public art – Page 6

March 12, 2021March 13, 2021, by Sophia Ma

Belonging to P.A.D. (Project Art Distribution)

A picture containing text, building, outdoor, scene

Description automatically generated — “Popular Jewelry” featuring Arkadiy Ryabin, Johanna Stroebel, Clarissa Hurst, and Ann Treesa Joy, on September 26, 2020, photo credit to Adam Golfer, image courtesy of P.A.D.

The artist-run Project Art Distribution (better known as P.A.D. or @project_art_distribution on Instagram) hosts day-long outdoor exhibitions on versatile packing 72”x80” pads. Set up in Soho, one of New York’s art and retail hubs, the padded surfaces become the metaphorical and physical exhibition space of the usual pristine white cube galleries. Unlike the current Soho rental clientele of luxury brands and gallery spaces, P.A.D. has no walls. Lacking barriers in more than one way, the sidewalk gallery provides the public, the artists, the curators, and the organizational collaborators a welcomed openness to art and discussion. The project creates an ongoing network that ever-expands its community.

February 8, 2021February 26, 2021, by Sarah Corona

Mercedes Matter Awards Show at Margalit Startup City

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.

January 5, 2021December 5, 2020, by Etty Yaniv

Margaret Roleke: Getting a Dialogue Started

Margaret Roleke, Margaret Roleke: Made Visible, 2020, window installation of cyanotype banners and mylar, Creative Arts Workshop, New Haven, CT., photo courtesy of Rashmi Talpade

When Margaret Roleke finished her MFA, she was a sculptor and installation artist. From early on she created installations dealing with issues of water, sound and light and after becoming a mother to four children, notions of motherhood and domesticity became central in her work. As her children grew, current political events became increasingly part of her visual expression. For instance, around 2002 she started including toy soldiers in her sculptures, referencing the Iraq war, and also around this time for a public art project in Brewster, NY, she made seating for the day-laborers who were regularly gathering on that site. She continued to make work that spoke to issues that were important to her, mainly gun control, domestic abuse, and immigrant rights. She says she had no intention to be an activist artist, but became one in the course of making art and exploring her true voice — “The Trump presidency led me to march on the streets and register voters, but I feel I can be a better activist when I create work which starts a dialogue on these important subjects, as this seems to be what comes naturally to me,” she says.

December 14, 2020December 14, 2020, by Etty Yaniv

Eirini Linardaki: Occupying Public Spaces

In Dialogue with Eirini Linardaki

The artist in Radiator Gallery, interactive magnetic collage artwork

For Greek based artist and activist Eirini Linardaki, who had been born and raised in Athens than moved and resided in France, cognitive diversity is at the forefront of her art projects. She sees her strength in building networks with different voices which help create an environment where diverse Ideas matter more than individual achievement. Through diverse social engagement methods, she aims to show that art is activism. She strongly believes that art can create direct channels for feeling and understanding within public spaces and communities, building trust and hope.

November 23, 2020November 23, 2020, by Etty Yaniv

Michele Brody – Embodying Daily Flux

*Michele Brody, working in home studio in The Bronx on handmade paper body sculpture for Annual Earth Celebrations Eco Pageant, paper made from recycled linen table cloths and caning, 2020.*
*Photo by Olivier Marcaud*

A fourth generation NY builder, artist Michele Brody loves working with materials. She recalls how her father groomed her early on to become an architect so that she could continue the family tradition of builders and land developers. Although she excelled in the study of Architecture, she was not attracted to pursue it as career. ” I prefer building with my own hands,” she says. So in 1994, instead of getting a degree in Architecture, she graduated with an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago from the Fiber and Material Studies Department.

September 17, 2020September 17, 2020, by Etty Yaniv

Diana Schmertz in Domestic Brutes at Pelham Art Center

In Dialogue with Diana Schmertz

Diana Schmertz has always been interested in systems that people create to organize what they perceive in the world around them — based in science, religion, psychology, philosophy or politics. The artist says that no matter how cerebral a system or an idea may appear, it is always experienced through our physical senses and in order to communicate balance between reason and senses, she paints imagery of the body expressing emotional understanding juxtaposed with systems of verbal and/or mathematical reasoning. In Domestic Brutes, the women group show at Pelham Art Center Diana Schmertz shows a painting installation. Her virtual artist talk hosted by PAC is scheduled for October 8th.

