Best known in the street art movement for his ubiquitous and iconic flower image, artist Michael De Feo has been creating illegal works on the streets for more than 20 years in more than 40 international cities including New York, Los Angeles, Miami, Cabo San Lucas, Amsterdam, Paris, Venice, Buenos Aires, Panama City and Hong Kong. Although his flower is the only image he repeats in his street art, Michael has created a variety of other works in the public sphere.
Not limited to the streets as his canvas, De Feo’s work has also appeared in numerous galleries and museums around the world: The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, Conn.; MASS MoCA, North Adams, Mass.; Museo de Arte, San Juan, Puerto Rico; The New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York; Colette, Paris; Stolen Space, London; The National Art Gallery, Bangladesh; and more. Notable exhibitions include Wooster on Spring at New York’s Candle Building, which Roberta Smith of The New York Times noted as one of 2006’s top 10 cultural events; 2005’s Two Atmospheres at The Aldrich Art Museum in Ridgefield, Conn.; 2008’s Flowers at Manifesta 7 in Trento, Italy; 2010’s Mining for Splinters and Diamonds at No Borders Art in Hong Kong; 2013’s 10 Years of Woostercollective, at Jonathan Levine Gallery in New York and most recently The 80’s Past + Present at the Bleecker Street Arts Club in New York.
Michael’s work has appeared in countless media outlets, including three covers of New York Magazine’s “Reasons to Love New York” issues, The New York Times, The London Sunday Times and TIME Magazine. In addition, De Feo’s work has appeared in a variety of film documentaries including Alice Arnold’s To Be Seen (aired on PBS/WNET and screened at The Museum of Modern Art, 2006); and Banksy’s Exit Through The Gift Shop: A Banksy Film (Paranoid Pictures, 2010) which was an Academy Award best documentary nominee. De Feo’s work has appeared in nearly 40 books such as Trespass: A History of Uncommissioned Urban Art by Carlo McCormick, Marc & Sara Schiller, and Ethel Sono (Tachen, 2010); Paris Graffiti by Fabienne Grevy (Edition de La Martiniere, 2008); and Home By Novogratz by Robert and Cortney Novogratz (Artisan, 2012).
De Feo’s award-winning children’s book, Alphabet City: Out on the Streets, employees New York City as his canvas – using his paintings glued on the streets of Manhattan to illustrate each letter of the alphabet. Currently in its fourth printing by Gingko Press, an initial review by Newsweek International said, “De Feo’s art evokes beauty and optimism with a childlike simplicity while paying homage to gritty Manhattan.”
Michael De Feo has been selected by The Rush Philanthropic Arts Foundation (RPAF) as their featured artist of 2014. Along with working with urban youth on arts programming through Rush, Michael created and donated a series of three new flower prints and two paintings to benefit the Foundation.
Michael is available for comment and interview, please call the gallery or email info@rushphilanthropic.org
Explore De Feo’s work at his web site: www.mdefeo.com
Born in California in 1975 and raised in Colorado, Dustin Yellin is a contemporary artist living in Brooklyn, New York, best-known for his sculptural paintings. Multiple glass layers, each individually embellished, create a unified intricate, three-dimensional collage. His art is notable both for its massive scale and its fantastic, dystopian themes. The work displays Yellin’s surreal romance with the detailed genius of the natural world and humankind’s dubious efforts to improve it. Yellin displays a ready willingness to experiment with forms and materials, using bizarre found objects, eccentric clippings from diverse sources, computer-generated images, acrylic, and glass.
After efforts primarily on canvas and paper, Yellin breakthrough came when he was working outdoors with natural materials embedded in resin. The effects were novel and suggestive, and Yellin realized collage could be literally expanded into another dimension.
The resulting innovative technique uses the atmosphere itself as material. With a precise and painstaking process, multi-dimensional images grow from successive planes of stacked transparencies. Initially, Yellin focused on evocative, otherworldly mutations of fundamental living things such as plants and insects, precious, alien specimens, “holograms trapped in amber.”
Soon Yellin began to make larger and larger pieces, using his display as a performance evoking an entirely believable new world. In a 2009 exhibition of this new approach, Yellin’s “Arboreum” featured a forest of eight to nine-feet-tall iridescent trees and multiple twelve-foot-long sections of a rosily glowing wildflower field.
Yellin’s work quickly graduated in complexity. His uncanny, improbably authentic portraits were built from partial worlds and extraordinary, discarded organs. Other small works presented discrete, imaginary tableaux. One scene reveals a mythical arithmetic factory with a dull tessellating assembly-line diminishing to infinity. Another is a surreal, dioramic room with a quiet door to another world guarded by a disintegrating medusa.
