Apr 092025
 

“Brownfield”, 2023-2024, Multi-color woodcut on fabric

“Our House is on Fire”, 2023-2025, Multi-color woodcut on fabric

“Our House is on Fire”, 2023-2025, Multi-color woodcut on fabric (detail)

“New York Street; Rainy Day”, 2023-2025, Multi-color woodcut on fabric

“New York Street; Rainy Day”, 2023-2025, Multi-color woodcut on fabric (detail)

For Zorawar Sidhu and Rob Swainston‘s exhibition Flash Point at Petzel they have created three series of works reacting to various environmental and political events. The large-scale brightly colored woodcut prints on fabric, three of which are pictured above, created for History is Present, are especially impressive.

From the gallery about all three series-

Their series of large-scale, multi-color woodcut prints on fabric, titled History is Present, considers the age of the Anthropocene and the relationship between human impact and shifting natural geographies. Referencing canonical artworks, Sidhu and Swainston lend iconic visual allegories to lasting social conditions and humanitarian issues; for example, their “Raft” depicts contemporary displaced peoples and a history of forced migrations. Made using a custom-built press to accommodate the scale of these works, these monumental woodcut prints demonstrate a mastery of technique and process, with layers of tonal values building complex compositions.

Their second series, War for the Union, features mixed woodcut with silkscreen prints on paper, looking toward distinctly American political issues from recent history. Layered with appropriated images from news media wood engravings of the civil war, such as Winslow Homer’s Civil War drawings for Harper’s Weekly, this series suggests both the cyclical temporality of images in American journalism and a collective fear of a second civil war in our current climate. War for the Union depicts scenes from pivotal moments of civil unrest, including demonstrations following the overturning of Roe v. Wade, 2024 pro-Palestinian protests on university campuses, the 2024 Republican and Democratic National Conventions, and the 2017 Charlottesville white supremacist rally. Through rigorous, vibrant layers of figures, rally signs, and geographies, Sidhu and Swainston slow down the processing of mass circulated images, the antithesis to our current barrage of news media.

The third series, a group of color etchings made in collaboration with Columbia University Neiman Center for Print Studies titled Spring Wake, highlights environmental issues in various regions, rendering signposts of protest with native plants of the respective terrain. For example, “Japanese Lily” layers images of activists protesting the radioactive water released from the Fukushima nuclear power plant into the sea, while “Fairy Primrose” depicts protests of the ecocide resulting from the ongoing Ukraine War—each indigenous flora overlaid atop the local environmental threat. Bearing an almost documentarian quality, these prints link political turmoil and climate disaster intimately with the depicted landscapes.

The exhibition title, Flash Point, defines not only the point of combustion, but also the instant at which a person or event flares up, suddenly exploding into action or being. Using woodcut printmaking, one of the oldest forms of mass communication and a means to propel revolutions, protests, and social movements, Sidhu and Swainston address structures of power and our relationship to hegemonic forces. The artists examine contemporary cultural conflicts through an unraveling of modern news media to reveal its canonical underpinnings, reaching back in time to consider how news images are represented, circulated, and consumed.

This show is closing on 4/12/25.

Feb 132025
 

The contemporary artists and designers in Seeing the Unseeable: Data, Design, Art at Art Center College of Design, each use different types of data as the basis for work that is both imaginative and informative. This exhibition is part of The Getty’s PST ART: Art and Science Collide programming.

From the gallery-

Seeing the Unseeable: Data, Design, Art explores selected works by contemporary artist and designers responding to data’s impact on daily life. The exhibition premise rises from the dawn of Big Data in the early 1990s, which brought with it advancements in the field of data visualization: the practice of representing vast quantities of information to make it understandable and engaging to the public.
In its early forms, data visualization was most often used in map-making and creating statistical graphics, viewed largely as a tool to convey information in the sciences and support analytic reasoning. In recent years the field has become an influential force in contemporary culture, transforming visual literacy in the global cultural landscape.

Seeing the Unseeable considers data in the recent past and present, addressing issues related to data mining and invisible data, data humanism, and data’s relationship to our varied environments. Exploring a critical cultural moment in our relationship with the magnitudes of information that routinely bombard us, works in the exhibition draw attention to issues ranging from the vastness and capabilities of data technologies to the personal, social and humanitarian consequences of data collection and data systems.

