Art Hag

Mark Anthony McLeod | Dear Self

Artist Mark Anthony McLeod and his Bluetooth piece Listen at Established Gallery

"Love yourself" is the message of Dear Self, artist Mark Anthony McLeod’s solo exhibition currently on view at Established Gallery. The exhilarating show features interactive mixed-media works emblazoned with uplifting messages and affirmations.

“I feel like self-love is missing in the world,” McLeod said at the exhibit’s opening on Friday. “I know myself—always in a hustle, always in this bustle in life—and [I] never stop to smell the flowers… never stop to say ‘Hey, I appreciate myself,’ or ‘I need this’ or ‘I don’t need that.’ We’re always saying ‘yes’ to things we don’t need to say yes to. We’re constantly on the go and we’re not stopping to think, ‘What do I need?’”

Charismatic figures populate McLeod’s contemplative and buoyant artwork. Visitors are encouraged to use buttons and knobs to activate the works, switching on lightbulbs or Bluetooth speakers. Five doors—"portals into a different version of yourself,” according to the press release—serve as backdrops to life-size characters. Strewn with playful drawings of crowns, dogs, hearts, and flowers alongside motivational text, such as “evolve,” “dream,” “love,” and “think,” the works invite visitors to write and clip on their own inspiring words.    

Dear Self (left to right): No Excuse, Carpe Diem, LOVE

Stay Royal and No Doubt by Mark Anthony McLeod

Detail of Mark Anthony McLeod's Lady in Pink

Detail of Mark Anthony McLeod's Dive Into You

A message seen in Mark Anthony McLeod's Stay Royal

As a Black man in America, a husband, and a father of three, McLeod feels “pressures from everywhere” in his daily life. The strain of “always [being] on the go” can lead to exhaustion and depression, he notes. McLeod uses his art to deal with the stress. It struck him one day in the studio that he was sending messages to himself through his work. “I started noticing the repeating images and repeating quotes,” he recalls. “And then I noticed…I’m letting myself know, ‘This is what you need to be your best self.’”

Along with directives like ‘focus’ and ‘self love,’ McLeod sometimes includes “obstacles” or disparaging terms on his canvases including ‘fear,’ ‘mistakes,’ and ‘doubt,’ but he cancels out these negative words with bold slashes. “I find myself stopping short a lot, not going through the finish line, worried about what’s on the other side,” he said. “You’ll see a lot of time I’ll put ‘doubt,’ or ‘sky’s the limit’ and I’ll add a question mark because there is no limit. [I’m] motivating myself to keep going. Self-doubt kills. It kills dreams, it kills brain cells, it kills hope. It’s a daily battle to fight that.” 

Born and raised in Brooklyn, McLeod was a creative child. “I was lost in my imagination,” he recalls. “I would always take things off the street and try to do something to it, paint it, reuse it in the house,” he said. “I literally had a park bench in my room. I just love seeing things repurposed. I hate seeing things go to waste.” For Dear Self, McLeod fused mirrors, fabric remnants, clothes pins, and a trumpet into his vivid works.

Mark Anthony McLeod and his lighting piece Enlightenment

It's all in The Flowers by Mark Anthony McLeod

Give Yourself Flowers (Red) and GIve Yourself Flowers (Yellow) by Mark Anthony McLeod

Messages clipped to Mark Anthony McLeod's Give Yourself Flowers (Red)

While studying photography at FIT, McLeod began merging his love of photography, crafting, and painting. When a stall became available at the school’s weekly flea market, he started making functional items to sell using empty liquor bottles he collected from a bartending job. “There are some beautiful liquor bottles. I hated throwing them away…. One day I started making different things, lamps, fishbowls, all sorts of different things.” Though he received some help from an electrician friend, McLeod is primarily self-taught, adding playful electronic components to his artwork, including light-up eyes or speakers that play “Whatever you want… whatever music helps you to heal.”

McLeod wants audiences to interact with his functional artwork. “I want people to be part of it,” he insists. If viewers interact and engage with the work “it gives you that reminder about these affirmations that I put into the pieces,” he adds. “We all need those affirmations. We all need that meditation. We need these constant reminders that it’s okay not to be okay.”

