Consumption: Food as Paradox

Shark-cuteri (partial), 2015, acrylic, ink and paper collage on canvas, 72 x 96 in by Anna U Davis
Shark-cuteri (partial), 2015, acrylic, ink and paper collage on canvas, 72 x 96 in by Anna U Davis

Consumption: Food as Paradox

January 30 – April 3, 2016

Consumption: Food as Paradox examines how food is inextricably linked to the social, political and economic aspects of life—class, culture, race, religion, gender and health. A baker’s dozen of contemporary artists, working in paint, collage, porcelain and printmaking, explore food and its connection to the world around them.

about the exhibition | artists

About the Exhibition

Consumption: Food as Paradox examines how food is inextricably linked to the social, political and economic aspects of life—class, culture, race, religion, gender and health. A baker’s dozen of contemporary artists, working in paint, collage, porcelain and printmaking, explore food and its connection to the world around them.

Food is enjoyable and accompanies a lifetime of celebrations. Sharing the tastes of our individual homes and homelands can be a way to cross divides between classifications of people—relating to others over a foodway can lead to greater cultural understanding and empathy. But that can also be displaced by tremendous anxiety. Passing down traditional recipes can morph from intergenerational connections to memories of slaves who worked in the kitchen and the continuation of the domestic sphere forced on women. Images of watermelon and berries evoke racial tropes. Adorable animals in TV dinners remind usof the flesh that we consume, but obscure with words like ‘meat,’ ‘beef’ and ‘pork.’ And piles of this meatreveal gluttonous men who treat women with a similar desire for consumption.

Food can be made holy, blasphemous or banal based on the religion, class and race that it is tied to. How can we know what arbiters of taste and health we can trust? Foods are alternately villainized and sainted—their status constantly in flux, depending upon a variety of mysterious government agencies and corporations. We are a nation obsessed with dieting but plagued by illnesses resulting from the ways food affects our bodies. The artists of Consumption investigate these concerns, propose questions to ask, actions to take and, occasionally, offer a view of a future that is healthier in body and cross-cultural relations.

Aden Weisel

 

Artists

Matthew Adelberg
S. Ross Browne
Anna U Davis
Dave Eassa
Roberto Guerra
Christi Harris
Sue Johnson
Jeffrey Kent
Delita Martin
Arvie Smith
Christina St. Clair
Eric Telfort
Stephen Towns

Image of the Black – Press

Pair, 2013 (detail) by Nina Buxenbaum
Pair (detail), 2013 by Nina Buxenbaum

The Image of the Black: Reimagined & Redefined

about the exhibition | artist bios

Press

Baltimore Sun, November 20, 2015
A Provocative, Powerful ‘Image of the Black’ at Galerie Myrtis by Tim Smith
…She casts a penetrating gaze at the viewer that does not let go easily, even far across the elegant, high-ceilinged front room of Galerie Myrtis. The more you look, the more those eyes impart about past, present and perception…
read article

 
 
Baltimore Style Magazine, 2015
Visible Man by Betsy Boyd
Black identity is reclaimed by black artists in The Image of the Black: Reimagined and Redefined, a seven-person exhibition now up and running at Galerie Myrtis. The mixed media show features gorgeously complex Elizabethan-esque oil paintings, shocking photographs depicting notorious black American gangs and KKK members and multimedia works with hand-stitched fabric.
read article

International Review of African American Art, 2015
Stayin Alive
…In this show S. Ross Browne, Nina Buxenbaum, Larry Judah Cook, Ronald Jackson, T. Eliott Mansa, Delita Martin and Arvie Smith draw from the familiar and the imagined to reinscribe the notion of blackness within the context of self.
read article

 
Bmore Art, October 2015
The Black Gaze: Where Cliff Huxtable and Cookie Lyon can Coexist by Cara Ober
…Things only got more complicated for black cold brewed coffee enthusiasts this past, blustery January when Empire exploded in front of our eyes. Cookie Lyon showed up in our living rooms draped in animal skins of various kinds and copious amounts of bling…
read article

imageoftheblack

The Persistence of History, 2010 by S. Ross Browne
The Persistence of History, 2010 by S. Ross Browne

The Image of the Black: Reimagined & Redefined

September 13 – December 15, 2015

artwork | artist bios | press
 
The Image of the Black: Reimagined and Redefined black identity is reaffirmed through the black gaze. Artists draw from the familiar and the imagined to reinscribe the notion of blackness within the context of self. Their imagery deconstructs the white representation of race and racism, and shifts the visual paradigm to the interpretation of the black experience by blacks.

