These days it’s hard not to think sometimes about the end of the world. But have you started putting together a plan? Thought about who would be good in a crisis? Put together a pros and cons list of your friends, family and acquaintances? Wondered if things would actually be better?
Finn Schult’s current exhibition Everything You’ve Ever Wanted at Gallery 114 at Hillsborough Community College’s Ybor City location, presents an interesting take on the current state of things for those with the end on their minds. It includes paintings, animal traps, an ipod and walkie talkie, as well as a book containing photos, prepper information, journal entries, drawings, and some pros and cons for the people in his life, including his mom. The paintings are titled “L’appel Du Vide” a French phrase meaning “the call of the void” or the urge to jump when you are standing in a high place.
From the gallery’s website-
Everything You’ve Ever Wanted is a solo exhibition of new work by Finn Schult (b. 1993, Naples, FL) reflecting on the inevitability of the end of the world and the fantasy of apocalypse as catalyst for utopia. Schult’s multimedia series exists as fragments, sketches and interludes distilled from an otherwise deranged web of theories. At times, the artworks presented in Gallery114@HCC feel terroristic, violent and unbearably bleak–at other times, they remind us of the beauty inherent in loss, longing and love. Schult’s work yearns for a world that doesn’t yet exist and mourns for a world that isn’t yet gone, answering the cry, “How will I ever get out of this labyrinth?” with “The only way out is through.”
There is also a video in the exhibition, Where r u rn? which mixes a variety of imagery with a bit of author and mystic Terence McKenna’s 1999 final interview where he discusses “the fire in the madhouse at the end of time”- the possibility of the craziness in the world being a sign of the dying of our species.
Morean Arts Center in St. Pete, Florida, is currently showing Fresh Squeezed 7, their annual exhibition of emerging artists in Florida. It’s a great opportunity to see some of the best artwork being done by local artists. The exhibition closes 6/22/23.
From the the Morean Arts Center’s press release-
As always, our selection panel culled over 120 applications from across the state, narrowing the exhibition down to the six artists featured here. It’s always a joyful and heartbreaking process, seeing so much inspiring good work and only having a limited amount of space in which to show it all.We were looking for diversity in medium, in ideas, and in geographical location, all of which somehow comes together to form a delightful, cohesive whole.
While we don’t necessarily plan it that way, themes and commonalities do emerge among the artists selected for the exhibition. We’re happy to announce this is the first year that we have an ALL FEMALE line up. And due to the inclusive interpretation we use to define an emerging artist (no previous solo shows in Florida), you’ll find artists here who are still pursuing their MFAs (KJ Skidmore and Leeann Rae) AND artists who are returning to their first love of art after finding fulfillment in decades of other related careers (Latonya Hicks and Deborah W. Perlman).
Other themes you may notice as you peruse the galleries are the inventive (and exuberant!) use of materials. Denise Treizman and Latonya Hicks both incorporate cast off, recycled and vintage materials in their dimensional wall work. While Denise’s process is more spontaneous and Latonya’s is deliberate and measured, they both create joyful works of art that invite contemplation and perhaps a spark of recognition from the viewer.
KJ Skidmore and Laura De Valencia both deal with contemporary issues and pop culture in their work, though to wildly different effect. KJ’s humorous mixed media paintings address the notion of the male gaze, and the women who must endure it. Laura’s installations use fashion culture as a jumping off point to raise questions about international stereotypes and the borders (both visible and not) that immigrants have to experience on a daily basis.
Both Leeann Rae and Deborah W. Perlman create work that challenge the viewer to look longer, and to think deeper. With their disparate materials (Leeann with soft pastel and Deborah with cut paper), they raise notions of space, whether physical or mental, real or imagined, in the present or a memory from the past.
KJ Skidmore “Squeeze ‘n’ Block”, Acrylic and coffee
KJ Skidmore
KJ Skidmore “Angel’s Bar”, Acrylic, fabric, trim, paste and wood paper
The work above is by Tampa based artist KJ Skidmore.
Morean Arts Center’s information about the artist-
KJ’s current work is based in painting/drawing that extends into3-D space through multimedia installation. Her immersive spaces are chaotic and aggressive, but at the same time alluring. She works within her own bizarre and disjointed narratives and themes containing warped textual elements, strange cartoon characters, and color palettes that are both grimy and fluorescent. Her material use is variable and may include masses of hair clumped together with canned beets, pink stained carpet, fabrics, wood, plaster, teeth, rain jackets, and Smurf-themed objects.
