Curator’s Statement

Ghost Town is a meditation on abandoned commercial enterprises, the result of an economic or natural disaster, in towns and cities everywhere. The emptiness and decay in the iconic signs and forlorn window shops are faithfully gathered and recorded by Patrick Sansone and Richard Klein in their photographs taken during road trips and in their on-going research. The poetics that these left-behind artifacts embody are rendered in photography and assemblage as each artist navigates their own feelings about this subject. 

Part homage, part cautionary tale, these works evoke memories of similar signs and locations that many of us have encountered in our own travels and daily life. The messages their images telegraph to me become an endless scroll of possible narratives. Who were the people that occupied these businesses? Why did the business, and often the entire town fold? 

The attraction I personally have to these works is about wistfulness for the remnants of the ghosts of the past in the cruddy, faded colors, peeling paint, and broken glass. I have a long-standing interest in the Moderne Design of the 1930s-60s used both in the architecture and the lettering on these storefronts and signs, which signaled velocity, ambition, and style. 

There is a frailty implied in these works, often tinged with a dry sense of humor. 

Ellen Hackl Fagan

Artist and Founder/Director of ODETTA Gallery

See the Storefronts below!

Click here for Patrick Sansone’s Storefront

Click here for Richard Klein’s Storefront!

If one could point to one color emblematic of the profound ambivalence and exasperating contradictions of our times, green would clinch the role.  Whilst cast as a symbol of life, luck, and hope, it also signals disorder, greed, and poison.  Juried by fellow NYAE members Alexandra Brock, Patricia Fabricant, and Christina Massey, “Green” comprises a group show of 30 + artists and allied whose works explore the dichotomies, mythologies, and suspicious underpinnings of chroma’s most fugitive player. 

Featuring work from:

Abisay Puentes | Alaiyo Bradshaw | Arlene Rush | Basia Tov | Carri Szoczek | Denise Sfraga | Eileen Ferera| Elizabeth Henneberry | Ellen Weider | Fran Beallor | Fukuko Harris | Gwyneth Leech | Jodie Fink | Katharina Bosse | Kristin Reed | Linda Vigdor | Marcy Rosewater | Margaret Roleke | Mark Rosenthal | Maxine Davidowitz | Melanie Brock | Morgan Petitpas | Nancy Gesimondo | Patricia Watwood | Petey Brown | Sarah Canfield | Shae Nadine | Suzanne Parker | Theophilus Gaffney | Victoria G Smith

The Valence Series of works are haptically curative. They are remnants of material investigations and they, like my current physical circumstances, are fragmentary alterations, transitory, and samplers for transformation.

I learned to sew, quilt, knit, and spin from a family of women makers and I studied Textile Surface Design by painting on paper. My default materials are linen, any woven fiber, paper pulp, gouache, and acrylics. Through these materials and mediums I developed a belief in the material language of abstraction.

The Valence works verbalize a range of forms and edges, using burlap and the textural weave and grid of woven fiber, against itself, as subject and matter. Through mono, contact, and stencil printing, the studies and works build a textual surface of layering, letting the textile be itself and paint be paint. Casual draping, fraying, folds, saturations, dripping, and varying surface tensions, speeds, and pressures are all considerations. Instead of a formal conclusionary construct, these works are meant as a less distilled, yet formative affirmation amid cacophony. Expressing an emotive plethora through disrupted aesthetics, these works link displacement and alteration as their conditions, and they play and blur the lines and spaces between high and low; rarified and every day; perception and imagination; known and unknown; careful and messy; and a thread of gathered references making for what Roland Barthes in A Lover’s Discourse describes as an affirmation of an unthought logic.

Trained as a Textile Designer yet thinking and practicing as a painter, Linda King Ferguson maintains studios in Marquette, MI and Nashville, TN. She has a MA from Rhode Island School of Design, MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts, and she studied at Penland School of Crafts and Academia Di Belle Arti, Perugia, Italy.

Artists, studio mates and domestic partners, Linda Griggs and Allen Hansen at first blush seem worlds apart stylistically. Griggs privileges a hard-edged realism; Hansen a numinous abstraction.   Yet, one intuits that these polarities are but contrarian shenanigans, a surrealist ruse to distract from their paired abandon into reckless romanticism.  Griggs’ seemingly unforgiving realism betrays a formalist obsession with painted color and linear design at arm’s length from the real world.  Her world is a garishly lit stage set, imagined one test shot at a time, devoid yet suggesting the unavoidable trespasses and clumsy human affairs we mistake for real life.  Hansen shares Griggs’ fetish for waking dreams and similarly toys with mood and melancholy, dark pools, and murky undertows.  If Griggs is a formalist posing as a realist, Hansen is the extreme close-up of a closeted narrative painter switching on the overhead to spy on deliciously shadowy goings-on rivaling creationist conspiracies and Hitchcock noirs. Taken together they are the perfect polar dive into the in-between space of February’s winter emptiness and its blasted flashes of fire and freeze that signal introspective epiphanies.  

