Notice Us was created for SHINE Mural Festival 2018 by Michelle Sawyer and Tony Krol. Together the husband and wife artist team create murals under the moniker illsol. The mural depicts the endangered Florida panther.
For more of their work, you can also find them on Instagram.
Héctor Zamora’s site-specific installation, Lattice Detour, located on the roof of The Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2020. It opened at the end of August of that year after being delayed when the museum shut down due to the pandemic.
The installation’s curved wall of terra cotta bricks measured at 100 feet long and 11 feet high. The bricks were not solid, as they first appeared, but hollow so viewers could see through to the other side. Throughout the day light would pass through the wall creating different patterns and shadows.
Zamora discusses the work in the video below from The Met’s website–
Xenobia Bailey’s mosaic tile work Morning Stars, 2018, in downtown St. Petersburg, Florida. The work was commissioned by the St. Petersburg Arts Commission.
From the information plaque-
Bailey primarily works in fiber arts, creating crocheted mandalas which consist of colorful concentric circles and repeating patterns. For Morning Stars, Bailey crocheted several mandalas of brightly-colored fiber medium and worked with her fabricators to create the design digitally to be applied as a mosaic design.
Floating Candy Canes, 2021, from Nancy Cohen’s 2021 exhibition at Morean Arts Center, This Is How I Got So Fat.
From the Morean Arts Center website about the artist and exhibition-
Nancy Cohen is a classical oil painter in the chiaroscuro style of the Old Masters, but with a contemporary twist. She paints the things that inspire her: light filled florals, still life, and landscapes. At the top of the list recently is food, especially desserts: cakes, cupcakes, ice cream cones, and candy. She likes juxtaposing her serious masterly painting technique against such a frivolous and fun subject.
Her current series, entitled “This is How I Got So Fat,” although whimsical, underlines a serious message. Nancy believes that celebrating something that many people find shameful makes a powerful statement about acceptance of differences and the ability to be confident without having to be perfect.
About this body of work, Nancy says: “I think ‘art’ can seem serious and intimidating for many people. I hope that my work brings humor and humanity that can make art more approachable and accessible. What could be more fun than seriously executed paintings of fluffy desserts and juicy fruits with maybe even some gum balls thrown in? One thing I’ve learned as an artist – everyone loves a painting of a giant donut!”
El Templo- Find the Light by Jade Rivera is part of the 2016 SHINE Mural Festival in St. Pete, Florida.
From the St. Pete Arts Alliance website about the work-
Perched on the boy’s neck is a huge monarch butterfly almost as big as the ibis, its gold, black and orange wings spread wide, flitting against the boy’s cheek. The boy looks serenely up and away, as if unaware of the bird and the butterfly. The ibis and butterfly reflect the Florida reality surrounding the boy – the ibis is an iconic Florida bird found along the coastline or wandering through the streets. The candle represents light from the soul.
It’s a startling image for passing drivers and pedestrians – peaceful, but unsettling, with the oversized butterfly touching the boy’s face and the bird’s beak digging in his chest.
For more work by Jade Rivera, also check out his Instagram.
“Call Me Mrs. Mary E. Pleasant: The Midas Touch” by L’Merchie Frazier
Pictured above is a portrait of entrepreneur, civil rights activist and benefactor, Mary Ellen Pleasant who made a name and a fortune for herself in Gold Rush era San Francisco. Her timeline from 1814 to 1904 begins in racial slavery as an indentured servant girl with no formal education. She ascended to a self-made millionaire, amassing a fortune in her lifetime of over $30 million, ($900 million today).
Organized by historian, artist, and curator Dr. Carolyn Mazloomi, “Black Pioneers: Legacy in the American West” at The James Museum of Western and Wildlife Art, consists of 50 pictorial quilts created by members of Women of Color Quilters Network, a group founded by Mazloomi in 1985.
Mazloomi’s statement at the exhibition entrance-
American history is incomplete without the stories of African American men and women, from our enslaved ancestors to our societal challenges. The role of African Americans in the movement toward westward expansion has been largely overlooked. This exhibition of original pictorial quilts brings into focus the rich and diverse stories and achievements of Blacks in American western history. The timeline begins with Esteban’s 1528 arrival in the West and continues through the Civil Rights Movement.
