The Everson Museum of Art is open! I mean, it’s been open – I just didn’t know it. I was able to catch the tail end of the Lacey McKinney show, Reconfiguration. The Everson Bulletin states the show’s run ended on the 24th so…lucky me and my friend Penny.
*The show has now been extended to February 28, 2021 so…lucky you!
I love the discourse between Penny Santy and me when we see exhibitions together. We don’t always like the same pieces but we understand each other’s point of view.
McKinney’s paintings are oil and acrylic. I suspect the acrylic was either a means to create texture or the underlying Frankenthaler-esque washes in some of the female populated landscapes.
Penny loved these new-technique-for-the-artist “cyanotypes” (above) but they reminded me of a crafty high school art project – female body parts minus vagina, lol, that is too mean, sorry Lacey, but, I felt like these were a bit too safe and they read more like studies than finished pieces. I did admire the size relationships though. And in person, the blue hues are lovely and more nuanced than the photograph suggests.
The larger portrait/landscape mash-ups were far more interesting to me. They offered visual collage in a successful way – female as mountain, eyes averted so as not to become a focal point – they had an ethereal beauty to them. She is quite proficient in the rendering of the subject matter, as well as holding a cerebral allocation of the structure of her iconography.
These two (above) were my favorites. I loved the softness of the colorations and the rhythm in the compositions. They whisper emotion in a powerful feminine way with subtle colorations of glaze-infused shadow. Perfection!
This piece (above) reminded me of Marilyn Monroe, but that may be because I had just watched a documentary on Arthur Miller, ex-husband of MM, and one on the fashion designer Dries Van Noten, Belgium fashion designer who created a line of menswear with a variety of images of MM silk-screened on jackets and shirts.
The literature states that the artist selected images from magazines and reconfigured them stealing fragments of different women juxtaposed as either friend or foe. So, maybe?
This collection is on view in the Robineau gallery on the first floor of the museum. I believe there were only about five other people in the entire museum today when we visited. Plenty of social distancing room to ruminate on this new work. Call (315) 474-6064 for more information.
Debbie Grifka, Ann Arbor, MI, Notre Dame, 2019, Textile, $8,500
Victoria Findlay Wolfe, New York, NY, A Year of Moments, 2018, Fiber, quilt, $15,000
Jeanne Hewell-Chambers, Cashiers, NC, Playground of Her Soul, 2018, Fabric, batting, embroidery floss, and discarded dress, $3,800
Kerri Green, Dallas, TX, Eyes On You, 2020, Cotton fabric hand-dyed by the artist, and cotton batting, $2,500
Susan Lapham, Vienna, VA, Playland #2, 2020, Pieced, hand-dyed cotton, and machine quilted, $8,000
Kerri Green, Dallas, TX, Eyes On You, 2020, Cotton fabric hand-dyed by the artist, and cotton batting, $2,500Diana Fox, Ellen Blalock, Judy Kirpich
The Quilts = Art = Quilts exhibition at the Schweinfurth Memorial Art Center is up until January 10, 2021, so you have plenty of time to see it. It is only the second installation since the mandatory Covid-19 shutdowns. The Made in New York show was their toe-in-water – they have upped their safety and security measures to include weekend visits.
Margaret Abramshe, Shinhee ChinVictoria Findlay Wolfe, New York, NY, A Year of Moments, 2018, Fiber, quilt, $15,000
Not sure if a lot of people know the museum is open. It is – and it is BEAUTIFUL. A wonderful experience, especially when you practically have the place to yourself and you can enjoy that intimate discovery of art elements – line, shape, color, texture and size, while appearing incognito.
#coach #marcjacobs #kesnyc #theory #joesjeans #calvinkleinDebbie Grifka, Ann Arbor, MI, Notre Dame, 2019, Textile, $8,500Jeanne Hewell-Chambers, Cashiers, NC, Playground of Her Soul, 2018, Fabric, batting, embroidery floss, and discarded dress, $3,800
Only some of these quilts are standard sizes – the rest are meant as wall decoration. Iconography runs the gamut from portraits and landscapes to the abstract. Traditional quilting techniques offer a stepping stone to what is and what can be.
