Hebrew text. Paintings by Joy Makon, Ellen Chuse, and Janet Pedersen boast vibrant palettes that play on light or dark while monotype prints by Gail Flanery and Jo-Ann Acey feature unique textures and hand-colored details.

"15": 440 Gallery Members Show (l-r) Doris Rodriguez, Kite Dreams #2, 2014; Leigh Blanchard, Flower.3.9.1, 2019; Amy Williams #148-Never been this way and #179-I never think, both 2019; David Stock, Red Cube (Noguchi), 2019

Leigh Blanchard created spontaneous colors and forms for Flower.3.9.1 by moving and distorting an image on a flatbed scanner, while David Stock shows an unexpected black-and-white view through a scarlet sculpture in Red Cube (Noguchi).

Karen Gibbons incorporated images of sculptures, mountains, and a woman balancing above a vivid blue sea for her dreamscape Common Ground, while Fred Bendheim carved a sheet of PVC into a red, yellow, and blue ribbon playfully twisting through a series of triangles for his Mondrian-like Night and Day. Inspired by Tom Phillips’ treated book, A Humument, Williams displays two pages from a copy of Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms that she found on the street and reinterpreted with ink, pencil, and gouache.

"15": 440 Gallery Members Show (l-r) Fred Bendheim, Night And Day, 2016; Richard Barnet, Sculpture Sketches, 2018-2019
 

Reflecting on her 14 years at 440 Gallery, Williams fondly notes, "This has become an extended family for me. Everybody really supports and encourages each other and I’ve developed incredible friendships with the artists."

Looking ahead, Williams is excited for the future of the art space. "The fact that we’ve been here for 15 years is so remarkable…as a group of artists, we’re all really committed to making sure that the gallery is here for another 15 years."

"15": 440 Gallery Members Show
440 6th Avenue, Park Slope
Exhibition on view February 12 through March 15
Founders' Talk with Nancy Lunsford and Shanee Epstein, Sunday, Feb. 23 at 4:40pm

Continuum | Established Gallery

Brooklyn-based artist Gail Flanery celebrates friendship, collaboration, and women artists in Continuum, a group exhibit currently on view at Established Gallery.

L-R: JoAnne McFarland, Free, 2012 and Tatana Kellner, Violent, 2018

While reading Mary Gabriel’s Ninth Street Women, which chronicles the careers of Lee Krasner, Elaine de Kooning, Grace Hartigan, Joan Mitchell, and Helen Frankenthaler, Flanery reflected on her life as an artist and the relationships she has developed with fellow women artists over the years.

“I was musing over the time I’ve spent in my life as an artist here in the city and the people I know,” she said at the gallery Sunday afternoon, “and the women that I have known through this whole period of [our] living in New York and paddling through the art world. I met these women in different ways but all of it having to do with art.”

Flanery was moved by the connections formed by the five artists in Ninth Street Women, “the influence that they had on each other” and “the risks that they were taking” when the arts community was “still a man’s world” and women had to balance their careers with their families. “That really made me stop and think because I’ve seen it. It was not always easy to be acknowledged [as an artist] and to get a show.”

L-R: Gail Flanery, Ocean, 2018 and Damali Miller, Memories of Home Once....and always

L-R: Ellen Chuse, Totem, 2017 and Kathy Caraccio, Victorian Wallpaper I, II, 2016

L-R: Amy Weil, Flowers not for Algernon and Karen Gibbons, Snake, 2018

Doris Rodriguez, Kite Dreams

L-R: Olivia Beens, Flowers of Perseverance, I, II, III and JoAnne McFarland, Positive Shirley, Negative Shirley

It can still be challenging today for women artists to be recognized, making the need for a supportive community crucial. “If you’re a functioning artist and you’re trying to get shows, you’re trying to be seen, and you’re trying to figure out what do…there’s a conversation that you can’t really have with anyone else as easily, as naturally [as another artist],” Flanery said. “There are things you don’t even have to describe because you know they know. There was a familiarity in a lot of [Gabriel’s] writing, just with the relationships.”

After receiving the offer to curate the exhibit at Established Gallery, Flanery faced the daunting task of coordinating the show in three weeks. “That night I tossed and turned,” she recalled, “and the next morning I got on the phone and I just called everybody.” She contacted artists she has known and collaborated with over the years—some for more than four decades—including former classmates, members of the printmaking community, members of 440 Gallery, and colleagues from the Studio in a School program. With the help of assistant curator Mitchell-lee Van Rooij, who is also assisting Flanery with her archives, the pair managed to present an empowering, consistent exhibit showcasing a diverse selection by 14 artists who have paid their dues in the NYC art world.