In 2011, Yellin began a series of life-size figures, a collection of entombed quasi-humans inspired by the two-thousand year old Qin funerary army of “Terra-cotta Warriors and Horses”. Yellin’s figures grow from thousands of antique clippings assembled in dense, tangled cellular silhouettes, as if man himself is no more than loose, disconnected images, a knotted form animated by partial truths. Other men are only ghostly wisps of vapor. These spirits sprout limbs of fog, spines of steam, humid heads. They are beings without a solid or permanent existence: transparent, dissipating, ephemeral. Still others are Siamese twins whose deformed extremities explode in animate color. All underscore disquieting realities of the human condition, revealing morality as a relative construction and ethics as a subjective prejudice. Our brief, fibrous existence and unequivocal mortality is laid bare.
“The Triptych” is Yellin’s largest and most complex work, a massive 12-ton, three-paneled epic embodying his vision of the world and consciousness. For Yellin, “the universe and the mind are shadowy places seething with dark magic, seas of boundless depth and possibility, overflowing with joy and disaster.”
In this composition of clippings, acrylic, and glass, Yellin presents a vicious, surreal spectacle. Instead of a glorious image of transcendent spirit, humankind is caught unawares by a divine reckoning. In this mythical, livid cataclysm, volcanic elemental forces smash the organized world into disconnected pieces. The preternatural scene recalls the orgiastic, aberrant violence of Bosch, with the wickedly sunny garden recast as an ominous, roiling sea. Confronted by colossal power, human technology is helpless and material progress is drowned.
In 2010, Yellin founded Pioneer Works, a social sculpture and non-profit institute for art and innovation in Red Hook. The capacious site is a venue for conceptual and creative cross-pollination, a quarter where resident artists and thinkers from diverse disciplines can interact without normative restrictions, ideally producing social change through innovative work.
Kimberly Witham was born and raised in Wakefield, Rhode Island; she received her Master of Fine Arts degree in Photography from the University of Massachusetts, and her Bachelor of Arts degree in Art History and Women”s Studies from Duke University.
While her photographs are strongly influenced by her studies in Art History, she is also interested in exploring the natural world. Her series featured below, Domestic Arrangements, combine those interests in fanciful tableaus of color, pattern, texture, and wildlife. The result is a series of charming still lifes that allow Kimberly to create her own sense of the world.
Kimberly’s work has been exhibited at the Jersey City Museum (Jersey City, NJ), Chashama ABC (New York, NY) , The Light Factory (Charlotte, NC) and The Houston Center for Photography (Houston, TX). Kimberly teaches photography and art history at Bucks County Community College in Newtown, PA. She has several upcoming exhibitions, a two person show with sculptor Keith Lemley this February-April at 1708 Gallery in Richmond, VA that features images from her Transcendence project. Several images from Domestic Arrangements will be included in the Working in Wonder show at the Walsh Gallery at Seton Hall University (NJ) this January/February. The show examines the influence of the cabinet of curiosity on contemporary artistic practice.
Adam Wallacavage was born in 1969. He currently lives and works in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He attended the University of the Arts in Philadelphia where he received a BFA in Photography in 1995. In 2001, Wallacavage taught himself the art of ornamental plastering and began making octopus shaped chandeliers. His chandeliers have been exhibited in galleries in São Paulo, Rome, London, Miami, Los Angeles, Vienna and New York. In 2012, Wallacavage had a solo exhibition at the Philadelphia Art Alliance titled Shiny Monsters. His chandeliers have been featured in publications such as The New York Times, New York Times Magazine, New York Magazine and TIME Magazine. Beyond making sculptural works, Wallacavage is also an accomplished photographer. In 2006, Gingko Press published Monster Size Monsters, a book documenting fifteen years of his photography.
Paul Villinski was born in York, Maine in 1960, and has lived and worked in New York City since 1982. An educational “scenic route” included stops at Phillips Exeter Academy and the Massachusetts College of Art, and a BFA from the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in 1984. He lives with his partner, the painter Amy Park, and their son, Lark, in their studio in Long Island City, NY.
His work has been included in numerous exhibitions nationally, recently including: “Second Lives: Re-mixing the Ordinary” at the Museum of Arts and Design, New York and “Prospect .1”, an international Biennial in New Orleans. “Emergency Response Studio,” a FEMA trailer redesigned and rebuilt into a solar-and wind-powered mobile artist’s studio, was the subject of a solo exhibition at Rice University Art Gallery, Houston; the exhibition also travelled to Ballroom Marfa, in Marfa, TX, and Wesleyan University’s Zilkha Gallery, Middletown, CT.