Visual tropes defy the sociohistorical construct of the “other” as inculcated through the white gaze that stereotypically degrades and dehumanizes blacks; and offers instead, an exploration of black body politics through figurative and conceptual works that challenge stereotypes, honor the black family, and as in the words of Arvie Smith, “pays homage to the dispossessed and marginalized members of our society.”

artwork

About the Exhibition

The Image of the Black: Reimagined and Redefined black identity is reaffirmed through the black gaze. Artists draw from the familiar and the imagined to reinscribe the notion of blackness within the context of self.

Their imagery deconstructs the white representation of race and racism, and shifts the visual paradigm to the interpretation of the black experience by blacks.

Visual tropes defy the sociohistorical construct of the “other” as inculcated through the white gaze that stereotypically degrades and dehumanizes blacks; and offers instead, an exploration of black body politics through figurative and conceptual works that challenge stereotypes, honor the black family, and as in the words of Arvie Smith, “pays homage to the dispossessed and marginalized members of our society.”

Michael Gross – Abstraction

Michael Gross: Abstraction I & II


Opening reception – American University Museum at the Katzen Arts Center, Washington, DC

Abstraction I
American University Museum at the Katzen Arts Center
June 13 – July 26, 2015
Washington, DC

Abstraction II
July 8 – August 8, 2015
Gallery B
Bethesda, Maryland

About the Exhibition

Michael Gross, painter and printmaker, offers expressive and emotionally filled works using a kaleidoscope of color. Gross creates art as “a means of grappling with the impulses and struggles that make up the way I see my place in the world.” Through his visual lexicon,which is devoid of ideological reference, Gross seeks to create order from chaos. His lyrical compositions of concatenated lines, textured surfaces and rich hues, invoke Abstract Expressionism and pay homage to artists who inspire his work: Willem de Kooning, Richard Diebenkorn and Jackson Pollock. Curated by Myrtis Bedolla

Artwork

Michael Gross

Born in 1944 and raised in Chicago, Illinois, Gross showed artistic promise from a young age. His talents were influenced and nurtured by his artist mother, with whom he would travel to the Art Institute of Chicago where they took classes and his father, an advertising executive who took Gross to his office on weekends, where he would set him up at a drafting table with crayons and paper, allowing him to draw for hours. As a fledgling artist at the age of ten, Gross won an art competition and received a $500 savings bond.

Gross would go on to earn a Juris Doctor degree from New York University School of Law, becoming a corporate attorney, and in the 80s, a real estate developer. But art-making always remained an integral part of his life, as he continued to take classes at the Corcoran College of Art + Design in Washington, DC and develop his techniques under the watchful eye of friend and mentor, artist William Christenberry.

Shadow Matter The Rhythm of Structure Afro Futurism to…

Shadow Matter: The Rhythm of Structure/ Afro-Futurism to Afro-Surrealism

January 19 – August 30, 2015

 

Curatorial Statementscott_johnson-techno-negro

by Myrtis Bedolla, Founding Director, Galerie Myrtis

Exhibition Location: Charles H. Wright Museum, Detroit, Michigan

Shadow Matter: The Rhythm of Structure/ Afro-Futurism to Afro-Surrealism features sculptures by New York sculptor M. Scott Johnson (Inkster, Michigan, 1968). In parallel with the aesthetic practices of both Afro-Futurism and Afro-Surrealism, Johnson transforms the ancient medium of stone into intricately carved sculptures that fuse African and African-American visual cultures. The work in this exhibition explores his journey in becoming one of the most unique sculptors of his generation.

This mid-career retrospective, traces the trajectory of Johnson’s multifaceted career. His works are rooted in Afro-Diasporan imagination and are inspired by folklore, mythology, revisionist history and his education as a student of Detroit’s techno/house

music universe. As an “artivist,” Scott unabashedly and unapologetically addresses self-perceived notions of classism and race, while harnessing his visual syntax to give voice to the disenfranchised. He has extended performance of sculpture into the social sphere by initiating and developing community-based collaborative public art throughout New York City.

Scott’s education as a sculptor began in 1994, in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe as a member of Operation Crossroads Africa. While there he studied traditional and contemporary stone sculpting under the tutelage of the local artists who occupied the endless alleyways of the city. At the time Zimbabwe was producing some of the most important stone sculptors in the contemporary art world. His greatest opportunity as a young artist came when he auditioned and was invited to apprentice (1996-1999) with master sculptor and national hero Nicholas Mukomberanwa (1940-2002) in Ruwa, Zimbabwe.