Born in Ohio to a career army sergeant, Flanery spent her childhood moving every 18 months around the world. “We’d ship out of Fort Hamilton Army Base in Bay Ridge. We’d leave from there and come back there,” she recalled. When her father retired from service, the family settled not far from the base in Staten Island where Flanery completed her last year of high school.

“From the time I was a little kid I’ve always drawn,” Flanery said before fondly telling her “fairy princess story.” During a visit to her grandmother’s farm in Ohio when she was about five years old, Flanery remembers standing outside with her pet cow and seeing a “fairy princess” fly by. “She was exquisite and had amazing wings, long blond hair, and high heels, of course.” While she now realizes it was probably a dragonfly, as a child she excitedly ran to tell her grandmother about her sighting. “I started to describe her and my Grandmother Abigail said to me, ‘Wait, don’t tell me. Show me,’ and she handed me a paper and a pencil.” This sparked Flanery’s passion for visual storytelling. “I always drew from that point on. It started early and it never ended…. Grandma, until the day she died, had that picture taped behind her bed.” she said. “When I became a teacher I often used that as my experience in how…there’s more than one way to tell a story.”

After completing high school, Flanery sold refrigerators in Manhattan for a brief stint before enrolling at The Cooper Union where she met Damali Miller, one of the artists featured in Continuum. “I love that school so much,” she said. “That school picked me up from one world and dropped me in another in such an enormous way.” Flanery recalls making lifelong friends and having incredible instructors at the school, including the art historian Dore Ashton who guided Flanery when she felt overwhelmed. After waitressing at many of the old Soho artist haunts to pay her rent throughout school, Flanery received her BFA in 1972.

Amy Williams, The Hemingway Series

Robin Holder, Copper Leaf Promise

Tracy Penn, Everything is Everything

L-R: Susan Newmark, The Language of Flowers I, II, 2015; Olivia Beens, Flowers of Perseverance, I, II, III; JoAnne McFarland, Positive Shirley, Negative Shirley; Amy Williams, The Hemingway Series

Shortly after graduating, Flanery met Kathy Caraccio whose “unique and extraordinary” personality fostered Flanery’s love for printmaking. “I discovered that I loved process and that’s what [Kathy] gave me,” Flanery said. “I learned so much from her and she gave me such confidence,” Flanery added, noting that she continues to learn from Caraccio today.

“The printmaking world is so small and intense, that everyone who has a shop knows everybody else in the city,” according to Flanery. She adds it was through Caraccio that she met Tatana Kellner who contributed two pieces to Continuum.

In the mid 1980s when Flanery moved from Soho to Park Slope, she needed to find a kindergarten for her son so she visited PS 107. “I went to look in on one of the classes and Olivia Beens was there with Studio in a School,” Flanery recalled. “I had never heard of it but I walk in and here is this artist and she’s really teaching. She’s not doing the turkey hand [tracing] kind of things…. I was like, ‘This is where I want my boy to go to school.’”

After working with Beens as a volunteer for Studio in a School, Beens recommended Flanery as a teacher for the program. Flanery spent the next 20 years teaching art to pre-K through high school students across the city, retiring about six years ago. Along with Flanery and Beens, Flanery’s old friend and classmate Damali Miller also taught for Studio in a School. Other Continuum artists Flanery met through the program include Robin Holder, Doris Rodriguez, and Susan Newmark.

Flanery has been a member of Park Slope’s 440 Gallery for ten years. It was at the artist-run gallery that she met Ellen Chuse, Karen Gibbons, Amy Weil, and Amy Williams, 440’s Gallery Director. Connections with Continuum artists JoAnne McFarland and Tracy Penn were more recently established through the Gowanus arts community.

Flanery’s prints are inspired by nature and feature vast landscapes, open skies, and bold horizons. “I would say palette is definitely my first consideration,” she notes. The deep blue waters in her Ocean complement Miller’s Memories of Home Once….and always. The similarities in the works' colors and lines suggest the synergy between the two longtime friends.

Gail Flanery stands next to Ocean, her monotype with chine collé

Flanery points out the relationships between Kellner’s Almost Gone and Weil’s Flowers not for Algernon, and the conversation between their palettes and grids. Penn's intricate encaustic piece Everything Is Everything is a perfect companion to Newmark's multi-layered collages The Language of Flowers I, II in the rear of the gallery just across from William's entrancing installation The Hemingway Series. “Mitchell and I walked through here and we were both like, ‘Wow. This is such strong work,’” Flanery recalled after hanging all the pieces. “I’m really glad we were able to hang it with space because each piece is so powerful.”