Artist Mark Anthony McLeod poses with family at the opening of his solo exhibit Dear Self

Listen by Mark Anthony McLeod

Along with his current exhibit at Established, McLeod can be found every other weekend in Williamsburg selling his work from his mobile art truck. He launched the pop-up art shop about two years ago, after his mentor, artist Andrew Cotton, gave him the vehicle he previously used himself as a mobile art gallery.

Visit Mark Anthony McLeod’s website marktheartison.com to see more of his work and check him out on Instagram to see when he’ll be out next with his art truck.

Mark Anthony McLeod | Dear Self
Established Gallery, 75B 6^th Avenue, Prospect Heights, Brooklyn
Exhibition on view Saturdays, 2pm to 6pm (or by appointment), August 6 through August 29

Yohanna M. Roa | La Bodega Gallery

Artist Yohanna M. Roa dismantles art history books and carefully pieces them back together, restructuring the art world’s discriminatory past one page at a time.

La Bodega Gallery

The Past: Instructions For Its Use, Roa’s solo exhibit currently on view at La Bodega Gallery, features dozens of pages torn from art history tomes reinterpreted using needlework, yarn, and thread. Identities are concealed with gauzy veils, scenes are embellished with colorful foliage, trim, and borders, and book leaves are stitched together and transformed into everyday items historically associated with women.

"Art history has systematically denied the participation of women in the production of knowledge through art," Roa explained. For centuries, women were omitted from practicing "traditional forms and techniques” of art and were restricted to crafts such as sewing, knitting, and embroidery "because the art [establishment] considered that these did not produce knowledge [since] they were activities carried out by women," she continued.

"I puncture the paper with the needle. I cut the books, delete information, or put glazes on the identity of the works and their subjects," she said of her painstaking work. "These actions subtly and…explicitly refer to the systematic violence exerted by an art history." Roa contends that art history intends to be "universal" but "reflects the blindness of others embodied in colonial, patriarchal, and racist power relations."

Yohanna M. Roa, Family Portraits I

(L-R) Yohanna M. Roa, New Patterns 2. a/v; New Patterns 1. a/v

Originally from Bogota, Columbia, Roa received an undergraduate degree in visual arts from Bellas Artes in Colombia and a master’s degree from the National Autonomous University of Mexico. Her work is inspired by history, feminism, her experiences as an immigrant, and her grandmother Helena. Roa believes observing her grandmother work as a seamstress taught her how to sew, embroider, knit, and crochet. "I saw her practice all my life," she recalled. "She was a designer but she never thought about herself as a designer." After completing her studies, Roa said she realized that her grandmother's craft was not considered an art form. "I asked myself why that kind of practice wasn’t included in art history," she said, which led her to examine her relationships with others as a woman.

Yohanna M. Roa, The Past Instructions For Its Use

Yohanna M. Roa, The Past Instructions For Its Use

For her installation The Past Instructions For Its Use, the artist cut out portraits from a book of French miniatures and obscured each subject’s face with oil paint. Roa also crossed out the text in the book with a marker. With these revisions Roa hopes viewers will be able to relate to the work on a personal level and create their own narratives or histories. "You might think that it looks like a family member, a neighbor, or an image you saw at your grandmother's house," she explained. "My goal is to establish a relationship between memory, materiality, and bodies. And point out that the writing of history has holes…which we can fill with our own experience."

Yohanna M. Roa, Tablecloth

In Tablecloth, Roa took pages from an art history book and sewed them together to form a table cover, complete with embroidered details including a duck, house, teacup, shoe, and cactus. "Traditionally history has been written in a chronological linear fashion, pointing out the events and characters that committed important acts, for example, the coronation of Napoleon," she explained. "I take a book that is written in a linear way, I disassemble it to make a fabric. I am interested in altering that order and making certain temporalities touch in non-linear ways."

As for the charming items adorning the tablecloth, Roa notes that they are decorations women commonly embroider onto household textiles. "Why is the image of Napoleon…or of a naked woman, more valid than a duck, a cactus, or a shoe?" she questioned. "I take that fabric, I cut it, to make a dress or a tablecloth, with the aim of saying that there are other ways of doing historiographies."

