Jamie Martinez in DUMBO Open Studios

Featured Artist

Artist Jamie Martinez at his studio with his work “Vision Mask I”.

Each spring over 100 artists and art organizations in DUMBO And Vinegar Hill open their studio doors to the public for a weekend. This year the event takes place on April 22 and 23 from 1 to 6 PM. Art Spiel created a Mixed Media Guide for this event in addition to other curated guides on the Art In Dumbo website here. In conjunction with the event Art Spiel conducted a few interviews with individual participating artists. This one is with Jamie Martinez whose multi- faceted art includes textiles, drawing, painting, sculpture, and installation.

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Liz Collins in DUMBO Open Studios

Featured Artist

Liz Collins in her studio. Photo by Joe Kramm.

Each spring over 100 artists and art organizations in DUMBO And Vinegar Hill open their studio doors to the public for a weekend. This year the event takes place on April 22 and 23 from 1 to 6 PM. Art Spiel created a Mixed Media Guide for this event in addition to other curated guides on the Art In Dumbo website here. In conjunction with the event Art Spiel conducted a few interviews with individual participating artists. This one is with Liz Collins whose multi- faceted art includes textiles, drawing, painting, sculpture, and installation.

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Denise Sfraga: Strange Brew at The Garage Art Center

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Denise Sfraga, installation detail

The work included in Strange Brew, Denise Sfraga’s solo show at the Garage Art Center, explores the life cycle of plants. This fascination with plants has always been at the root of the artist’s creative inspiration. Sfraga, who is based in New York City, says that working in her own garden and experiencing its constant state of flux, gives her the opportunity to witness first hand actual seed germination, leaf and flower growth, the dispersion of the next generation of seeds and the final stages of decay, “an ever evolving landscape of life forms that change color, shape and appearance daily.”

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William Norton – Styx & Stones- at The Boiler – ELM Foundation

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“Cop,CodPiece, and Tigger”, “Lurking Cop”, “Cutting the Head Off the Thug”, “in the rain i feel myself swallowed, savored, teased by your tongue”

William Norton’s large-scale paintings at The Boiler – ELM Foundation evoke imagery of oppression and protest through gestural graphic marks and bold color on recycled vinyl advertisements as canvas. “We are always being sold something in this age of hyper-ventilating propaganda. And there is just enough of the advertising image left over to titillate the viewers’ eyeballs,” Norton says.

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Whisperings from the Wormhole with @talluts

The Proof is in the Punctum

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Film still from 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)

Once, my day job was a freelance graphic designer and I worked from home in Brooklyn. My desk was in a corner of the combination living-room-kitchen-dining-room, right next to the TV. I had cable, and while I worked, I would put on Turner Classic Movies because they didn’t play commercials. And those of us who worked from home during the golden age of cable know that the middle-of-the-day commercials were the most depressing.

TCM showed black and white movies from the 30’s, 40’s and 50’s in an unending ribbon of celluloid, one right after the other. And after months of working like this, it began to amaze me how little the films stuck in my head. They just pleasantly wafted into one ear and floated out the other. There were two exceptions, though, that seemed to have the ability to stick: Stanley Kubrick’s 2001 A Space Odyssey and The Bells of St. Mary (starring Casablanca’s Ingrid Bergman as a nun). And this forgettable/unforgettable phenomenon got me wondering: Why those two? Why did they stick and not the hundreds of others that I had watched?

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Kahori Kamiya: Long Eclipse at Amos Eno

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Kahori Kamiya, Solo show Long Eclipse Installation view at Amos Eno Gallery

Long Eclipse, Kahori Kamiya’s NY debut solo exhibition currently showing at Amos Eno Gallery, delves into the artist’s deeply personal experience of motherhood, breastfeeding, and the impact of the pandemic. Through paintings and sculptures, Kamiya explores the emotions and challenges of this unique time in her life, while also reflecting on themes of racial discrimination and grief. Her organic shapes run through semi-figurative drawings and painted sculptures, resonating with ancient Japanese spirituality and its relation to nature. The show runs through March 26, 2023.

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Whisperings from the Wormhole with @talluts

Beware the Leave-It-Like-That

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Moby Dick Illustration by Augustus Burnham Shute, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Gather round, me hearties, and let me tell you a tale: a tale about a much-dreaded comment received by many an artist on Instagram and during a studio visit. This comment can sound like a terrifying roar made by a fearsome beast. And it’s called—the “Leave-It-Like-That.

It’s the kind of comment we might receive on our works-in-progress (a struggling fawn just starting its wobbly walk). And we may have blithely thought to ourselves, “Hey, why don’t I post this WIP on the ‘Gram and give people a window into my process!” But…Beware ye who enter here. This generous sneak peek could attract a Leave-It-Like-That (or even its frightening brethren: the “Stop-Don’t-Touch-It” or the “Looks-Finished-To-Me”).

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Jessica Weiss PRESENT at 490 Atlantic

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Jessica Weiss, installation view

The exhibition PRESENT at 490 Atlantic gallery features nine paintings by Jessica Weiss. In this body of work, made during the pandemic, Weiss continues to combine wallpaper, silkscreened patterns, fabric, and paint—utilizing the optical and psychological power of these scraps from domestic life. Within the colorful and tactile surface, figures appear, and gesture becomes important. The exhibit opens Saturday February 25th, 5-8pm.

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A Grain of Salt | Un Grano de Sal at ELM

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Styrofoam Cristalizador de Sal | Styrofoam Salt Crystalizer, 2023. © Fernando Ruíz Lorenzo / Artist Rights Society, 2023

A Grain of Salt | Un Grano de Sal, the new exhibition at the Boiler in ELM Foundation features Fernando Ruíz Lorenzo’s new body of work—a series of paintings and installations with solar salt, styrofoam, acrylic, and aerosol paint. Ruíz Lorenzo’s work merges the history and political narratives of Puerto Rico’s colonial relationships to Spain and the United States.

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Frances McCormack: Wonder and Limitations

Frances McCormack

Paintings are the products of imagination whose language is feeling and form.  My paintings describe an interior theatre where the relationship of energy to limitation unfolds in a drama that is primarily optical.  The work references the natural world filtered through the lens of the marvelous and invites the viewers’ participation and interpretation…. a task ideally suited to painting.                                                                              

  – Frances McCormack, 2020​

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