Joyfully explaining Continuum to a visitor at the gallery on Sunday, Flanery noted, “The thing that pulled it together for me is my relationship with these artists. I’ve known them and made art with them 30, 40, some of them almost 50 years in New York, and we never dropped the thread. And the thread was creation…our work. There’s great variety in our work but there’s a strength and a continuum.”

“It was about us keeping on keeping on,” she continued. “After decades it continues. That was the commonality, the artists I knew who have never stopped.”

Continuum
Established Gallery
75 6th Avenue, Prospect Heights, Brooklyn
Exhibition on view January 18 through February 9

Studio Visit: Dara Oshin | TI Art Studios

After seeing Dara Oshin's artwork in several group shows around Brooklyn including the Park Slope/Windsor Artists 2019 group exhibition at Ossam Gallery, The Constructions at Ground Floor Gallery, and the 15th Annual Small Works Show at 440 Gallery, I wanted to check out more of her nature-inspired work and was happy to find an opportunity to visit her studio last weekend.

Dara Oshin's artwork on display in her studio

Dara Oshin's 'Ascension' available at 440 Gallery as part of the 15th Annual Small Works Show

On Saturday, December 7, Oshin invited visitors to her sunny, fourth-floor space at TI Art Studios in Red Hook for a studio sale featuring artwork by her and fellow artists Robin Roi and Mahalia Stines. Originally from New Jersey, Oshin studied English at Allegheny College in Meadville, Pennsylvania and minored in Studio Art. She discovered her true calling was art and continued taking various art courses, including a two-year stint studying oil painting at a Paris atelier. She painted for more than ten years but after having three kids found that she needed to switch media because of the toxic chemicals in paint. 

Dara Oshin's studio at TI Arts Studios

Line Drawings by Dara Oshin

A line drawing by Dara Oshin (courtesy of the artist)

A line drawing by Dara Oshin (courtesy of the artist)

In 2016 she began a series of line drawings. "There was a point in time when there was so much bad news...and I was feeling distressed about it and I wanted to do something to bring love into the world and that showed people connecting and loving one another," Oshin said. "This whole project was about spreading love and good feelings and showing what emotional connections are all about." The uplifting, stark drawings unite the figures by blending their body parts "so it becomes kind of ambiguous where one person ends and the other person begins," she explained. "I try to minimize the amount of lines that you actually need."

Works from Oshin's 'Not A Toy' series

Another earlier series, Not A Toy, consists of small interactive boxes filled with a variety of beads and moving objects that viewers can shake, rattle, and roll inside the wooden containers. "I don’t think I ever would have moved into this mixed media world if I didn’t have to move away from [oil painting] and I’m just loving it. I’m loving having no restraints on what I do," Oshin said. The boxes include everyday objects from Oshin's Windsor Terrace home, such as dryer lint lining the edges of the works, and abstract photos of kitchen items such as plates and pans. "I incorporate a lot of stuff from my domestic life into my work," she explained. One image, which suggests a woman's nether regions, is actually a close up shot of the corner of a baking pan. "I was just playing with the idea of women in the kitchen and, it being a toy, women as objects," she noted.

Dara Oshin, Rising and Falling, 2019 (image courtesy of the artist)

Her photographic Eggs series was conceived in her kitchen. "I was boiling eggs for my son’s lunch every single day, and they would burst, and I started realizing how cool they were. Most of the work is really inspired by my life with my family." she recalled. "You can’t fight trying to separate it, I had to just incorporate it into my work."

"They’re just abstract forms. They don’t have to be an egg," she said of the photos. "They’re just these cool forms that everyone can see in them whatever they want to see." Oshin began photographing the misshapen eggs—many of which could be mistaken for sculpture or otherworldly beings—and soon started incorporating the images into mixed media sculptural works. 

Artwork by Dara Oshin

Works by Dara Oshin

Artwork by Dara Oshin

These rustic yet elegant Icons feature images of the distorted eggs on a gilded background embellished with beads and surrounded by twigs, feathers, seed pods, and other natural materials she collects from Prospect Park. Oshin said she gilds the works as a way to "raise nature to a religious level," presenting them "like little altars or reliquaries." She also sews glittering beads onto the images to create a sense of movement and sparkle and to symbolize seeds or Mother Nature.

