Mixed Media Art – Page 4

NYC Public Art- The High Line- Teresa Solar-Abboud

Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Mixed Media, New York Art Shows, Public Art, Sculptors / Sculpture

Jun 042025

Currently on view on the High Line in NYC is Teresa Solar-Abboud‘s colorful sculpture, Birth of Islands.

From the High Line’s website about the commission-

Teresa Solar-Abboud creates sculptures, drawings, and videos characterized by an interest in fiction, storytelling, natural history, ecology, and anatomy. In her work, she alludes to material entities in states of transformation and the tension between the organic and synthetic, interior and exterior, gestation and birth, and embryonic and advanced. Solar-Abboud wields these tensions as a tool, not to draw binary juxtapositions, but rather to suggest that they co-exist in a quantum world, in a constant flow state of evolution. This is articulated in her work through an interest in and re-imagination of life’s diverse and sophisticated networks—cultural, geological, industrial, and anatomical—and how these systems overlap or sometimes clash.

For the High Line, Solar-Abboud presents Birth of Islands, a new sculpture in her series of zoomorphic shapes inspired by animals and prehistoric life forms. Birth of Islands, is composed of slick, blade-like foam-coated resin elements that emanate outward from the pores of a muddy, gray ceramic stump. When visiting New York, Solar-Abboud was struck by the landscape—building after building rising from the soil in a fight for prominence, just as vegetation in the forest combats for sunlight in order to survive. Birth of Islands refers to this competitive ecosystem, while also evoking human anatomy: two yellow, tongue-like emanations have seemingly tunneled their way from underground onto the High Line. The forms are spoon-like in their appearance, concave or convex, depending on one’s vantage point. The result appears simultaneously post-human and primordial, sophisticated and elementary—a representation of our own unending transformation alongside nature’s ever-evolving state.

This sculpture will be on view through July 2025.

Flashback- Florida Art Shows- Tania Figueroa at The Werk in St. Pete and Upcoming Exhibition at The Studio @620

Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Florida Art Shows, Mixed Media, Painting / Painters, Pinellas County, St. Pete

May 302025

Tania Figueroa‘s painting Oronym, pictured above, was part of a group exhibition at The Werk Gallery in St. Pete, Florida, in April of 2023.

About the artwork from the artist-

Expressing a point of view feeling restricted. Throwing your truth only between the lines. Not being able to express your thoughts openly because of fear, pressure or prejudice. In that restriction, we feel trapped, we feel with two faces. The one the world wants to see and the genuine face.

Like an oronym.

You might hear one thing, but what is it really saying?

The artist is currently part of the three person exhibition, Between Worlds on view at The Studio @620, also in St. Pete. The other Florida artists included are Sketzii (Ketsy Ruiz) and Alexa Espinosa (ArttByLexx).

From the gallery-

In Between Worlds, artists Sketzii, ArttByLexx, and Tania Figueroa bring together layered narratives of memory, identity, and cultural connection. Their work moves across genres and materials—painting, digital illustration, and mixed media—to explore what it means to exist in the spaces between home and heritage, past and present, tradition and personal truth. Each artist offers a unique lens through which to view belonging, storytelling, and the way art creates meaning across generations.

Sketzii is a celebration of her Puerto Rican heritage and the experience of living within the Latinx diaspora. Her bold, vibrant compositions honor communities that are often overlooked—uplifting stories of cultural pride, displacement, and the longing for connection that spans across geography and time.

ArttByLexx’s practice centers on her connection to ancestry and the inward journey of self-discovery. Her practice embraces nature’s rhythms and emotional depth, creating intuitive pieces that blur boundaries between past and present. Through her exploration of joy, grief, and transformation, her art becomes a spiritual and reflective space.

Tania Figueroa brings a rich history of movement to her visual art practice. Trained in classical ballet and theater, her work now lives in the textures of mixed media—combining textiles, sand, and paper to evoke memory, place, and care. Her pieces draw on deep personal experience, blending the sensorial and the sacred to reflect both resilience and tenderness.

