Artists' Websites: Katherine Mann
Katherine Mann is about to have her MFA exhibit at MICA this coming Friday, April 24 from 5-7PM (Details later this week).
She writes about her work that her "paintings depict ever-changing fantasy worlds where blood cells, rainforests and coral reefs collide and intertwine. Each piece functions as a man-sized porthole into a landscape alive with minute details, patterns and interlocking systems. This is achieved through the conglomeration of minutia piled and cobbled together to create larger, overarching systems that define the whole painting. I work with ambiguous shapes that could function as elements in radically different environments in the real world—a scabby circular shape could be a marsh object covered with barnacles, a white blood cell, or a cratered moon."
Visit her website here.
Wednesday, April 22, 2009
Conservation lecture tomorrow
Join Amber Kerr-Allison, Paintings Conservator and Lunder Conservation Fellow at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, for a gallery talk where she discusses the conservation treatments of several paintings in preparation for the Smithsonian American Art Museum's exhibition 1934: A New Deal for Artists, currently on exhibition through January 2010.
Learn more about the paintings themselves as you become acquainted with the techniques, methodology, and tools used by conservators in the treatment and care of the collection. Ms. Kerr-Allison will be joined by curator Ann Prentice Wagner. In tandem, they will explore the technical and visual components of the artwork, elaborate on the historical context of this period, and dialogue about collaboration between curators and conservators.
Thursday, April 23, 2:00 p.m. Meet at the entrance of the 1934 exhibition.
Tuesday, April 21, 2009
Open Studios in DC
On April 25 & 26, 2009, 52 O St. Studios will host their annual Open Studios event.
You can view the working and living spaces of over 20 DC artists at one of the largest and oldest buildings dedicated to the practice of Fine Arts in Washington D.C. Artists range from painters to graphic designers, sculptors to musicians, mixed-media artists to furniture makers. The O Street Studios hosts this Open Studio for a rare peak into their process and creative influences. Meet the artists and discuss their work over refreshments, music and interactive activities.
The building will be open from 11 AM - 5 PM both days. Free and open to all
52 O St., NW
Washington D.C. 20001
Featured Artists:
Stevens Jay Carter
Matthew Scott Davis
Department of Furniture
DJ Natty Boom
Adam Eig
Thom Flynn
Cianne Fragione
Gallie Hendricks
Andrea Haffner
Peter e Harper
Matt Hollis
Andy Holtin
Dean Hutchinson
Rebecca Kallem
Micheline Klagsbrun
Raye Leith
Michael Mansfield
Kendall Nordin
Holly & Ashlee Temple
Lisa Marie Thalhammer
Ben Tolman
The Tuesday Night Group
Zach Vaughn
Trevor Young at Flashpoint
Trevor Young returns to present his second solo exhibition, curated and produced by my good friend Annie Adjchavanich at the Gallery at Flashpoint, with 100 paintings in homage to non-places. The exhibition addresses generic spaces, such as freeways, hotel rooms, airports and supermarkets, which are familiar and safe, but often make us feel like we do not belong. Trevor Young: Non-Places, runs through June 6, 2009 and has an opening reception on Saturday, April 25, 6-8pm.
In Marc Augé’s Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity (1995) he coined the phrase "non-place" to refer to spaces of transience that do not hold enough significance to be regarded as "places." Young says, “We survive with the greatest of ease in non-places. That is the point. There is no need to travel from village to village when one store has everything we need. The non-place neutralizes individuality. ‘Place’ is filled with history and identity. Non-place is void of history and identity.”
Created in his studio in Silver Spring, MD and during a 45 day painting fellowship in Los Angeles, Young’s new works are a departure from his mail art series, Trevor Young Has Gone Postal, in which he mailed more than 500 number ten sized envelopes to his friend and curator Annie Adjchavanich. These elaborately decorated envelopes were exhibited at the Gallery at Flashpoint in 2004.