As an Afro-Futurist/Surrealist, Scott embraces the aesthetic mixture of fantasy, Afrocentricity, and magic realism with non-Western cosmologies to create new cultural landscapes and reshape old ones. Johnson believes his early embrace of Techno music was a point of departure into the scientific and spiritual practices of the African Diaspora. He also states that growing up in the close-knit community of Inkster provided him with an extremely supportive base of natural allies, willing to help expand his intellectual and artistic horizons.

Exhibition Location:
Charles H. Wright Museum
315 East Warren Avenue
Detroit, MI 48201
thewright.org

Emergence 2014

The Stairwell 2009, by Rosalind Kennedy, USA
The Stairwell 2009, by Rosalind Kennedy, USA

Emergence 2014: International Artists to Watch

September 14 – January 10, 2015

 
artwork | the artists | artists’ talk | the jurors | reception photos
 
The voice and vision of 60 artists from Burkina Faso, Canada, Finland, Ireland, Israel, Kenya, Korea, Lebanon, New Zealand, Singapore, United States and Zimbabwe, will be presented in the exhibition “Emergence 2014: International Artists to Watch.” Artworks and short films offer a global perspective on the cultural, political and societal concerns of contemporary artists.

Artwork

artists

Elaine Alibrandi, USA
Maya Freeelon Asante, USA
Gloria Askin, USA
Ronald Beverly, USA
Patrick Burns, USA
Nina Buxenbaum, USA
James Buxton, USA
David Carlson, USA
Wesley Clark, USA
Suzanne Coley, USA
Alyscia Cunningham, USA
Jessica C. Damen, USA
Anna U Davis, USA
Blanco de San Roman, Spain
Maria-Theresa Fernandes, Kenya
Ric Garcia, USA
Shaunte Gates, USA
Lorenzo Gattorna, USA
Jehanne-Marie Gavarini, USA
Atar Geva, Israel
Susan Goldman, USA
Karina Griffith, Canada
Michael Gross, USA
LaToya Hobbs, USA
Ronald Jackson, USA
Benjamin Jancewicz, USA
M. Scott Johnson, USA
Rosalind Kennedy, USA
Jeffrey Kent, USA
Kung Chee Keong, Singapore
Lauren Shea Little, USA
Robert Machiri, Zimbabwe
Florence Alfano McEwin, USA
Lin Rebolini McJunkin, USA
Edmond Nassa, Burkina Faso
Zahra Nazari, Iran
Joseph O’Neill, USA
Bart O’Reilly, Ireland
Ruth Pettus, New Zealand
Greg Pitts, USA
Steve Prince, USA
Terrence Reese, USA
Rotem Reshef, Israel
Jamea Richmond-Edwards, USA
Arvie Smith, USA
Lynda Smith-Bugge, USA
Casey Snyder, USA
Antar A. Spearmon, USA
Kara Bettie Speckhals, USA
Stan Squirewell, USA
Shahrzad Taavoni, Iran
Terry Tapp, USA
Maxine Taylor, USA
Rebecca Weed, USA
Stanley Wenocur, USA
Alison Wiklund, Finland
Morgan Willingham, USA
Sea Yoon, Korea
Helen Zughaib, Lebanon

Art of the Collectors IV

Voodoo (detail), 1977 by Alvin Hollingsworth

Art of the Collectors IV

June 29 – August 2, 2014

 
| watch curator’s talk |

Art of the Collectors IV features works from private collections created by prominent African and African American artists. Included in the exhibition are paintings and sculptures by artists who played an integral role in the Harlem Renaissance, as well as those whose works informed the landscape of American art.

Artwork


Featured Artists: Alexander (Skunder) Boghossian, Elizabeth Catlett, David Driskell, Palmer Hayden, Alvin C Hollingsworth, Joseph Holston, Jacob Lawrence, Joyce Lomax, Edward Love, Artis Lane, Thomas P. Miller, Frank Neal, Gene Pearson, Anderson Pigatt, Elizabeth T. Scott and more…

Printing Yellow

Flower Power V (detail) by Susan Goldman
Flower Power V (detail) by Susan Goldman

The World is Going to Hell and I am Printing Yellow!