September 4, 2020November 15, 2020, by Etty Yaniv

Shift Happens at GreenHill

In Dialogue with Heather Gordon

Heather Gordon, 2019, photo courtesy of Eli Gray

In her drawings, paintings, and installations North Carolina based artist Heather Gordon maps the poetry of life using mathematical elements like numbers and geometry to coax narratives from information related to data of place, time and physical properties. In her collaborative projects she has extended her practice to large scale site-specific installations based on elaborate research, often including sculptural, performance and movement elements which altogether result in multifaceted and thought provoking projects that prompt the visitor’s intellectual and visceral engagement. In this interview Heather Gordon sheds some light on her nine-foot-high site-specific mural on the large exterior window of the GreenHill gallery to be completed late September. Heather Gordon’s public art initiative is the first of a group of works by the artist at GreenHill Center for North Carolina Art, as part of the Shift Happensart installation series which aims to explore art engagement at a time of social distancing.

June 24, 2020June 3, 2020, by Etty Yaniv

Artists on Coping: Simona Prives

During the Coronavirus pandemic, Art Spiel is reaching out to artists to learn how they are coping.

Working on Governors Island during a residency with 4heads, 2019. Photo by Ed Grant

Simona Prives is a Brooklyn-based visual artist. She creates collages, both still and moving, that focus on the process of decomposition and reconstruction and that examine our complex relationship between the organic and the man-made. Each work combines multiple forms of printmaking, using drawing, monotype, found material and hand-shot video to assemble the composition. Her artwork has been exhibited in New York City, Chicago, Miami, Italy, Greece, Japan and China, including at the Shanghai International Print Biennale.

June 20, 2020June 20, 2020, by Etty Yaniv

Artists on Coping: Niki Lederer

During the Coronavirus pandemic, Art Spiel is reaching out to artists to learn how they are coping.

*Goldenrod*, 2019, Found re-purposed plastic bottles, machine screws, hex nuts, wire, rebar armature, concrete base. Artist with sculpture currently on view at Wolfs Lane Park as part of Pelham Art Center’s Public Art Program.

Niki Lederer is a sculptor working with found materials including discarded umbrellas and post-consumer plastic. Born in London, Ontario and raised in Vancouver, she received her BFA from the University of Victoria and her MFA from Hunter College in New York City. Group exhibitions include Portal: Governors Island, 50 Years of Public Art in NYC Parks, Central Park and the Outdoor Sculpture Biennial Adelphi University, Garden City, NY. Solo exhibitions include Washington Square Windows, NYU and Preset Tense, Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto. Niki recently collaborated with XAOC Contemporary Ballet for Norte Maar’s CounterPointe8. Currently her re-purposed plastic bottle sculpture is featured at the Pelham Art Center and Wolfs Lane Park and her discarded-umbrella based work will be included in the Wassaic Project 2020 Summer Exhibition. Niki lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

June 11, 2020November 2, 2022, by Catherine Kirkpatrick

Artists on Coping: Carmen Paulino

During the Coronavirus pandemic, Art Spiel is reaching out to artists to learn how they are coping.

Carmen Paulino is a visual artist who works on providing community art programming in hospitals, community centers, and senior centers around New York City. Raised in the El Barrio section of New York City, her love for the arts was inspired by the murals in her diverse neighborhood, and her father who performed as a musician in several traditional salsa bands. As a young child, she watched her mother and grandmother knit, crochet, and sew unique traditional quilts and patterns. These experiences inspired her to develop her own techniques and produce her own mixed media works that incorporate her own life experiences, visuals from her immediate surroundings, and the inspiration that comes from living in a diverse melting pot of cultures. Paulino works at the Creative Center of University Settlement House, and in 2019 was artist-in-residence at El Barrio’s Art Space PS 109.