My good friend Al Miner has written about this show:
Trevor Young: Non-places
On the road between here and there are anonymous structures, mere rest stops for most of us, but not for Trevor Young. Where some see purgatory, he sees and paints an oasis, and a portal becomes a destination. Young’s “non-places,” coax us down the highway with their seductive smell of familiarity and french fries. His paintings are composites made of a lifetime of mental snap shots taken on countless trips through the drive-thru. We are simultaneously drawn to their slick veneers and repulsed by their lack of history. Young’s gas stations, retail mega chains, fast food restaurants, and airline terminals capture the conflict we feel about such shrines to modern capitalism.
Brightly colored and backlit, they snap us out of highway hypnosis like dazzling beacons on a bland horizon. Young renders their flat, artificial surfaces in luscious oil, rich with the evidence of his hand. In Washington, Tokyo, Buenos Aires, and beyond, non-places all essentially look the same, and that is comforting. To the artist, airline terminals serve as a gentle transition between the security of home and the shock of flight and then foreign soil.
However, non-places have a sinister side. While we may speak their language fluently, Young cautions against blind trust with his haunted, cinematic night scenes. Hotel rooms might feel like homes away from home, but who and how many slept there before? And how clean is that shiny fast food tabletop when we invoke the five-second rule?
Like all great love affairs, Trevor Young’s relationship with non-places is a complex one. His use of a traditional medium imbues them with the history they inherently lack, while his prolific practice reminds us that they are a dime a dozen. At once devotional images and mug shots, they marry optimism and cynicism. Lucky for us they make a beautiful couple.
-Al Miner
Monday, April 20, 2009
Artists' Websites: Nina Glaser
Nina Glaser is a superbly talented young painter about to do her MFA exhibit this coming Friday at MICA (details on all of those Frida MFA shows later this week).
Alyssa. Oil by Nina Glaser. 36x24 inches.
Her work is not only superbly crafted (she's a painter's painter) but also has that hard-to-describe inner quality to it that adds a sense of depth and mystery to the work which immediately separates her from the pack of technically savvy painters. There is youth and narrative in her work, and more importantly, immense promise.
Visit her website here. This is an artist which should be snatched by regional galleries now!
Aqui Estamos comes to Philly
As I've written many times, as result of the decades-long Cuban embargo, the work of contemporary Cuban artists has been noticed for many years by many important museums and curators around the world, but often remains a mystery to American collectors and art enthusiasts. And those who write about the commoditization of art, such as the Wall Street Journal, have been telling art collectors who buy art in the hope those prices will rise, to buy contemporary Cuban art.
The WSJ wrote:
"With art from Asia and Russia in demand, some in the art world are betting on Cuba to be the next hot corner of the market. Prices for Cuban art are climbing at galleries and auction houses, and major museums are adding to their Cuban collections. In May, Sotheby's broke the auction record for a Cuban work when it sold Mario Carreño's modernist painting "Danza Afro-Cubana" for $2.6 million, triple its high estimate.This suggestion and idea is simple, and has been proven recently by the super hot rise of Chinese artists: when a closed society is opened up a little, its top artists see a substantial rise in exposure and thus in demand, and of course, in prices!
Now, with a new president in power and some hope emerging for looser travel and trade restrictions between the U.S. and Cuba, American collectors and art investors are moving quickly to tap into the market. Some are getting into Cuba by setting up humanitarian missions and scouting art while they're there. Others are ordering works from Cuba based on email images and having them shipped.
The collectors are taking advantage of a little-known exception to the U.S. trade embargo with Cuba: It is legal for Americans to buy Cuban art."
And it makes sense (if you buy art as an investment strategy rather than love of art).
Generally speaking, when an artist is in certain major collections around the world, such as the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the Tate in London, and other such giants of the museum world, it attracts a certain level of collector interest, and it is almost always associated with a certain price range.
And there are many contemporary Cuban artists whose work has been in those and many other important museums around the world for a very long time, and whose work continues to attract curatorial, critical and savvy collector interest, but because of their lack of exposure to the American market in general (often created by their closed societies), their price range is not in par with their colleagues from other nations in the same level.
