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Joy Curtis: With Every Fiber at Pelham Art Center


The artist holding a “green study”. Photo courtesy of the artist

Joy Curtis was born in Valparaiso, Indiana, and grew up in rural Indiana and Iowa. In college, she studied painting while making objects outside the medium. Later, Curtis earned her MFA at Ohio University where she studied sculpture. In 2002, she moved to Bushwick, Brooklyn, and has been living and working there since that time. Curtis has been represented by Klaus von Nichtssagend since 2010, and has had 5 solo shows with them. She has been included in other recent exhibitions at the Pelham Art Center, Ceysson and Bénétière, the Aldrich Museum (CT), and T.S.A (Brooklyn). Curtis is the recipient of fellowships from Socrates Sculpture Park and the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council. Her work has been reviewed in the New Yorker, Hyperallergic, ArtCritical, and Saatchi Online, and she has been featured on Gorky’s Granddaughter and James Kalm’s Rough Cut video blogs. Currently Curtis is working on a large, outdoor sculpture made of fabric that will be included in a summer show.

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Babs Reingold: Palette of Materials

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From left to right: Babs Reingold in the studio with Hair Nest ’01, Hair Nest ’16, Hair Nest ’15, photo courtesy of the artist

In her multi layered installations Babs Reingold‘s brings together drawing, sculpture, found objects, and at times video, to create potent environments alluding to the body, the environment, and the passage of time. Equipped with a fine tuned sensibility to materiality and an imaginative approach to spatiality, Babs Reingold’s installations inhabit spaces as an alternate force of nature and take a life of their own.

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Alexander Rutsch, The Voluptuous Eye at Kenise Barnes Fine Art


Sunset, mixed media on board, 36 x 44 inches, 1990s

My first encounter with the work of the artist Alexander Rutsch was through his daughter, the artist Alexandra Rutsch Brock (Alexi), a friend and one of my fellow co-founders of the London Calling Collective. I visited the Rutsch family home in Pelham where she grew up and where her mother still lives. The home, an eccentric, polymathic cacophony of hand-hewn art and embodied life, reflects my experience of Alexi as a passionate and energetic artist, teacher, and friend. A labyrinthine artist’s house- the type that real estate brokers abhor, is brim-full of paintings, sculptures, built-in furniture, object d’art, hand-tiled stone walls, curved nooks, hallways to a warren of rooms, and Alexander Rutsch’s overflowing attic studio, where the work from this exhibition came. I marvel at the fecundity of imagination a childhood in that house must have fostered. This history makes it a special honor to step back and review the exhibition, Alexander Rutsch, a Pop-Up, at Kenise Barnes Fine Art in Larchmont, NY, on view March 4-7 and March 11-14. 2021. The exhibition includes paintings on panel, works on paper, sketchbook pages, and whimsical bronze sculptures cast from industrial materials and found objects.

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KODA – A Focus on Artists

In Dialogue with Klaudia Ofwona Draber

A person standing in a forest

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Klaudia Ofwona Draber at The Strange Foundation (https://thestrange.foundation). Photo by Willa Köerner

The idea for KODA has already germinated in Klaudia Ofwona Draber’s mind during her graduate degree at Sotheby’s Institute of Art New York. While researching extensively for her business plan, it has occurred to her that mid-career artists are not getting enough support and something needs to be done about it. She founded KODA in 2019 guided by her initial observation regarding the needs of mid-career artists. KODA focuses on artists who explore social related topics through rigorous research, providing them with exposure and enhancing their opportunities for scholarship through residencies, survey exhibitions, and community-based activities. Klaudia Ofwona Draber, KODA Founder and Board President, shares with Art Spiel the vision behind the organization and sheds some light on some of the affiliated artists.

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This Two: Sun You at Geary

In Dialogue with Sun You


No Title (detail), 2020

This Two, Sun You’s first solo show with Geary, takes place concurrently at Geary’s two locations: Bowery in the Lower East Side and Main street in Millerton, New York. Geary features You’s clay- based work which includes oven-baked polymer clay forms mounted on painted wood panels, sculpted clay forms in cardboard boxes, and a separate body of sculptures made of mixed media — metal wire, razor blades, beads, and artificial flowers “held by magnets and gravity”, as described by Michael McCanne in the press release. The show runs through March 5th, 2021.

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Mary Ann Lomonaco: With Every Fiber at Pelham Art Center


The artist and Mop with Delicas

Mary Ann Lomonaco began her artistic life as a papermaker after majoring in
Fiber art at Parsons School of Design . Ultimately this led to exploring the kitchen mop as a cellulose fiber she could use when making pulp. One day she started noticing the mophead itself as a potential sculptural element on its own. This insight subsequently led her to explore other recycled materials. Mary Ann Lomonaco recently completed commissions for Delta Airlines for their Executive Lounges in San Francisco, London, JFK, Seattle and Atlanta as well as a large piece for their Atlanta Headquarters. Her installation at the Westchester County Airport is comprised of 55 multiple pieces. Her work is also in the collections of the Neuberger Museum, Neutrogena, AT&T, PepsiCo and the World Bank Library among others.

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The Process of Weaving the Intentionally Fragmented at Transmitter


Installation of Patchwork at Transmitter, image courtesy of the gallery, Brooklyn, NY (2021)

The Brazilian educator and philosopher Paulo Freire speaks on the essential character of dialogue for revolution. Seen as the thread that connects communities to revolutionary ideas and actions, dialogue is a continual process. A continuum revolves visually and semiotically within the walls of Transmitter gallery these days with the new exhibition Patchwork. Time is of central significance as the theme of fragmentation provides illuminative access through each of the three artists in the show, highlighting complex pasts that beget the enormous project of both appreciation and reconciliation via understanding the significance of each layered memory.

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Mercedes Matter Awards Show at Margalit Startup City


Installation view

Artist, writer, and educator Mercedes Matter’s legacy is a memorable one. Matter studied and worked with many notable artists including Hans Hofmann, Lee Krasner, and Willem de Kooning during the 1930s and 40s, and then founded the New York Studio School in the tumultuous year of 1964. The Studio School became one of the defining institutions of the New York art scene and delivered high profile artists from that year on. One telling fact is that Leo Castelli and company were habitual goers, and this is still the case today.

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Krista Svalbonas: Recent Works at Klompching

In Dialogue with Krista Svalbonas


Krista Svalbonas

Krista Svalbonas has been capturing images since her first darkroom photography course in high school. The camera in some form — as an integral part of the work or as a reference — keeps playing a central role in her artwork, which takes shape in diverse forms such as painting, ceramics, and sculpture. Her first solo exhibition at Klompching Gallery in Dumbo, Brooklyn, features work spanning a six-year period.

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Debbie Hesse: Spatial Paintings


Debbie Hesse, Laboratory for Healing, 2018, Immersive installation at Yale West Campus, Photo Courtesy of Graham Hebel, Artspace

Debbie Hesse, the CT based artist, makes plexiglass sculptural constructions and video installations. Her sculptural installations, or “spatial paintings” are typically made of multiple planar Plexiglas and wood cutout shapes layered to create complex shapes which bring her ideas to life through light and color.

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