L-R: Robin Roi and Dara Oshin pose with an elaborate nest they created for a duo show at Ground Floor Gallery in March

"I was feeling really disconnected from nature...and when I started making these I felt very nourished by getting out and constructing them and bringing these pieces of nature into my space and then living with it," she said. Oshin soon discovered that she wanted viewers to interact with the works. "I want people to connect with stuff…pick flowers and stick them in and just continue adding on to them and swapping them out," she insists. "One of the things I like about this series is that it really can be interpreted on a lot of different levels. Some people see completely different things than me and I love that."

To learn more about Dara Oshin, and to see more of her artwork, visit daraoshin.com.

The Constructions | Ground Floor Gallery

Kurt McRobert's signage on the window of Ground Floor Gallery

Ground Floor Gallery’s latest group show, The Constructions, is packed with wonders inspired by the art of Joseph Cornell including sculpture, assemblage, collage, and painting.

“I have a long affair with Joseph Cornell. I love the work. It’s kind of heartbreaking. It’s poetic,” said the exhibit’s curator, John Gagné, during the gallery opening Friday evening. “His kind of working method was [going to] Downtown Manhattan, [into] old bookstores, antique stores, and gathering up all these small bits and then building them into boxes.” 

Cornell (1903-1972) crafted dreamlike scenes with found objects arranged inside wooden boxes as intricate tableaux. The self-taught artist called his boxes "constructions,” Gagné added. Learn more about Cornell and see his artwork at Guggenheim.org and artnet.com.

The exhibit features work by 21 local artists, including Kurt McRobert who hand-painted the eye-catching vintage type on the gallery window.

Clockwise from top left: Jon Bunge, Energy #5, 2017; Tony Stanzione, Glass Punching Bag, 1991-2019; Christina Martinelli, MY MEMORIES/OF YOU/HAVE BECOME/SILENT FILMS/YOU CONDUCT/AN ORCHESTRA/NOW AND THEN/I HEAR IT/CALLING ME, 2018; Rachel Wren, Nevertheless, 2017

Clockwise from top left: Barry Rust, Marsh Wheeling Cigar Box Ukulele, 2014; Barry Rust, Club House Cigar Box Ukulele, 2015; George Horner, Enlighten Up, 2014

Clockwise from left: Andrew Robinson, Jamón in the Marais (For the love of Bruno Lenoir and Jean Diot), 2019; Sophia Rauch, Ghost at Lunch, 2018; Sophia Rauch, Stripe Dot, 2018

Barry Rust’s cigar box ukuleles breathe brand new life into found objects while Sophia Rauch’s “literally constructed” photographic works reinterpret Cornell’s tableaux. Rauch created rich abstract scenes with painting, self-portraiture, cardboard, string, and spray paint, according to Gagné. “I think [this] is the essence of what Cornell was doing,” he said.

Assemblage works include Ward Yoshimoto’s compelling mixed media pieces and Susan Greaves’ ornate frames filled with photos and an array of trinkets. Marlene Weisman’s Pop Art Punchboard assemblages and Saved Souls collages mix vintage objects that evoke different eras. Weisman’s recent Super Deep series combines 3D lenticular plastic panels to create captivating images that transform from different vantage points.

Ward Yoshimoto, At the Bell/Papal Escutcheon/Parking on Left, 2001

Clockwise from left: Susan Greaves' Sir Michael, 2014; Lady Diane, 2014; Demonica, 2014; Little Ruth, 2015

Marlene Weisman, Saved Souls Series - #16, 2017 and Barbara J. Norman's School Kids/Palms/Eyes Small/Bricks/Eyes Full, 2019

Marlene Weisman's Super Deep Series: Glam Rock, 2019; Hudson Valley Abstract, 2019; Geometric In Nature, 2019

“I’m always interested in the materials,” Gagné noted before pointing out Tony Stanzione’s wood pieces filled with hundreds of colored pencils providing an unexpected pop of color, as well as the artist’s Brass Dumbells—a pile of shiny doorknobs transformed into a work of art.

Tony Stanzione, Penciled Logs, 1999-2019 and Tree Project, 2019

Tony Stanzione, Brass Dumbells, 2014

With such diverse artwork showcased in the exhibit, Andrew Smenos decided to display six ceramic pieces. “I wanted to make it as straightforward as possible,” he said. The artist’s three 24-karat gold-lustered figures are fixated on their cell phones while catastrophes surround them—Smenos’ other sculptures of a burning building and a pair of sinking ships. “It’s fun to have them in the middle of the three disasters. They just can’t be bothered,” the artist noted.