This is a juried exhibition cultivated from a nationwide call for entries. Seventy-one quilts were selected.
Susan Lapham, Vienna, VA, Playland #2, 2020, Pieced, hand-dyed cotton, and machine quilted, $8,000
Valerie S. Goodwin is a mixed media fiber artist and architect whose works of fine art are included in museum and private collections. Most of her work is inspired by a love of aerial views of landscapes and cities. Many of her quilts are based on maps.
Goodwin’s art has moved through various stages from traditional quilting to an interest in abstract expressionism and, currently it is inspired by real and imaginary landscapes and cities. In some cases, her work shows an architectural sense of space with an archaeological perspective. In others, the network of the city and its built form is more prominent. These compositions work on several levels, from close up and far away as if one was looking at it from above.
She received degrees in architecture from Washington University and Yale University. Her award-winning work has been widely published and exhibited. She also lectures and gives workshops nationally and internationally. Currently she teaches architectural design at Florida A&M University.
Fiber artist Mary Lou Alexander’s two great passions are art and nature. She grew up in Northeast Ohio playing along the streams and paths of a nearby forest, drawing, and stitching together fabric scraps in her Godmother’s sewing room. She studied art and art history in college, but spent much of her adult life as a biologist, examining the ecology and reproductive behavior of small South American monkeys. She earned a PhD from Kent State University in Biological Anthropology, and holds an international Diploma from the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew in London. She taught at Northeastern Ohio College of Medicine and in the Department of Biological Sciences at Kent State University.
In mid-career she resigned her tenured professorship to return to art and stitching full time. Over the year she had mounted 5 solo exhibitions in museums and galleries, and she has been represented in many juried exhibitions in the US and Europe including Artist as Quiltmaker, Quilt National, Quilts=Art=Quilts, Best of Ohio, Form Not Function, Focus Fiber, and others. Her work was invited to be included in Color Improvisations, which toured Europe in 2010 through 2013 in the Inaugural Exhibition at Edison Price Gallery in New York City and Material Pulses, which is touring the Us through 2023. Her quilts are part of many private and public collections including Marbaum Collection at the San Joe Museum of Quilts and Textiles. She has curated several exhibitions for the Butler Institute of American Art and written reviews for Fiber Arts Magazine. Natural phenomena remain a major inspiration for her work.
Carolyn Skei, Karen Schulz
The exhibiting artists are as follows:
Margaret Abramshe, Geneviève Attinger, Bobbi Baugh, Deb Berkebile, Margaret Black, Ellen Blalock, Holly Brackmann, Peggy Brown, Betty Busby, Libby Cerullo, Shinhee Chin, Gregory Climer, Tyrus Clutter, Holly Cole, Shannon Conley, Petra Fallaux, Victoria Findlay Wolfe, Diana Fox, Kerri Green, Debbie Grifka, Carol Grotrian, Betty Hahn, Barbara Oliver Hartman, Jeanne Hewell-Chambers, Virginia Holloway, Judy Hooworth, Beth Porter Johnson, Noel Keith, Natalya Khorover, Judy Kirpich, Elke Klein, Karen Krieger, Denise Labadie, Judy Langille, Susan Lapham, Niraja Lorenz, Valerie Maser-Flanagan, Alicia Merrett, Kestrel Michaud, Susie Monday, Kathy Nida, Frauke Palmer, Julia Pfaff, Heather Pregger, Wen Redmond, Denise Roberts, Irene Roderick, Barbara Schulman, Karen Schulz, Candace Hackett Shively, Carolyn Skei, Brenda Gael Smith, Gerri Spilka, Lee Sproul, Victoria van der Laan, Cynthia Vogt
Candace Hackett Shively, Libby Cerullo
The Schweinfurth Memorial Art Center is located at 205 Genesee Street, Auburn, New York 13021. They are open Tuesdays-Saturdays from 10AM – 5PM and Sundays from 1PM – 5PM. Call (315) 255-1553 for more information or email at mail@schweinfurthartcenter.org.
