Rush Philanthropic Arts Foundation is proud to bring the work of our past five Rush Arts Gallery Artists in Residence to Scope Art Fair Miami 2014 including: Allison Janae Hamilton, lauraberth lima, Patrick Rowe, Alexandria Smith, and Cullen Washington Jr. Established in 2011, the Artist in Residence Program at Rush Arts Gallery provides a recent graduate of a MFA program or the equivalent with a summer studio space in Chelsea, NYC. The residence program culminates with a solo pop-up exhibition at the Rush Arts Gallery Project Space. These artists range in style and technique from collage arts, performance art, painting, drawing, and installation.
Girl Bye – Curated by Rashaad Newsome
Artists include: Doreen Garner, Dana DeGiulio, Kenya (Robinson)
Oct. 2nd – Oct 31st 2014
Opening Reception – Thursday Oct. 2nd 6-8pm
Artist Talk – Sat. Oct. 18th 3-5pm
“Girl bye,” a popular colloquialism that is notably among the quips and verbal arsenal of many Black female reality TV stars, and among the canon of widely-circulated internet memes featuring celebrities serving severe side-eye (such as Rihanna and Nene Leaks of Real Housewives of Atlanta stardom), represents a grandiose and flamboyant dismissal. It is a performative palm to the face. Girl bye also signifies an epistemological shift, the need to approach a subject from different paradigms.
Appropriately named after the popular expression, this exhibition (Girl Bye!) brings together video, photograph, and collage by three artists who urge us to consider new ways to understand our complex social worlds. Through bold and irreverent creative gestures they investigate discourses around identity, power, and resistance.
A graduate of Rhode Island School of Design’s Glass MFA program, Doreen Garner’s performance and sculptural work juxtaposes beautiful and grotesque imagery to complicate the viewer’s visual experience. In a video piece Uniqua Revisited, the artist considers the enduring history of the Black female body as spectacle. Garner dances seductively in a clad white bikini to LL Cool J’s “Doing It,” conjuring the hypersexual Jezebel archetype. A video collage of repulsive imagery — fatty flesh, incisions made to the chest of a corpse, crawling maggots, bloody organs — projects over her. Using her body as a site of investigation, Garner maps new meaning onto her flesh that complicates the iconography and consumption of Black women’s bodies within the American imagination.
A native of Gainesville, Florida and graduate of Yale School of Art’s MFA program, Kenya (Robinson) remixes narratives of power as it relates to race, class, and marginalization. Her stylized book covers interweave descriptions of suspense and mystery plots, images of pop culture luminaries, and fictive reviews from revered intellectuals. Jesus Be A Lacefront imagines a duo of Black hairstylists who cultivate a successful weave enterprise by scalping rich white men. Her collages permeate through social boundaries with references to popular culture, academia, the art world, and the social lives of the Black working class.
Chicago artist and SAIC alumni Dana DeGiulio reveals the fragility of structures in her performance work. “Medusa” is a photographic documentation of a performance in which the artist drove a 1996 Buick Lasabre into the wall of The Suburban, an independent exhibition space in Oak Park, Illinois. The artist received permission by the gallery’s co-operator, artist and curator of the 2014 Whitney Biennial Michelle Grabner. The photo depicts the permanently broken facade of the building after the car’s removal; a gaping hole where bricks and wood once separated the interior from the outside world. The literal and metaphorical undoing and transforming of the building reminds us that institutions and structures can be breached.
– Kiyan Williams
HOME
September 14 – November 22, 2014
Opening reception Sunday September 14, 4-6pm
In his 1986 Governor General’s Award-nominated book Home: A Short History of an Idea, Witold Rybczynski gives us the perfect groundwork to open the dialogue about this exhibition: “Home brought together the meanings of house and of household, of dwellings and of refuge, of ownership and affection. Home meant the house, but also everything that was in it and around it. As well as the people and the sense of satisfaction and contentment that all these conveyed.” I’d say, rather, a spot-on description that gives some real heft to the adage “home is where the heart is.”
Let’s start with the people. Felix Plaza’s gum bichromate and silkscreen print and his tiny house sculptures made from prints are about his memories of his childhood homes. Felix explains, “I am a product of orphanage and foster home.” His series Mi Casa, Su Casa invites viewers to find iconic images and symbols that may spur their own memories. Growing up with an artist father meant that there was little time for boredom in Diana Rickard’sapartment as a child. When Diana and her brother had “nothing to do,” their dad’s response was always, “Let’s make something!” Diana still takes that advice to heart, and has been beading usable household objects ever since, transforming mundane tools into magical machines.
Family units are often multi-generational and can include both biological and chosen family members. The home, no matter what it looks like, is where our tribe gathers. We often interchange language describing our homes and their rooms with words we use for the animal kingdom – nest, den; in current parlance, man-cave; or, when things get really out of hand, pigpen. In her mixed-media sculptural installation of a colony of bats dangling from the ceiling entitled Roost, Deborah Simon depicts that animal instinct of the family home.