KJ’s painted series Burger Time caricatures leering male clientele as flat, monster-like cartoons that interact with a staring waitress to explore gendered tropes and forms of voyeurism. This series reconstructs reality in relation to being female by presenting experiences like getting stared at or groped within a hokey themed attraction called “Burger Time” restaurant. Her series is meant to revolt the viewer through acknowledging the male gaze, while also celebrating its trashiness and the culture surrounding it. She uses humor to poke fun at this harmful and uneven power dynamic. The series presents this sickening concept through more palatable presentation such as expressive cartoon figures and bright colors.
KJ is from Gainesville, FL, but was living on the West Coast until recently. She is back in Florida pursuing an MFA at USF in Tampa.
For more of the artists in the show, continue to the next page.
Between 1915 and 1970, in the wake of racial terror during the post-Reconstruction period, millions of Black Americans fled from their homes to other areas within the South and to other parts of the country. This remarkable movement of people, known as the Great Migration, caused a radical shift in the demographic, economic, and sociopolitical makeup of the United States. A Movement in Every Direction: Legacies of the Great Migration brings together twelve contemporary artists to consider the complex impact of this period on their lives, as well as on social and cultural life, with newly commissioned works ranging from large-scale installation, immersive film, and tapestry to photography, painting, and mixed media. Featured artists are Akea Brionne, Mark Bradford, Zoë Charlton, Larry W. Cook, Torkwase Dyson, Theaster Gates Jr., Allison Janae Hamilton, Leslie Hewitt, Steffani Jemison, Robert Pruitt, Jamea Richmond-Edwards, and Carrie Mae Weems.
A Movement in Every Direction presents a departure from traditional accounts of the Great Migration, which are often understood through a lens of trauma, and reconceptualizes them through stories of self-possession, self-determination, and self-examination. While the South did lose generations of courageous, creative, and productive Black Americans due to racial and social inequities, the exhibition expands the narrative by introducing people who stayed in, or returned to, the region during this time. Additionally, the Brooklyn Museum’s presentation centers Brooklyn as another important site in the Great Migration, highlighting historical and contemporary census data about the borough’s migration patterns. Visitors are encouraged to share their own personal and familial stories of migration through an oral history “pod” available in the exhibition galleries.
About Robert Pruitt’s work, pictured above, from the museum’s wall information plaque-
“A Song for Travelers” celebrates the individual and Black collective experiences that have shaped the histories of rural East Texas and Houston’s Third, Fourth, and Fifth Wards. In this drawing-based on an early 1970’s photograph of a reunion of the artist’s family in Dobbin, Texas -sixteen people gather around a seated central figure about to embark on a journey. During the creation of this work, the masked traveler became a stand-in for Pruitt, who had recently left his hometown of Houston.
Pruitt often draws inspiration from his and others’ family photographs while examining historical events that have impacted Houston’s Black communities. Wearing costumes and adorned with items that reference various aspects of Black culture found in schools, social clubs, and religious spaces, the figures in the work reflect the numerous networks that remained and flourished in the South. Merging the Great Migration period with the present, Pruitt centers the Black neighborhoods across the southern region that served as safe havens and rich sites of cultural expression for migrants during the twentieth century. This link extends to today as many Black Americans leave the northern and western cities that once attracted their elders and return to the South.
Allison Janae Hamilton’sA House Called Florida, below, takes the viewer on a journey through part of northern Florida’s natural beauty.
From the museum’s information plaque about the video installation-
Allison Janae Hamilton produced the three-channel film installation A House Called Florida in her hometown region of northern Florida. The breathtaking landscapes of Apalachicola Bay and the swampy Blackwater Lakes of Florida’s Big Bend frame musicians, dancers, motorists, a Victorian house, and a slow resounding rhythm.
The artist references French Argentinian writer Julio Cortázar’s 1946 short story “Casa Tomada.” (“House Taken Over”) about ghosts that slowly take over a home and eventually push out its owners, room by room. Hamilton echoes the story’s theme of displacement with two regally dressed, spirit-like protagonists who move about the house engaging in mark-making and ritual performances. Hamilton’s film pays tribute to the Black Floridians who remained in the Red Hills and the Forgotten Coast regions, despite the racial violence and environmental precariousness they faced throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Carrie Mae Weems‘ personal and moving contribution is in two parts- a series of photographs and a unique digital video installation.