Hyojung Seo, “Singapore Weather Data Drawing Series (Wind Direction, Tem-perature, Windspeed) 2022

About the video work by Hyojung Seo

Singapore Weather Data Drawing Series reconsiders data visualization as it develops beyond mere representation to aestheticization. As the title of the work suggests, this series of data are drawings aimed to build a visual narrative beyond the original scope of the data itself. The weather data drawings generally represent information about Singapore’s weather patterns, while also standing as abstract digital artworks. This visual loosening of data into a series of patterns and movements presents weather statistics thorough a visual sensation rather than a more conventional data visualization design. The essential link is the descriptive title. While the work may abstract Singapore’s weather patterns, the movement and shapes designed by Seo also expand the meaning of the information as a kind of living, organic form.

 

About the above work by Linnéa Gabriella Spransy

Described by Spransy as “procedural abstractions,” the paintings shown present an alternative to what may be considered data-driven art. While terms such as “data” and “generative art” are often used to describe digital-based imagery, the artist’s painting method lies at the heart of data and data visualization: number patterns. The Prime Mover paintings demonstrate the intimate working relationship between the artist and pure data. Spransy begins by constructing linear patterns using prime number sequences onto the prepared canvas. From this accumulated form, she then selects areas to pour paint over. After the paint dries, she initiates another pattern that grows around the existing intrusions. This push and pull of structure and chaos creates a field of balance and counterbalance, an ebb and flow between the artist, the numbers, and the seemingly shifting, multiple layers and dimensions of her paintings.

Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle, “Lu, Jack and Carrie (from The Garden of Delights)”, 1998, Archival pigment prints

About the above work by Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle and Storm Prototype: Cloud Prototype No. 2 and 4, 2006 (the hanging titanium sculptures in the first photo)-

Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle is recognized for a wide-ranging, multifaceted practice resulting in sculpture, large-scale instal-lations, photography, and video. Ranging in scale from modest to monumental, his works are the result of years of research and achieved working in collaboration with creatives, inventors, and technicians in a vast range of fields, from the physical and life sciences to earth sciences. Lu, Jack and Carrie (from The Garden of Delights) (1998) is comprised of three colorful digital prints: a series of abstractions based on images of DNA samples taken from imaging technologies utilized in genomic mapping and depicting “families” of friends selected in sequence. Storm Prototype: Cloud Prototype Nos. 2 and 4 2006) are hovering spectral forms manifested in three dimensions from the analysis and compilation of real weather data. Additionally, the works are inspired by the artist’s consideration of global migration patterns. These works represent the compulsory flow of nature, whether revealed in the sky, ocean, or over land, impervious to international boundaries.

Giorgia Lupi and Ehren Shorday, “Incroci (Crossings)”, 2022, Black paint on raw canvas

About the above work by Giorgia Lupi and Ehren Shorday

Described by the artists as data portraits, this collaborative project emerged from Lupi’s observation that “each person’s life may be unique and different, but when seen together, these distinct paths begin to form patterns.” For Incroci, a dataset was created by asking strangers, and their social media circles, to share five dates (day/month/year) representing significant life moments, from the day of their birth up to the year 2022. The project was conducted during the Covid-19 pandemic, which gave weight to the question of what could be considered a significant life moment. Incroci exemplifies the ways in which data visualization design is evolving to a level beyond merely providing an aesthetic framework for data to realizing subtext within the datasets. As Lupi states: “The more ubiquitous data becomes, the more we need to experiment with how to make it unique, contextual, intimate. The way we visualize is crucial because it is the key to translating numbers into concepts we can relate to.”

About the work above by Semiconductor

Ruth Jarman and Joe Gerhardt, aka Semiconductor, have been collaborating for over 25 years working in sound, video, installation and sculpture. Referring to their work as technological sublime, they explore ways of experiencing nature mediated through the languages of science and technology. Spectral Constellations is a series of generative animations, driven by scientific data of young stars. This data, collected by scientists using a method called Spectroscopy, creates an understanding of structures around distant young stars, where gas and dust come together to form planets. Semiconductor have employed this spectral data as a physical material, translating it into rings of light which resemble gradiated discs of planetary and stellar formations. As the data ebbs and flows it introduces a sense of form and motion. Waveforms merge and interfere revealing patterns and rhythms, engaging our human tendency towards pattern recognition. The fragmented LED mosaics provide partial windows from which the spectral data shifts and shimmers.