A basic function of a dwelling is to keep its inhabitants safe, in ways ranging from protection against the elements and inclement weather to security against intruders. Valerie Hegarty points out that her sculptures of crockery that appear to be riddled with gunshots are relevant to current home-life in Israel/Palestine, which – as author/theology professor Dr. Salim J. Munayer says – “may be the most intractable conflict of our time.” While we in the United States are not now experiencing the peril of living in a war-torn environment, according to the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty in 2014, there are over 1,750,000 homeless Americans – people who do not even have protection from weather. Artist Greg Kloehn constructs compact abodes on wheels using discarded materials. On view is a micro-home that will be spruced up by Rush Kids and Teens during the exhibition, and then given away. Kloehn says his work is not a permanent solution; in the wake of growing concern for people living in poverty and for the environment, though, it is a temporary fix and a humane gesture to keep people safe while also recycling used materials.
Neighborhoods are the areas we live in. They can be defined by history, the people who live there, or even the real estate market. Chicago-based artist/architect Amanda Williams’s Color(ed) Theory: Homage to an Englewood Block is an ongoing project in which Williams is painting (and reinvigorating) abandoned homes in Chicago’s South Side, using a color palette she has developed of hues that are significant and have associations with home to Chicago’s South Side black community. On view is a photographic piece documenting the project. As a newcomer to an area, a person can feel a range of emotions, from comfort to unease. Rachel Rath’s photograms, created while living in London, reflect on the emotional ideas of being lost and adrift in a new place. Giuseppe Di Lelio’sdrawings explore the generation, decay, and regeneration of the built environment surrounding his home in Sperlonga, Italy along the Tyrrhenian Sea, something that we New Yorkers often have mixed feelings about, as the bodega on the corner becomes a fancy café and the empty lot a new high-rise.
The homes humans build reflect their environment, available resources, and economic means. Catherine de Zágon has called many places home. Her compassionate and strikingly composed photographs show us the beauty and comfort of indigenous Vietnamese homes and their occupants. Don Lambert’s photographs chronicle the poignant “homecoming” between family remaining in Cuba and those who have left to forge a new life in Miami. Brazilian-born artist Flávia Berindoague has created two pieces that call to mind an animal hide made of institutional blankets, ubiquitous in Brazil and used for protection by homeless people, prisoners, and moving companies. The painted text on these pieces takes a critical look at the artist’s homeland and its failure to provide protection at a more humane level.
From the battered wobbly table in the corner that belonged to Great Aunt Barbara to the sleek modern chair near the front window, the objects in our home can come to represent us as people. Susan Hamburger’s ink drawings of stacks of her morning coffee cups and kitchen plates become an obsessive self-portrait of sorts. In a recent New York Times review of photographer Carrie Mae Weems’s retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum, Holland Cotter writes,“In a sense, much of Ms. Weems’s art radiates out from this point: from home, you might say, into the world.” I agree. Her photographs included in Home eloquently bring to mind our capacity to make a home just about anywhere. Be it a temporary housing facility, high-rise apartment, brick row house, or limestone mansion, what makes that structure a home is you.
This exhibition will serve as a teaching tool for 2014/15 Rush Education Programs in our Year of Home.
Meridith McNeal, Curator
Kingdom of the Marvelous
Allison Janae Hamilton
Thursday, September 4 – Saturday, September 20, 2014
Opening reception: Thursday, September 4th, from 6:00 to 8:00pm
Artist talk and closing Reception: Saturday, September 20th, from 3:00 to 6:00pm
Kingdom of the Marvelous is a restaging of photographs from Hamilton’s collection of her family’s photo albums from rural Tennessee as well as classic studio and fashion portraits depicting African-American life. In this series, Hamilton asks questions about representation and self-fashioning by interrogating and reenacting persistent gestures in both studio and vernacular portraiture of the first half of the twentieth century. The images in Kingdom also comment on the haunting gaps within cultural memory and histories and fill these voids with imaginative fantasies pieced together from fairytales, family myths and overheard gossip, superstitions, sermons, archival family photographs and memorabilia, Baptist hymns, and other forms of cultural iconicity.
In many of her portraits, Hamilton constructs elements of her sitters’ garments out of taxidermy—animal hides, antlers, skins, and heads. Additional icons such as lace, flowers, veils, church fans, tambourines, curiosities, and food items animate her play on cultural history and memory and toy with expectations of identity and culture against the rural landscape. The work is presented in the form of an installation that also includes landscape photographs Hamilton makes on her family’s farmland in Tennessee as well as furniture, parlor knickknacks and curiosities, taxidermy, fabric, and various sourced elements. In this way, the work draws from the canons of magical realism, southern gothic literature, and the carnivalesque in order to meditate on disruption and magic in everyday routines and rituals of rural life.
