The Immigrant Artist Biennial – In Dialogue

Interior Worlds of Sculpture and Performance: Bonam Kim, Raul De Lara, and Nyugen Smith

Nyugen Smith and Marvin Fabien, After the Fracture 2019. Performance at Pérez Art Museum, Miami. Photography Pascal Bernier.

Creating work that both resists and grapples with their immigrant experiences, Bonam Kim, Raul De Lara, and Nyugen Smith offer distinctive approaches to sculpture. Their perspectives on their immigrant experiences show some overlap but also many differences. As part of The Immigrant Artist Biennial, Kim’s work in Enmeshed, Dreams of Water explores how new morphologies of identity emerge across time, place, and patterns of self-reflection, while Smith and De Lara’s work that will be on view in Excavated Selves, Becoming Magic Bodies begs the viewer to interrogate place through storytelling. Together with the artists, co-curator Anna Mikaela Ekstrand discusses the politics of art and how the artists approach personal histories and historical and political events before the exhibit.

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Dee Shapiro – From Fibonacci to Bathers

A person smiling in front of a curtain

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The artist at the Islip Museum. “Cornered”, watercolor on graph paper, 40 x 40 inches, 1975-76

Dee Shapiro’s paintings have evolved over decades of a rigorous thematic and formal search—how colors and shapes can express the intricate relationship between pattern, geometry, and nature through a two- dimensional form? With what appears to be a strong impetus to constantly re-invent her painterly vocabulary, Dee Shapiro’s work keeps us on our toes with each of her series of work, which she sees overall as evoking an alternate reality with absurd connection. From her early Fibonacci progression color coded on graph paper, to her later representational Bathers series–Shapiro’s paintings assert themselves with a life of their own, without a need for any explanation.

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