Fernanda Bertini Viégas and Martin Wattenberg, “Wind Map”, 2012, Interactive software, dimensions variable

About Fernanda Bertini Viégas and Martin Wattenberg‘s Wind Map-

Fernanda Viégas, a computational designer, and Martin Wattenberg, a mathematician and journalist, are known as pioneers in the field of data visualization. Their research has helped define visualization as a discipline and practice, creating interactive and open-source tools for examining a wide range of scientific, social, and artistic questions. Conceived as a personal art project, their iconic work Wind Map culls information from the National Digital Forecast Database, which is maintained by the National Weather Service and available to the public. Continually gathering these forecasts, which are time-stamped and revised each hour, the artists have created a “living portrait” of the wind landscape over the United States. To emphasize the beauty and distinction of this influential work, exhibition curators commissioned a special iteration of Wind Map without the city locations and names. The standard version of this piece remains in the public domain on their website: http://hint.fm/wind/

Laurie Frick, “Moodjam Intense”, 2024 and “Moodjam Mild”, 2024, Abet Laminati samples on ACM panel

About Laurie Frick’s Moodjam Intense and Moodjam Mild-

In her exploration to humanize data, Frick creatively mines information from her own functional and behavioral patterns as part of her art practice. Inspired initially by the daily activity tracking of computer programmer Ben Lipkowitz, Frick began tracking her own sleep with an electroencephalogram headband, expanding it to her husband’s sleep patterns and then others. Initially mapping her moods with color swatches through Mood-jam.com, Frick expanded to track her temperament every few seconds using a combination of heart rate (HRV), facial recognition and galvanic skin response (GSR), assessing her stress, nervousness, and general mood every few seconds. The work shown is an interpretation of this compiled data, using boxes of countertop laminate samples that she sourced during an artist residency at the Headlands Art Center near San Francisco. Moodjam Intense and Moodjam Mild are the resulting gridded works.

Peggy Weil, “77 Cores”, 2024, White Mylar Digital print

About Peggy Weil’s 77 Cores

Peggy Weil has long been engaged in exploring ways of seeing. Today she continues to inquire the realms of perception, investigating how we see, what we see, and how we can see beyond. When she heard about the Greenland Ice Sheets project which stores 2-mile-long poles of ice samples in meter long cylinders, she was compelled to document them. The ice cores-paleo thermometers holding ash from volcanic eruptions, pollen and environmental gasses-are, to Weil, “deep space holding very deep time.” As such they speak to the notion of the extended landscape: stretched out beyond what we perceive and see, hidden in the atmosphere or the earth underneath our feet. In 77 Cores, images of seventy-seven glacier ice-sheet cores are printed and laid out over twenty-four feet. allowing the viewer to mark time by walking its length.

Sarah Morris “Property Must Be Seen [Sound Graph]”, 2020; “Deviancy is the Essence of Culture [Sound Graph]”, 2020; “You Cannot Keep Love [Sound Graph]”, 2020, Household gloss paint on canvas

About Sarah Morris and the Sound Graph paintings above-

Sarah Morris creates films, paintings, and sculptures based on a wide range of sources, including graphic logos, architectural space, transportation systems and maps, GPS technology, and the movement of people in urban locations. She has said, “I want to map what is going on, these situations we find ourselves in-both physically and philosophically.” The Sound Graph paintings are derived from fragments of conversations and sounds recorded by the artist and translated into hard-edged geometric shapes in vibrant patterns that seem to visually fluctuate. Her interest in incorporating sound into her paintings began when she conceived the film Finite and Infinite Games (2017), titled after the cult philosophy and numbers theory novel by James P. Carse. Morris sees her paintings as being part of a larger self-generating system, always remaining open and allowing for interpretation, motion and change.

Mimi Ọnụọha, “The Library of Missing Data Sets”, 2016; “The Library of Missing Data Sets v2.0”, 2018; “The Library of Missing Data Sets v3.0”, 2022, Mixed Media Installation

Mimi Ọnụọha, “In Absentia”, 2019, 6 risograph prints on paper

About the works above by Mimi Ọnụọha

The Library of Missing Datasets comprises three filing cabinets filled with folders the reveal unseen biases within the system of data collecting. According to the artist, this work is “a physical repository of those things that have been excluded in a society where so much is collected.” While data-collecting algorithms claim to provide comprehensive information, their vastness hides data-driven forms of inequity: what Ọnụọha considers “algorithmic violence.” Revealing the conditions surrounding invisible data, she “aims] to trouble assumptions baked into the beliefs and technologies that mediate our existences.” In Absentia (2019) presents six risograph prints in the style of twentieth-century African American sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois’ infographics presented at Exposition Universelle, the Paris World’s Fair, in 1900. Ọnụọha visually quotes from Du Bois to acknowledge his work’s significance and the injustice it has since suffered: the US Department of Labor and Statistics halted publishing of his sociological research on Black rural life in Alabama, claiming it to be too controversial.

Finally, the image above is of work from Refik Anadol’s AI data painting series– California Landscapes.