At the end of Reconstruction in the South, discrimination and segregation caused African Americans to seek opportunities where there was less prejudice. In the 1800s, they moved by the thousands to the American West. Some went West as slaves, while free African American men joined the United States Army or became ranch hands, fur traders, cowboys, or miners.
Why quilts? Quilts and quilt making are important to American, and Black culture in particular. The art form was historically one of the few mediums accessible to marginalized groups to tell their own story, to provide warmth for their families, and to empower them with a voice through cloth. Using quilts to tell these stories accentuates the intersections of African Americans in the Western frontier while at once informing about the art form and its role in Black history. It is this often unknown and underappreciated shared reality that must be voiced if we are ever to truly value the unique contributions diverse groups make to the fabric of our nation.
Two more selections from the exhibition are below, although it was very hard to choose which quilts to highlight- there are so many great ones to choose from.
“A Good Soldier: Thomas C. Fleming, America’s Longest Serving Black Journalist” by Rosy Petri
At the time of his retirement in 1997, California journalist Thomas C. Fleming was the nation’s oldest Black journalist with the longest consecutive period of publication.
Information from the Museum’s wall plaque on Stagecoach Mary–
Mary Fields- also known as Stagecoach Mary, Black Mary and White Crow-became a Wild West legend because she was the second woman and the first African American woman star route mail carrier in the United States.
Born into slavery and freed after the Civil War, she worked as a servant and laundress for families on riverboats before moving to Montana in 1885. A decade later she became a star route carrier, delivering mail using a stagecoach. She drove the 15-mile route from Cascade to Saint Peter’s Mission, Montana, from 1895 to 1903. Nicknamed Stagecoach Mary, she was known for her reliability and speed.
The six-foot-tall Fields was a quick-shooting and hard drinking mail carrier who wore men’s clothing and flaunted a revolver and a rifle. Locals praised her kindness and generosity, and schools in the town of Cascade were closed each year to celebrate her birthday. Cascade’s mayor granted her an exemption to enter saloons after Montana passed a law forbidding women from entering these establishments.
The impressive quilts on view educate viewers with stories of individuals and events in African American history that may not have previously been familiar, and present new perspectives on those that are. It’s a wonderful way to utilize a visual medium to captivate, inform, and often inspire.
This exhibition closes on 1/8/2023.
“Tower, Houston”, 2020
“Tower, Houston”, 2020 (closer look)
“City Square at 4 am (Palazzo della Civiltà Italiana, Large Version)”, 2020
“Midtown, NYC”, 2020
The paintings above are from Daniel Rich’s 2020 exhibition at Miles McEnery Gallery in NYC.
From the gallery’s press release-
Daniel Rich’s reticulated cityscapes and slick façades appear at first glance to be quite literally superficial. Whether it is a geometric exterior pressed close to the picture plane or a cluster of multiple structures glimpsed from a distance, we experience architecture in his painting as a wholly exteriorized phenomenon— looming close up or made smaller through a bird’s-eye view.
His process-oriented paintings offer windows to different parts of the world— some figuratively, others much more literally—and can evoke a distorted experience of temporality for the viewer. Like compositions by Bernd and Hilla Becher or Andreas Gursky, Rich’s artworks offer clinical, complex architectural views onto the world that are filled with subtleties. However, Rich differs from Becher or Gursky in his painstaking, intricate process of translating found images into painting. The works also evoke early 20th century European Modernism, recalling Giorgio de Chirico’s metaphysical cityscapes and Germany’s Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) artists of the 1920s and 1930s.
Architecture, as it is commonly understood, is designed and implemented to house the human and is itself the manifestation of our constructed realities. When all signs of life are missing from buildings and spaces, as in Rich’s paintings, the result is an unsettling subversion that upends and questions what we have come to expect of both architectural spaces and the organized linearity of time. Rich probes viewers to consider what lies beyond the surface.
Rich also uses his anonymous architectural imagery to talk about history and politics. He speaks of his scenes as “failed utopias” and “changing political power structures.” In their seeming permanence, the fixed and rigid edifices that populate his work speak to a late capitalist urbanism that sees its monuments not as contingent, but as immovable and eternal.
