Contemporary Art and Culture
During the Coronavirus pandemic, Art Spiel is reaching out to artists to learn how they are coping.
Yolande Heijnen was born and raised in Luxembourg, and has lived in New York since 1998. She has an MFA in painting from the New York Studio School, has won the Edward G. McDowell Travel Grant of the Art Students League, and is a three-time recipient of the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Grant.
Continue reading “Artists on Coping: Yolande Heijnen”During the Coronavirus pandemic, Art Spiel is reaching out to artists to learn how they are coping.
Robin Holder is a 2020 Clark Hulings Fund For Artists Executive Fellow. Her recent exhibit “Access and Inequities. I Hear You. Do You See Me?” featured works exploring identity conflicts. She has presented one-person exhibitions at the Mobile Museum of Art, The NCCU Art Museum, The Labor Museum, and The Spelman College Museum. She was awarded an Individual Artist Grant by The Brooklyn Arts Council as well as a Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation Artist As Catalyst Residency. Holder has completed 5 public art commissions, and her work is included in significant collections including the Library of Congress and The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.
Continue reading “Artists on Coping: Robin Holder”During the Coronavirus pandemic, Art Spiel is reaching out to artists to learn how they are coping.
Can we ever really know another person? I ask myself that frequently when thinking of the great Vito Desalvo. Though I have known Vito for nearly 60 years, he is still an enigma to me. A huge fan of his work, I tentatively approached Desalvo about this interview. He demanded a carton of cigarettes in return for sharing his thoughts. I then turned to his friend and colleague Stan Klein who graciously agreed to approach the inscrutable Desalvo on my behalf. The following is the result.
Continue reading “Artists on Coping: Vito Desalvo”
Rebecca Morgan’s solo exhibition “Town and Country“ at Asya Geisberg offers viewers a subversive and unflinching look into aesthetics of Americana. Panty raiding hillbillies, buxom bonnet sporting milkmaids, and characters engaged in Appalachian revelry scrupulously rendered in paint, graphite, and brass galavant throughout the exhibition. Morgan’s cringeworthy figuration walks the line between portraiture and allegory and highlights the pitfalls of romanticization. Inspired by the sucker-punch illustrations of R Crumb, Morgan’s depictions of rural life speak to notions of voyeurism, power dynamics, and the ubiquity of toxic masculinity within contemporary American culture. The works included in “Town and Country” strike a balance between hilarity and horror and provide a fantastical portal into the American psyche. I had the opportunity to chat with Morgan about her fourth solo show with the gallery and reflect upon her personal fascination with the subjects she portrays.
Continue reading “Americana Archetypes Frolic Centerstage in Rebecca Morgan’s Solo Show Town and Country at Asya Geisberg Gallery”
Immigration is a hot issue. It has determined national elections and divided communities around the world. Artists have weighed in on it, often with projects lacking input from the immigrants themselves.
Jackie Neale is a fine art photographer, author, instructor, and former Imaging Producer of Online Features at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In her project “Crossing Over: Immigration Stories,” she pairs large-scale cyanotype portraits of immigrants with audio of them telling their own stories. In May it will be on exhibit in Palazzo Mora at the Venice Biennale.
Continue reading “Artist Without Borders: Catching Up With Jackie Neale”The Painting Center
I’ve been looking at and occasionally commenting on the virtues and various points of particular interest in Alannah Farrell’s lusciously pictorial, sometimes lushly lusty paintings for a number of years now, and one thing I’ve enjoyed noting is that there seems often to be something stealthily, furtively, sometimes perhaps a bit serpentinely surreptitious about many of her works.
Continue reading “Nota Bene with @postuccio [v]”After November 2016 Patricia Fabricant‘s paintings shifted from dense and layered abstractions to self portraits depicting fluctuating expressions and altogether underscoring post election malaise. Fabricant developed an intriguing mechanism of observation and layering. Her gaze is meant to be neutral, just a stare into the mirror but throughout the weaving process, chance yields unintended emotions – knowing, anxious, sad. The artist describes in this interview for Art Spiel her process, ideas, and on going projects.
Continue reading “Patricia Fabricant – Weaving a Fluctuating Self”
For photographer David Samuel Stern’s photography typically serves as a departure point for crafting tangible objects. In his Woven Portraits series for instance, Stern physically assembles pieces of his photographic portraits into new forms, aiming to fuse the notion of photographic representation with its own material nature, making a new essence. The imagery in this series may bring to mind Cubists’ and Futurists’ paintings, or David Hockney’s Polaroids, but in Stern’s hybrid artworks, the imagery derives from a photographer’s imagination and can be distinctly traced to our digital age – the manual counterpoints the virtual. Here Stern shares with Art Spiel some of his ideas, process, and projects.
Continue reading “David Samuel Stern’s Portraits: The Mechanics of Longing”