Refik Anadol is an artist, designer, and leader in the aesthetics of data and machine intelligence. Utilizing advanced technologies including Al, machine algorithms, and quantum computing, he has become known for large scale, immersive installations that render massive amounts of data into highly dynamic abstractions. The artist’s California Landscape series employs images of California’s national parks. Spawned from a dataset of over 153 million images, the largest dataset of this kind ever to be used for an artwork, the Generative Study works feature images that are recognizable. Yet as these majestic landscapes constantly morph, so does the matter that we conventionally identify as earth and sky. A series of interconnected lines imbue the images with additional references, in this case the algorithm driving this perpetual visual flux. In its varying juxtapositions of nature and technology, this work reminds us of how distinctive our perceptions of each may be.

This exhibition closes 2/15/25.

Dec 252024
 

“Lilies of the Field #1, Bethlehem, Christmas Day”, 2019–2020

“Lilies of the Field #1, Bethlehem, Christmas Day”, 2019–2020 (detail)

“Lilies of the field #1, Jerusalem, Mosque El-Aksa”, 2019–2020

“Lilies of the field #1, Jerusalem, Mosque El-Aksa”, 2019–2020 (detail)

“Lilies of the field #1, Jerusalem, Jews’ Wailing place”, 2019–2020

“Lilies of the Field #1, Jerusalem, Mount Olives”, 2019–2020

The images above are from Jerusalem-born artist Dor Guez’s Lillies of the Field series, part of his 2023 exhibition Colony at Princeton Art Museum’s Art@Bainbridge gallery project.

From the museum about the exhibition and this series (by curator Mitra M. Abbaspour) –

Guez, whose family are Palestinians from Lydda on his mother’s side and Jewish immigrants from North Africa on his father’s, has developed a practice of engaging historical objects, especially photographs, to reveal unwritten and overlooked pasts. Colony / Dor Guez brings together works that resulted from the artist’s years of research in the archives of the American Colony, a charitable Christian community established in Jerusalem in 1881 by American expatriates. In the first decades of the twentieth century, the artists of the American Colony created hundreds of photographic views of the locations described in Jewish, Christian, and Muslim religious texts that collectively came to be known as the Holy Land. These photographic prints, albums, and picture postcards, which attracted an international audience, form a substantial visual record of the region from this era. In this exhibition, the contents of the American Colony archive and the vision of the Holy Land that they produced are, respectively, the source materials and subject matter for Guez’s artistic exploration…

Two of the arrangements pictured in Lilies of the Field are captioned “Mosque El-Aksa” and feature delicate pressed-flower arrangements as stand-ins for this site of spiritual significance. Built on an elevated point in the Old City of Jerusalem, the El-Aksa Mosque is adjacent to the Dome of the Rock and the Temple Mount, understood as the point of departure for the Prophet Muhammad’s night journey or the story of Abraham’s near-sacrifice of Isaac, depending on one’s faith tradition. Captions for another pair of floral arrangements draw associations between the pictures and Bethlehem on Christmas Day and to the Grotto of the Nativity, the day and site of Jesus’s birth. Through their design and presentation, the botanical samples pressed into the album pages take on the qualities of a reliquary, carrying the trace of a holy site through space and across time.

Turn-of-the-century photography relied on devices such as albums and glass-plate negatives to create photographic objects that would transport their viewers—not just visually but experientially—to the significant sites pictured. It is notable, then, that in the creations of the American Colony, pictures of early twentieth-century Jerusalem are layered with symbolic weight, metaphoric meaning, and set into the viewer’s imagination. Guez’s artworks extend the metaphors to the present—reminding us that as the American Colony constructed an idea of the Holy Land and its inhabitants to meet the desires of international audiences, the idea of Jerusalem as a place continues to accrue meaning over time through the images we create and the stories we tell about it.

 

Dec 192024
 

“Fire in the Fishtank (Synchronized Dance)”, 2022, oil on birch, white oak, cherry, walnut

“Blue Like Jazz”, 2022, oil on birch, oak, and “Who more Sci-Fi than us?”, 2023, acrylic on mdf, walnut

“Blue Like Jazz”, 2022, oil on birch, oak, and “Who more Sci-Fi than us?”, 2023, acrylic on mdf, walnut (detail)

“Even Keel”, 2019, various wood, and “Yellow Butter, Purple Jelly, Red Jam, Black Bread”, 2023, acrylic on mdf, cherry

“Even Keel”, 2019, various wood

“Crowd IV”, 2016, woodcut print on BFK Rives cream

Multidisciplinary artist Nate Harris’s work for Arrangement, his solo exhibition at The Delaware Contemporary, highlights his ability to use his training in graphic design to create unique work using a variety of materials.