Sunny Chapman delves into the profound depths of darkness, both literal and metaphorical, through a series of evocative paintings. The work explores the shadows that linger on the periphery of our consciousness, inviting the viewers to confront the enigmatic beauty within the obscurity. Each piece is a dance between light and dark, revealing the hidden narratives that unfold in the twilight realm. The compositions, born from the interplay of nature and night, provoke introspection on the complexities of the human experience-navigating the mysterious recesses of emotion, memory, and the unexplored corners of the psyche.

The Pattern and Decoration movement was born to counter male-centric minimalistic trends. Emerging in the 1970s, it foregrounded elaborate patterns interwoven with global influences and boldly challenged Eurocentric paradigms through its distinct voice, especially when interpreted through a feminist perspective. The "Process and Delight: The New P&D" exhibit illustrates this movement's enduring impact on contemporary art and pays homage to the tradition of the 1970s P&D movement.

The contemporary artists showcased, informed by this tradition, are more than mere revivalists. Their layered surfaces carve out immersive worlds that reflect our zeitgeist—spaces that celebrate complexity in form and content through an unabashedly maximalist ethos—artworks abundant with detail, pattern, and repetition. Highlighting the P&D continuity, one cannot miss the inclusion of Arlene Slavin and Dee Shapiro, two pivotal figures from the original movement. Slavin and Shapiro enrich the exhibit with their signature use of luminous colors and intricate grids. 

Marcy Rosenblat and Oriane Stender also use bold colors and detailed motifs, specifically referencing textiles, evoking an engaging dialogue with what was traditionally perceived as "women's work." Patricia Fabricant, David Ambrose, Charles Clary, and Kit Warren masterfully intertwine natural motifs with patterned details. Simultaneously, Sui Park and Jaynie Crimmins offer critiques on materialism, Park with her repurposed industrial objects, and Crimmins through her use of post-consumer remnants. The materiality in Caroline Wayne’s and Theda Sandiford’s works taps into deeply personal stories while resonating universally. Seren Morey, Amy Cheng, and Chris Arabadjis further diversify the collection, drawing intriguing lines between art and physics, abstraction, and representation.

Collectively, the voices in "Process and Delight" vibrantly celebrate the fusion of artistry, craft, technique, and the intertwining of beauty with excess.

— Etty Yaniv

For most visual artists, the bulk of time they spend creating work is alone in the studio. A studio can be a sanctuary, a second home, a vessel of inspiration. But a studio practice can also be very isolating. How can an artist know if what they are creating is communicating what's intended? How does the work resonate with the viewer? Artists are charged with not only the difficult work of transforming inspiration into expression, but also providing context for that expression. It can be challenging for some artists to explain their practice.

transcender was created in 2017 in Bushwick to help artists fill this void. Feeling support from a community of like-minded creators have helped move a practice forward, inspire new thinking, and open doors to new methods of presentation. transcender presentations have assisted presenters polish their descriptive skills for the benefit of viewers/collectors/curators, and are inspirational for the audience as well. transcender sessions fostered a nurturing environment, sorely missed since the sessions went dark in 2020.

Participating in transcender, presenting or attending, is free of charge. Every session will include roughly a half-dozen artists, each of whom will have 9 minutes to present (up to)10 images. The presenter can decide what kind of feedback they'd like to receive from attendees. Digital images will be projected for the audience. Sharilyn Neidhardt, a co-founder of transcender, will return to facilitate the first two sessions at Equity Gallery.

Wed. Oct. 18th and Wed. Nov. 15th, 7 :00 - 8:30 PM

Post-holiday sessions will be announced at a later date

How to apply:

Interested participants need to send an email with a single paragraph artist statement and five to seven images to info@nyartistsequity.org with the subject line “transcender application”. At this time we are not supporting video or musical accompaniment.

Oct. 18th Session applications are due EOD Mon. Oct 9th.

One application per artist. There are no fees and all are invited to participate, however Artist Equity Members will receive priority consideration.

Ecstatic Nature: Shiri Mordechay and Matt Rota

All art is seeded in some measure with dissatisfaction or anxiety with the world.  Hence the need to re-order an alternate or opposing view.  In some instances, particularly in times of cultural or economic stress, art acts to fracture reality to the very extent said realty is untenable or incomprehensible.  Novel forms, relationships and mythologies rear up in the pictorial space and augur a unique perspective that alters both inner being and world view.  This deconstruction and reordering is not without violence, a power struggle first witnessed by those unable to shield themselves from the marauding influxes unleased when cultural containers are compromised.  The rest of us, unseeing and insensitive, experience that battle as art.

In his newest series of drawings for Equity Gallery, Matt Rota dismisses his signature saturated dyes for the stark graphic of black and white, the latter an argot punctuated by an infinitesimal array of implying gestures and coded symbols.   A cue that he is threatening to abandon reality all together, and who can blame him, Rota retreats to the dream of history and casts its marauding gods, freaks, and half-crazed heretics in narrative intrigues lasting well past the sleeping hours.  The series, a frenzied scavenger hunt unearthing blasphemies, taboos and every god-forsaken mishap known to modern man, can only lead to the jumping off point---the cliff’s edge that separates the agnostics from the true believers.  The former, high-minded and vainglorious, are ever ready to fall on their swords in a last-ditch effort at redemption whilst the latter blunders on, occasionally committing random acts of revenge when reality threatens to close in. 