Ann Clarke, Syracuse, NY, Self Portrait 2020, wool yarn
I drove to the Schweinfurth Memorial Art Center in Auburn, New York (205 Genesee Street) to view the Quilt=Art=Quilts show (blog post to follow). This fabulous show of textiles (or as she calls them – rugs) is by Ann Clarke and is located in the upstairs gallery through January 19, 2021.
It was only my second time up there due to the fact that previously, I did not know there was more than met the eye to the museum – there is a second floor accessed via stairs or elevator hidden behind the gallery shoppe and a basement room as well, where the museum hosts art classes and activities.
Ann Clarke, Syracuse, NY, Insomnia, 2020, knitted and fulled woolAnn Clarke, Syracuse, NY, Noah, 2018, wool yarn
Clarke’s show is more than meets the eye too. It is full of eyes – the hooked wool rug variety. Although this technique was introduced to me in the 1970s as craft, Clarke’s deft handling of the media allows for nuances of color that create a feeling of light flickering throughout, which reminds one of time passing. She has elevated this former stitch-by-numbers-style craft into legitimate art.
The show is titled Lessons of Empathy in Wonderland. Clarke shares a journey of self as artist, and care-giver to her elderly mother. It reads as catharsis. She is literally and figuratively weaving the fragility of life and its complex relationships with love-infused yarn. This journey into an alternate universe (where the family narratives have changed) seems to have inspired empathy for her relationship with family in addition to finding personal solace, strength and depth of character within each intricately detailed piece in this collection.
It is a breathtaking exhibition. All of this large-scale work has been completed in the last two years. It is all so uniquely personal and yet, so compelling as one feels the resonance.
I love how life shows you what to do, what to create based on where you are on the emotional scale. And wherever you are, there will be others who totally see you. <3
The Erie Canal Museum (318 Erie Blvd. East, Syracuse, New York 13202) is host to a ceramics exhibition, one installed in February 2020. The museum is currently closed due to the world-wide health crisis – that makes interacting with the clay vessels (created as site-specific art) nearly impossible.
photo cred – Jocelyn Reynolds
This is an irony because the idea behind the work envelopes the scope of human life, as it interacts with the forces of nature, the forces of water and the history of the man-made canal. The humans in question are every socio-economic level of local and regional society. All races of people who, in some way, have interacted with, associated with or had some understanding of what the Erie Canal has meant in our history, as well as those who have no idea but in fact, have been, inadvertently, affected by the legendary waterway.
photo cred – Shane Lavelette
Artist Linda Zhang was the 2017-2018 Boghosian Fellow in the School of Architecture at Syracuse University. She came to Syracuse from Europe and knowing no one, she spent time meditating (think deep thought) on designing the curriculum for this relatively new fellowship. She proceeded to think about and create strategies for the design of her position, ideas that would ultimately catapult her educational journey to include making art and teaching electives at the college, which led to philosophical-infused artwork and the idea of making meaning in terms of one’s personal vortex. This path included an interdisciplinary union with Errol Willet, Associate Professor of Art (ceramics) and Biko Mandela Gray, Assistant Professor of American Religion.
graphic design – Im Burrow
Although Zhang is currently a professor at Ryerson University in Toronto, The Story of Water pairs the artist with her SU educational cohorts. The clay vessels in this exhibition were slip cast and formatted utilizing water from the canal. There is a transformation – water crafts and the art is manipulated to create a phenomenological transcendence – art as symbolism.
Taking an idea and moving it through time, so that the result is present while encompassing a larger whole – this is incredibly interesting on so many levels. Fortunately for all, nothing is truly impossible. This exhibition can be viewed remotely. Zhang will be offering a lecture on her process via an on-line Zoom meeting. This event takes place on Saturday, April 18, 2020 at 1:00 PM. Click on the link above to join the party or check out the same link by way of the event’s Facebook page.