From the museum-

Design begins with the fundamentals; lines, shapes, and colors create compositional variety. No matter how complex the resulting product is, it can be broken down into these foundational elements. A keystone of design is “arrangement”. It defines whether the composition is representational or abstract, if it is a pattern and showcases repetition, or highlights key moments of visual interest. Multidisciplinary artist, Nate Harris, understands the critical nature of arrangement and by examining several mediums, showcases his expansive power of this knowledge base.

Based in New York City, Nate Harris is a formally trained graphic designer, who utilizes these fundamental elements as a launching point to direct variable bodies of work. While Harris produces with an array of mediums and in a range of scale, wood is a central throughline in much of his work. In his practice, wood can be utilized as an incised tool to create graphic prints or carved as an added sculptural element. Inspired by experimentation, Harris does not discard materials, opting to hold onto wood shards and other spare pieces. These leftovers are saved, sometimes for years, as shapes destined for unknown, future works. Harris navigates this “library of materials” as an iterative resource and a welcome limitation; the path into his experimentation that is also influenced by spatial constraints within his studio.

With a deep understanding of graphic elements, Harris can combine this education with his innate comfortability with wood as a medium. As a young man, Harris liked to work with his hands; fixing his bike and building skate ramps with friends, and this foundation has allowed Harris to transcend the medium within his practice. Through shape, color, and line, Harris consistently redefines his aesthetic. His woodblock prints can depict geometric figures animated with movement, while others may showcase abstract and clean duplication, ultimately becoming patterns themselves. Harris will expand from the surface itself, layering wood in conjunction with other materials, or will use numerous types of wood to create a free-standing sculpture.

Harris’s approach is based on fundamentals, uniquely propelled through material, and grounded in experimental vigor. These works showcase his keen sensibility as a designer, while simultaneously blurring this concept with fine woodworking. Harris is in dialogue with these two constructs continuously to create a style that expands definitions of design and fine art together.

This exhibition closes 12/29/24.
Nov 232024
 

Both Hammer Museum in Los Angeles and Palm Springs Art Museum are showing prints from Henri Matisse’s Jazz. It’s interesting to see the same work but in two different contexts based on the curation.

At Hammer Museum they are part of the group exhibition Sum of the Parts: Serial Imagery in Printmaking, 1500 to Now, on view until 11/24/24.

From the museum-

Printmaking’s capacity for serial imagery was recognized during the Renaissance in Europe and has continued to be explored by artists across centuries and geographies to creative, oftentimes experimental ends. Print publishers had a hand in issuing series, which could be conceived complete from the start, expanded from shorter sets, or even formed from existing bodies of related works. Diverse organizing principles have shaped the serial format, including pictorial narratives, iconographic groupings, formal innovations, thematic variations, and sequences measuring time and marking place, as well as structural, modular, and conceptual progressions. Importantly, the creative act itself is an open-ended serial pursuit, with each gesture, idea, and decision interacting with or informing the next.

While we can appreciate an individual print extracted from a series as a work in its own right, our visual perceptions, intellectual interpretations, and emotional responses shift when we view multiple images collectively: the whole becomes greater-or other-than the sum of its parts. New meanings surface as commonalities, patterns, or differences emerge. Selected from the collection of the Grunwald Center for the Graphic Arts, this exhibition presents prints conceived as sets or series and further considers artists’ informal serial procedures and approaches to printmaking across five centuries.

At Palm Springs Art Museum they are part of Art Foundations, which places different works together in from their collection into groups organized in different themes. Matisse is paired with Ellsworth Kelly in a section devoted to “artmaking through the angle of a given concept, with each wall dedicated to a single concept: pure color, automatic painting, text as a motif, or ready-made.”

From the museum about the exhibition-

Art Foundations explores how various art forms have been produced throughout the last two centuries. It presents a succession of artwork groupings across multiple media and disciplines, bringing together works not usually shown in the same space. Meant to be visited clockwise, each gallery provides a different angle on what we consider art, with each grouping questioning how art is made, why, where, and by whom.

This presentation shifts the lens through which we look at art, allowing us to explore gallery after gallery, the conception and the material of artmaking, and the spaces where it is created. Art Foundations brings together academically trained and untrained artists as well as visual arts, architecture, design, and glass, displaying the breadth and interconnectedness of the museum’s collection.

For more on Matisse’s Jazz, The Metropolitan Museum of Art provides detailed information on its website.