Double billed with Rota, Shiri Mordechay is similarly showing a new series of works on paper at Equity.   Like Rota, Mordechay’s new work evinces a masterful exploitation of the immediacy and spontaneity of drawing⎯in particular a compelling balance between narrative potential and the veiled coding proffered by water media.  And while Rota reaches for a dissonant ensemble of line expressions, from skittish jumps to adrenaline-pumped swipes, to alchemize his compositions, Modechay floods the picture plane leaving Rorschach bleeds, tide marks, and a  layered sediment of forms, simultaneously ethereal, dense, and teeming with the alien life. 

Strange birds both, save Mordechay, has largely dispelled with any seeming effort to temper her wild imaginings with the slightest reference to the outside world.   Her expedition is a DUI joyride to the phantasmagoric underbelly of the unconscious.  Technicolor lizards, ruffed changelings, assorted livestock, and poison fruit collide in a giddy idyll—a pagan forerunner to a Thanksgiving feast. 

The haunting question however is whether Mordechay is pulling our leg; are these works simply (as she states) traces of the wonderous wanderings of an unquestionably inventive mind or are we glimpsing the preternatural sentience of a world to come?

Mark LaRiviere first impulse is to make convincing people—to give them a solid, lasting form. He adds that, “always, the question remains; how can I bring forth these figures honestly, reflecting a sense of truth that feels in sync with our time.  That spark of truth becomes apparent as I work and search for the rhythms, forms, movements and a certain light that resides in all things”.

Fay Ku: Eye Teeth

Fay Ku creates worlds inhabited by women and children engaged in often troubling or even demonic behaviors which evince cultural, sexual, and political identities, power dynamics, social and familial conflicts—the full spectrum of human behavior. Ku adds that, “I suspect my narratives arise from my personal experience of displacement as an immigrant.  My parents and I carried our culture within ourselves, disconnected from our physical reality”.  In her artwork, this cultural isolation is seen as figures drawn against stark backgrounds.  “My characters have little need for a physical setting”, Ku notes, “because they exist in a psychological and not a concrete realm.”   

Apropos of its 77 - year legacy supporting emerging artists, NYAE opens the fall season with an exhibition featuring artists participating in the NYSCA-funded Paying Artist Program which awards stipends for new projects.

Opening Reception: September 7, 6pm - 8pm

Srishti Dass recently earned a BFA at the School of Visual Arts, New York. Born and raised in New Delhi, Dass’ abstract drawings trace the flow of energy connecting the mind and the outside world as the former seeks peace through introspection. 

Ricki Dwyer is an artist and educator working between San Francisco and Brooklyn. His practice considers weaving and craft in both theory and practice and honors drapery as the negotiation that things will never fall the same way twice. 

Maryanne Pollock received a BFA from Tyler School of Art and continued studies at the Pennsylvania Academy, the Corcoran, and American University. Pollock’s project experiments with draping and hanging silkscreened fabric to create tents that transform outdoor spaces into a place of refuge, protection, and meditation. 

Colette Robbins is a hybrid digital-analog sculptor, educator, and curator. Her sculptures include motifs of abstracted and remixed ancient symbols, archaic smiles, augmented Greco-Roman heads, and detailed rocky textures. This eclectic imagery references occultism, antiquated medical practices, neuroscience, and psychology. 

Summertime Rolls is a classic seasonal survey show featuring artists addicted to materials and processes. The exhibition is organized by Brooklyn-based painter Benjamin Pritchard who exhibits in the New York and Detroit areas.

“The decision to follow ones own thinking leads to strange outcomes.

The Artists in this group all have taken on the direct and difficult work of pursuing a personal perspective into the world unmitigated by style or fashion or larger forces whether by strength of will or  incapability to do otherwise..

 This quality or disposition around thinking and making from a personal idiosyncratic place is the central thing I love about each of the artists in this show and also what got me curious about how the work would all interact together.

Artwork that starts from this simple place of the self and feelings and thinking sympathetically about ones ideas leads to interesting realms.

My plan is to see how these different streams of thinking and making come together Into a larger thing.

Ben Pritchard

Featured Artists:

Peter Bonner | Fiona Buchanan | Guy Corriero | Carol Diamond | Martin Dull | Charles Goldman David McDonough | Nikki Mehle | Ilse Murdock | Whitney Oldenburg | Shivani Patel | James Prez | Ben Pritchard | Kim Reinhardt | Jason Rohlf | Mark Sengbusch | Melissa Staiger | Christina Straight | Natasha Wright | Andrew Zarou

Organized by: Ben Pritchard

Beginning in ancient Greece and up through the modern era, poets and painters have portrayed seemingly guileless, chimeric creatures with enchanting voices that unfortunately forebode destruction.  First mentioned in Homer’s Odyssey, these hallucinatory beings were heard offstage, leaving their physical characteristics to be imagined by the reader.  Later they were described as part human and part bird –and capable of playing string instruments such as the lyre.  These initial descriptions envisioned sirens of both sexes but by the Middle Ages, sirens were depicted solely as female and their hybrid natures more complex to include human heads and torsos combined with wings, claws and fishtails.  