His work is widely collected, including large public works created by commission. He has been a recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts grant, and has been an Artist-in-Residence at the Serenbe Institute, (GA); the Millay Colony (NY); the Ucross Foundation (WY); the Djerassi Foundation (CA) and the Villa Montalvo Arts Center (CA). He is represented in New York by Morgan Lehman Gallery.
A pilot of sailplanes and paragliders, metaphors of flight and soaring often appear in his work. With a lifelong concern for environmental issues, his work frequently re-purposes discarded materials, effecting surprising and poetic transformations.
Chris Vicini is a sculptor based out of Gothenburg, Sweden. His chosen medium is porcelain, with which he creates nearly impossible compositions, stretching the medium to it’s limits. Vicini’s main source of imagery is the smaller flora and fauna that can be found in many wooded rural areas. With Love With Tear Us Apart, he uses his traditional motifs combined with more figurative elements to create a stunning layering of detail and eroticism. He has also employed neon to further enhance the concept and eloquence of the piece. Vicini’s work can be found in numerous private collections and museums throughout Europe and the United States. Please email johnj@mcgurkartadvisory.com for more information.
These chemical cocktails [embedded in the paintings] can no longer reach the brain through the bloodstream and must take a different route to altering perception. In my work, they travel to the brain through the eyes.
—Fred Tomaselli
Drawing upon art historical sources and Eastern and Western decorative traditions, Fred Tomaselli’s works explode in mesmerizing patterns that appear to grow organically across his compositions. In the introduction to a 2003 essay on Tomaselli’s work in Parkett magazine, curator James Rondeau writes: “Over the course of the last ten years, Fred Tomaselli has established an international reputation for his meticulously crafted, richly detailed, deliriously beautiful works of both abstract and figurative art. His signature pieces are compelling, hybrid objects: ersatz, or maybe surrogate paintings, or tapestries, or quilts or mosaics. Their various components—both over-the-counter and controlled pharmaceuticals, street drugs, natural psychotropic substances and other organic matter, collaged elements from printed sources, and hand-painted ornament—are all suspended in gleaming layers of clear, polished, hard resin. Forms implode, explode, oscillate, buzz, loop, swirl, and spiral. Actual objects, photographic representations, and painted surfaces co-exist without hierarchy on and in a single picture plane. The combined effect, neither determinably real nor fully illusionistic, is at once electrifying and destabilizing.”
PHILIP TAAFFE was born in Elizabeth, New Jersey in 1955, and studied at the Cooper Union in New York. His first solo exhibition was in New York in 1982. He has traveled widely in the Middle East, India, South America, and Morocco, where he collaborated with Mohammed Mrabet on the book Chocolate Creams and Dollars, translated by Paul Bowles (Inanout Press, New York: 1993). Taaffe lived and worked in Naples from 1988-91. He has been included in numerous museum exhibitions, including the Carnegie International, two Sydney Biennials, and three Whitney Biennials. In 1990 his work was the subject of an extensive critical study in Parkett no. 26 (Zurich & New York). His work is in numerous public collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Philadelphia Museum of Art; the Whitney Museum of American Art; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum; and the Reina Sofia, Madrid. In the year 2000, the IVAM museum in Valencia organized a retrospective survey of his work, with contributions by Enrique Juncosa, Robert Rosenblum, and Robert Creeley. In 2001 an extensive survey of his work was presented by the Galleria Civica of Trento, Italy (with texts by Vittoria Coen and Francesco Pellizzi). In 2004 the Galleria d’Arte Moderna in San Marino (Italy) presented a survey of paintings and drawings based on the artist’s explorations with floating pigments and the paper marbling process, accompanied by the Skira publication, Carte annuvolate (Cloud Papers) with esssays by Peter Lamborn Wilson and John Yau. In 2008 the Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg organized a retrospective survey, The Life of Forms in Art: Paintings 1980-2008, with a publication by Hatje Cantz, featuring contributions by Markus Brüderlin, Holger Broeker, Kay Heymer, and Brooks Adams. Philip Taaffe presently works and lives in New York City, and West Cornwall, Connecticut