The event is free, however; donations to the museum are welcome. <3
*from the Erie Canal Museum web-site
Weighlock Gallery
February 3-April 16, 2020:The Story of Water: The Erie Canal as a Site of Untold Stories
“The Story of Water” is a collaborative project between Linda Zhang, Assistant Professor of Architecture at Ryerson University, and Biko Gray, Assistant Professor of Religion at Syracuse University. This exhibit features clay vessels based on 3-D drone scans of Erie Canal structures, transformed by the introduction of Canal water before the firing process. The resulting clay models symbolize the transformative effects, positive and negative, that the Erie Canal had on the lives of those who built it, used it, and lived near it.
Join artist Linda Zhang and Syracuse University Professor Biko Gray at 1 p.m. Saturday, April 18 for a live, online talk about ‘The Story of Water,” an exhibit of abstract art that is at the Erie Canal Museum. It will be hosted on the Zoom meeting app. Click on this link to register and you will receive an email confirmation: .https://ryerson.zoom.us/meeting/register/u50vcuGsqTwsjUGXxhFl1-DgYZPFHN2lzA.
Zhang will discuss the artwork, her creative process, and what inspired her and collaborator Biko Gray to develop this exhibit. “The Story of Water” features clay vessels based on 3-D drone scans of Erie Canal structures in Central New York. The artist introduced Canal water to the pieces before the firing process, creating models that symbolize the transformative character of water and the Erie Canal.
The Museum is currently closed to the public to protect visitors, volunteers, and staff from Covid-19. We’re working diligently to serve you by offering programs by alternative means, and greatly appreciate your help. You can make a donation to the Museum through the link in the “Get Tickets” box below,
We look forward to seeing you on April 18 for this thought-provoking talk!
It started out as an experiment. How could Michael John Heagerty create an homage to artist Ji Lee, as well as manufacture a happening that transcends art and becomes a part of the bigger picture?
Answer: plant umbrellas.
Last summer, as co-owner of Wildflowers Armory (217 S. Salina Street, Syracuse, New York 13202), Heagerty collaborated to install a series of umbrellas in the nook next to the gallery’s former location. The event, called #colorfulcanopysyr invited patrons to visit and share their photographs on social networks, which led to a “Best Selfie Spot” award from local media.
The umbrellas lend color to otherwise dreary spaces, according to the artist, as follows:
Red is a very emotionally intense color. It enhances human metabolism, increases respiration rate, and raises blood pressure & appetite. Red represents COURAGE.
Pink is intuitive and insightful, showing tenderness and kindness with its empathy and sensitivity. Pink represents HOPE.
Yellow is the most luminous of all the colors of the spectrum. It’s the color that captures our attention more than any other color. It’s the color of happiness, and optimism, of enlightenment and creativity, sunshine and spring. Yellow represents HAPPINESS.
Burgundy, named for the French region of wine-making, shows unconventional thinking, a desire for being unique and self expression. It can increase your energy, like red. Burgundy represents COMFORT.
The umbrella configurations have visited several locations in the past few days. They have spent twenty-four hours each at Onondaga Park, Woodland Reservoir, Onondaga Creekwalk, Thornden Park and their present location, Willow Bay at Onondaga Lake Parkway (3858 Long Branch Road, Liverpool, New York 13090).
photo cred – Lisa Richards Kane
They are planted in the ground (curved handles removed), and to honor our current life circumstances, they are pointing towards hospitals or engaging in the six-feet-apart modality.
photo cred – Lisa Richards Kane
For the next phase, the future installments will last forty-eight hours in duration. This for those who adhere to an every-other-day walk-about, as we further distance ourselves while allowing the medical epidemic to dissipate. The installations will continue as phantom pop-ups to sustain the idea’s magic.
photo cred – Lisa Richards Kane
Heagerty is a fan of the artist Christo who, along with his wife Jeanne-Claude, created large-scale temporary installations for the purpose of fulfilling a happiness and joy credo or art for art’s sake, in addition to making the invisibility of common-place landscapes visible via “immediate aesthetic impact”.