Andrew Smenos' Idle Worship I, II, III, 2019; Looks Good Going Down, 2019; Destroyer, 2019

Clockwise from back left: Tony Stanzione, Glass Seed Bomb Prototype, 1990; Barbara J. Norman, Franken-Her, 2019; Jordan Maurice, Light Study No. 11, 2019; Andrew Robinson, Reliquary, 2019; Andrew Robinson Chicken Paw, 2019

When curating the exhibit, Gagné was drawn not only to materials but also to the artists’ practice. Of Jordan Maurice’s Light Study No. 11—a stout aluminum base topped with two 9-volt batteries and wrapped with a simple strip of LEDs—Gagné said, “I love seeing the batteries. I like seeing the process. When I saw that work, I thought that walks right into what I’m trying to show.” The intensive manufacturing required to produce Scott Albrecht’s steel tabletop sculpture Rise also appealed to Gagné. “I’m interested in what these artists are capable of doing,” he said.

George Horner, Putties, 1985 (front) and Scott Albrecht, Rise, 2018 (rear)

Like several of the artists included in the group show, Gagné met Albrecht in October during Gowanus Open Studios. Albrecht created his sculpture last year as part of a series of work that “use the same shapes and relationships, but personify different characteristics or situations,” the artist explained. For Rise, he “took the basic geometry of a circle to represent the sun, but abstracted it and personified it” to represent “rising up, rising above.”

Scott Albrecht and his work Thinking/Feeling, 2017

Originally from New Jersey, Albrecht studied graphic design at the Art Institute of Philadelphia. “A majority of my work is mostly informed by abstracted typography,” he said. Albrecht’s puzzle-like Thinking/Feeling overlays the two words in the work’s title. “Because they are overlaid on top of one another, you’re seeing little moments of each word coming through, but as a viewer you can’t really distinguish the words independently,” he explained. “It’s intentional because those two ideas are conflicting with each other. They’re fighting for your attention, and in the end because they are in direct competition, [neither] can get resolved.” Albrecht adds that his intention is to encourage viewers to slow down and “have them meditate on those ideas [and] find their own relationships.”

Earlier this year Gagné launched Gagné Contemporary, an online gallery where he represents 13 NYC-based artists and organizes exhibits, studio visits, gallery tours, and more. Originally from Canada, he traveled across Europe in 80s and 90s creating experimental films. Gagné worked in advertising as a Creative Director for twenty years, moving to NYC eight years ago. He left the ad industry three years ago to focus on art—his “first love,” he says.

“Gowanus, Bushwick, Greenpoint, Red Hook, DUMBO…they’re filled with really good, strong artists doing great work and I love being able to share that,” Gagné said. Head over Ground Floor Gallery and check out work by 21 of those artists.

The Constructions: A Complete Fabrication 
Ground Floor Gallery, 343 5th Street, Park Slope
On view November 22-December 8
Learn more here.

Park Slope/Windsor Terrace Artists 2019 Open Studios

Dozens of artists in Park Slope and Windsor Terrace welcomed visitors into their studios the past two weekends (November 9-10, 16-17) for tours. 

Since 2013 Park Slope/Windsor Terrace Artists—a collective of visual artists living and working in the two Brooklyn neighborhoods—has hosted annual PSWT Open Studio Weekends, inviting the public to visit local artist workspaces and maybe even purchase original works of art. This year, the "Open Studio Central" at Ossam Gallery (300 7th Street) showcased one piece by each participating artist, offering attendees a preview of each studio as well as information on the artists and maps of tour locations. The diverse selection exhibited at Ossam Gallery ranged from ceramics, collage, drawing, painting, photography, print, and sculpture.

Syncing, Chris Baily, mixed media on canvas, at Ossam Gallery

Coney Island Cyclone, Chris Doogan, woodcut print, at Ossam Gallery

L-R: Torii Gate, Dara Oshin, mixed media; Nested, Karen Giordano, watercolor and ink on paper, at Ossam Gallery

Else, Phil Desantis, photograph, 2019, at Ossam Gallery

9 Block North, Daniel McDonald, 9 panels, acrylic & mixed medium, at Ossam Gallery

Point/Counterpoint, Steve Ettlinger, cedar (epoxy on slate base), at Ossam Gallery

Just off Prospect Park West on 14th Street, Judith Eloise Hooper invited guests into the sunny fourth floor walk-up where she has lived and worked for 44 years. Originally from New Jersey, Hooper grew up in a creative household—her mother was an opera singer, her father a carpenter, and her three brothers musicians.

