Harriet Salmon: Tracing Genologies at Heroes

Featured Project: with artist and co-founder of Heroes Gallery

Harriet Salmon with (from left) Benny Merris’ An Other Another 196, 2022 and an Emilio Pucci silk scarf from 1964. Courtesy: Emilio Pucci Heritage.

Hrriet Salmon is an artist, gallerist, as well as a podcast host and producer. Her engagement in art is deep and wide—in her own art she makes sculpture, drawing, photo, installation, and weaving; in Heroes, the gallery she co-founded with her partner, Jesse Penridge, they create vibrant visual dialogues between contemporary artists and historical art; in her Craftsmanship podcast she discusses technical skill in the contemporary artworld told through oral history of fabricators.

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Jesse Pallotta – QT Art Camp

Grantee of Brooklyn Arts Fund

Project Profile: QT Art Camp Brings Free Art Workshops to Queer and Trans Youth

Photographer: Carmen DeCristo

Brooklyn Arts Council announced in March 2022 an allocation of over $1.3 million to 238 Brooklyn-based artists and cultural organizations. This year marks the highest number of grantees and awardees as well as the largest amount of funding BAC has ever distributed. Art Spiel in collaboration with Brooklyn Arts Council features some artists who received a Brooklyn Arts Fund, Local Arts Support, and/or Creative Equations Fund grant in 2022.

QT Art Camp just announced its summer series of art workshops for queer and trans youth taking place in New York. These workshops are free and welcome to youth ages 13-19. During the workshops, youth will work with NYC-based trans artists. Workshops including vogueing, film photography, painting and drawing. Youth are encouraged to learn new skills, discuss art with their peers and mentors, and will leave with a finished art piece. QT Art Camp is starting local but hopes to reach youth nationally, especially in smaller cities that don’t currently have many resources for queer and trans youth.

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Heidi Norton – The Edges of Everything at Wave Hill

Featured Artist

Heidi Norton and Eileen Jeng Lynch, curator.

Heidi Norton’s site-specific installation at Wave Hill examines the intricate links between humans and the natural world. Inspired by Wave Hill’s grounds and the Sun Porch’s architecture. Activated by sunlight, Norton’s installation is made of sculptures and large, vibrant photographic scrolls draping from the ceiling and undulating through the space. Norton says that the configuration of scrolls encompasses landscapes of present and past, incorporating recent photos that the artist took of the gardens, as well as archival images. Norton’s work draws on her rural upbringing by New Age homesteaders. She upcycles discarded plant clippings from Wave Hill’s gardens, repurposes compost and deconstructs past work, incorporating it into new pieces—speaking to sustainability, contemplating how memories are embedded in materials and landscapes, as well as how a sense of place is recorded through time and changes in the land. Heidi Norton with her site specific installation, The Edges of Everything at Wave Hill, July 16th – August 28th, 2022. Meet the Artist recording can be found here

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My Upstate Art Weekend Adventure

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Vanessa German,  Black on Black, 2021, Handmade folk art cloth Black woman pin cushion, glory, wood, love, astroturf, Black seed beads, confusion, Black rhinestone trim, Black bead trim, (they traded your grandmother for a handful of beads), vintage hand purse, rage, old doll parts, ptsd, the fallout from white supremacist delusion, cork, Black pigment, sorrow, vintage mirror, self loathing, cotton, a miracle, twine, tears, yarn, heartbreak, love. 26 x 18 x 9 1/2 in

Last weekend was the third annual Upstate Art Weekend, a wildly ambitious and fun three-day art fair that winds its way from Westchester to Catskill NY. Founded by impresario Helen Toomer in 2020, Upstate Art Weekend celebrates and promotes visual arts throughout the Hudson Valley. One hundred and forty venues participated this year, and there was everything from art in a big-box truck in Kerhonkson to the gallery/studio campus of Foreland in Catskill.  The intense heat of last week made this year’s event a challenge, but totally worth the sweat. Here is a brief travelogue of my schlep around the Hudson Valley: 

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Hew Locke: The Procession at the Tate Britain

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Each year The Tate Britain commissions a large-scale art installation for the iconic Duveen Galleries at the museum. This is a vast space, an art-filled hall, more than a typical gallery that winds its way down the center of the museum on the first floor. This year they tapped the Guyanese-British artist Hew Locke whose visual musings on migration, history, national identity and ritual are well known in the British art world. Locke has long worked these themes, but never on such a scale. It is a wildly ambitious vision that embraces his interests and presents a fully developed Universe.

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The Baroness at Mimosa House London

Art Spiel Photo Story

Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven (c. 1921-22), George Grantham Bain Collection, Library of Congress Prints & Photographs Division, LC 5677-2. From digital scan of photograph.
Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven (c. 1921-22), George Grantham Bain Collection, Library of Congress Prints & Photographs Division, LC 5677-2. From digital scan of photograph.

The Baroness at Mimosa House in London is a group exhibition dedicated to Dada artist, the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven (1874–1927). The exhibition manifests the ongoing influence of the Baroness on contemporary artists and poets, showcasing artworks and performative contributions created in homage to Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven or influenced by her radical work and effervescent personality. The show questions the legacy of Dada poetry and performance today, in a feminist and queer dimension in particular. How can artists navigate the art world, politics and society while creating a work which resists and disrupts the conventional canon? Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven becomes a role model and inspiration for international artists of different generations and media of work.

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Alicia Piller – Weathering Climates

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Alicia Piller in her Inglewood studio.

LA based artist Alicia Piller creates multi layered sculptures and installations in which material, media, form, and color metamorphose into alluring environments filled with cultural, political, and biographic references—latex balloons, sycamore seeds, silkscreen images fuse into a cosmos with visually complex and open ended layers of meaning.

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Water Conversations, The Goddess Brigid, and Mayflies

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49th Uranium Mining Legacy, Remembrance Day and Action Day, Navajo Nation, Grants Mining Belt, New Mexico, USA, July 12, 2018 .

Irish visual artist and researcher Anna Macleod has spent the last 15 years exploring the environmental, economic, spiritual, political, and scientific aspects of water through interdisciplinary collaborations, performance, public interventions, and socially engaged activism. 

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GLASSTRESS 2022: State of Mind at Fondazione Berengo Art Space

Art Spiel Photo Story

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Jimmie Durham, Untitled (detail), 2020- Photo credit Francesco Allegretto, Courtesy of the artist’s estate (6)

Coinciding with the 59th Venice Biennale, the seventh edition of Glasstress, running from 3 of June to 27 of November 2022 in Venice, features a group of leading contemporary artists from Europe, the United States, Latin America and Africa in an ambitious exhibition who explore the infinite creative possibilities of glass. The artworks will be exhibited at the Fondazione Berengo Art Space in Murano, an old abandoned furnace that was transformed into a unique exhibition space a few years ago. This extensive group show, curated by Adriano Berengo and Koen Vanmechelen with the contribution of Ludovico Pratesi, channels diverse contemporary art through the ancient art of Murano glassblowing, aiming to search for new contemporary visual vocabulary in glass art.

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Helen Twigge-Molecey: Fungi at Palazzo Mora

Featured Artist


Helen Twigge-Molecey with glass fungi sculptures photographed by Sylvain Deleu

UK based artist Helen Twigge-Molecey’s installation at Palazzo Mora in Venice depicts a group of colorful fungi. Each hand-blown recycled glass piece features individual shapes and interconnects with its neighbours through translucency and color. This installation is part of the Venice 2022 Art Biennial organized by the non-profit organization European Cultural Center, running from April 23, 2022 through November 27th, 2022.

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