April 6 – May 31, 2014

artists’ talk | about the artists

They seek refuge in the joy of art making; and offer the color yellow as a metaphor for exploring notions of self-preservation and empowerment as they make their imprint in ceramics, paintings and prints.

Artwork


Featured Artists: Susan Goldman, Sujata Gopalan, Anita Jung, Barbara Kerne, Bridget Sue Lambert, Kathryn Maxwell, Miriam Mörsel Nathan, Patricia Underwood, Eve Stockton and Judit Varga.

Printing Yellow About the Artists

Flower Power V (detail) by Susan Goldman
Flower Power V (detail) by Susan Goldman

The World is Going to Hell and I am Printing Yellow!

about the exhibition | artists’ talk

About the Artists

Susan Goldman

Suan Goldman
Power Flower V
My recent prints explore the sheer pleasure and sensuality of color and form. The circle, the target, the mandala, open fields of color filling the eyes and expanding breath down into the stomach, the center, the core have exploded out of the center of my obsession with the flower and vessel form.

I experience pure beauty and pleasure in their making. These simple, pure, and timeless images heal through their visceral and meditative qualities. I take respite from an unrelenting and aggressive environment in the creation of these highly saturated, colorful life size totems. Like an archer aiming for the bull’s eye, concentration and calm focus are required. The center is off center. It is not perfect, but we perceive it to be perfect. Seeing through our eye, the pupil, the target is always moving, but we keep trying to aim for the center, aiming for balance and perfection, an illusion to be in control. Throughout history the human need to create beauty and order out of chaos, has sustained and restored us through immeasurably challenging times. The world may be going to hell, but I am printing yellow and it feels great!

Sujata Gopalan

Sujata Gopalan
Red Party Dress
Historically, my work has taken a few divergent paths. I am interested in more than one genre or medium; I am trained in printmaking, attracted to painting, rely on drawing. I have become engrossed in the visual inspection of landscape, people and of the details of my own life. I have referenced trees, insects, shoes, pincushions, my mother and a gamut of other things which have some particular place in my universe. My work is diaristic. In a sense, I’m interested in the moment; I look at a place or a person or a thing at a specific moment in time. I expect the viewer to draw his or her own conclusions while I merely provide the inference.

My work is not political or angst-laden. I strive to make images that are honest and without subterfuge. Often, the concept succumbs to the process and the work becomes as much about the drawing or painting or printmaking, as the idea.

My last body of work addresses the concept of displacement, specifically the displacement of immigrants. Having emigrated to the United States at a young age, part of my own psyche is bounded by the experience of changing cultures. I examine the differences and similarities by inspecting the minutia, the objects of everyday life, in one culture versus another: an embroidered green dress to a sailor dress, a rag doll to Barbie. Collectively, these things represent the dichotomy of two different worlds, to each of which I belong. This body of work also speaks to our self-actualization as women; how we perceive ourselves; how our experiences and upbringing affect who we become.

Ultimately, there is a thread that connects all of the work together. My color and formal sensibilities, which draw upon my training as well as my cultural background, and my interest in creating a rich visual, if not tactile, surface, are reflected in the drawings, prints and paintings. I hope that my work remains truthful and continues to evolve even as I do.

Anita Jung

Anita Jung
Sari Sorry #1
Anita Jung is interested in aspects of the ephemeral, the overlooked, and unwanted. Her work is comprised of elements that have been discarded. Through repurposing these become visual metaphors for contemporary places and experiences.







Barbara Kerne

Barbara Kerne
The Moon
Tarot Cuts through the Woods

Nature’s resonance is cathartic for me, soothing, healing, and inspiring, so I image natural forms of connection with lyrical expression. In this series, Tarot Cuts through the Woods, the natural forms ebb and flow to conjure our futures, as oracles, as well as present equanimity that I always long for. While Ad Reinhardt, Jimmy Ernst, and Sidney Gross were important teachers for me, I have developed my own voice, female and naturalistic, abstract and realistic, in which I transcendentally soften the world’s hard-edged lines through interpretive painting and printmaking.



Bridget Sue Lambert

Is She Cool?
Is She Cool?
I spent my childhood rearranging the lives of the dolls that inhabited the dollhouse my grandfather built for me when I was five years old. Over the last 7 years, I used this dollhouse to construct—and photograph and print—scenes that simulate the emotional and physical clutter surrounding romantic relationships as well as a woman’s relationship with herself.

