Contemporary Art and Culture
Chicago based artist Rita Grendze draws, sculpts and makes large scale installations that bring the two and three dimensional forms together in imaginative ways. She creates visceral environments utilizing mostly found materials, ranging from music sheets to textiles.
Continue reading “Rita Grendze: Material Exploration”
Manufacturers Village Artist Studios, located in an 1880’s historic industrial complex at 356 Glenwood Avenue in East Orange, NJ, will feature the work of over 60 different artists at its annual open studios weekend, Friday 10/15 (VIP Preview) and Saturday thru Sunday from 11-5, 10/16 and 10/17.
Continue reading “Marcia Miele Branca: MVA Open Studios”
About a decade ago, Maggie Nowinski shifted her focus from site specific project-based installation to her studio as the primary site of her work. She made this shift after realizing that her connection to the work had become too fragmented. She needed her studio work to become more accessible and her creativity more meditative. Since drawing has always been at the core of her work, focusing on drawing with limited materials and themes, enabled her to process a lot of the ideas she had been working through in her large-scale installations. “I was craving a way to immediately access creativity, to be in a place where if I had an hour I could walk into my studio and pick up where I’d left off on a drawing,” she says.
Continue reading “Maggie Nowinski -Drawing (un)limited”
Manufacturers Village Artist Studios, located in an 1880’s historic industrial complex at 356 Glenwood Avenue in East Orange, NJ, will feature the work of over 60 different artists at its annual open studios weekend, Friday 10/15 (VIP Preview) and Saturday thru Sunday from 11-5, 10/16 and 10/17.
Continue reading “Mona Brody: MVA Open Studios”
Manufacturers Village Artist Studios, located in an 1880’s historic industrial complex at 356 Glenwood Avenue in East Orange, NJ, will feature the work of over 60 different artists at its annual open studios weekend, Friday 10/15 (VIP Preview) and Saturday thru Sunday from 11-5, 10/16 and 10/17.
Continue reading “Donna Conklin King: MVA Open Studios”
I recently read the article “As the Climate Crisis Grows, a Movement Gathers to Make ‘Ecocide’ an International Crime Against Humanity” from Inside Climate News. The authors state that “international lawyers, environmentalists, and a growing number of world leaders say that ‘ecocide’ – widespread destruction of the environment – would serve as a ‘moral red line’ for the planet.” French President Emmanuel Macron and Pope Francis add that ecocide is an offense that poses a similar threat to humanity as genocide. And Pope Francis describes ecocide as “the massive contamination of air, land and water” or “any action capable of producing an ecological disaster.” The Pope has proposed making ecocide a sin for Catholics, endorsing a campaign by environmental activists and legal scholars to make it the fifth crime before the International Criminal Court in the Hague.
Continue reading “What Is Your ‘Tipping Point’ for Collective Action?”
The figures in New York City based painter Keisha Prioleau-Martin, become an essence of motion and emotion – exuding a sense of radical joy and playfulness, expressed through gestural brushstrokes and vibrant colors.
Continue reading “Keisha Prioleau-Martin: I Have Been the Dancer”
In her drawings, murals and paintings, Japanese born, and Brooklyn based artist Naomi Kawanishi Reis, utilizes paper and fabric to make idealized spaces, ranging from utopian architecture of modernism, gardens, and more recently, still life in domestic spaces. In this recent body of work, Reis starts with photographs taken by her mother of her ikebana arrangements displayed outside the family home in Kyoto. Reis downloads the images from the family online chat, the link that has connected her diasporic family across oceans.
Continue reading “Naomi Kawanishi Reis: Snippets of Beauty”In Dialogue with Lisa Pressman
The current exhibition at Susan Eley Fine Art, Hudson features Lisa Pressman’s newest encaustic paintings and works on paper. One of the primary series on view in this show is entitled Messages, a recent and ongoing series of mixed media works on various handmade papers. Pressman collects handmade paper, including Japanese Shikishi board, which is edged with gold, as well as Letraset—the rub-on letters employed by graphic designers before the computer era. Onto these unique handmade paper, she employs the press-on letters of the Letraset, as a mark-making tool to create a symbolic language—hieroglyphic and intuitive.
Continue reading “Lisa Pressman and Jim Napierala at Susan Eley Fine Art”