 

Oct 312024
 

Adrienne Elise Tarver

Cara Despain

Cara Despain

Ashanti Chaplin

Ray Anthony Barrett

Ray Anthony Barrett

Olivia “LIT LIV” Morgan

One room of the gallery with Margaret Griffith sculpture (center)

Jane Chang Mi

Andrae Green (paintings) and Phoebe Collings-James (sculpture)

Andrae Green

Margaret Griffith

Margaret Griffith (detail)

Against Dystopia, the group exhibition at Diane Rosenstein curated by niko w. okuro, presents a variety of interesting work that speaks to the times we are living in.

The exhibition includes ten international artists representing twelve cities across the United Kingdom, Jamaica, and all five regions of the United States-  Ray Anthony Barrett, Ashanti Chaplin, Phoebe Collings-James, Cara Despain, Andrae Green, Margaret Griffith, Jane Chang Mi, Olivia “LIT LIV” Morgan, Esteban Ramón Pérez, and Adrienne Elise Tarver.

From the gallery-

Presented on the eve of the 2024 presidential election, Against Dystopia is ‘a far-reaching exhibition, both in terms of the diverse backgrounds and approaches of its featured artists, and the social, cultural, and geographic ecosystems those artists represent and critique,’ writes okoro, who is based in New Haven, CT. The exhibition ‘features artworks that inhabit a spectrum of anti-dystopian thought, from mobilizing conceptualism to overcome historic traumas and the precarity of the present, to envisioning future utopias against seemingly insurmountable odds.’

Against Dystopia transforms fear and anxiety surrounding the uncertainty of our shared future into a tangible site of hope—one where collective memory reminds us of our agency to enact change today, and rich cultural traditions empower us to imagine alternative futures. Of significance is the inclusion of artists who identify as multi hyphenates, playing numerous social roles within their communities, such as advocate, change agent, chef, documentarian, educator, father, filmmaker, mother, musician, oceanographer, researcher, and too many more to name.

Artworks are grouped into three thematic sections, each of which explores creative strategies of resistance and works against dystopia at all costs: field research, symbolic interactionism, and speculative fiction.

Ray Anthony Barrett (Missouri), Ashanti Chaplin (Oklahoma), Cara Despain (Utah/Florida), and Jane Chang Mi (Hawai‘i/California) use field research to map histories of frontierism, settler colonialism, and land politics onto ecological and socioeconomic systems today. With a focus on listening to the land and sea to both unearth and atone for difficult truths, these artists name and dismantle dystopian practices on the path to reconciliation. Embracing an appreciation for both hyperlocal traditions and the tenets of global citizenship, each underscores our shared duty to ensuring ecocultural sustainability and Earth’s habitability for future generations.

While Margaret Griffith (California), Olivia Morgan (New York), and Adrienne Elise Tarver (New York) work through markedly different mediums and styles, they share a fearlessness in addressing ongoing tensions and questions surfaced amidst the political firestorm of 2020. Embracing tenets of symbolic interactionism, or the theory that individuals shape and are shaped by society through daily interactions and the co-creation of meaning from symbols, these artists remind us of the power of human connection to bridge difference. Each steers towards social cohesion by processing collective grief and the enduring impacts of the 2020 presidential election, the proliferation of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the resurgence of the Black Lives Matter Movement respectively. Whereas Morgan and Griffith subvert symbols that often polarize rather than unite us within physical space—such as fences, face masks, and smartphones—Tarver reaches into the past to pull forth reimagined symbols that speak to our spiritual interdependence.

Phoebe Colling-James (United Kingdom), Andrae Green (Massachusetts/Jamaica) and Esteban Ramón Pérez (California) boldly envision alternative realities by using speculative fiction and symbolic allegory to sew threads of connection across time and space. Each resists linearity and subverts narrative tropes to instead materialize the fluid spiritual dimensions of lived experience. Through their layered ceramics, paintings, and sculptures, these artists mine the depths of their respective Jamaican/British, Jamaican/American, and Chicanx heritages to comment more broadly on social conditions today, prompting us to dream beyond what’s readily visible or knowable.

Against Dystopia opens concurrently with The Getty’s Pacific Standard Time: Art x Science x LA, which similarly explores, “opportunities for civic dialogue around some of the most urgent problems of our time by exploring past and present connections between art and science.” By convening an international group of visionary artists to help initiate these dialogues, Against Dystopia prompts viewers to pursue deeper understanding of shared challenges and solutions, on both the micro and macro levels.’

This exhibition closes 11/2/24.

 

 

Aug 022024
 

It’s the last few days to see Utagawa Hiroshige’s 100 Famous Views of Edo at Brooklyn Museum. They are incredible to view in person, but are also available to view in their entirety on the museum’s website. The exhibition also includes a few images of the places depicted in the prints today as well as Takashi Murakami’s large painted versions of some of the prints.