It is this purpose Michael John Heagerty aligns with most. This is his love-letter to Syracuse, New York, suggesting that we WILL get through this mayhem with courage, hope, happiness and comfort, and above all, a caring, creative-arts zest for life. <3
photo cred – Benjamin Terry
***all other photographs not tagged are used with permission courtesy of the artist
The Richell Castellon art exhibit at Wilson Art Gallery in the Noreen Falcone Library on LeMoyne College campus is a must-see. (1419 Salt Springs Road, Syracuse, New York 13214).
Castellon gives us his impressions of homeland Cuba vs. Syracuse, New York. The landscapes of Cuba appear as an anachronism – like a sunny Miami circa the 1950s – the cars are vintage, the streets are clean and the people appear content. The Syracuse paintings are a bit more gritty, There’s a painting representing the underside of a rusty Route 81 bridge and another depicting a homeless panhandler holding a sign reading, in part, “the best is yet to come”. I am assuming this is a metaphor for the artist’s life?
Because he does live here now. According to the literature, the artist is interested in the similarities and differences between Cuba and Syracuse – the paintings are all street views, painted in the same style, yet these places are distinctly different with regard to the way he captures the light.
Castellon offers both city views in color and in value studies using an impressionistic brushstroke with acrylic paint. The paintings seem to glow from within. The Syracuse paintings radiate heat, especially in the way he handles the traffic lights in the night-time street scenes. They appear to have a sort of uncanny incandescence, which is quite impressive. How does he get acrylic to do that?
I met him at the Syracuse Tech Garden a while back – he told me then that he paints from photographs and from memory. There is a sense that the images have emerged from dreams. They portray a sequence of moments in time, as if they are somehow actually moving. I think it is the combination of loose brushstroke and just enough sharp edges that creates this phasing in-and-out of reality magic.
Yeah, I think Castellon is some sort of artist wizard. The larger originals are only $850 and the two smaller framed paintings on paper are around $300. Very collectible!
From Cuba to Syracuse continues through March 30, 2020. See the library website for hours of operation. For more information, call (315) 445-4330.
Terry Askey-Cole was in charge today at Gallery 54 (54 E. Genesee St., Skaneateles, New York 13152). She is one of the artists represented by the gallery. Fifteen years ago, Askey-Cole took courses in ceramics. Now she has her own home studio complete with kiln where she creates decorative pieces, like these whimsical floral garden sculptures (below), as well as slab and wheel thrown pottery and mosaics.
According to the gallery’s website:
Opened July 2009, Gallery 54 is an artist owned and operated gallery located in the scenic Finger Lakes village of Skaneateles. Most of our artists are local to the Finger Lakes/Central NY area and offer our customers a wide variety of high-quality and unique fine art and fine craft, including paintings, mosaics, pottery, art quilts, jewelry, photography, stained glass, handbags, scarves, and more.
In addition to the artwork our owners have on display, we also represent many additional local artists, whose mediums include paintings, jewelry, metal, glass, wood boxes, sculpture, tiles, silk wearables, ceramic clocks, illustrations and more. Be sure to visit our artist’s pages for more information about our artists and to see photographs of their work.
Askey-Cole said there are eight artist owners. Other artists may submit their work for jury – they can sell it on commission or sometimes items are purchased wholesale, so working the cash register is optional. It is an interesting model for business – and quite successful. Askey-Cole has played a part here for the past eleven years (since its inception)!
Traffic consists mainly of day trippers, like me. People from outside the Skaneateles area who venture in exploration and leave with a wooden bowl, jewelry, painted glass, knitwear and/or artwork. Gallery 54 makes use of every available space and when there are several people inside, it’s tight. There were a bunch of excuse-mes and sorrys today as I guided my way around every nook and cranny.
My friend Nella Joseph does well here. She hand-paints glassware. I am in love with the cardinal pieces (below).