Increasingly, particularly in Christian iconography, sirens were seen as a symbol of irresistible temptation leading to man’s downfall and death.  In the 17th century, the age of exploration, sirens were situated on exotic islands steep with rocky cliffs and lashed by high seas.  Her appearance changed to that of a woman fish,  mermaid-like, an evolution that  her favored prey were unsuspecting mariners who Leonardo da Vinci wrote,  would be first lulled to sleep by the siren’s sweet song and then murdered by them.  

In modern times, sirens lost their fish tails and were depicted as fully human; their fabled songs, whilst still spellbinding, simply detained travelers and made them forget their native lands—rather than lure them to a certain death.  Divested of their murderous reputations, sirens were at worst talented courtesans with questionable morals.  The curators of Siren: Reinterpreting the Temptress Song propose to continue this rehabilitation and evolution of the siren and suggest that all along her song was indeed irresistible –but her enchantment did not cause misfortune rather it was meant to be an impossible-to-ignore warning sign of grounding shoals and capsizing squalls.  Her songs inviting respite and temporary forgetfulness can too be viewed as a salve—a psychological waystation to regroup before taking up one’s duties and travels with renewed vigor.   

One imagines that in our present time the siren’s song grows ever louder –like an incessant gale wind. She panics.  The siren’s exotic locales have all but disappeared, her beloved seas choked with the detritus of a wasteful and selfish culture that celebrates greed and injustice.   We push ourselves and others to exhaustion ---happiness a forever out of reach destination informed by a thousand self-righteous demands and entitlements while she serenades us to stay and quiet. Lastly, we fight about everything,  each party insisting the other is in the wrong.  “Hush” the siren sings. Rest your weary head and let things be.  

Curated by Carri Skoczek and Michael Gormley

NYAE proudly presents Linnea Paskow in the Project Room at Equity Gallery.

“Demons, killers, fairies, and angels come to me in night visions. Staring into the dark canvas,

scraping paint, mushing colors gives them faces and names. Sometimes they come with stories

and sometimes they are silent, their hands praying that they will wake up again. Let us meet in

the dark woods to follow their stories. Let them ignore me or be amused by my company.

Scratch at the door and meet the stranger who stands at the threshold.”

Linnea Paskow

See Linnea’s work online through our SIREN storefront below

Participating Artists:

J[ulie] L[ee] Abraham / Lee Apt / Linda King Ferguson / Ryan J. Brady /KAYla gibbons / Kyra Husbands / Paul Michael Graves / Jim Osman / Myke Karlowski / Esther Podemski / Kim Uchiyama / Beth Reisman / Gary Stephan / Ellen Weider / Kevin Wixted

Opening Reception: Thursday, May 11th at 6PM

245 Broome Street, NY

The modernism informing Geometric Abstraction, as filtered through the Greenbergian lens, opened a formalist critique presenting a new reality distilled to its purest, most basic structure ⎯a seemingly impossible utopian vision comprising a pure and harmonious expression of space, color, light, and design. Informed and permissible aesthetic debates on an artwork’s perceived merit (or lack) focused on this reductive plasticity as form, as opposed to content, given modernism’s wholesale rejection of the need to paint or sculpt “something” or represent or allude to anything outside of itself. 

The curators of The New Math propose a number of artists working today whose aims closely align with those of the transcendental painters, and who as quoted by TPG artist Raymond Jonson, seek “to carry painting beyond the appearance of the physical world… and widen the horizon of art”. Though their approaches, methods and outcomes when dealing with their plastic problems vary from a scientific balancing of the elements involved to an emotive expression of the creative urge itself, overall they share an overarching metaphysical motivation and an aspirant vision that reflects upon the cultural developments, philosophical arguments and societal divides of our time.

The West Harlem Art Fund and NY Artist Equity Association are proud to present sculptor Miguel Otero Fuentes and his latest work XOXO on Governors Island this spring in Nolan Park. “XOXO” is an interactive installation that invites the public to perform as shapes of love within a heart-shaped opening framed by two interlocking circles. Beyond the physical presence of this proposal, the project remains forever in transition as it displays ephemeral interactions with the public and it extends into digital space when its turned to pixels and is shared/ stored in digital social platforms. Public interaction is the primary material used to convert this sculpture into a multi-dimensional sphere of connection and unity.

About the Artist:
Miguel Otero Fuentes is a Puerto Rico-born sculptor and architect skilled in façade system design, 3D modeling, and at facilitating collaboration between design and engineering teams. He holds a Master of Architecture degree from Georgia Institute of Technology, where he was awarded the T. Gordon Little Fellowship, participated in design-build studios, worked as a teaching assistant abroad and was involved in research in the areas of digital design and fabrication. During his academic career, he won three first-place prizes including the distinguished Portman Prize. He holds a Bachelor of Environmental Design degree (with honors) from the University of Puerto Rico. 

XOXO will be on display from May 5th through October 31th at Nolan Park on Governers Island. Governers Island is open every day of the week. 

Find out more information here!

This project is made possible by generous funding from NYSCA

Diversity, equity, inclusion, and access are the trending buzz words defining the gains, and alarming backlash, surrounding the intent to level the cultural playing field. An open arts community representative of the greater world it informs was the dream of NYAE’s founders—though in 1947, the year the association was founded, that liberal aspiration was nothing short of radical in a world dominated by straight white males.