From the museum-

What are the must-see locations in your favorite city? Where do you go when you need a breath of fresh air? What makes certain neighborhoods famous? Join an artist-insider on a tour of nineteenth-century Tokyo (then known as Edo), from lumberyards to destination restaurants, and see if his choices illuminate your own relationship with the cities you know well.

For the first time in twenty-four years, Utagawa Hiroshige’s 100 Famous Views of Edo—one of the Brooklyn Museum’s greatest treasures—returns to public display. The Museum’s complete set of these celebrated prints is among the world’s finest, full of vibrant colors preserved by decades in the dark.

While most presentations have centered on the prints’ technical sophistication and influence on European artists, here we focus on their urban subject matter. Originally published in 1856–58, the series captures the evolving socioeconomic and environmental landscape of the city that would become Tokyo. Through both the prints and complementary objects drawn from the Museum’s collection, you’ll be immersed in mid-nineteenth-century Edo and see it through the eyes of the ordinary people who populate Hiroshige’s settings. You’ll encounter all four seasons in scenes of picnics beneath cherry blossoms, summer rainstorms, falling maple leaves, and wintry dusks. The exhibition also includes modern photographs to show how Hiroshige’s scenes morphed into today’s Tokyo.

Artist Takashi Murakami (born Tokyo, Japan, 1962) takes Hiroshige’s views into a more fantastical realm with a set of his own paintings. Created in direct response to 100 Famous Views of Edo, these works invite us to reconsider Hiroshige’s world and his contributions to global art history.

Below are a few more selections from the exhibition from the museum’s website.

This exhibition closes 8/4/24.

Apr 252024
 

Alyssa Lizzini, “Industrial Valley”, Ink and acrylic on paper on panel

Alyssa Lizzini, “East 41st”, Ink, acrylic, and found object on paper and panel

Alyssa Lizzini, “Unraveling City”, Ink and acrylic on paper mounted on 2 panels

Akron Soul Train is currently showing two exhibitions by Ohio artists. Alyssa Lizzini’s The Universe Between Here and There, pictured above, expands upon scenes from daily life using a mixed media approach. The works take the viewer into her expanded sections of the city, and encourages them to think about what may be unobserved in their own daily life.

From the gallery-

In The Universe Between Here and There, Alyssa Lizzini explores the interwoven connection between space, time, and memory through large-scale, multi-layer drawings. Lines, grids, maps, and data become the stars, black holes, and supernovae of an ever-expanding universe of memory. Using ink, acrylic paint, and collaged paper, Lizzini creates overlapping images that seem to compress space and time yet simultaneously fly apart or implode. Her drawings suggest that memory unravels in much the same way and investigates the almost inseparable connection between person and place.

“Drawings explore both my own personal histories related to remembered places and broader histories recorded through archival, ethnographic, and visual research of city spaces…The scale of [my] drawings allow the viewer to feel immersed in each piece, surrounded by swirling and morphing cityscapes, memory objects, and natural elements. They ask the viewer to consider the many layers of context not immediately visible in our urban world, and give a new language for understanding the ever-changing nature of memory.” – Alyssa Lizzini

Akron Soul Train Artist-in-Residence Melih Meric’s uses traditional Middle Eastern patterns to explore identity.

From the gallery-

Meric uses a traditional approach to their imagery through sacred geometry and explorations of Islamic geometric abstraction. Challenging traditional presentations of print editions, Meric’s print work crosses the borders of the paper. It highlights an expansion of patterns like Middle Eastern tiles. It also speaks to queerness without being explicitly queer. Stitched Editions: Exploring the New poses integral questions surrounding erasure and identity in Middle Eastern communities. Meric’s craft lies in creating wall-hanging objects that play between the realms of dimensionality while still being unmistakably paper. Their work acknowledges and is proud of its dimension, speaking certain truths to multiple minority groups.

“My work deals with making peace with a part of my culture that drove me to leave it. Finding beauty in design and simplicity, then creating systems to complicate those principles. I fell in love with printmaking and the idea of multiplicity when I first made the connection to tiles from the Middle East. It suddenly became a tool to create and expand patterns that challenge traditions in crafts.” – Melih Meric

Melih Meric, “I Think I Remember Something, Nevermind”, “Stitched Edition” of 12 linoleum prints

Melih Meric, “Carnation”, “Stitched Edition” of 36 woodblock prints

Melih Meric, “Carnation”, “Stitched Edition” of 36 woodblock prints (detail)

Melih Meric, “Swept Under”, “Stitched Edition” of 8 silkscreen prints

Both of these exhibitions close 5/11/24.