The museum’s description of the work-
Carrie Mae Weems explores a painful family story: the disappearance of her grandfather Frank Weems, a tenant farmer and union activist who was attacked by a white mob in Earle Arkansas, in 1936. Presumed dead, he narrowly escaped and made his way to Chicago on foot, never again reuniting with his family. Frank Weems may have followed the North Star to Chicago. Weems’s series of seven prints, The North Star, makes an apt metaphor for Frank’s life. In Leave! Leave Now! Weems conjures the figure of her grandfather with a Pepper’s Ghost, a late nineteenth-century form of illusion first used in theater. By weaving historical events with fragmented family stories, photographs, poetry, music, and interviews, the artist reveals the tragedy of her grandfather’s disappearance and the aftermath.
This exhibition will close on Sunday, June 25th, 2023.
The latest pop-up exhibition at Chad Mize’sSPACE in St. Pete’s Warehouse Arts District, is Hot Box, which opened Friday 6/9/23. The show includes a LOT of artists and installations as well as, for this past weekend, an immersive performance by Dirty John’s comedy troupe.
Keefe is a talented ceramicist as well as photographer. For this series she created the objects, photographed them, and than used a specific AI filter to obtain her final results.
Fashioned after both the artist’s workspace and print editions he created during his Arts Council of Princeton’s Anne Reeves Artist-in-Residency, Somatic Pause invites Princeton to contemplate the transformational power of rest, and how time changes each of us.
Somatic Pause – a wheat-pasted, painted, and collaged installation – is an ephemeral one. Meant to change over time, the mural will be exposed to harsh winter weather, early spring rains, and glaring sun, each doing its own work to fade, soften, tear, and mar its surface.
Change is the constant.
And about the artist-
Dave DiMarchi is a queer, multi-disciplinary artist working in printmaking, papermaking and sculptural book forms. He engages in a relentless material practice, nurturing ideas into singular and editioned works. As a multi-disciplinary artist, he has exhibited works on paper, installations and books in the US and internationally. He maintains a small collaborative studio and art space in New Hope, Pennsylvania and teaches printmaking, papermaking and book forms extensively throughout the New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania area. In Fall of 2022, he was announced as the ACP Artist-in-Residence which will allow him to continue to explore collage-based multi-media and print works.
Since 2012, he has created his own work, curated exhibitions, provided print exchange opportunities, and published fine art prints as 9INHANDPRESS, a fine art printmaking and education studio located in New Hope, Pennsylvania.
Rachel Ratcliff, “Roll of the Kaleidoscope”, 2021, acrylic on canvas
Richard Logan “Sea Oats”, 2022, photographic transfer on metal with etched glass
Steven Spathelf, “Orange Blossom”, 2022, acrylic on canvas
This past Friday the city of Dunedin, Florida, celebrated the opening of its new City Hall. As part of the celebration, the building and all of its offices were open to the public. It was the first opportunity to see all the wonderful art by Florida artists- selected and commissioned by Elizabeth Brincklow.
Pictured above are works by Rachel Ratcliff (wave painting) and Richard Logan (photography). The third work is by Steven Spathelf whose oranges can be seen adorning buildings and homes all around town.
Scroll through the pages below to see the other works on view.
A member of the Seneca Nation, Watt also has German-Scott ancestry. Her layered and complex influences include Indigenous knowledge and Iroquois proto-feminism, the matriarchal structures of certain Native American nations, the rise of social activism throughout the 20th century, and the anti-war and anti-hate content of the 1960s and 1970s music scene.
Central to the exhibition are three Sewing Circle pieces that were initiated at communal gatherings at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 2022. Watt’s sewing circles are cross generational, multicultural gatherings that she has been organizing for over a decade. Inspired by poet laurate Joy Harjo’s (Mvskoke/Creek) poem Singing Everything, Watt collects words from the participants of her sewing circles with the prompt, “what do you want to sing a song for in this moment?” The submitted words are then embroidered or sewn onto patches of fabric during the sewing circle. For the Whitney Sewing Circle, with over 300 participants, Watt, for the first time, used all the submitted words. Each panel is patterned in a way that stays true to the original hand. She thinks of ones handwriting as an extension of the cadence of one’s voice and in this project, it becomes part of a larger chorus. By composing large-scale wall works from these pieces of fabric, Watt creates collaborative artworks that interweave many individual handwritings, touches, and the stories that were exchanged in a shared space.