I explore the physical and psychological stages couples inhabit by photographing old dollhouses, miniature furniture and vintage dolls. I create large size pigment prints of ordinary intimate scenes and voyeuristic portraits and am interested in evoking the tensions, anxiety, and muddle that exist in these private spaces. The things we all strive to keep hidden behind closed doors. I manipulate the viewer’s sense of time and space and offer frozen tableaux that suggest a living narrative. Messy beds, knocked over drinks, bras and clothing flung on the floor hint at feelings of lust, desire, fear, love, faith, anticipation, and expectation. I distill personal experiences and draw on memories and images from both childhood and adulthood to engage in a contemporary discourse.

The ironic titles of my work are inspired by self-¬-help relationship books, instant message texts and the season finale of The Bachelor and allow me to make light of uncomfortable situations. Although I present constructed vignettes peppered with references to popular culture, I demonstrate the universality of human reactions and emotions.

Kathryn Maxwell

Hemisphere 2
Hemisphere 2
My interest in genetics and the broad connections among groups has translated into a new body of work that explores the grandest connection of all—the relation of humans to the universe. Carl Sagan wrote in Cosmos, “The nitrogen in our DNA, the calcium in our teeth, the iron in our blood, the carbon in our apple pies were made in the interiors of collapsing stars. We are made of starstuff.” It seems we are connected to the universe through our very beings. We are all part of the whole and it is a part of us.





Miriam Mörsel Nathan

Miriam Mörsel
On this winter afternoon…
My work—
mostly fragments or traces of time and place.
Memory occasionally
and poetry always.

You know how one word in a poem opens
an interior door over and over.

I am always surprised.

Then paper, human-like
from the earth, might seem slight
but can be torn, bent, made wet
and it survives

like us.


Patricia Underwood

At the Table
At the Table
Patricia Underwood is a Washington based mixed media artist / printmaker whose use of materials and symbols in such sophisticated and subtle ways has led her work to be described as evocative, complex and richly textured. Content encompasses nature, human spirituality and healing. After studying the Japanese language, she began to interpret music (a universal language) through her own visual calligraphy, which finds it’s way into almost all of her work.

Her latest body of work “At the Table”, was created for the exhibiton “THE WORLD IS GOING TO HELL, AND I AM PRINTING YELLOW!”. The implied absurdity in the show’s title (concern for choosing a color when there are greater concerns) belies the real importance of the act in a time when the world does seem as if it is coming apart. Artmaking is the sustainance needed to deal with this world. “At the Table” uses her signature symbols to explores the simple yet very complex act of coming ‘to the table’ to break bread.

Eve Stockton

Eve Stockton
Agrarian
Eve Stockton’s woodcuts are inspired by close observation of nature and an eclectic interest in science. Utilizing a multifaceted background in architecture and art, Eve is able to engage the variables of printmaking, allowing her to produce an ongoing body of dynamic, graphic images. The Agrarian Ensemble is exemplary of Stockton’s ongoing investigation of the natural world.

The presentation of her prints in ensemble groupings helps Stockton to better enlarge on her themes of variation, change, and evolution. With her balancing of representation and abstraction, the Agrarian prints suggest a seasonal passage of time that she hopes viewers will find meditative and playful.

Her large woodcuts are printed from three-foot square woodblocks that she carves, a different block for each color layer. Her prints are made with the assistance of master printer, Chris Shore, at The Center for Contemporary Printmaking in Norwalk, CT and Susan Goldman of Lily Press in Rockville, MD. Since 2005, Eve’s art has been regularly featured on the cover of Nature Genetics Magazine

Judit Varga

Judit Varga
Cocoon
Finding the perfect balance between shape, color, surface and structure is always a challenge, an emotional struggle. The mere existence of this powerful energy makes it so appealing to me to work with clay. My work has a strong connection with nature and its organic structures which is built upon. I’m not interested in simply copying the forms and textures rather I wish to understand the reasons and relations which lay beneath the surface of a shiny pod or a weather-worn shell.

My inspiration comes from these small artifacts I collect on walks or trips with my family. These fragile imprints of nature provide me with rich visual vocabulary, endless shapes and colors. I work in a quiet solitude in my studio and find this peaceful loneliness a perfect stage for my play with clay. In the silence sometimes there is a moment of harmony when the clay and I understand each other perfectly, we know exactly what the other one wants to do. Those are the moments that I long for and this longing draws me back to the studio to open up a new bag of clay and start again.