Join me for this exclusive benefit event at the Joan Hisaoka Healing Arts Gallery and add one of the 125 Alchemical Vessels works to your own
collection! Opening is Friday, May 17 from 7-9 PM.
This unique exhibition will feature the work of 125 artists,
hand-selected by 16 invited curators (including yours truly) , to engage in a community dialogue
on healing and transformation through the arts. Each artist will
transform the ceramic bowl by means of his or her own personal aesthetic
and medium, drawing inspiration from the bowl as a place of holding,
open community, a circle of care, sacred space, nourishment, and even
the alchemical vessel.
100% of the ticket sale proceeds will go to support Smith
Center’s life-enhancing work and programs for people living with and
recovering from cancer.
Ticket information:
- Benefit tickets $125: 125 Benefit tickets will be sold, and each ticket holder at this level will be given the opportunity to select a piece
of art. Priority will be given by the order in which the
tickets were purchased—so the first to buy a ticket will be awarded
first pick of the 125 works, and so on. All 125 works will remain in the show until after the closing of the
exhibition on June 7, at which time the new owners can pick them up.
- Supporter ticket: $50: This price level is good for entrance to the Benefit only. Ticket holders at this level do not get to keep a piece of art.
If you have trouble purchasing tickets, please call 202.483.8600 or email them at outreach@smithcenter.org.
See the Facbeook Event for more photos from the Artists!
Benefit attendees will also be invited to the Artists' Closing Reception for Alchemical Vessels on June 7, 2013!
My donation to this event is below. I debated what to create, and in the end, I gessoed the bowl and once again delivered the visage of the most transformative artist that I know: Frida Kahlo.
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The Secret Substance of Frida Kahlo
Charcoal, conte and graphite on gessoed ceramic |
Seldom has human history seen an artist so transformed by
destiny, events and the agony of constant pain as Frida Kahlo. When Kahlo's
young body was nearly destroyed and re-arranged by a horrible accident in her
youth, where the young art student was impaled on a handrail that pierced her
vagina and emerged through her chest, her agony transformed her into another
being who then proceeded to gift onto the world some of the most spectacular
portraits of pain that we've ever seen.
The intense brutality of pain transformed Kahlo with the same intensity that a
thermonuclear reaction transforms its surroundings. She became a being
submerged in constant pain for the rest of her life, both physical (she
underwent dozens of surgeries) and mental (she experienced many miscarriages
and was never able to have a child). And that transformation was the catalyst
the propelled her to paint her own image as a mirror of the pain in her life,
and in the process to become one of history’s great artists.
In the process, Kahlo transformed all of us, as a little bit of
her artistic alchemic powers infect all of us who become hypnotized by her
portraits; the power of her gaze, the eloquence of her eye brows and the
intensity of her face, all leave a little bit of the secret substance that
changes artistic matter from the mundane to an aspiration to the sublime.