Yohanna M. Roa, Huipil Mazahua (dress)

Similarly, Roa sewed together pages to create Huipil Mazahua (dress), a faithful reinterpretation of a traditional Mexican dress. After spying a woman proudly wearing an unconventional version of the garment in Mexico City, Roa was inspired to create her own. "It surprised me because it’s a traditional dress and she made it with a weird fabric," the artist recalled of the woman's lace interpretation. "The woman made a mix between the traditional model and the new fabric. It was amazing to me. I said, 'I’m going to do the same thing but with a history of art book.'"

Using pages from a book printed in 1955, Roa stitched together a structured blouse and a pleated skirt and apron. The work warns of cultures losing information about themselves and women. "A lot of information is lost because the original paintings in the museum are big paintings with a lot of texture and color, and in the printed version, it’s in sepia...." she noted of the reproduced images culled from the book. "I intervened again [with linoleum and lace engravings] to say there’s one more layer of information. Art is a contextual experience."

Roa relocated from Mexico City to NYC nearly two years ago to study at CUNY Graduate Center's Women’s and Gender Studies Program. She recently completed a residency at NARS Foundation in Sunset Park, Brooklyn where she created a project based on archiving memories "to claim the memories of women."

Yohanna M. Roa at her 2019 exhibition at NARS Foundation (photo courtesy of the artist)

The work was inspired by a wooden sewing box Roa found at a thrift shop. Along with needles, thread, and beads, the box contained "documents"—instructions on how to make a beaded belt. "Maybe the owner of the [box and the] documents was a woman," Roa mused. "I thought it’s amazing. It works as an archive." The artist emailed her friends requesting that they send her a photo and history of a woman who is important to them. "I printed those portraits over some maps and I embroidered them using the supplies I found in that box," she said. "It’s about their memories, their stories. Everyone has a story and I’m trying to recover it.... We need to return the value of the things that women have been doing through history, like cooking, embroidery. Women live their own lives and that’s important."

Currently working on a project about her grandmother, Roa insists that the past and history can be revised and transformed. "The present is a port which allows us to use our memories to rebuild the past," she said. "History is a technique."

The Past: Instructions For Its Use | A Solo Exhibition By Yohanna M. Roa
La Bodega Gallery, 695 5th Avenue, Park Slope
Exhibition on view February 7 through March 2

Queer + Peculiar Craft | The Clemente

Currently on view at The Clemente in the Lower East Side is Queer + Peculiar Craft, an exhibition of contemporary ceramics and textiles that examines identity and challenges viewers' expectations of craft.

Queer + Peculiar Craft installation view: works by Phoenix Lindsay-Hall (far left); Greg Climer (right and left of window); Koren Christofides (rear table); Andrew Cornell Robinson (front table); and Roxanne Jackson (far right)

Curated by Andrew Cornell Robinson, the exhibit showcases “an intersectional group of artists who explore craft to transgress expectations of traditional materials, methods, and meaning,” according to the show’s press release. The show features a diverse selection of subversive work that includes pottery, quilting, cross-stitching, printmaking, and crochet employed in unconventional and refreshing ways.

Clockwise from top: Puppetmaster Punch Bowl, Rhyton, and Doll House, all by Koren Christofides

Couple Kissing (blue and yellow), George Climer

#communication (top) and Mincing Queen Mincing Words (bottom), both by Timo Rissannen

Detail of Mincing Queen Mincing Words by Timo Rissannen

One artist featured in the show, Koren Christofides, explores feminism through ceramics. In an email, Robinson explained that some of Christofides' works are soft sculptures made with industrial ceramic fiber insulation covered in paper clay, resulting in pieces that are simultaneously “familiar and strange.” For his prismatic quilts featuring erotic males nudes, Greg Climer reinterprets traditional quilt-making methods by “creating the fabric fragments rather than upcycling scraps,” according to the exhibition essay.

