Carrie Mae Weems has worked toward developing a complex body of art that has employed photographs, text, fabric, audio, digital images, installation, and video over the past thirty years. Her work has led her to investigate family relationships, gender roles, the histories of racism, sexism, class, and various political systems.
Weems has participated in numerous solo and group exhibitions at major national and international museums including the Whitney Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Most recently her work was the focus of a major retrospective, Carrie Mae Weems: Three Decades of Photography and Video. The exhibition began its run at The Frist Center for Visual Arts in Nashville, travelled to Portland Art Museum, Oregon; Cleveland Museum of Art, Ohio; Cantor Center for Visual Arts, Stanford University, and ended at the Guggenheim Museum, New York in May 2014. Yale University Press published the eponymous accompanying catalogue.
Weems has received numerous awards, grants and fellowships including the prestigious Prix de Roma, The National Endowment of the Arts, the Alpert, the Anonymous was a Woman and the Tiffany Awards. In 2012, Weems was presented with one of the first US Department of State’s Medals of Arts in recognition for her commitment to the State Department’s Art in Embassies program.
In 2013 Weems was not only the recipient of the MacArthur “Genius” Grant, but she also received the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation’s Lifetime Achievement Award. In February of 2014 she was presented with the BET Honors Visual Arts Award.
She is represented in public and private collections around the world, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY; The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the Museum of Modern Art, NY and Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Weems has been represented by Jack Shainman Gallery since 2008. Her exhibitions with the gallery include Slow Fade to Black (2010), Signs Taken for Wonders (2009) curated by Isolde Brielmaier, Carrie Mae Weems: A Survey (2008) and The Whole World is Rotten (2005).
The 2014 Art For Life Art Auction will feature works by a variety of artists including this by Carrie Mae Weems.
Deborah Simon lives and works in Brooklyn, NY with her husband, cat and rabbit. She studied sculpture at the Repin Institute of Art in Leningrad, USSR, received a BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute and an then a MFA from School of Visual Arts in New York. She has shown around the country, including a solo shows at LZ Project Space in New York City and Packer Schopf in Chicago. She has also shown at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center in Wisconsin and St. Ann’s Warehouse’s Labapalooza! in Brooklyn. NY. She received a Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation grant and is a Sculpture Space and Vermont Studio Center fellow. She was a resident of the Marie Walsh Sharpe Space Program and is represented by Packer Schopf in Chicago
Felix Plaza is an artist born in Puerto Rico and raised in Spanish harlem. He curently resides on the Lower East Side and is a keyholder at the Lower East Side Printshop where he has pursued printmaking for over 15 years. His primary focus has been to depict objects found in everyday life and accord them a heightened interest. Besides pursuing his art, he is a staff member of the Brooklyn Public Library where he has worked at the Williansburgh branch for over 25 years as a children’s specialist, providing library programs and outreach for the community.
I am fascinated with the production of image, knowledge, and the building of institutions. I am specifically interested in motivational aspects of social identification and how these may be used to satisfy individuals’ needs for assimilation and differentiation- belonging and remaining distinct.
The thread that runs through the whole of my work is an interest in understanding the importance of relationship in the lives of individuals. My practice is not relegated to the creation of objects of which one can easily say where they precisely start or end. The works are as much process, and interaction, as they are object.
Gregory Kloehn’s work is about taking the grandeur of the world and mixing it with social irony. Through a solemn, yet spontaneous rendering of people, animals and everyday objects. He seeks to explore the relationships that have emerged from the symbiotic relationship between us and our world. Presenting the familiar as an icon to our present condition, Kloehn mimics nature and industry into an artificially manufactured shade of reality.
“For myself, the work is about pushing an idea into the tangible world. The working through process behind a piece and the play I have between a vision, materials and my abilities is the aspect I cherish most. I like to have some crude essence of this making process to remain, leaving a residue of the moment for the viewer. Above all, it is good to laugh. It loosens the air. Issues can be present without overburdening the viewer.”
For Valerie Hegarty, the joy of her work lies in its destruction rather than its making. Centring her practice on the politics of the American myth, Hegarty’s canvases and sculptures replicate emblems of frontier ethos – colonial furniture, antique dishware, and heroic paintings of landscapes and national figures only to demolish them by devices associated with their historical significance.
Flávia Berindoague’s works address subjects like collective memory, violence and oblivion. Born in Brazil, a country with a history of political and social instability, she uses metafictional narratives as a way to visualize the tensions of postmodern society. Her sculptural meditations and installations articulate memory as a displacement of past into present. In addition, she uses language as a visual construction, and materials that remind us that all memory is re-collection. Her interest is not in the act of remembrance, but rather the memory of forgetfulness.
Berindoague received her B.F.A. from Escola Guignard in Brazil, a Post Baccalaureate in Contemporary Art from Universidade do Estado de Minas Gerais, Brazil, and an M.F.A. degree from Montclair State University, where she was awarded a graduate assistantship. In 2012, she received the Individual Artist Grant from Lei Municipal de Incentivo a Cultura in Brazil. Her work has been exhibited internationally including New York, New Jersey, the United Kingdom, Brazil, and she is included in public collections such as Museu de Arte Contemporânea de Campinas and Centro Cultural de Curvelo in Brazil. The artist has recently published two books: if… and The Mourning Without Body.
Allison Janae Hamilton is a visual artist based in New York City. She was a 2013-2014 Fellow at the Whitney Independent Study Program, sponsored by the Whitney Museum of American Art. Hamilton has exhibited in solo and group shows in galleries such as Rush Arts Gallery (New York, NY), chashama Gallery (New York, NY), and A-I-R Gallery (Brooklyn, NY). Her commissioned public projects include the Smithsonian Institution’s 2013 Folklife Festival and she has given lectures and workshops at a number of museums and universities such as the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Smithsonian Institution, the Brooklyn Museum, Université Paris, The University of Manchester (UK), Columbia University, and Northwestern University. Hamilton was a 2013 Summer Artist-in-Residence at the School of Visual Arts (New York, NY) and the 2014 Summer Artist-in-Residence at Rush Arts Gallery in New York, NY.