The barn studio with artists (left to right) Rick Klauber, Sky Pape, Nancy Davidson, Lyn Godley, Rebecca Welz, and David Provan, 7/23/2022. Photo courtesy of John White.
The Swimming Hole Foundation offers residencies to groups of artists, designers and educators who are exploring environmental and social justice through collaborative work. In Animal Well Being artists Nancy Davidson, Lyn Godley, Rick Klauber, Sky Pape, David Provan, and Rebecca Welz referenced the theme of birds in their collaborative project. The project was open to the public Saturday, July 23rd, 2022.
Elizabeth Meggs’ work in Found & Lost includes prints, posters, fabric design, and clocks. The exhibit explores the discoveries and losses many have experienced in the world in recent years, from profound themes such as hope, time, or love, to mundane items such as umbrellas. Through this exhibition and opening event Elizabeth Meggs expresses a gratitude for life, and a catalyst for connecting with friends and building community through August, after recovering from being hit by a car and sustaining a head injury in late April of 2022.
Project Profile: QT Art Camp Brings Free Art Workshops to Queer and Trans Youth
Photographer: Carmen DeCristo
Brooklyn Arts Council announced in March 2022 an allocation of over $1.3 million to 238 Brooklyn-based artists and cultural organizations. This year marks the highest number of grantees and awardees as well as the largest amount of funding BAC has ever distributed. Art Spiel in collaboration with Brooklyn Arts Council features some artists who received a Brooklyn Arts Fund, Local Arts Support, and/or Creative Equations Fund grant in 2022.
QT Art Camp just announced its summer series of art workshops for queer and trans youth taking place in New York. These workshops are free and welcome to youth ages 13-19. During the workshops, youth will work with NYC-based trans artists. Workshops including vogueing, film photography, painting and drawing. Youth are encouraged to learn new skills, discuss art with their peers and mentors, and will leave with a finished art piece. QT Art Camp is starting local but hopes to reach youth nationally, especially in smaller cities that don’t currently have many resources for queer and trans youth.
Elena Chesnykh’s paintings at Space 776 depict women in landscapes—the vitality of the body merges with a dynamic natural world into a sensual dance of color and shape, sometimes in reference to harsh current events such as the war in Ukraine. The show, curated by Dasha Bazanova, will be on view from July 22 to August 17, 2022.
Featured Project with Co-Curators Anastasia Amrhein and Patricia Eunji Kim
Gallery view with works by Tessa Grundon, David Nasca, Joiri Minaya, Himali Singh Soin and Alexis Rider, and micha cárdenas.
Fluid Matters, Grounded Bodies: Decolonizing Ecological Encounters at the Gallatin Galleries in New York City explores complex questions around impermanence, belonging, transformation, and erasure as they relate to human and non-human lives and the earth itself. The exhibition showcases the work of several contemporary artists, of various backgrounds, who utilize a broad range of media. It includes work by Farah Al Qasimi, Beatriz Cortez, micha cárdenas, Tessa Grundon, Joiri Minaya, Ada M. Patterson, Himali Singh Soin, and Alexis Rider, among others. The show runs from July 22 to August 17, 2022. Co curators Anastasia Amrhein and Patricia Eunji Kim shed some light on this group show.
Heidi Norton’s site-specific installation at Wave Hill examines the intricate links between humans and the natural world. Inspired by Wave Hill’s grounds and the Sun Porch’s architecture. Activated by sunlight, Norton’s installation is made of sculptures and large, vibrant photographic scrolls draping from the ceiling and undulating through the space. Norton says that the configuration of scrolls encompasses landscapes of present and past, incorporating recent photos that the artist took of the gardens, as well as archival images. Norton’s work draws on her rural upbringing by New Age homesteaders. She upcycles discarded plant clippings from Wave Hill’s gardens, repurposes compost and deconstructs past work, incorporating it into new pieces—speaking to sustainability, contemplating how memories are embedded in materials and landscapes, as well as how a sense of place is recorded through time and changes in the land. Heidi Norton with her site specific installation, The Edges of Everything at Wave Hill, July 16th – August 28th, 2022. Meet the Artist recording can be found here.
Zinaida is one of the most important Ukrainian artists working today. Her practice revolves around the study of mythologies, national symbols, archaic imagery, and the role of women as carriers of sacred knowledge, stemming from the Kyiv-based artist’s extensive ethnographic research and close collaboration with indigenous communities in remote areas of her country. Marina Abromović has described Zinaida’s practice as subtly balancing her work “at the juncture of historical symbolism and modernity. She uses traditional imagery, rituals and crafts to convey meanings that are relevant to a vibrant and fluid culture. Zinaida is a rebel. She was in many dangerous zones (on Maidan during the Revolution of Dignity, Chornobyl, in the war zone in the Eastern Ukraine). To me she is like a Ukrainian “Guerilla Girl.” Zinaida’s work is currently on view in Venice and New York.
Zinaida’s solo pavilion Without Women is an official Ukrainian Collateral Event at the Venice Biennale. The exhibition’s curator, Dallas Contemporary Executive Director Peter Doroshenko, introduced Zinaida as “a national cultural figure for Ukraine.” He says that over the last fifteen years, she has “summarized, documented and interpreted contemporary Ukrainian society through her work. Zinaida’s works have become an important and seminal influence for all the contemporary Ukrainian artists.”
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.
Vanessa German, Black on Black, 2021, Handmade folk art cloth Black woman pin cushion, glory, wood, love, astroturf, Black seed beads, confusion, Black rhinestone trim, Black bead trim, (they traded your grandmother for a handful of beads), vintage hand purse, rage, old doll parts, ptsd, the fallout from white supremacist delusion, cork, Black pigment, sorrow, vintage mirror, self loathing, cotton, a miracle, twine, tears, yarn, heartbreak, love. 26 x 18 x 9 1/2 in
Last weekend was the third annual Upstate Art Weekend, a wildly ambitious and fun three-day art fair that winds its way from Westchester to Catskill NY. Founded by impresario Helen Toomer in 2020, Upstate Art Weekend celebrates and promotes visual arts throughout the Hudson Valley. One hundred and forty venues participated this year, and there was everything from art in a big-box truck in Kerhonkson to the gallery/studio campus of Foreland in Catskill. The intense heat of last week made this year’s event a challenge, but totally worth the sweat. Here is a brief travelogue of my schlep around the Hudson Valley:
Each year The Tate Britain commissions a large-scale art installation for the iconic Duveen Galleries at the museum. This is a vast space, an art-filled hall, more than a typical gallery that winds its way down the center of the museum on the first floor. This year they tapped the Guyanese-British artist Hew Locke whose visual musings on migration, history, national identity and ritual are well known in the British art world. Locke has long worked these themes, but never on such a scale. It is a wildly ambitious vision that embraces his interests and presents a fully developed Universe.
