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A glimpse into the Sam and Adele Golden Foundation Residency Program

Featured Project with Emma Golden

Emma Golden (Executive Director), Mark Golden (Founder and CEO of Golden Artist Colors and President of the Board, The Golden Foundation), Barbara Golden (Founder of Golden Artist Colors and Secretary/Treasurer of the Board, The Golden Foundation)

The Sam and Adele Golden Foundation Residency Program began as a dream of Sam Golden. Sam was a paint maker for most of his life at Bocour Artist Colors in New York City and in retirement, moved to upstate New York with his wife Adele.  Sam was an incredibly restless retiree.  Emma Golden, Sam’s granddaughter says that with the push of Adele, he called up his son, Mark Golden, and asked him to come help him make paint. That is how Golden Artist Colors started in 1980—in an old cow barn in rural New Berlin, New York. This fall I had the wonderful opportunity to be a resident at the Golden Foundation and after this deep experience I wanted to share with Art Spiel readers some insight into this unique residency by interviewing Emma Golden, who currently runs it. When he realized retirement wasn’t for him, he began making paint in a barn, delivering it to his artist-buddies’ studios in New York City.

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Jody MacDonald: Under the Veneer of Whimsy

Jody MacDonald, Everywhere All Over. All Over. Everywhere. (detail), mixed media, 168″ x 180″ x 96″, 2022.

Jody MacDonald dissects in detail the concept of “identity” through a cast of small-scale 2-D and textile-based 3-D surrogates. She uses repurposed materials to create figures and detailed, miniature accessories (wigs, clothing, shoes furniture) set inside elaborate, mixed media environments with clues which shed light on the complex, often conflicting narratives.

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Myth Catchers: Manju Shandler, Rithika Merchant and Jacqueline Shatz

Manju Shandler, Wonder Whale 1, 2018, mixed media, 23×19 inch

Luckily, or to many art-mavens’ chagrin, our 21st century art world—in line with the global techno-culture and socio-political processes—seems to have abandoned crusades of “right” or “wrong” related to artistic form (though sometimes that does not apply to content). We are experiencing a dizzying array of aesthetic expressions, where often fast-pace visual trends replace ideologies of form. Unlike some passing trends, visual narratives based on mythological iconography have been central in all art forms since archaic ages, except for the early-mid half of the 20th century when narrative impetus was largely downplayed in most of what was called the “Avant Garde” art of the time.

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Alice Zinnes: Inner landscapes of Light

Alice Zinnes in her studio, with charcoal drawings behind

Alice Zinne‘s paintings draw from literature and mythology to create dramatic landscapes in which light and dark interplay as main protagonists. Her oil paintings, watercolors, and drawings often depict floods of light intertwined with fragmented darker patches, evoking dense and fluid inner spaces.

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Rec Lobe TV at The University of Wyoming Art Museum

In Conversation with NonCoreProjector collective

Rec Lobe TV, University of Wyoming Art Museum, 2022, Police Scanner, monitor, projections, sound, laptop, printer, printouts, speakers

NonCoreProjector is a collective of visual artists, technologists, scientists, and musicians experimenting with physical, biological, conceptual, and political data systems, along with human/AI symbiosis. In their projects they explore consequential relationships between spoken and written language and multisensory, visceral experience. Their project Rec Lobe TV is currently exhibiting at The University of Wyoming Art Museum through December 23, 2022. The NCP collective members—Jack Colton, Elias Jarzombek, John O’Connor, Rollo Carpenter and Nat Clark—are in conversation with Art Spiel about their projects and collaborative work.

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Luscious Wasteland: Cathy Diamond and Laurie Fader at Radiator Arts

In conversation with Patrick Neal, Cathy Diamond, and Laurie Fader

A hallway with art on the wall

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Installation of Luscious Wasteland: Cathy Diamond and Laurie Fader at Radiator Arts (All images courtesy Radiator Arts).

The two-person exhibition Luscious Wasteland at Radiator Arts features landscape paintings by Cathy Diamond and Laurie Fader. Both artists embed in their imagery elements from personal experience, nature, visual art, music, literature or science, to create intricate and imaginative landscapes. The exhibition opens Fri, September 16 and runs through October 23, 2022. Art Spiel invited the curator of the show, Patrick Neal, and the two artists, Cathy Diamond and Laurie Fader to reflect on the featured paintings as separate bodies of work and in relation to each other.

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Habby Osk: No Tricks Involved

Habby Osk, Installing at Undercurrent for the solo exhibition Connectivity, 2020, photo credit Andrew Hendrick

Habby Osk’s work rests upon basic physics—gravity, balance, movement, time and force. These concepts are the concrete medium for her artistic practice which toys with the limits of balance and stability using gravity and force. Through sculpture, photography, and installations, Osk reveals a tension between movement and stillness by placing objects in seemingly unstable positions, capturing a moment of perpetual precarity. These compositions of fragility emphasize the potential for destruction but within an equally mirrored state of balance and stability using a variety of materials such as concrete, wood, aluminum, wax, sugar and jello. Her work references impermanence and the contingency of an action—probing how far objects can go without tipping over, to capture the moment of stillness before a looming collapse or transformation over time.

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Sophia Sobers: How Life Might Look

Sophia Sobers, Power Tools, 2018, artist with plush fabric sculptures

Sophia Sobers started making site-specific and installation art in what she sees as a somewhat “meandering path.” She studied Architecture at the New Jersey Institute of Technology while taking art courses at Rutgers. There she started learning about working with space, concept, and materials. Simultaneously taking Art and Architectural History as well as Theory, expanded what she imagined as possible in the arts. Site specific works by artists like Robert Smithson and Gordon Matta-Clark as well as architectural projects like the Blur Building by Diller and Scofidio, inspired her deeply and set her on a path of wanting to create large scale installations.

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Małgorzata Mirga-Tas Re-enchanting the World – the Polish Pavilion at the 59th Venice Biennale

A picture containing text, indoor, bedroom, decorated

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Małgorzata Mirga-Tas, Re-enchanting the World, Polish Pavillion, 59th Venice Art Biennale

As you enter the Polish Pavillion at the Venice Biennale 2022 you are surrounded by Małgorzata Mirga-Tas’ stunning floor-to-ceiling hand-stitched tapestry panels, richly depicting mostly female protagonists in everyday life. If you had a lucky chance to visit the Renaissance Palazzo Schifanoia in Ferrara, Italy, you would most likely soon discover in Mirga-Tas’ images myriad allusions to the Palazzo’s splendid ‘Hall of the Months’ cycle of frescoes portraying Olympian gods, astrological figures, and scenes from court life in Ferrara. The name of the Ferara palazzo derives from the phrase ‘schivar la noia’, meaning ‘escape from boredom’, which accurately defines the purpose of this splendid architectural gem—built for the leisure of the powerful Este family over 500 years ago.

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Zachary Keeting: Reconciling Layered Energies

Zachary Keeting coffee and cigarettes 2016 acrylic on canvas (triptych) 48” x 124” photo courtesy the artist

In Zachary Keeting’s restless and complex paintings swirls of vivid purples, yellows, and reds float by or contained within geometric shapes of subdued browns and pinkish off-whites. Together they orchestrate distinct rhythms and create a sense of luminosity. Keeting’s alluring colors often generate dynamic pictorial spaces filled with an imaginative array of fragmented forms which remind me of mirror shards prisms against a shifting light, particles in a quantum physics lab, or visual transcriptions of sounds. Although each of these parts, whether biomorphic or geometric, appears to assume a distinct characteristic, the overall sense we get is—what we see now is on the verge of changing within the next second.

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