She moved to Brooklyn to study fashion design at Pratt and worked as a fashion illustrator for several years before taking a class in book writing and illustration at the School of Visual Arts. "[I] did some children’s book illustration but at the time—this was in the 70s—it was very hard for me to get someone to give me [work] that wasn’t black-related," explained Hooper, who is black. In the early 80s she shifted to working in clay, initially creating ceramic objects with an Asian influence—"so that I could have some kind of diversity in what I did," she said—and moving on to create bowls, platters and ceramic landscapes.

Today, Hooper is writing a cookbook, "where food is a character...the recipe is the action within the story," and is working mostly on paper collages—intricate, hand-cut portraits. "The paper work teaches me something different about depth and dimension," she said. "I love focusing on the expressions on people’s faces." She also teaches art therapy to patients at nearby NY-P Methodist Hospital, where she has been volunteering since the 90s. "I was trying to get the patients to do self-portraits," she recalled. "I said they could either be as you see yourself, as you think others see you, or how you want to be seen. I wanted them to have fun with it, so I would do myself and make fun of myself." These early sample self-portraits she created with her students eventually evolved into a series of evocative paper portraits featuring musicians, family members, children, and more.

Paper collage portraits by Judith Eloise Hooper

A paper collage portrait by Judith Eloise Hooper

A paper collage portrait by Judith Eloise Hooper featuring her nephew and his newborn

An early paper collage self-portrait by Judith Eloise Hooper

Japanese Napkin Rings by Judith Eloise Hooper

Also exhibiting work in Hooper's living room was ceramist Lynn Goodman. This is the fourth time the two artists have shown together during the PSWT Open Studios. A native New Yorker, Goodman studied ceramics as an undergrad at Philadelphia College of Art [now University of the Arts] and received an MFA in Ceramics from Southern Illinois University at Carbondale. The Windsor Terrace resident works from the Can Factory in a studio she shares with two other ceramists. "I love it there," she said of the creative complex. 

Inspired by the shapes, patterns, and colors of Islamic art, Goodman incorporates fun, unexpected elements into her works. "I like urban wildlife, so you’ve got koi, pigeons, and a squirrel. It’s partly that I’m very into certain things and it’s partly that I’m drawing from the environment," she said of her porcelain pieces. "I’ve got a fascination with UFOs. I will slap them on anything."

From sci-fi to physics, some of Goodman's tableware features swirling atoms and Feynman diagrams, mathematical representations of subatomic particles. She said a physicist gave her "these nice juicy images and I’ve been using them ever since." She pointed to an orange platter showing a flurry of particles that pass through a digram in the center and transition into a trio of koi on the opposite end. "It’s probably a stretch in the way I use it," she said of the interpretation before declaring, "artistic license."

Ceramics by Lynn Goodman

Ceramics by Lynn Goodman

L-R: Lynn Goodman and Judith Eloise Hooper during Park Slope/Windsor Terrace Artists Open Studios

Over in Windsor Terrace, Robin Roi welcomed a steady flow of visitors to her 18th Street home and studio to check out her mixed media work which includes paintings, ceramics, and works on paper. This was her fourth PSWT Open Studios event. 

Roi studied print-making at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and received her MFA in Painting from Claremont Graduate University in California before moving to NYC when she was 27. She worked for various arts organizations including the American Craft Museum and the Drawing Center before taking a job at EverGreene Painting Studios [now EverGreene Architectural Arts] where she was the Director of Decorative Painting for more than 30 years. She took up pottery after having kids. "I was always a painter, and then when I had children, it was very hard to do both, to have that career and raise the kids," she recalled. "I started going to a ceramics class on 3rd Avenue where my kids were going for ceramics, and I fell in love with it. It’s hard to dabble and not fall in love with ceramics," she said. Roi focused her personal practice on ceramics for several years, saving the drawing and painting for her day job. "When I retired in 2015 it was like it just poured out. I started wanting to work on paper again."

Family Tree by Robin Roi

A table exhibiting Robin Roi's ceramics

Ceramics by Robin Roi

Roi says that nearby Green-Wood Cemetery inspires much of her work as well as patterns and layers. Her collage work incorporates layer upon layer of dressmaking pattern paper "because it’s transparent. It’s tissue, so you can see things underneath," she explained. She pointed to one work, Family Tree, featuring a letter written to Roi's aunt in the 1940s from a boyfriend in Germany, layered under images of branches and leaves. "That’s why I use that pattern paper because it allows me to layer things up and to obscure some things and let other things show through," she said. "I like that word palimpsest.... It’s the whole idea of something rising up and coming through."