Seventy-five years later and that hard won advance has seen significant gains not only in the arts but in many commercial, professional, and societal vectors. Said gains now seem commonplace as we saunter from one Lower East Side gallery to the next before stopping at a chic sidewalk café for an iced chai latte. Its near impossible to imagine these same streets teeming with recent immigrants fighting for some small portion of the cultural and economic resources seeming, for the first time, to be within their reach. Within the Five Point district they converged—in American’s original melting pot. The first settlers were newly emancipated blacks and ethnic Irish, their cohabitation signaling the first large-scale instance of volitional racial integration in American history. Successive waves followed, Italians, Eastern European Jews, Chinese and more recently Latins—each group drawing lines in the sand, desperate for a foothold in the mythic American dream.

We look back at that time of opportune, if not forced co-habituation and cognizant of the many tensions between competing groups that often led to violence, question if there are not certain parallels with our own time. On the national and international stage there is an abundance of evidence indicating that present gains pointing towards a truly equitable world are at best tenuous and on a more personal level, our own thoughts and actions are likely far from utopian when we perceive our own needs threatened. How often are we victimized by our own greed, forever grabbing for more than we need while fearful that there will never be enough? How do we honestly feel about those that look and act differently from us?

Taking the Five Points neighborhood as a starting point, NYAE invites artists to create works that foreground and explore the multiplicity of issues arising in a society that seeks to celebrate a diversity of being.

Baris Gokturk

is a Turkish artist living and working in Brooklyn, New York. He teaches at John Hopkins University, Parsons School of Design and Columbia University where he has got his MFA in 2020. He was an ApexArt fellow in Seoul, artist-in-residence at ISCP, LMCC and YADDO, as well as a participant in Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and SOMA Mexico. Gokturk has shown his work internationally in the US, Germany, Spain, France, Korea, Turkey and Puerto Rico. Recent museum exhibitions include Pera Museum in Istanbul and SECCA in Winston-Salem, NC. He recently completed a mural for Columbia University’s Butler Library and a commission by the Public Art Fund as part of Art on the Grid. His solo exhibition Public Secret could be seen at Helena Anrather Gallery in New York.

Artist Statement

My work is between and across media. I am particularly interested in the idea of transposition, creating a visual system seemingly made for one medium (eg. drawing) and then treating it in another medium (eg. sculpture). I reshuffle conceived notions about traditional media such as drawing, painting and sculpture. I break each down to its fundamental elements and reconfigure them as parts of the other. The physical slippages between image, surface and material in my work is a reflection of the conceptual slippages between image and meaning in the wider cultural and political contexts.

Available work

Riad Miah

was born in Trinidad and currently lives and works in New York City. Miah attended the School of Visual Arts and The Ohio State University. His post-graduate work consisted of a year-long residency at H.I.S.K located in Belgium and Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. His work has been exhibited at Wave Hill, Simon Gallery, Sperone Westwater Gallery, Rooster Contemporary Art, Lesley Heller Work- shop, Baltimore Museum of Contemporary Art, White Box Gallery, and deluxe projects.

His work has been shown internationally, including in Scotland, China, Belgium, and Hungary, and he has participated in the artist residencies: Vermont Studio Center and Germination Europe.

He’s received awards, including a Painting Fellowship from New York Foundation for the Arts. He teaches at Pratt Institute and has taught at Parsons, Sarah Lawrence College, Kean University, and Montclair State University.

His works are included in private, universities, and cooperate collections, including Novar- tis. He is a co-editor for Two Coats of Paint, published in Vasari 21, Painters On Paintings, and Art Savvy.

MY EYES JUST HEARD MY BRAIN

By Sharon Butler

As I walk through the dimly lit space behind an elegantly nostal- gic bespoke clothing store on the Lower East Side, I feel as if I’ve landed in “Desperately Seeking Susan,” the iconic film starring Madonna that captured New York creative life of the 1980s. On the other side of a worn red curtain looms Riad Miah’s bright, busy studio. Confronting me is a plethora of colorful canvases, covered with writhing shapes, floating freely on irregular canvases. They make an impression, summoning Elizabeth Murray’s work as they also distinguish themselves with innovative effects. Some of the shapes are painted on the back of shiny Dura-Lar that has been attached to the edges, as if they were escaping or perhaps growing from the primary painting. Miah is enthralled with the variety of surfaces and paints available to him, mixing thick paint with thin, shiny with flat, combining all and sundry to create lively abstract entities that rise and wriggle next to one another but rarely overlap or make contact.

There is a wide range of sources and inspirations for the shapes in Miah’s work. They recall punctuation, clouds, paisleys, and even visual tropes from famous paintings, notably Matisse’s. Miah turns and multiplies the French modernist’s figures and dancers to create flat, patterned compositions that, in an unexpected twist, sometimes reclaim the fabrics, costumes, and carpets that Matisse also depicted in his work. At first Matisse used these as background decoration, but eventually he began to look to them for radical approaches to composition that eschewed linear perspective and explored idiosyncratic harmonies of color and line. Miah too adopts the flatness of fabric patterns while ignoring their geometric underpinnings, lending his work a loopy, carefree instability.