Together, their work maps a shared space between worlds—charting stories of belonging, resilience, and the quiet beauty found in complexity.

This Saturday, 5/31/25, there will be a reception held from 1:00 PM – 3:30 PM with an artist talk at 2:30 PM.

Delaware Art Shows- Maurice Evans at Bridge Art Gallery

Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Collage, Delaware, Mixed Media, Painting / Painters, Wilmington

May 282025

“Khola”, Mixed media, acrylic paint, fabric and collage on canvas

“Kanga Amricani”, Mixed media, acrylic paint, fabric and collage on canvas

The images above are from Fabric Secrets, Maurice Evans‘ solo exhibition of mixed media paintings, on view at Bridge Art Gallery in Wilmington until 5/31/25.

From the gallery-

Born in Smyrna, Tennessee, Maurice Evans discovered his artistic passion through music before transitioning to visual arts. After studying Fashion Illustration at the Art Institute of Atlanta, he pursued a career that blended bold colors, cultural narratives, and mixed media. In 1994, his independent career took off with a successful exhibition at the Black Arts Festival in Atlanta, leading to national and international recognition.

Evans’ work, often incorporating photography, painting, and sculpture, explores themes of music, culture, gender, and politics. His distinctive style has been showcased in numerous galleries, museums, and collections, including Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport and the Hammonds House Museum.

Residing in Atlanta, Evans continues to push artistic boundaries, living by the mantra, “Create art for art’s sake,” inspiring artists and audiences alike.

It’s also worth checking out his Instagram account where he posts videos of his process, as well as his most recent work.

Delaware Art Shows- Mia Fabrizio at The Delaware Contemporary

Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Collage, Conceptual Art, Delaware, Furniture, Installation Art, Mixed Media, Photographers / Photography, Sculptors / Sculpture, Wilmington

May 222025

For Mia Fabrizio’s installation in the lobby of The Delaware Contemporary, Pull Up A Chair, she has created several sculptures that use domestic objects to explore a variety of social issues. It is part of the museum’s Winter/Spring three-part exhibition, Dinner Table.

From the museum-

Mia Fabrizio is an interdisciplinary artist creating mixed media portraits, freestanding sculptures and installations composed of building materials and domestic items. She carves away, mends, and cobbles together assemblages from a domestic landscape that is both nostalgic and full of pathos.

In these works, Fabrizio explores the power structures and cultural paradigms associated with, “having a seat at the table.” Fabrizio reveals how furniture conventions can grant power to the user. It is the “power to be seen, power to be heard, and power to contribute to the framing of a society” that Fabrizio aims to scrutinize. The chair sculptures become vessels for memories with details that reference labor, gender, and cultural constructs. Her multilayered constructions toggle between tearing apart and memorializing her personal experience. The assembly and material choices subvert the basic understood function of a “seat” and reveal illusions of functional space. She asserts that, “these seats are invitations in name only, token representations.”

Mama Liked the Roses links past to present by combining images and materials from Fabrizio family home with images collected from regions in Italy where her great grandparents had originated. The details within the piece reference labor, food, gender and religion.

And from the artist-

I am an interdisciplinary artist. Mixed media portraits, freestanding sculptures and installations are composed of building materials and domestic items. Multilayered concepts relating to identity and social constructs are presented through a variety of artistic mediums and processes. Consumed with hidden and exposed structure, my investigation of physical construction, cultural paradigms and their relationship, originates from the framework most familiar to me, the house in which I grew up. Contradictions within this space spark my desire to highlight the fluidity of perceived binaries, particularly those relating to feminine and masculine, public and private and modern and traditional.

Ascribing to the visual context of home as well as the ethos of homemade I paint, adhere, carve and chip away at plywood, drywall and paper. I vacillate between tearing apart and tenderly memorializing my personal experience, concurrently the work points outward to larger societal conversations around immigrant status, feminism, and queerness.

This exhibition closes 5/25/29.