A dining table displayed an eclectic selection of Roi's ceramic work, including bowls, plates, jars, and several pitchers inspired by vintage oil cans. "These are kind of riffs on those old tins. I’m inspired when I see a really interesting shape," she said. "I love that shape."

Also exhibiting with Roi was ceramist Carol Adams. Originally from New Jersey, Adams has lived in Park Slope since 1981 and is a lawyer by trade. "I don’t have any formal training. I’m self-taught," she said. "I went to law school. I practice trust and estates," While studying at Cardozo Law in Greenwich Village, Adams lived across from Greenwich House where she first discovered the joys of pottery. "I’ve always made pottery. I love the tactile nature of it," she said. "There’s something powerful about taking dirt and making it beautiful." Adams added that up until five or six years ago, she'd always created functional pieces, such as bowls, plates, cups, and vases often adorned with sgraffito.

Oxidized metal leaf works by Robin Roi (above, on wall) and sculptures by Carol Adams (below)

Sculptures by Carol Adams

L-R: Robin Roi and Carol Adams during Park Slope/Windsor Terrace Artists Open Studios

Inspired by ancient sculpture, mythology, and everyday people on the subway, Adams switched to figural sculptures, first creating angels, then moving on to classical busts as well as whimsical armless characters topped with crowns or rings of flowers. "I always start with the faces and then they develop their own personality," she explained of her process. While Adams still practices law part-time from home, she is now able to dedicate more of her time to creating. "Now I’m doing less law, more art," she said with a smile.

To learn more about Park Slope/Windsor Terrace Artists, visit artspswt.com or follow @ArtsPSWT.

 

 

Arturo Herrera | Sikkema Jenkins

Venezuelan-born, Berlin-based artist Arturo Herrera's new works on paper and wall painting, on view at Sikkema Jenkins, display vibrant explosions of pattern, color, and fragmented imagery.  Herrera's collages "juxtapose a myriad of cut-out and painted elements into a wholeness that is continually in flux and without hierarchy," (from the show's press release).  The artist takes images culled from the pages of books, magazines, newspapers, coloring books, and more and crops them tightly so the original subject is barely discernible and places them alongside figures and shapes carefully painted and crafted from construction paper or found materials. 

Like hundreds of shards taken from multiple shattered images, Herrera gives the pieces new meaning by assembling them into indecipherable, abstract compositions with generic monikers like Bob, Jack, and Peter.  Herrera's kaleidoscopic works will sometimes offer viewers identifiable clues—a forehead, blond hair, a limb—among the sea of fragments and forms, yet no straightforward narrative.  "All the works display a tactile quality that reinforces the dynamic struggle between referentiality and the desire for a concrete reality."  Rich, detailed, and ambiguous, each of Herrera's works deserves a long, sweeping exploration.  Learn more at Sikkemajenkinsco.com.  Through March 5th.

Igor, 2010

Victory, 2010

Santiago, 2010

Peter, 2010

Cliff, 2010

Jack, 2010

Tail, 2010

Bob, 2010

Under the Tree, 2010

Huma Bhabha | Peter Blum

Over at Peter Blum's Chelsea location is Huma Bhabha's Drawings, a series of "new over-painted and collaged photographs" by the Pakistan-born, Poughkeepsie-based artist.  Bhabha added touches of paint, ink, and collage to large-scale prints of photos she shot of vast landscapes in Karachi, Pakistan and Carrara, Italy. 

In some of the works, the artist added only a subtle arc, handprint, or outline while in others she added looming, shadowy, alien-like figures or gigantic feet (subjects that often show up in her sculptures as well).  Some of the pieces look like nightmarish headshots of mask-like faces while others have funny, incongruous images pasted onto them - like a cute, mischievous dog poking its snout into a fish bowl or a smugly mugging George Clooney in a watch advertisement.  The entire surface of some of her works are covered in deep, saturated colors causing the edges of the photo paper to curl slightly.

By "drawing" on her photographs Bhabha creates new stories for her scenes and adds life, mystery, and humor to her images of dusty landscapes and decaying buildings.  Learn more at Peterblumgallery.com and see my previous post on Bhabha's sculpture exhibit at Salon 94 Bowery here.  Through January 15th.