His approach is not, however, glancing or unserious. One of Miah’s recurrent shapes is a large hand-drawn circle with puffy edges that looks a bit like one of the weather emojis on an iPhone keyboard. The shape appears in the foreground and thebackground, sometimes as an opaque blob, other times in outline. For Miah, the shape functions more broadly and enigmatically, representing a thought bubble—more pointedly, the abstract activity and output of thinking. He is after something more considered than just a beautiful painting.

His personal history is an important factor in his offbeat aesthetic. When he was eight, his family moved from Trinidad to New York City, where he still lives and works. His bright, vivid colors hark back to his early Caribbean experience. The shaped canvases can be seen as fragments—not so much of larger images as of the city itself, where views of the moody sky are invariably framed by the geometries of surrounding skyscrapers. Closer to the ground, Miah as a child was inspired by graffiti artists for whom tagging was a dangerous obsession that risked life and liberty. His freewheeling, curvy paint handling conjures the subway art that was ubiquitous in pre-gentrification NYC and is still abundant.

Like Mary Heilmann, one of his mentors in art school, Miah is drawn to challenging, even eccentric compositional approaches. He begins with pasted-paper and gouache studies to determine canvas formats, color, and internal shapes, some of which might be based on accidental floor spatter. But once his brushes hit the constructed canvases, he moves intuitively, workingloosely from the sketches and color studies, improvising along the way. He has a lively mind that moves from shape to shape, canvas to canvas, and it’s easy to imagine him reveling in images and riffing on them down the line. His process allows for both careful plotting and accidental surprises, and always for asking what the endeavor of painting really means— a question that has challenged many a painter since the 1970s. While he is certainly methodical, his approach is fundamentally searching and open-ended. Finishing a painting, he says, is overrated.

Available Works

Overview

Winter Palace references the St. Petersburg palace that served as the official residence of the Russian Emperor from 1732 to 1917. The palace was conceived as a modern town residence incorporated into the fabric of St. Petersburg—a new metropolis rising from the dark wetlands bordering the Baltic.

St. Petersburg soon rivaled even the most splendid cities being erected by powerful European sovereigns---its canals recalling Venice, its grand palaces outshining Versailles. Yet against this backdrop of magnificence and extravagance, of sophistication and manners, was the grim reality of life in Russia and its oppressive culture of feudal servitude still mired in the Middle Ages. As the Winter Palace grew in richness and splendor, so did Russian serfdom.
This led commenters to describe the palace as a place of "gilded squalor” ⎯a lavish stage for masquerade balls, court intrigues, bloody power struggles and regicide. The last Russian regent to lay claim to imperial power was the fated Tsar Nicolas II and the Winter Palace, long the symbol of that power, was to be at the center and catalyst of some of the most momentous happenings in Russia's early 20th century history.

The Exhibition

One may view our own polarized and contradictory time as mirroring the crashing dichotomies that colored 19th Century St. Petersburg. Russia looms large in our nation’s postwar consciousness as the “other”, the ideological disruptor and existential threat to Western cannons and the greater world order. Yet alongside this seeming insatiable appetite for ruthlessness and wealth lies the sublime heights of culture achieved by Russia’s artists, the stark beauty of her winter landscape and the deep passions of her people. The contrasts mystify us. Winter Palace seeks to explore these themes and profundities with works by the artists listed below. Artist works will include paintings, drawings, collage, tapestry, sculpture (indoors and out), dolls and ceramics all displayed within a theatrical staging of palace opulence.

Participating Artists

Jamie Adams, Sunny Chapman, Gigi Chen, Anna Cone, Pablo Garcia, Amani Heywood, Howard Kalish, Julian Kalwinowski, Ariel Kleinberg, Margret Krug, Krista LaBella, Adrian Milton, Shiri Mordechay, Sean O'Connor, Matt Nolen, Andrew Robinson, Carri Skoczek, Manju Shandler

Curated By

Michael Gormley

Available Works

Peripheral Visions

By Susan Stillman

What was the first work of art you recall having an impact on you? How did it change you?

“I don’t have a recollection of visiting a museum as a child, but I do remember lying awake excitedly while my parents attended the 1st grade book fair one evening. I had fallen in love with a lavishly illustrated book of fairy tales that I requested they buy for me. I remember the gorgeous imagery and colors were thrilling and kept me awake in anticipation.”

What, if any, allied arts, sciences or humanities (i.e., music, literature) influence your practice?

“I’ve always been a reader, and a lover of music. I feel the creative impulse is much the same in all the arts and I enjoy reading about the creative process in all disciplines.”

At what point did you decide to become an artist? Was your path continuous or interrupted?

“I made up my mind in grade school that I was going to be an artist, and that has never changed, or been interrupted. I drew, painted, took classes outside of school, and studied anatomy as a teenager. I didn’t anticipate that I would become an educator in my early days, but I fell in love with art school at RISD and I’ve been teaching in a college classroom ever since.”

What media do you work with most often? What appeals to you most about that media?

“I work in acrylic but I began as an oil painter. I became allergic to oils in my 30’s and have never looked back. With acrylics, you can continuously paint without any drying time. I find my paintings are clearer and brighter than when I worked in oils. The heavily textured surfaces I prepare on my supports insure I don’t get mired in details.”