Flashback- NYC Art Shows- Matthew Stone at The Hole

Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Conceptual Art, Digital Art, New York Art Shows, Painting / Painters

May 162025

“Radiating Kindness (Oil)”, 2023, Oil on linen

“Bold Glamour”, 2023, Digital print on linen

For AI Paintings, Matthew Stone‘s 2023 exhibition at The Hole’s Lower East Side location, he explored new ways of using the latest technology while expanding on techniques used in his previous digital creations.

Details from The Hole about this exhibition-

Two LED screens form the center of this show, displaying an unedited stream of novel AI outputs; a new painting every ten seconds. Corresponding in scale to the surrounding works on linen and functioning like smart canvases, these AI paintings transform endlessly and if you’re alone in the gallery, you will be the only person to ever see that version of the artwork.

Stone’s AI paintings—both the tangible on linen and the fleeting screenic pieces—are created through his training of a custom AI model on top of Stable Diffusion’s open source, deep learning, text-to-image model. By feeding it only his past artworks, Stone has created a self-reflexive new series of AI works that disintegrates the hegemony of the singular static masterpiece and problematizes the idea of ownership, or even what “the artwork” itself entails.

AI has become part of contemporary culture, used to solve real world problems and also create TikTok filters. It’s a tool and like a paintbrush it can be used skillfully or not. At the moment AI is throwing the art world into upheaval as artists explore its potential, galleries contend with its disruption of technique and presentation and collectors and museums feel the dissolution of authorship and ownership.

A second type of work makes its debut here, Radiating Kindness (Oil), a 3D printed, machine-assisted oil painting made in collaboration with ARTMATR labs in Red Hook, where MIT artists and engineers have come together to make innovative tools and tech. By leveraging AI, robotics, computer vision and painting scripts, their robot has created a traditional oil painting in three dimensions. You can see on the surface how the interplay between analog and digital mark making is eye-boggling.

The show also includes examples of Stone’s “traditional” technique, which is anything but: on the 13-foot wide linen painting, Irradiance, four nude figures dance over piles of strewn AI paintings. The figures in the foreground, reminiscent in choreography of Henri Matisse’s Dance (La Dance), 1910, are bodacious, athletic women, heavy and sexy like a Michelangelo marble while at the same time futuristic, weightless and splendid in impossible glass and metallic brush marks. Here Stone’s circular and sensitive approach is laid bare for the viewer, the references to art history, technology, culture, access and the pursuit for the intangible is almost overwhelming to grasp.

Stone’s approach points to the deeply interwoven nature of our offline and online lives today. He sees artists’ use of new technologies as necessary, with creatives deploying these tools in a manner that’s not motivated by big tech or financial gains, disrupting the algorithm by creating their own and exploring this new frontier without data-driven deliverables. Creating new context and room for human subjectivities and emotion in the shift from analog to digital that arguably has already occurred.

Below, in an interview for The Standard, he discusses using AI for this work further-

When working with AI, do you sometimes feel overwhelmed or do you always feel in control?

I have never felt fully in control while making art and I’ve always been back and forth between wanting to be and understanding the transformative and creative power of just letting go. The most exciting moments in my creative process have often been unexpected mistakes. Those happy mistakes have revealed something that can then be consciously amplified. Using AI creates lots of unexpected outcomes very fast. So as someone who likes accidents in this context of image making, it’s a good way to become accident-prone.

Do you consider AI as just another digital tool? Or does it feel more like a collaboration? In other words, do you sometimes feel AI might develop its own taste, point of view, conscience?

It’s a digital tool and I try to resist the urge to anthropomorphize it. But it’s difficult because it feels like such a paradigm shift and also sometimes like dreaming. I think that culturally speaking, we are moving in a direction that assigns these qualities of perceived sentience to AI even when more mundane actions are at play. It’s not clear to me how we will tell if AI has achieved general intelligence, but I think most people will assume it to be the case long before it actually happens, assuming that it does.