Richell Castellon is the featured artist. His original paintings are cityscapes with one of the groupings done in black and white on burlap. Castellon is also currently exhibiting (until March 30, 2020) in a solo show (From Cuba to Syracuse) at the Wilson Art Gallery in the library at LeMoyne College.
Eventually I will purchase one of these amazing ceramic slab wall hangings by Peter Valenti. His work is so incredibly well-crafted. I love the Arts & Crafts feel with the ginkgo leaf and dragonfly motifs and the copper finishes. They are so distinctive in style! They are raku-fired, which is the method where the ceramics are removed from the hot kiln and placed in sawdust, salt or another smothering effect to starve the artworks of oxygen thereby affecting the glazing process. Valenti’s pieces offer rich texture and color.
Other artists represented by Gallery 54 include Lisa Maffiore, Liz and Rich Micho, Donna Smith, Sallie Thompson, Fred Weisskopf, and Judi Witkin. The gallery is open 10 AM – 5 PM daily.
Joy Engelhart was the January and February 2020 artist exhibiting at the Community Library of DeWitt and Jamesville. (5110 Jamesville Road, DeWitt, New York 13078). I caught the tail end of the show on Sunday.
She is a “signature” member of the Central New York Watercolor Society. These pieces are watercolor and mixed-media, a combo of portraits and still-lifes. I am assuming that she will take down today. The library opens at 10 AM. Call (315) 446-3578 for the deets.
Jim Ridlon serves us a triptych-rich medley of Spring in his new exhibition at the Everson Museum of Art (401 Harrison Street, Syracuse, New York 13202).
Two of these immense acrylic and collage paintings welcome museum guests at the door. The remainder are located in the Robineau Memorial Gallery.
According to the literature, “Cazenovia-based artist Jim Ridlon creates impressionistic portraits of gardens that are poetic meditations on the passage of time and the impermanence of nature.” They are acrylic studies of gardens created on paper then cut and reassembled onto stretched canvas, the borders of which are all painted Titanium White.
They are like a Claude Monet-Jaskson Pollack mash-up, but with this amazing cohesiveness that is inherent in Ridlon’s work. The mindful decision making is what hooks me – the formal thinking solutions – harmony in the cut shapes, which leads to a rhythmic flow of color that seems to change as one travels through each trio. Subtle coloration changes happen in the light then everything transforms upon closer inspection, as the texture begins to dominate.
It is this deliberate action as an artist, used to create something that is meant to be fleeting, meant to be an essence of nature, that I whole heartedly admire in Ridlon’s creations. He knows how to be present. How to focus on the work and consciously capture the beauty of life.
These paintings are relatively new, made in the last two years and exhibited for the first time here. We are privileged to be among the first to witness this poetry.
Jim Ridlon: The Garden continues through March 29, 2020. Call (315) 474-6064 for more information.
Be prepared for an all consuming journey of the mind, if you plan to visit Syracuse University’s Point of Contact Gallery (350 W. Fayette Street, Syracuse, New York 13202) in the next two months. Puerto Rican artist Rafael Trelles has reinterpreted visions, dreams and literature to create a compelling dialogue between artists while exposing his queries regarding the human condition in his art exhibition titled The Imagined Word.
Twenty-two painted drawings are presented here. They are figurative – faces painted with etching inks, an oil-based ink that dries relatively quickly (as opposed to using oil paint, which would bleed on this particular paper, as he explained to me at tonight’s reception).
Some faces came first until a literary resource matched the artist’s hand then others selected first and the process reversed. Gestural lines and acrylic paint in sweeping brushstroke join these brilliantly rendered portraits to create compositions of depth and allegory, allowing the viewer to attach meaning in terms of their own identity to the stories with respect to personal fears and the beauty of their individual subconscious realms.
There is magic here. These recent pieces reflect two years of work. Next up for the Trelles, large-scale paintings on canvas and an exhibition in London!
The Imagined Word continues through March 13, 2020.
Point of Contact Gallery |350 W. Fayette St. Syracuse, NY 13202 | Open Monday – Friday: 12PM – 5PM or by appointment. Call (315) 443-2169 for more information.