Are there other artists, schools, periods, or movements (historical or contemporary) that you feel your work responds to or is in conversation with?

“I feel very rooted in the American canon of painters. I’ve been influenced by Bellows, Diebenkorn, Porter, Freilicher, and Hopper. Lately though, I feel very connected to Morandi. My work centers on being present in observation of minute changes in light and form. I return to the same places again and again, and these variations begin to accrue meaning for me. The repetition of place and the intimacy of my environment brings to mind how Morandi used his limited trove of objects as an infinite source of study.”

Tell us about your current studio work and specifically the work you are presenting in our project space. What themes, emotions, or events (real or imagined) are you seeking to represent or respond to.

“This project, Peripheral Visions, is an ongoing series of small works that addresses the sensation of moving briskly through my own suburban landscape, capturing fragmentary views. I’ve produced over 100 small panels to date, with sizes from 8” x 10” on cradled wood panels. These are designed to be viewed individually and in various groupings and installations. I’m looking forward to presenting the project in the Gillette Gallery at the Garrison Art Center this coming May/June 2023.”

“I’m interested in the ephemeral, homing in on moments when light transforms things we would normally ignore. With early evening walks in my hilly Westchester neighborhood, I’m on the lookout for sudden shifts in color brought on by the changing light. Many views have become familiar motifs repeated in different seasons and times of day.”

“The light that I capture only exists for a few seconds. I document these views with my camera and use the archive of images to recall what I felt at the specific moment. The process emphasizes that nothing observed is fixed, as light shifts second to second. Color is transitory by nature, and paying close attention is what fuels my work.”

“This series with its small-scale panels has allowed me to document more of the thousands of moments I have archived over the years than I could ever accomplish in larger works. The informality of the compositions and the fluid execution of the paintings mimics the myriad brief impressions we observe as we move through our days.”

Available Works

Ben La Rocco’s Sculpture

Recently, Ben LaRocco and I were discussing what was to be done about the  floating island of garbage in the Pacific Ocean, now apparently equal in  area to Rhode Island. I offered the usual arguments based on outrage. It  has to be cleaned up, of course. The garbage threatens marine life and  shows lack of care and respect for the Earth. What we have created, done to the world, brings feelings of grief. Above all, it is ugly. 

“Is it?” Ben asked. “Why not declare it art? And, as art, curate it!”  

If the island is a grievous reflection of our behavior, then shouldn’t we honor  it? Freud said that which remains unconscious undergoes no alteration with time.  LaRocco brings the grief, in material form, into daylight, into his studio. If  the ills of the world are to be cured (shares a root with ‘curate’), first they  have to be valued- held in aesthetic esteem and held up to aesthetic  scrutiny. Ben sees that we live in a swirl of detritus. As residents, therefore,  it behooves us to work on it, to make it beautiful. 

Saving the world with art practice is a precarious position, but, hey, maybe  sculpture and poetry can succeed where politics fail.  

Nature is never out of balance in form, light and color. How? Cezanne called it harmony and believed it took place in the way light struck the eye. So an observer is the other half of the equation. Now, the observer is in the experience as is the eye and the nerves that fire. Suddenly, the range of activity and process becomes pretty infinite. I think LaRocco argues that this is a good thing. So how to proceed with these self-imploding categories? When a whole bumps up against its boundaries it becomes “part” again, and the process goes on.

It has been said that paintings proceed to finish through alternate cycles of  affirmation and negation on the part of the artist. Building and erasing. This  seems self evident but LaRocco calls out this idea for what it is, a fantasy. A  

fantasy hard wired in us for whom beginning, middle, and end are a given.  He proceeds via accretion, mimicking the behavior of a coral reef. As  in a tropical reef, the focus of interest and beauty is scaleless, proceeding  from microscopic to very large incrementally, with no possible location for the jumps between contiguous scales. These sculptures are the result of a slow, incremental, additive process. As such, they outstrip the subjective  reach of the artist’s hand and intention. No single action is decisive. 

This work asks us, the viewers, to shed certain assumptions of  privilege implied in authorship. I, and most of my painter friends, hope to  gain insight from our activity, and pass that insight on to the public through exhibitions. Ben makes no such claims. He displaces the ‘insight’ onto  the viewer. I may prefer this object to that one, but that’s on me and my  subjectivity. The operational fantasy here is that every part is as interesting  as every other part, throwing us back into wild nature. The artist has  spoken to me about the equal fascination in all the activities of his daily life;  teaching, child rearing, relationship work, and cleaning up his backyard. Art  making is another daily action without special emphasis. 

LaRocco’s claim is that we are looking not at intention, but behavior. And  not only the artist’s behavior, but that of the world. Cycles of growth and  decay. Place is the emphasis here, not space. Specificity trumps  “abstraction”. By using bits and pieces gleaned from the street, objects and  paint left over from job or home construction, LaRocco extends ‘place’ from  his studio and basement to the neighborhood, sometimes incorporating artworks found on the sidewalk into his practice. “Ownership” really has no  relevance in the reef, just usefulness. 