Flashback- NYC Art Shows- Saya Woolfalk at Susan Inglett Gallery

Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Ceramic Art, Collage, Conceptual Art, Drawing, Fiber Arts, Glasswork, Mixed Media, New York Art Shows, Painting / Painters, Printmaking, Sculptors / Sculpture, Video and Film

May 092025

The images above are from Saya Woolfalk‘s exhibition The Woods Woman Method at Susan Inglett Gallery this past March.

From the gallery about this show-

The Woods Woman Method is the newest manifestation of the artist’s ongoing exploration of hybrid identity, accomplished through an elaborate fiction inspired by her own family background. Combining elements of African American, Japanese, and European cultures with allusions to anthropology, feminist theory, science fiction, Eastern religion, and fashion, Woolfalk depicts the story of a chimeric species she names the Empathics, botanic humanoid beings with a highly evolved ability to understand the experiences of others.

The Woods Women, a secret society of forest dwellers, first emerged within Woolfalk’s Empathic Universe, as she prepared for her solo exhibition at the Newark Museum of Art in 2021. While an Artist-in-Residence at the Museum from 2019 to 2021, she closely engaged with its renowned Herbarium and Hudson River School collections, leading to her reimagining of the earth and sky as she considered the “speculative fictions” of these idealized American landscapes, and her consideration of indigenous North American creation myths, oral histories of the descendants of enslaved Africans, and their uses of medicinal plants.

The exhibition features drawings, prints, mixed-media collages, sculpture, and video. Among the works on view are Birthing a New Sky: Starship Moon Cycle (2022), an inspired visualization of the artist’s sister, sitting in a lotus position, anticipating the birth of her daughter. Woolfalk writes:

“For a new sky to be born she must split herself into a million pieces. Each cell in her body replicates itself, spinning in twirling orbits. Her atomized insides burst apart, cascading into the void around her. Swirling and churning, one cell makes its way back to her center, where her heart had been. This brave new life expands, forcing its way out as new light, new land – a new sky.”

Other highlights include the landscape collages, Birthing a New Sky: Manuscripts 3 and 4 (2021),and 5 and 6 (2022), in which Woolfalk posits an alternative American creation myth. While appearing to be simple abstractions, these works are quite complex, composed of hundreds of intricately pieced and layered elements created from handmade Japanese papers that she has painted and stained with watercolor and gouache, Japanese silver foil, and acrylic medium.

The series of large-scale prints, The Four Virtues (2017) depict the physical embodiments of Prudence, Fortitude, Justice, and Temperance, qualities that are vital to the ethos of her world.

The exhibition was held in advance of Woolfalk’s mid-career survey at the Museum of Arts and Design– Saya Woolfalk: Empathic Universe, curated by Alexandra Schwartz. That exhibition includes multimedia installations paintings, sculptures, performance, and works on paper created during the past twenty years and will be on view until 9/7/25.

Flashback- South Carolina Art Galleries- Chenoweth. Halligan Studios

Art, Art Shows by Location, Ceramic Art, Collage, Drawing, Mixed Media, Painting / Painters, Places to Visit, Sculptors / Sculpture, South Carolina Art Shows, Tarpon Springs

Apr 252025

Work by Roger Halligan

Work by Jan Chenoweth

While visiting Lake City, South Carolina for ArtFields one must see gallery is Chenoweth. Halligan Studios. The gallery showcases the work of artists Roger Halligan and Jan Chenoweth who relocated to the area from Chattanooga, Tennessee in 2019. In addition to being a gallery, it is also a working studio with an outdoor sculpture space.

During ArtFields and other events the gallery is open to the public, but they are also available by appointment.

Work by Roger Halligan

Work by Roger Halligan

Work by Jan Chenoweth

Apr 252025

Mural by Donald Walker

ArtFields Community Mural by Jessica Diaz, Morgan Funkhouser, Olivia Cramer, Sam Ogden

Today’s flashback is to 2021 and a trip to Lake City, South Carolina to check out ArtFields. Started in 2013, the event is a wonderful example of how the arts can revitalize local economies.