Several years ago, almost by accident, I became involved in the curatorial process of contemporary Cuban art, in an effort to help with fundraising efforts by the Havana Hebrew Community Center. Since then I have become an experienced curator in this genre and have acquired a wealth of good knowledge about the artists from that unfortunate and imprisoned island.
Aquí Estamos (Here We Are) is my latest curatorial project and after an initial showing in Norfolk, Virginia, it traveled to to H&F Fine Arts and the Greater Washington, DC region and now travels to Philadelphia's Projects Gallery with an exhibition of recent work by several important Cuban artists working out of Havana as well as Cuban artists from the Cuban Diaspora.
How can this be done?
It’s a brutal, labor intensive touch and go process, as although art and books are the only two items exempt from the Cuban embargo, the heavy hand of the Communist dictatorship that runs everything on that unfortunate nation touches all aspects of life, including the creation and destination of art. Bypassing and escaping the government is not easy, but it can be accomplished if the artist is willing to risk it.
In the works that you’ll see at Projects Gallery we find narratives and imagery that represent many of these artists’ historical dissidence to the stark issues of contemporary Cuban life. The works are images that offer a historical and visual sentence in the history of an island nation behind bars with a powerful world presence in the arts and events of world history.
In Sandra Ramos’ works we see one of the most important contemporary Cuban artists in the world continue to visit themes dealing with racism in her homeland, the physical and intellectual drain caused by mass migration, and other austere realities of daily Cuban life. Ramos uses her body and her figure in many of her paintings and mixed media etchings to narrate the daily issues that confront her life in Havana. In her drawing "Larva," Ramos anticipates a future Cuba where she may be allowed to spread her artistic wings to full capacity, without fear of how her visual imagery may be interpreted by her own government.Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons, who escaped from Cuba in the early 1990s, also uses her image and body to deliver powerful biographical and observational elements of the realities of being a black Cuban woman in America. She has been called “one of Boston’s most prominent artists,” and as evidence it has been submitted that the Cuban-born artist has shown at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, Minneapolis’s Walker Art Center, the Smithsonian, the Venice Biennale, and many other prestigious venues around the world.
And last year the Indianapolis Museum of Art hosted “Everything Is Separated by Water,” a mid-career retrospective of Campos-Pons’ paintings, sculptures, photos, and installations. And as an Afro-Cuban woman, Campos-Pons has used her cultural and racial background as the initial key theme of her own work, with long ties to her Cuban homeland, but also with a powerful influence of her evolving Americanosity.
"Consume preferably before age 30." Gelatin Silver Print. Cirenaica Moreira
Both Cirenaica Moreira and Marta Maria Perez Bravo also employ their bodies to become the canvas of their photographs, although in each case with a different goal. Moreira has been called “woman as vagina dentata” for the ferocity via which her images depict her themes of loss of freedom, feminism, and being a Cuban woman in a land of unabashed machismo.
Perez Bravo is considered by many to be the preeminent Cuban female photographer in the world, and her work addresses the fabulous rituals and images of Santeria, the unique Cuban mixture of Catholicism and African religions brought to the island by African slaves.Kcho (Alexis Leyva Machado) is also considered by many to be among the leading Cuban artists in the world, and he first attracted international attention by winning the grand prize at South Korea's Kwangju Biennial in 1995.
Other artists in the show include work by Alejandro Mendoza (winner of the Best in Show 2006. IX Exposición de Arte Latinoamericano y del Caribe, Museum of the Americas) and Alex Queral. Also Roberto Wong, whose powerful paintings develop intelligent ways to showcase ways in which freedom is restricted and Aimeé Garcia Marrero, considered by many to be among Cuba’s most talented new crop of painters. Her technical skills are married to intelligent interpretations of daily Cuban life and even the influences of the giant to the North.
"Concavo" Digital Print by Aimee Garcia Marrero
The opening, free and open to the public is on May 1st, 2009 from 6-9PM. Projects Gallery is located at 629 N 2nd Street, Philadelphia, PA 19123, tel: 267.303.9652 and on the web at projectsgallery.com. The exhibition is open through May 29, 2009.