Peter Acheson

Available Works

AMY BASSIN: FAMILIAL GHOSTS

Queering the Photograph 

by Michael Gormley 

Amy Bassin queers photography.  Her current project, Familial Ghosts, comprises a series of altered images derived from an inherited slide collection documenting decades of childhood vacations, outings, and parties with her family.  Choosing slides randomly, Bassin alters the image using wax, ink, and cleaning products before digitally reconstituting the photographic print. 

In keeping with the experimental focus of Knight Lawrence Web Projects, Bassin is still in the early stages of the Familial Ghosts series.   Chance, and allowing random materiality effects, remains at the heart of the project.  Both reference classic surrealist techniques meant to reveal unconscious associations and incite altered states of awareness.  Bassin adds, “Meret Oppenheim’s fur-lined teacup is the first work of art that I remember having the most impact on me as a teenager. I was inspired by her bizarre combination of found objects that seemed to challenge all reason with the unexpected subconscious and poetic associations in the work. The concept of transforming found, every day, familiar objects has been a reoccurring theme in my work.”   

For those old enough to remember, Familial Ghosts # 3 recalls the ghost -like and somewhat scary silhouetted figures and scenes burned out in the negatives that came with processed film.  Equally haunting, Familial Ghosts # 3 recalls Gerhard Richter’s ghosting---a record of who is missing.

Avalible Works

2022 NYAE Annual Member’s Invitational

December 8 - January 8, 2023

Jurors

Ambre Kelley

Michael Brennan

Robyn Gibson

Christopher Stout

Participating Artists

Abisay Puentes . Balbir Krishan . Barbara Laube . Bonnie Ralston . Brenda Zlamany Carol Bruns . Chuck Fischer . Cynthia Reynolds . David Genest . Elizabeth Jordan . Elizabeth Keithline . Ellen Maidman-Tanner . Ellen Weider . Rita Finnegan . Sharilyn Neidhardt . Stacey Creem . Sunny Chapman . Susan Hensel . Susan Stillman . Theresa DeSalvio . Toshiko Kitano Groner . Victoria Smith

VARIATIONS ON A BLOOM

Deborah Sherman

Deborah Sherman paints flowers or rather she makes paintings that reference flowers– there’s a difference.  “I’ve returned to this theme time and time again”, Sherman notes, “I paint landscapes, still lifes, and figures but floral compositions are an obsession.”  Upon viewing these works one immediately senses a tension between the real versus an imagined world—a baited hook that pulls equally on the maker and the viewer. When one considers Sherman’s early artistic training and the instructors she gravitated to, this push-pull between realism and abstraction makes sense.  She began taking classes with the celebrated realist Nelson Shanks (1937 – 2015) at the National Academy School; he advocated working from direct observation while employing a full-chroma palette to develop form and illusionistic space through subtle color transitions.

Sherman subsequently obtained an MFA from Parsons and studied with (among others) Leland Bell, Graham Nickson, and Peter Agostini who likewise advocated an experiential approach to picture making albeit with an emphasis on plastic expression and formalist concerns over realistic depiction. “Variations on the Theme”, depicted on the right, exemplifies this more modernist leaning. Though there are vestiges of recessional space and three-dimensional form, the painting succeeds in its celebration of natural form through an expressive emphasis on composition, color, and line. “Poetry means a lot to me”, Sherman adds, “it informs my way of thinking about the works and how I paint. So rather than being descriptive about working from nature—I try to evoke its fleeting appearances with mark-making that is both calligraphic and elusive.”

Though Sherman’s approach to the floral motif leans into the abstract, they evince a very real connection to nature and a commitment to its preservation. “My art isn’t overtly political and does not offer a narrative; it reflects my deep involvement and appreciation of the spirit of nature, my fascination with the sense of sight, and my belief in the importance of freedom of expression in art and the world.  I felt great sorrow for all the suffering brought on during the pandemic.  I began to see my work as having the potential to bring joy to the viewer and counteract the seeming insurmountable challenges we were all facing.” 

The tondo “earth” shaped canvases often employed by Sherman in her flower series echoes her view on sustainability.  She adds, “It’s my way of making a statement about my dedication to the preservation of the environment”.   There is also a subtle feminist message being imparted.  Like “Variations of a Theme”, “From My Studio” and “Flower Study” employ tondo shaped canvases—ovals that in tandem with Sherman’s energetic and weaving paint handling, floral motifs, and decorative patterning recall embroidery or tapestry.

Those illusions signal gender roles, binary thought and hierarchal positioning that amplify her messaging about personal expression, the aesthetics of beauty, and the sanctity of nature.  Embroidery, tapestry, and other textile-related crafts are traditionally associated with women while painting, historically positioned as distinct from and in a cultural class above craft, has been seen as the province of men.  Sherman manages to meld craft and painting into a singular expression– albeit a challenged one. 

Our collective culture’s desire for spectacle, entertainment art, and high-tech shenanigans renders the type of hand-made art that Sherman creates as seemingly off-trend.  In fact, her work is a siren call reclaiming the sensual and visual aspects of human existence– the very salve we need to balance deadening screen time and robotic scrolling. Sherman’s work requires us to deconstruct our prejudices and viewing habits, or at the very least be aware of them, by reenergizing a traditional motif and media with a direct and fresh infusion of contemporary meaning.