So what is ArtFields? Every year for one week local businesses and galleries host works created by artists from the Southeastern United States for a competition with prizes totaling over $145,000. There are also two People’s Choice Awards which are determined by the attendees of the festival. The other awards are chosen by a panel of art professionals. Special events take place throughout the week and ArtFields Jr. offers a chance to see work by South Carolina students.

This year the event runs from April 25th to May 3rd, 2025. Even if you can’t make it, it’s worth taking a look here at this year’s artwork as well as from past years.

Below are a few selections from 2021-

Mural by Lance Turner

“From This Moment Forward” by Herman A. Keith Jr. inspired by Gee’s Bend Quilters

Partially finished mural by Broderick Flanigan honoring Lake City educators Elouise Cooper and Derrick Faison.

“7 Red Wolves” by Joann Galarza Vega

About the work from the above by Joann Galarza Vega–

“There may be as few as only 7 red wolves remaining in the wild. These animals, like so many others, are disappearing in the shadows of our periphery. Their very existence depends on us, as did their extinction. Let us see them, acknowledge them, acknowledge that biodiversity and the balance of life matters. They are painted bright red in order to stand out and bring attention, no longer hidden away.”

Pictured above is The House on Church Street which in 2021 was used for several art installations including the two below. The first is New Histories: The Gadsden Farm Project by Michael Austin Diaz and Holly Hanessian.

About the installation-

New Histories: The Gadsden Farm Project is a socially engaged art project that explores the new history of the Gadsden County, FL. Once a thriving agriculturally center, the county is now the poorest in the state of Florida and the only county with a majority African American population. Working with a team from the State of Florida Archives, we were able to build relationships with over a dozen small farmers trying to address the area’s status as an economic and food desert. These farmers included first generation immigrants, fourth generation shade tobacco farmers, livestock farmers, and organic vegetable growers. The project is presented here through a dining table installation. Embedded speakers play a series of interviews with participating farmers, and each farmer is represented through an individually designed ceramic dinner. The table is set with live plants, seed bombs, and alfalfa hay.

The installation below, All Too Brief, was created by Gainesville, Florida artist Cindy Steiler.

From the ArtFields website about the installation-

All Too Brief was inspired by the movement of time and the unconscious process where our present moment is being continuously converted to memory. The elements comprising All Too Brief include a series of scrolls of cyanotype photographs and repurposed textiles wound on antique industrial weaving bobbins. Each scroll has a WW2-era laundry pin embossed with a number that corresponds to the written narrative of the images and textiles it holds. This piece is my attempt to document and archive people, places, and fleeting moments I hold dear. This piece became even more meaningful to me this year. My studio assistant at the time this piece was created has since passed.

Finally- while in town it’s also worth checking out the Ronald E. McNair Life History Center and Memorial Park. The Lake City-born astronaut and physicist died tragically in the 1986 Space Shuttle Challenger explosion.

NYC Art Shows- Suellen Rocca at Matthew Marks

Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Collage, Design, Drawing, Mixed Media, New York Art Shows, Painting / Painters, Sculptors / Sculpture

Apr 162025

“Night”, 2014, Oil on canvas

“Ocean Ladies”, 1988, Oil on canvas

“Untitled”, 1964, Oil on canvas

Currently on view at Matthew Marks Gallery is Good Things and Bad Things, an exhibition of paintings, drawings and objects by the late Suellen Rocca. The collection highlights the artist’s use of a variety of styles throughout her career to express similar themes.

From the gallery-

Suellen Rocca’s work is marked by dream-like ambient landscapes filled with pictograms arranged in loose grids. She drew inspiration from various types of “picture writing,” such as ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, advertisements, and children’s activity books. Fantastical, witty, and deeply personal, Rocca’s unique visual language comprises a collection of images from her life, including 1950s dollhouse furniture, jewelers’ catalogs, bodily sensations, and the work of artists such as Marc Chagall and Max Beckmann. Rocca combined these symbols in eccentric compositions. As one critic observed, “Rocca offers up mysterious mystical visions for contemplation.”