Apr 192024
 

Meryl Engler, “Lying in Red”, 2023, Woodcut

Work by Michael Loderstedt (left), Eva Pozler (center) and Lori Kella (right)

Work by Lori Kella, Maria Uhase, and Meryl Engler (right two pieces)

Lori Kella, “Mudslide and Forsythia”, 2022, Inkjet print (left) and Corrie Slawson, “Amalgam 4”, 2022 (top) and “Amalgam 3”, 2022 (bottom), Oil and screenprint on plywood

Today (4/19/24) is the last day to see Life Out of Balance at the Emily Davis Gallery at The University of Akron. The group show show includes work by Maria Uhase, Meryl Engler, Lori Kella, Benjamin Lambert, Michael Loderstedt, Eve Polzer, Ron Shelton, Ariel Bowman, and Corrie Slawson.

From the gallery-

When a tree falls in a forest, we may see it as the death of the tree. It stops photosynthesizing, growing, feeding its mycorrhizal symbionts, flowering, developing fruit, dispersing seeds, taking in carbon dioxide, and producing oxygen. But in the ecosystem, it begins a whole new life in decay. It feeds the soil and microbes through the decomposition of its tissues; it provides a place for fungi, mosses, and lichens to grow; and it becomes a protected habitat for a myriad of insects, mammals, and birds. This same tree, therefore, can be both dying and living at the same time, depending on perspective. It can be dead if considered separate from its surroundings, or it can be alive in its continued relationship within its ecosystem.

Humans can feel more alive by being integrated with the rest of the natural world. We are not living to our full potential, or allowing nature to be its full potential, when we consider ourselves as separate from it.

If we are to have hope for solving the complex environmental issues that are facing us today, we need to work with, rather than against, the forces of nature.

Below are a few more selections.

Ron Shelton, “Yellow Mosaic”, 2021, Plastic and wire

Ariel Bowman, “Wall Trophy Series”, 2019, (Cave Bear, Antique Bison, Early Horse, Saber Cat, Dodo, Brontotherium, Parasaurolophus), Unglazed, high fired porcelain; Maria Uhase, “Splitting Headache”, 2022 Ink on paper and “Softly”, 2023, Graphite on paper

Ariel Bowman, “Wall Trophy Series”, 2019, (Cave Bear, Antique Bison, Early Horse, Saber Cat, Dodo, Brontotherium, Parasaurolophus), Unglazed, high fired porcelain

Benjamin Lambert, “A pint for a gallon”, 2020 and “I Found Your Damn Lost Shaker of Salt”, 2020, Stoneware, underglaze, glaze, epoxy

Corrie Slawson, “Stage Set Tapestry 1, for Feast: a ballet. Of Bats, Blue Footed Boobies, Penguins and other threatened fauna and flora. Pastoral landscape after Rubens”, 2020, Oil and mixed media on muslin

Corrie Slawson, “Stage Set Tapestry 1, for Feast: a ballet. Of Bats, Blue Footed Boobies, Penguins and other threatened fauna and flora. Pastoral landscape after Rubens” (detail)

Michael Loderstedt, “Snakehead”, 2023, “Thistles”, 2023, Cyanotypes on fabric, embroidery, fabric collage

Lori Kella, “Mayflies in the Grass”, and “Yellow Irises”, 2024, Framed inkjet prints

Maria Uhase, “Encircled”, 2023, Oil on linen panel, “Worm”,2023, Oil on linen and “Conglomeration in the Spiders’ Ghost Town”, 2020, Oil on canvas

Eva Polzer, “Gift from a Cat”, 2024, Ceramic, underglaze, velvet jewelry box, and “Gift from a Rat”, 2024, Ceramic, underglaze, petri dish

Meryl Engler, “Waiting”,2023, Woodcut Block

 

Mar 282024
 

Jazzalyn Palma, “21st st”, Oil on canvas, 2023

Rachel Augustson, “Gaze”, Ink on Paper, 2023

Ashton Burton, “…”, Oil on canvas, 2023

Cleveland Institute of Art’s 78th Student Independent Exhibition is currently on view in their Reinberger Gallery. The juried show is organized by the students and includes work from all mediums.

There are so many great pieces in this show, above and below are just a few selections.

This exhibition closes 4/7/24.

James Schaffer, “Bound”, Oil on canvas, 2023

James Schaffer, “Bound”, Oil on canvas, 2023 (detail)

Gwen Putz, “Viv!”, Monoprint, 2023

Tristen Kovacs, “897”, Spray paint and acrylic on canvas, 2023

Emily Fontana, “Untitled”, Acrylic and spackle on fabric, 2024

Emily Fontana, “Untitled”, Acrylic and spackle on fabric, 2024 (detail)