Untitled (left), 2010, Clifton (right), 2010

Untitled, 2010

Untitled, 2010

Untitled, 2010

Untitled, 2010

Achilles (left), 2010, Untitled (right), 2010

Untitled, 2010

Untitled, 2010

Untitled, 2010

Untitled, 2010

Shred | Perry Rubenstein Gallery

Shred at Perry Rubenstein Gallery features a group of collage-based works composed by conventional layered assemblages on paper as well as more unusual methods including a three-dimensional piece and three video animations.  Curated by Paper Magazine's Carlo McCormick, Shred presents works "specifically created for the exhibition" by Faile, Shepard Fairey, Leo Fitzpatrick, Mark Flood, Erik Foss, Swoon, and Judith Supine.  Also included are works by Jess, Bruce Conner, and Gee Vaucher, artists who helped pioneer "collage as fine art" (from the press release).  Less traditional collage pieces include Shelter Serra's three-dimensional work consisting of "red roses cast in white silicone" and video works featuring "cutout paper silhouettes" by Martha Colburn, Tessa Hughes-Freeland, and Bec Stupak and Malcolm Stuart.

According to a statement by McCormick, the title "Shred" refers to "the way in which artists have come to mangle and remake the fabric of representation to reconstitute imagery to their own purposes."  The exhibit is "[N]either comprehensive nor precise as a survey," but a "most informal measure of how the visual strategies and techniques of collage have resurfaced in some of the more irascibly iconoclastic artists of our time."  Some artists took a spare approach combining only a few images together while some created compositions overflowing with visuals, and others chose to bring their collages to life with depth or animation.  Learn more at Perryrubenstein.com.  Through August 27th.

Jess, Untitled (with Joan Crawford Head), 1952-1953

Bruce Conner, Four Square, 1986

Gee Vaucher, Faces 1-3, Animal Rites 1, 2010

Faile, Never Enough, 2010

Swoon, Helicopter, 2010

Jack Walls, Jack #1 - #5, 2008

Dash Snow, I'd Rather Be Back in Hawaii, 2006-7

Shelter Serra, One Dozen Roses, 2010

Leo Fitzpatrick, Untitled (4 from series of 6), 2010

Erik Foss, Look Out, 2010

Mamma Andersson & Jockum Nordstrom | David Zwirner

David Zwirner presents Stockholm-based, married artists Mamma Andersson and Jockum Nordstrom in two concurrent solo exhibitions sharing the title Who is sleeping on my pillow.  On display are Andersson's quiet and moody paintings of "domestic interiors" and "luminous pastoral landscapes and gardens" (from the press release) and Nordstrom's two and three-dimensional paper works consisting of "collages, watercolors, graphite drawings, and architectural sculptures" built from "cardboard and matchboxes."  Also on view in the short hallway separating the two exhibits are a pair of recent, two-sided, collaborative works in which Andersson created the backgrounds and Nordstrom collaged in people and animals.

According to the press release, Andersson's paintings "embody a duality that is central to Swedish culture: the interplay of rural and urban aesthetics, combined with the notion of the everyday."  She is inspired by "filmic imagery, theater sets, period interiors, and her native land..."  While Andersson's pieces depict seemingly ordinary scenes of people sitting around and empty kitchens and hallways, the works are far from ordinary.  You can almost hear the humming or the settling of the still houses as they emit a sense of tension and pique your curiosity.

Nordstrom refers to his two-dimensional works as "stills" because they "read like storyboards" with "all the action tak[ing] place simultaneously in a frozen frame."  His naive, childlike scenes show "fantastical settings populated with unique figures, animals, architecture, furniture, musical instruments, and other props, all varying in scale and coexisting harmoniously."  His diverse cast of characters include "primitive hunters on horseback, jazz musicians, 18th-century dandies," a Victorian couple and reindeer.  One of Nordstrom's many influences is Belgian artist James Ensor and his multi-narrative, action-packed "stills" remind me of Henry Darger and Nordstrom's good friend Marcel Dzama (who interviewed Nordstrom in Who is sleeping on my pillow, a new monograph/catalogue designed by the couple's son, Valentin).  Learn more about Who is sleeping on my pillow at Davidzwirner.com.  Through June 12th.

Andersson - Dead End, 2010

Andersson - Filly, 2010

Andersson - Kitchen Fight, 2010

Andersson - Pigeon House, 2010

Andersson - Who Is Sleeping On My Pillow, 2010

Nordstrom and Andersson - Sleepwalkers, 2010

Nordstrom - Blockhead, 2010

Nordstrom - Fools Coffin, 2009

Nordstrom - Down The Road, 2009

Nordstrom - It's Winter Now, 2009