It is 2013 and I live in the United States.
My basic survival needs are met.
I enjoy a level of freedom that allows me to entertain the intellectual pursuits of my choosing – even investing in higher education, to that end. But the barrage of interloping marketers, invading my mind and home, feed into a distracting urge that there are needs, often experiential needs, that require me to purchase or subscribe to something new.
How many ways come to your mind when you think about painting on canvas? Using brushes to create strokes, using a painting knife to paint in a thick paint? By letting fate and gravity lead the way, Pollock creates a new chapter in history of two-dimensional art with the revolutionary drip painting. Amongst painting genres, portraiture can be considered as the oldest art genre in painting. The evolution of portrait painting seems minimal despite its long history.
Lauren Gregory, a Tennessee-based painter, is the third generation from female artist family: Lauren’s grandmother (Sally Wheat), her mother (Jean Wheat Gregory), and Lauren herself.
Influenced from her life surrounding by portraits and sitters, Lauren creates her own language in portraiture on canvas using fingers. The artist render another dimension of portraiture into a living soul which later transforms into the new facet of portraiture with animated painting.
I first met Cecelia on the last evening of the Spring/Break Show,a curator-driven art fair at the Old School (a NoLIta schoolhouse turned venue.) Though we had just met, in typical New York fashion, it did not take us long as our conversation almost instantly led to our exchange of thoughts about art and artist circles. Because the night was rather short, we decided to meet again on a sunny day afternoon, the first sunny day of spring.
Cecelia Stucker is an independent curator and the director of CC: Curating & Collections, traveling back and forth between New York and Los Angeles while curating shows in the United States and Europe. Wearing several hats in the art world, she has a background in art conservation, art business, and art history. Cecelia is a hybrid or jack of all trades – but in her case, a master of all. Let us step into the world of visual art, curating, and thinking through Cecelia’s lens, where life and curating meet.
When it comes to feminism, all of us have our own idea of how it may be defined. Some say that anyone supportive of equality is a feminist. Some adhere to a strictly canonical history when it comes to the timeline of feminist “waves.” Others may have a more loose notion of the general profile of what a feminist might look like, act like, and how that person has been educated or even how relevant their core values are today. When it comes to this issue of “relevance,” it may be worth a refresher course – one informed by a primary source rather than a subjective feeling.
Seven years ago, I moved to New York. Around that time I got wind that the Brooklyn Museum of Art was working on the permanent installation of Judy Chicago’s seminal work, “The Dinner Party”. Consisting of handmade place settings for influential women throughout history, and many more names inscribed on floor tiles. You might say that Judy was the first woman to publicly display that women belonged “at the table,” (as Sheryl Sandberg asserted in her Ted Talk, and subsequent book, “Lean In”.)
“Investing in the arts should never be a partisan issue.” –Congresswoman, Betty McCollum
Here are my 10 reasons to meet with Senators and Congressmen on the Hill today about art sector issues, (inspired by the Nancy Hanks Lecture last night in Washington, DC, by Cellist, Yo-Yo Ma)
#2 – Lil Buck
This is Nancy Hubbard. She is a resident artist at The Invisible Dog Art Center, where we recently met and struck up a conversation about our work and common interests. What impressed me about Nancy was her relative non-eccentricity. Soon after we met, I was able to have a studio visit with her. Perhaps due to the art history training that has framed her pursuit of art, I found the conversation to be well articulated and her process well placed. She cited sources for inspiration and she possesses experience that buttresses her thinking. Though Nancy is working with a few different techniques, there is a cohesion to her body of work that reflects a thoughtful approach, one that considers natural conclusions and how they inevitably can wrap back around on themselves.
Right before I started my first year in college for art history, someone told me that the best way to learn about an artist is to think of him / her as someone who you would fall in love with. Looking back, it is ironic and rather cliché that I first came cross Rebecca Chamberlain’s work by coincidence on a rainy day. I was wandering around the lower east side and just like other love stories, there must have been a series of unlikely circumstances which brought me to meet her (work). As an art history student, all my love was devoted to portraiture both in sculpture and paint. However architecture slide lectures were the most challenging to get through while staying awake. The gallery representative triggered the curious bug in me as I complimented the space, (which used to be a sausage factory.) It was after our interaction that I walked down the black spiraling metal staircase and officially met face-to-face with the Homatorium I exhibition.
I met Tracy Ann Essoglou at the Creative Time Summit last year which focused on “confronting inequity.” We connected after attending a seminar that was lead by Steve Lambert. Like magnets, Tracy and I, along with two representatives of Reel Grrls, were drawn together to exchange statistics and contact information.
Tracy had been a part of the Women’s Action Coalition (or WAC) in the nineties which is associated with the beginnings of Third Wave Feminism. You could place WAC alongside the Guerilla Girls (still active today) and ACT UP! as another activist organization that was using strategy and aesthetics to give a voice to politically charged issues of the time.
Image courtesy of the artist.
Lesley Flanigan was born and raised in Florida. “I did not grow up in a family of artists. My mother was somewhat whimsical person and she loved books… she very much encouraged my imagination and creativity, such as building these elaborate structures out of wooden blocks (would sometimes take days!), but my leaning towards music and visual art, that was something I kind of pioneered on my own.” Pioneer is a good word for her, as Ms. Flanigan has forged her own way in the experimental electronic music scene in her practice of ‘sound sculpting’.