His newest paintings are currently on view at the gallery for his exhibition Flat Earth on view until 1/28/23.
For more work by Bryan Snyder, check out his website. It has a large amount of information about the artist and his history.
During his time in Carlsbad, he has done a lot of work to create an artistic community- including founding both the Carlsbad Crawl, a website which focuses on art happenings around town; and the Carlsbad Art Wall, which rotates new art murals every two months, alternating between visiting artists and local artists.
Finally check out his Instagram for up to date content- today he posted a video segment his students made on his as a skateboarding teacher.
“Themes for a Left-Handed Pitcher”, 2021: “Still Life with Left-Handed Pitcher (04-06)”, 2021. serigraphy, pochoir, collage, acrylic ink, gouache on paper; “Left-Handed Pitcher Still Life (II)”, 2021. particle board, acrylic ink, concrete, polymer clay; “Perfect Games (Theme for a Left-Handed Pitcher)”, 2021. projected sound from single speaker. 9:00 min. (infinite loop)
While at Dunedin Fine Art Center to hear Ry McCullough’s talk, I was reminded of seeing this work at the USF Contemporary Art Museum last year as part of Skyway 20/21: A Contemporary Collaboration. The discussion was great and touched on a lot of interesting topics, especially around his use of collage.
From the gallery’s wall plaque about Themes for a Left-Handed Pitcher–
Inspired by the perfect game Los Angeles Dodgers’ pitcher Sandy Koufax threw against the Chicago Cubs in 1965, Themes for a Left Handed Pitcher engages compositional fielding of the domestic pitcher and black and white balls in a callback and comparative dialogue between sculptural objects and works on paper. Inviting playful and participatory discovery, the project includes an amplified palindromic sound score and a zine, which are both available to download. Interspersed with abstracted baseball references, the project evokes a change-up between the fabricated and found forms, the known and the unknown.
On McCullough’s website you can find the downloadable zine and the audio file mentioned in the description above and its a chance to check out more of his impressive collage pieces. For his most recent work, also check out his Instagram.
In addition to his independent practice, he is part of the collaborative project, small_bars, with artist Nick Satinover.
From the small_bars information page about the project-
Within their collaborative practice they explore the structural authority of their band name moniker, small_bars. This ambiguous name serves as an all-encompassing banner which simultaneously referencing pixels on a screen, lines of type of a letter press, halftone processes, and the physical clubs and venues their former bands played. As small_bars, McCullough and Satinover are able to generate a collection of collateral materials such as audio recordings, videos, printed ephemera, performative events, and structural arrangements, all of which support and expand the notion of what the moniker suggests. This collaborative effort seeks to use the form of a band-like entity to create a space where the acts of publishing, printing and performance co-exist.
Orange Tree
One Line That Connects Us
Orange Tree by Angela Warren is one of several of her works currently located at the Fenway Hotel in Dunedin, Florida. Organized by Creative Pinellas, Beyond the Walls 2022 places Pinellas County artists in several different hotels in the county.
Warren is also part of Arts Annual 2022 at the Creative Pinellas Gallery. For this exhibition she created the interactive work shown above, One Line That Connects Us.
From her Instagram about the work-
Last summer I took some time to brainstorm this work. I wanted to do a piece that would engage people in the gallery and encourage others to participate in creating. My idea/the concept is that we are all literally connected with one line, there’s so much that divides people but art is a way to connect us together! 💜
One Line That Connects Us:
This is an interactive art piece.
This year was hard. The recent hurricane Ian, the pandemic, various wars…these things pushed us further and further away from each other. It’s time to come back together!
During the 2022 Arts Annual opening on November 11th, I invite friends to have their portrait drawn by me in a “blind contour” style. If guests are feeling extra brave and want to take a turn, it is highly suggested!
The two rules are, no looking at the canvas, and no lifting your marker. This allows for an intimate interaction between the drawer, and the drawee. Once there are a good “community” of drawings, we can fill in each others portraits.
The picture above is from one of the earlier days of the piece. Check out her Instagram for more updated shots or better yet, see it at the gallery.
Tomorrow, 12/15, Creative Pinellas is having a party to celebrate the exhibition, from 6-9pm. It’s a great way to experience the show and meet the artist participants.