Vick Quezada's Table Remains (front) and Phoenix Lindsey-Hall's Fourteen Blows (rear)

Phoenix Lindsey-Hall's Fourteen Blows

Jamon Jamon V (Chueca), Andrew Cornell Robinson

Works by Andrew Cornell Robinson

Phoenix Lindsey-Hall’s ceramic sculptures play with “repetition and formalism,” according to Robinson. “It uses that formalism to include queer stories within the framework of contemporary aesthetics.” Her Fourteen Blows features a row of white porcelain claw hammers—a weapon used in hate crimes against members of the LGBTQ community—protruding limply from a wall.

Robinson’s own ceramic and mixed media sculptures included in the show “explore historical customs as a metaphor for queer-baiting and conformity.” The sculptures in his Jamon Jamon series reference a medieval Spanish custom in which hosts offered ham to visitors to “sniff out heresy during the inquisition when the pious were looking for expressions of distaste in response to the offer of sliced pork,” the exhibit essay explains. His Jamon Jamon sculptures are a “metaphor about being ‘suspected’ and ‘queer-baited’ as a gay man."

Inspiration for Queer + Peculiar Craft came from a 1993 interview with the late artist Felix Gonzalez-Torres for A.R.T. Press. When asked about the lack of “overt political or Latino content” in his work, Gonzalez-Torres responded:

“I’m not a good token. I don’t wear the right colors. I have my own agenda. Some people want to promote multiculturalism as long as they are the promoters, the circus directors. We have an assigned role that’s very specific, very limited….”

“[Gonzalez-Torres] expressed an impatience that I could identity with as a gay man making art,” Robinson noted. “I felt empowered by his question, ‘Who is going to define my culture?’”

Born in Camden, New Jersey, and raised on the outskirts of NYC, Robinson grew up in a creative family and discovered ceramics at an early age. He studied ceramic sculpture at the Glasgow School of Art and the Maryland Institute College of Art and received his MFA in sculpture from the School of Visual Arts. “I make work that explores identities and lived experiences, but I have often come to the same conclusion that [Gonzalez-Torres] had. Our voice, our creative lineages have broader roots that span across times, cultures, politics, sexualities, genders, languages and media,” he said, noting that he is influenced by poetry, fiction, sculpture, film, dance, and more.

“I have been fascinated by how some artists challenge an accepted idea or a material tradition and are then dismissed or criticized for their peculiar transgression against the norm,” Robinson continued. “I love that sense of the peculiar, the unfamiliar…. It’s exciting.”

Queer + Peculiar Craft installation view

Healer Giant, Roxanne Jackson

Walking Ten More Steps, Suddenly Open, Dad's Tear (top); Walking Ten More Steps, Suddenly Open, Grandmother's Grievance (bottom), both by Lu Zhang

Works by Edmund Green Langdell

Queer + Peculiar Craft on view at The Clemente. _SCAR by Brian Kenny is seen beside door.

The 11 artists included in Queer + Peculiar Craft are based around the world but most have a connection to New York City, Robinson explained. “Some are gay, lesbian, straight and/or transgender. Some are older and younger and represent a multi-racial and multi-cultural group of makers,” he said. “Their work touches upon an underlying sense of being outside of a tradition, culture or common ground, and seeing the world through that particular point of view, which may often be met with suspicion, or dismissal, hence the title Queer and Peculiar.”

With works that address homosexual desire, feminism, transgender narratives, immigration, racism, and class, the artists “push the boundaries of a particular craft tradition by introducing a new technology, material, or by combining new content with anachronistic making methods,” according to Robinson, who adds that the featured artists are “doing something now and new with materials that have deep histories.”

Robinson hopes audiences will be introduced to a new group of artists and “recognize something familiar” in their work. “Perhaps they might see the common grounds that may be found in our queerness and/or peculiarity, and find empathy, or humor, or hope, or recognition,” he said. 

Queer + Peculiar Craft
The Clemente, Abrazo Interno Gallery, Second Floor
107 Suffolk Street (between Rivington & Delancey), Lower East Side
Exhibition on view through January 18
Artists' Panel Discussion scheduled for Thursday, January 16, 6pm to 8pm