Marc Swanson (American, b.1969) works in diverse media, including sculpture, drawing, collage, photography, video, and installation. The artist employs a refined range of materials, relying on a concentrated vocabulary of wood, glass, textile, naturally-shed animal antlers, and precious metals. He often juxtaposes “high” and “low” materials in the same work: rhinestones, gold and silver chain, and black mirrored panels meet lumberyard two-by-fours and white cotton t-shirts coated in latex. In these juxtapositions, the former adorns the latter in a way that is transformative for both. The artist grew up the son of an ex-Marine and avid hunter in small-town New England. He then moved to San Francisco in the early 1990s and became involved in the city’s gay counterculture and club scene. He did not feel totally at home in either place, and he began making his first mature work—the crystal-covered deer head sculptures for which he is perhaps best known—as a way to explore, both physically and spiritually, the duality of masculine identities he was experiencing. To this day, this investigation of personal history saturates his work in all media, as does a quiet nostalgia that accompanies such a mining of the artist’s past. As the critic David Velasco writes, “Swanson is an automythologist, one who excels at crafting sparkling, enigmatic totems from the messiness of his own history.” The artist has also been called an alchemist, recasting the aesthetic and cultural connotations of his materials through a visceral, highly personal narrative. Swanson received his MFA from the Milton Avery Graduate School at Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, and also studied at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Skowhegan, Maine. Swanson’s work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at the Herbert F. Johnson Museum, at Cornell University, in Ithaca, New York, and the Saint Louis Art Museum, and in 2011 he will have a solo show at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston. He was commissioned to make the 2009 Peter Norton Family Christmas Project, and in the fall of 2010 he will complete a large-scale outdoor sculptural commission for the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, in Kansas City. He lives and works in Brooklyn.
Andréa Stanislav (born 1968, Chicago) is an American artist based in New York City and Minneapolis whose practice includes sculpture, video installation and public projects. Ms. Stanislav received a MFA from Alfred University, New York; and a BFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her work considers themes of harmony and deconstruction in the natural world, popular culture and, by extension, regards the sublime — realized through unexpected visual manifestations, multi media installations and monumental sculpture.
Selected solo exhibitions include: Minneapolis Institute of Arts, Minneapolis, MN; 21c Contemporary Art Museum, Louisville, KY; Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, Omaha, NE; Redux Contemporary Art Center, Charleston, SC; Packer Schopf Gallery, Chicago, IL; thisisnotashop, Dublin, Ireland; Jonathan Shorr Gallery, New York, NY; Burnet Gallery, Minneapolis, MN; and Scope New York 2013. Her work has also has been exhibited around the world at venues such as: The 2013 Moscow Biennial, Moscow, Russia; The U.S (Ambassador’s) Residence, Stockholm, Sweden; Fieldgate Gallery, London, UK; Al Sabah Gallery, Kuwait City, Kuwait; Ormeau Baths Gallery, Belfast, Northern Ireland; Socrates Sculpture Park, New York, NY; Weisman Art Museum, Minneapolis, MN; The Delaware Center for Contemporary Art, Wilmington, DE; Santa Monica Museum of Art, Santa Monica, CA; Minnesota Museum of American Art, St. Paul, MN; Plains Art Museum, Fargo, ND; John Michael Kohler Arts Center, Sheboygan,WS; See//Me, New York, NY; Carriage Trade, New York, NY; Dumbo Arts Center, Brooklyn, NY; Land of Tomorrow, Louisville, KY; and Rush Gallery, New York, NY. Andrea’s work has also been exhibited in numerous art fairs including: Art Chicago, Art Miami, Art Hampton, Art Southampton, Art Palm Beach, Art Wynwood, Chicago Next, Houston Fine Art Fair, Pulse Miami, San Francisco Fine Art Fair, Scope New York and Scope Miami.
Andréa Stanislav’s work is represented by The Cynthia Corbett Gallery, London, UK; and Packer Schopf Gallery, Chicago, IL.
Public and private art commissions and project locations include: Weisman Art Museum, Minneapolis, MN; New York, NY; University of Oregon, Eugene, OR; Morningside College, Sioux City, IA; Mon Serrat, Spain; Key West, FL; Louisville, KY, and Washington DC. Ms. Stanislav has recently received a 2013 Imagine Fund Award, The Lower Manhattan Cultural Council – Swing Space Artist Residency, New York, NY; a 2012 Minnesota State Arts Board Grant, a 2010-2011 McKnight Artists Fellowship for Visual Arts; a Socrates Sculpture Park 2009 Emerging Artist Fellowship; the 2010 University of Calgary International Visiting Artist Award, and the 2011 Can Serrat International Full Fellowship, a 2005 FSP/Jerome Fellowship Award, among many other awards.
Andréa Stanislav is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Art, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN. Andréa also has a background in film, stage, and museum exhibit design and production — and worked as an artist and designer for Matthew Barney’s Cremaster Cycle films.