NYAE Curatorial Residency Program (2020 - Ongoing)
Curating exhibitions is a significant and important benefit of NYAE membership--as the association is founded on the empowering principal of artists helping other artists. Yet many members do not avail themselves of this opportunity, likely given the complexity of the undertaking. Alternatively, submitted projects often demonstrate a limited understanding of planning and lack aesthetic merit. The NYAE curatorial residency aims to mitigate these shortcomings with goal-based instruction, guided mentor and peer meetings, independent research and administrative support.
2020 CURATORIAL RESIDENCY PROGRAM
“The Center Cannot Hold”
February 12 — March 7, 2020
Artists: Lexi Axon, Guy de Baere, Mark Bouthilette, Chellis Baird, Ellen Hackl Fagan, Erin Gleason, Andrew Hockenberry, Markus Holtby, Mija Jung, Kelly Olshan, Claudia Renfro, Vincent Romaniello, Terry Rosenberg, María Durán Sampedro, Kristen Schiele, Linda Streicher, Deborah Winiarski
Curated by: Lexi Axon, Guy De Baere, María Durán Sampedro, Hayley Ferber, Mija Jung, Kelly Olshan
Organized by: Eric Sutphin
The Center Cannot Hold is a collaborative project comprising 6 curators and featuring the work of 17 emerging and established artists working in drawing, painting, photography, and mixed media. Fields of diffuse color and stains appear as proxies for escape or reprieve while geometric abstraction signals a sense of order and structure. These formal strategies trigger associations to the urban landscape as a site fraught with contradictory forces; no blueprints, no site inspections.
The artists in this exhibition depart from the laws of spatial logic, creating works that upend physical and metaphysical conventions. Using diaphanous layers to construct impossible spaces, investigating spatial relationships, the artists make the intangible habitable. The Center Cannot Hold is a meditation on the perpetual sense of expansion and contraction that comprises urban experience.
Curator Bios:
Lexi Axon's first exhibitions in the late 1980s New York East Village and Paris were attended by critic Maurice Poirier, a Clark Gable impersonator, Andy Warhol, New York Times and Paris editors. BFA Syracuse University Visual and Performing Arts with Friedl Dzubas, Judith Rothschild a Hans Hoffman colleague, Larry Bakke; MFA CUNY Hunter College in Painting during Robert Morris and Rosalind Krauss tenures.
McCrady Axon’s parents were jazz musicians, and as a child, the three moved often after a tragic event. A lifelong artist, awards and exhibitions also include NEFA, CT Commission on the Arts, New York University NEA digital grant, Smith College, Sao Paolo Biennial, East Village NYC and London.
Only If We Wish To brings together 15 artists of various backgrounds united by works that decontextualize and undress the layered complexities that center around forms, systems, bodies, freedom, and communal empathy.
Curated by Shane Allen, Cecilia André, Hadass Backman, Shwarga Bhattacharjee, Gosha Karpowicz, A. Morgan McKendry, and Alison Pirie. All were selected as participants in The New York Artists Equity Association’s Spring Curatorial Residency. This residency was established to meet the NYAEA’s core value of “artists helping artists” empowering those with a passion for curation with guidance, support, and instruction through the complexities of initiating an exhibition.
ABOUT THE RESIDENCY LEADERS:
Luciana Solano is an independent curator based in Brooklyn, New York. Her multidisciplinary projects focus on the intersection between art, science and language in contemporary environments.
Solano is particularly interested in art exhibitions that reconfigure physical and spatial relationships with the viewer. She brings a unique perspective to her curatorial platform after working in the field of Biological and Computer Sciences, for which she holds undergraduate and graduate degrees. She serves as a trustee for the New York Artists Equity Association.
Hayley Ferber is an independent curator, educator and artist living in Brooklyn, NY. Her curatorial practice explores the dichotomy of abstract and representational art. She further examines this division through her artistic process of creating artist's books.
Hayley’s professional mission is to initiate and support creative opportunities in the arts. She accomplishes this in her daily role as Deputy Director of Chashama, a non-profit organization that transforms unused real estate into artist studios and exhibition spaces.
She received her BS in Studio Art from New York University and her MAT in Visual Art & Design Education from the Rhode Island School of Design. Hayley is an Emerald Member of the New York Artists Equity Association.
