Ultralight Beam, curated by Rebecca Mills at the Pelham Art Center, brings together paintings, sculptures, and installations by artists who focus on visionary methods and spirituality of all kinds. Featured artists: Sunny Allis, Angelica Bergamini, Claire Buckley, Susan Carr, Joan Di Lieto & Thunderfox, Ala Ebtekar, Gabriel Mills, Sarah Renzi-Sanders, Christina Saj, and Chris Watts. The show runs from September 15 to October 30, 2022.
The artist and “Por siempre joven” (Forever Young) Series. Installation at the Bronx Museum’s The Block Gallery, 2019. Photo courtesy Argenis Apolinario/The Bronx Museum of the Arts
Jessica Lagunas is Interested in working with unconventional materials—makeup, hair, perfume, organic materials—through video-performance, installation, drawing, prints, artist books, embroidery, and recently, weaving. She is a New York City-based Latinx artist, whose group exhibitions include El Museo del Barrio’s The (S) Files Biennial, The Bronx Museum of the Arts’ Artist in the Marketplace, Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA at Museum of Contemporary Art Santa Barbara and Laxart, among others.
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.
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.
Artist at home with paintings during lockdown, May 2020
Nancy Elsamanoudi says she was drawn to painting because of its fluid relationship to time from the viewer’s and the painter’s perspectives alike. The viewer gets a visceral sense of the painter’s vision in the past, and the painter experiences the fluidity of time throughout the process of painting. Elsamanoudi further specifies: “when you paint, you can, so to speak, go back and forth through time, adding layers-submerging the past or revealing the past by scraping or stripping away previous layers.”
Sharon Madanes grew up in Chicago in a family of physicians and was exposed to both art and medicine from a young age – her first job was helping to package sterilized surgical equipment. She also spent weekends at the Art Institute of Chicago taking art classes and wandering through the collection. She has always found the strange forms and aesthetics of medical settings fascinating: “as a painter and physician, I’m currently making work about this very juxtaposition, exploring different elements of hospital and medical culture through paint,” she says. Sharon Madanes is participating in Domestic Brutes at Pelham Art Center.
Artist in her Studio. Photo by Ryan Bonilla 2019 . Photo by Ryan Bonilla 2019
Maria de Los Angeles says she feels very blessed to be included in the Domestic Brutes exhibition at the Pelham Art Center. A DACA recipient, she grew up undocumented and currently she is working on getting her citizenship, looking forward to contributing by voting for the first time. “Since I arrived to this country 20 years ago, I have looked forward to Voting. I love this county and consider it my home and can’t wait to do my part by helping elect new people. I truly believe we can build a better future together,” she says.
Aisha Tandiwe Bellis interested in the many manifestations of the traps of race, sex, and class. She makes drawings, paintings, ceramic sculptures, installations, and performance work that examine the metaphors and the allegory that this trap manifests. In her newest work Aisha Tandiwe Bell’s is looking at how one might negotiate traps, utilizing shape shifting, and code-switching as well as looking at identifying markers that both separate and unify. She says, “I am a Black African American Jamaican Woman Artist Wife and Mother. These are all categories that I consistently juggle and negotiate in a white male dominated space.” Aisha Tandiwe Bell is participating in Domestic Brutes at Pelham Art Center.
Melissa Stern is an artist, working in mixed materials and across genres. She is interested in ideas that are simultaneously funny and dark- that is, “work that might make you smile or laugh, but with a wee bit of discomfort,” as she puts it. Much of her work of recent years focuses on home and childhood and the ways in which our childhoods and our memories haunt our lives. She works in clay, found objects, wood, metal collage and various drawing materials. Her goal is that the materials she uses are at the service of the ideas. On a different note she says, “I am an only child, raised by older parents who were first generation Americans. My mother desperately wanted to be ‘American’. My father was very connected to his European heritage. This push and pull; between belonging and being an outsider has profoundly influenced my life as an artist.” Melissa Stern is participating in Domestic Brutes at Pelham Art Center.
Tirtzah Bassel grew up in Israel, the oldest of eight in a Jewish Orthodox family. Her father is a traditional scribe and her mother, a ballet dancer by training, was the homemaker when they were growing up. Although both of her parents were very creative and the value of making things by hand was instilled early on, she didn’t know any professional artists and had no concept that making art was something she could do as an adult. This changed when she took a night class at the Jerusalem Studio School in her early twenties. She recalls how she was immediately drawn to the intensity of the atelier-style learning environment, drawing and painting from observation, and the methods of the Old Master paintings. She later decided to pursue an MFA at Boston University and subsequently moved to Brooklyn. “Perhaps it was the continuous traversing of worlds – religious and secular, Israel and the US, Hebrew and English – that led me to ground my work in close observation of seemingly mundane situations,” she says.