When entering the gallery, the visitor is greeted by a sweeping, 24-foot-long neon sign spelling out the words “deer, skywalker, heron, bass, great lake, woodland, beaver, turtle, wolf, lowly, muskrat, rat” in various hues that evoke the sky on the horizon during sunset and sunrise. While the piece represents a new direction in Watt’s work, she views neon as an extension of beadwork. The glass itself is at once thread and bead, and both neon and beads have a relationship to trade. They both envelop light, color, and sound, embodying sunrises and sunsets on the horizon.
Two blanket towers, her signature sculptural works, appear in the show but now with tin bells or jingles added to the reclaimed wool blankets. This choice of added material felt like a natural extension to Watt. She writes: “Blankets are danced and so are jingles, there is something healing about them both. They are objects of comfort” – by way of touch or sound. “Jingles acknowledge the Jingle Dress Dance which began as a healing ritual in the Ojibwe tribe in the 1910s during the influenza pandemic. The Jingle Dress Dance was also a radical act. In 1883, the United States banned Indigenous ceremonial gatherings. Though the ban was repealed in 1978 with the American Indian Religious Freedom Act, during its century-long prohibition the Jingle Dress Dance was shared with other tribal communities. Today it is a pow-wow dance and continues to be associated with healing. The relevance of this dance extends beyond pandemics.” By including jingles Watt brings the potential of sound into her work, adding to their visual and tactile aspects.
While drawing from long craft traditions such as textile or glass work, Watt is expanding her work by including contemporary stories and both individual and collective experiences. Her primary interest is to think about art as more experiential, rather than only visual, a direction she plans to explore further.
Bowerbirds and butterflies decorate the building’s facade. Nguyen considers the former “the artists of the bird world.” Each year, for up to six months, the male bowerbird will spend its days building arches made of straw. He will then gather brightly colored objects and place them outside the construction in order to attract mates.
“They perform,” says Nguyen. “They use the hole [of the arch] as a stage. … They’re also great mimickers and singers. I thought that was interesting. They’re like actors, performance artists, builders, makers, collectors, [and] in some way they’re painters. They pick certain colors and situate them.”
Nguyen saw the creature as a perfect symbol for The Refinery Creator Space. She lists off the various types of artists (painters, photographers, sculptors, filmmakers, fiber artists…), in addition to the art-based organizations (Asheville Darkroom, Asheville Makers, The Bright Angle, Local Cloth and Mechanical Eye Microcinema) that now call the space their home. She views her mural, with its bright colors and visual appeal, as a way to help facilitate traffic; a way to intrigue the public to step inside and support the arts.
More recently, Nguyen contributed work to the 2023 annual ArtFields event in Lake City, South Carolina. The two pieces are from her series “Letters to My Children”.
Her statement about these works-
“Strong Arms” & “Keep Going” are from a series entitled “Letters to My Children.” I was diagnosed with uterine leiomyosarcoma in July 2018 when my kids, Atticus and Moon, were 7 & 9 years old. In January 2020, my lung collapsed and I underwent a lobectomy. Now with a stage 4 cancer diagnosis I have found myself up at all hours worrying about dying before my kids are grown. When I couldn’t sleep, I wrote letters to them, recording their favorite recipes and my fondest memories of them for them. In 2021, I decided to share my writing with them instead of saving all this pondering in a box for later. Making and sharing this work has allowed us to cry and grieve together, which, in turn, has opened up space to truly be honest and present for one another while we are all still alive. With my children’s permission, I present slices of difficult conversations we have had to a wider audience in hopes of easing any load the viewer might be carrying on their own personal journey.
There’s only a few days left to see Miriam Schapiro: The André Emmerich Years, Paintings from 1957–76 at Eric Firestone Gallery.
From the press release-
Miriam Schapiro (1923–2015) is now well-known as a pioneer of the Women’s Art Movement, and for her contribution to the Pattern and Decoration Movement. She fused craft work, traditionally made by women, with modern painting in collages termed “femmage.” However, this exhibition will additionally shed light on her early Abstract Expressionist canvases, and her pioneering approach utilizing computer technology to create Hard Edge geometric painting in the 1960s. Spotlighting the legacy of this feminist artist, the exhibition will explore three stylistic phases, with significant examples from these two decades of Schapiro’s career.