ABOUT THE CURATORS
Exploring the key components of what pushes both yesterday’s and today’s culture, Shane Allen is driven to seek out and tell the stories that deserve to be told. As the Editor in Chief of Populist Magazine, he interviews and films an eclectic pallet of artists from a wide range of mediums. Shane graduated from Brooklyn College with a degree in Film Production in 2018. Since, he has worked primarily in both film and photography as well as administration for the arts.
Cecilia André is an immigrant Brazilian artist and curator residing in New York City for three decades. Art tours were her first curatorial projects. For nine years she has led small groups around NYC galleries offering routes of pre-selected galleries most indicative of the contemporary art scene. By translating any unnecessary art-speak and making the content of the shows transparent, Cecilia promotes dynamic discussions amongst participants, stirring and empowering them to elaborate their own views on art.
In her studio, Cecilia focuses her artistic research on light and colors. She creates immersive public installations where malleable transparencies generate color shadows. In the last four years, Cecilia participated in two residencies for outdoor projects where her ideas could evolve in dialogue with peer artists.Pedagogically, Cecilia devises non-traditional methods of teaching art whether it be teaching in public and/or in progressive schools, in her own studio or, currently, online.
A New York City native, Hadass Backman’s fascination with collecting eclectic things began on the streets of Brooklyn, and in wooded areas of Prospect Park. A nurse by training and a lover of all forms of art, Hadass has devoted her time curating rare pieces and is well known for her unique housewarming gifts for friends and family upon their moves to a new home (which happens quite often on the wild streets of NYC). As a Hospice Nurse, Hadass infused arts as a poignant part of her patients end of life experience, this experience fueled her interest to further engage in the arts and resulted in her independent curation of a photography art show in October of 2020.
Shwarga Bhattacharjee was born in Dhaka, Bangladesh. He received his MFA in Drawing and Painting from Tyler School of Art, Temple University and his BFA in Drawing and Painting from the Faculty of Fine Arts, University of Dhaka. He has been showing his work in the United States and Bangladesh. His shows include venues like Vox Populi, Jcal Art Center, Temple Contemporary, and Dhaka Art Summit. He was selected as one of the "Young Talent" at Dhaka Art Summit, 2012 and also been awarded residency at Britto Student Residency and Jentel Artist Residency. He also worked as a children book illustrator for ' Room to Read' in Bangladesh.
At a young age, Gosha Karpowicz was compelled to leave her home country of Poland, then part of the Communist bloc, to live and paint where freedom of expression was encouraged and respected. Karpowicz arrived in the United States as a political refugee, soon graduating with a BFA from Parsons School of Design in NYC. She is an abstract painter and a teacher, exhibiting internationally. Karpowicz’s paintings portray the interactions of arising layers of color fields, and ultimately illuminate the relationships in-between them. The ephemeral mood of her paintings relates to the romantic and utopian quality of our infinite yearning for meaning.
The alluring, yet undeniable reference to horizon lines, becomes an evocative image contemplating the known and the unknown, no beginning and no end, vastness before the form.
In a world where stillness is rare, Karpowicz’s paintings rely on moments of quietude. They offer the viewer a space to pause and reflect on their own experience.
A. Morgan McKendry is an independent curator, visual artist, and arts non-profit professional keenly interested in the dynamism, intermingling, and complications between art and technology. With a breadth of museum and gallery experience they have lived, studied, and worked in Boston, Washington D.C., and New York. They are dedicated to the belief that the arts can change the world and are passionately driven to make art available for all audiences while supporting young and emerging artists and those who have been historically marginalized.
Alison Pirie is a multimedia artist and curator based in Brooklyn, New York, working across performance, installation, new media, drawing and more. Pirie juggles simultaneous explorations of gender, identity, language and sexuality: with a particular lens onto female sexuality and the concept of “female hysteria.” She is interested in showing how history shapes our contemporary world and dialogue around bodily autonomy and gendered violence.
With past curatorial projects, such as Pirie’s co-curated series, Gxrl on Grill, she has explored creating immersive and interactive food-themed video and performance exhibitions at Brooklyn bars and music venues, bringing together artists that use food as a medium in their practice to explore, challenge and respond to a range of social, cultural and political issues.
Exhibition Images
