Contemporary Art and Culture
With only a few days left before it closes on October 4, Extreme Whether Show at Icebox4 offers a gathering of 21 artists responding to the turbulence of the present. Curated by Tom Fitzgibbon, the exhibition unfolds less as a single argument than as a shifting field of voices, unsettled, layered, and in dialogue.
Rubble, mutated crop fields, floods, scorched earth, and occasional female figures floating or submerged unfold throughout the sixteen landscape paintings in Deborah Wasserman’s current solo show, The Bitter Earth at Kuma Lisa. Though the paintings differ in scale and media—from small acrylic and oil on panels to larger acrylic, oil, and stained clothes on canvas to medium-sized works on paper—they all share the sense of a world where multiple perspectives from different vantage points co-exist. Wasserman’s energetic strokes and searching lines create a rhythmic movement upward, downward, and sideways—reminiscent of the fluidity in Chinese and Japanese calligraphic scroll paintings and the clear, directional lines of a hand-drawn map. These linear dynamos intertwine with a palette of earthy tones, greens, yellows, oranges, blues, reds, and pure blacks, creating multiple vignettes within a layered landscape.
The group show Fragile Rainbow: Traversing Habitats at the Williamsburg Art and Historical Center in Brooklyn includes paintings, sculptures, videos, and installations addressing environmental issues by more than fifty artists from the New York City region who are members of ecoartspace. The title is based on Claire McConaughy’s oil painting, Fragile Rainbow, referencing both hope and loss. The show runs from May 7th through June 4th, 2022. Curator Sue Spaid elaborates on this large-scale group show.
In Dialogue with Catherine Fosnot
Art for Your Collection, the upcoming group show at Catherine Fosnot Art Gallery and Center in New London, CT., features paintings and sculptures by 26 artists who were recommended by New York City art critics and curators. Catherine Fosnot, the founder of the gallery who is an artist herself, says that her own experience as an isolated artist during the pandemic has been an impetus for opening this art gallery as a hub for art discourse and art collection outside large metropolitan centers. The exhibition opens November 12th and runs through December 30th, 2020. Catherine Fosnot shares the genesis of her new gallery, her vision, and how this show evolved.
During the Coronavirus pandemic, Art Spiel is reaching out to artists to learn how they are coping.
Inspired by her rich South American and Middle-Eastern background, Deborah Wasserman makes personal and visceral art stirred by Ecofeminist themes. A graduate of the California Institute of the Arts and the Whitney Independent Study Program, she has exhibited nationally and internationally, and is a grant recipient of the Experimental Television Center, Aljira Center for the Arts, the America-Israel Cultural Foundation, and is a Skowhegan fellow. She received an IAP Social Practice fellowship from NYFA in 2017, a grant from the Puffin Foundation in 2018, a grant from Citizens committee for New York in 2019, a Queens Council On The Arts New Work grant in 2020, and a Su-Casa award from the New York State Department Of Cultural Affairs every year since 2015.