The exhibition, whose title, Good Things and Bad Things, is borrowed from one of Rocca’s paintings, includes two large-scale paintings made in 1964. In one painting, palm trees, shoes, and gold rings with gemstones emerge from a turquoise ground. Another painting presents repeating images of Santa Claus, dancing couples, and winter landscapes. Later canvases envision interior worlds in electrifying fields of vibrant color.

Purses were also an important motif for Rocca, which she first developed from images in a 1940s manual on how to crochet purses. For Rocca, they were examples of “the cultural icons of beauty and romance expressed by the media that promised happiness to young women of that generation.” In the late 1960s, Rocca expanded this imagery to sculpture and began painting on purses. Describing Rocca’s sculpture Purse Curse (1968), Dan Nadel has written, “it reminds me of a world of images that did not have double meanings, and of the fantasy of love, pure and simple. But the purse also conceals. What’s inside?”

This exhibition closes 4/19/25.

NYC Art Shows- Julio Galán at kurimanzutto and Luhring Augustine

Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Mixed Media, New York Art Shows, Painting / Painters

Apr 162025

“Sí y No”, 1990, Acrylic and collage on canvas

“Sí y No”, 1990, Acrylic and collage on canvas (detail)

“Sí y No”, 1990, Acrylic and collage on canvas (detail)

Luhring Augustine and kurimanzutto are currently showing paintings by the late Mexican artist Julio Galán in both of their galleries. The captivating paintings are filled with symbolic imagery and reflect the artist’s struggles with identity.

From kurimanzutto-

Galán’s brilliant career, which spanned from the mid-1980s until his untimely death in 2006, was primarily centered in New York City, Paris, and Monterrey, Mexico. While his work has not been broadly exhibited outside of his native country since his passing, his work was exhibited internationally extensively during his life, and he is widely considered the preeminent Mexican painter of his generation. Galán’s nonconformist and expansive multidisciplinary practice addresses issues of identity, gender, culture, and social constructs in works that layer self-representation and aspects of the personal with larger themes of cultural and sexual difference. Infused with an allegorical quality and woven throughout with a complex array of signifiers—enigmatic iconography and cultural references—his works, as well as his carefully crafted public persona, embraced a self-conscious othering and an ambiguous mutability that refused fixed interpretation. As art historian and professor Teresa Eckmann writes, “On canvas, he recounted and constructed illogical visions, teasing out the line between the real and artifice, his artwork deemed an “inaccessible yet formally intoxicating fabrication of self.” Galán hid from the viewer his artwork’s content as much as he revealed it; simultaneously, with his body, he explored fluid identity through masquerade.”

Rendered in a pastiche of styles, with a syncretic approach to culture, Galán’s work blends references and influences from Mexican folk and religious imagery to Surrealism, Pop Art, and graffiti. While he has often been associated with the Neomexicanismo movement of his native country and the Neo-expressionism of his peers in New York, these were characterizations he resisted, much in the way that he deliberately rejected any form of restrictive definition or singular interpretation. Magalí Arriola, former director of Museo Tamayo and curator of Galán’s most recent major retrospective, notes, “Though in some of his work [he] resorted to an iconography associated with popular Mexican culture…the use of stereotypical figures such as the charro of the Tehuana, was also related to his interest in transvestism and disguises as strategies to subvert sexual identities and other cultural constructs.” Galán’s approach exposes the limitations and issues inherent in the interrelated sentiments and systems that create and uphold any form of binary classification or fixed characterization, be they related to sexuality, nationality, spirituality, or any categorization. As writer Evan Moffitt notes, “Galán’s adoption of Mexican stereotypes and Platonic personalities reveals nationalism to be a kind of pompous drag…. There’s plenty of kitsch in Galán’s paintings, to be sure, but that kitsch is fundamental to their radicalism.” Continuing to resonate today are the remarkable energy, intelligence, and theatricality of Galán’s work, and the questions he explored regarding the relationship of individual identity and the creation of the self to oversignified notions of culture and nationalism.

For more detail on Galán, kurimanzutto has provided a link to an excellent essay by Evan Moffit about the artist and his work.

This exhibition closes 4/19/25.

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