Michael De Feo : A pocket full of posies
Thursday, September 4 – Saturday, September 20, 2014
Opening reception: Thursday, September 4th, from 6:00 to 8:00pm
Artist talk: Saturday, September 20th, from 3:00 to 5:00pm
Rush Arts Gallery is pleased to present, A pocket full of posies, an exhibition of new paintings by artist, Michael De Feo in what will be his first solo gallery exhibition in New York in more than ten years.
From his illegal art installations on the streets of international cities to his widely exhibited paintings, Michael’s works of the past twenty and more years merge a childlike wonder of the world with universal themes of loss and renewal. Sometimes utilizing cheerful imagery such as his globally recognized flower project juxtaposed with its ephemeral installation on the streets highlights the cycle of life while also spreading smiles and whimsy. His studio paintings are frequently on collaged maps on canvas which create new geographies and links his desire to spread his art on the streets at a worldwide level. For Michael, painting on maps acts as a metaphor for painting the entire world.
Beginning September 4, 2014, Rush Arts Chelsea will present the first exhibition ever organized to focus exclusively on Michael De Feo’s flower paintings. A pocket full of posies showcases paintings on canvas and board that range in size from small portrait format to wall height.
These new paintings are a departure from Michael’s iconic street flower while also continuing his exploration of flowers as subject. Throughout history, flowers have been present in times of celebration as well as times of grief. In a similar duality, Michael’s paintings seem to depict the flowers blooming and wilting simultaneously. De Feo’s interest in Dutch 17th century flower painting as well as Vanitas Painting is evident and Michael’s new works are an homage as well as a revolt against them. The title of the exhibition, A pocket full of posies is a line from the over one hundred year old nursery rhyme, “Ring Around the Rosie” which legend says originally described the plague. At that time, many people believed that carrying sweet smelling flowers such as posies on one’s person could ward off illness and disease.
Rush Arts Gallery in Chelsea is pleased to announce the opening of The Grand Cypher: Hip Hop, Iran & Syria group exhibition featuring the work of Sajjad Aliyaghi, Tammam Azzam, Alonzo Brown (the original Mr. Hyde), Caitlin Cherry, Aline Dolinh, Farid Farlek, Humans of Tehran, Hedieh Javanshir Ilchi, Immortal Technique, Jenny Holzer, Kinetics, Kim Noble, Shahpour Pouyan, Rakim, Sadra Shahab, Elias Shalhoub, Sham MCs, Saye Sky, Spiritual Mic, Siavash Talaei (Sis Tan), Francis A. Willey, and Ehsan Ziya (Atour). The opening party is April 24 from 6-8pm at 526 West 26th Street, Suite 311, New York, NY 10001. This exhibition continues through May 24, 2014.
This exhibition explores the geostrategic and cultural diplomacy aspects of hip-hop by bringing together visual artworks and handwritten verses by Iranian, Syrian and immigrant youths, rising international stars, and inspiring American, British and Canadian forerunners who in turn reference history. In the accompanying catalog essay, Julie Ashcraft begins, “Chosen for authentic intensity, magnetic beauty and frank content that aligns it with the innate spirit of hip-hop, the artworks in this exhibition combine keen perception with resourceful transcendence.” Shahpour Pouyan combines night vision Iraq war video with Hudson River School painting aesthetics. Fred Wilson pinpoints oil and slave trade routes around a darkened globe. Caitlin Cherry ponders the future of security in her blockbuster painting featuring a giant robot, police cars and lone humanoid figure practicing martial arts. Jenny Holzer provides insight into war planning. Tammam Azzam alludes to the soft power of music versus armed warfare in his limited edition print. Hedieh Javanshir Ilchi contrasts Persian motifs with amorphous clouds of color as free speech and information war engages megaphones and satellite dishes. Farid Farlek addresses appearances versus underlying reality in his assumption-busting digital collages. Elias Shalhoub illuminates the disruptive influence of hip hop upon the grand chessboard in his digital artwork. Francis A. Willey creates an iconic photo of a blindfolded figure which may trigger memories of hostages, detainment or consenting intimate encounters. Ehsan Ziya (Atour)’s documentary photos and portraits present glimpses into the underground world of conscious Hip Hop in Iran, and his recent digital artworks grant entry into the abstract beauty of his heart and mind. Photographs Sadra Shahab took in Von King Park, Brooklyn are a natural extension of his support for public assembly, public spaces and human rights. Humans of Tehran‘s photo of young female skateboarders in Tehran is a heartening reminder that we may have more in common than we realize. Kim Noble‘s painting explores personal identity from the unique perspective of a multiple. Siavash Talaei (Sis Tan)‘s montage of self portraits creates a circle of men seated under a night sky in the desert who look towards the one whose face is illuminated by the glow of a laptop computer. Rakim paints his “Paid in Full” verses, which are proof that talent and ethics have uplifting potential. The catalog essay continues, “Official lines of communication are sometimes superseded in influence by grassroots Hip-hop culture. Revered verses in the Hip Hop canon inspire youths in areas targeted by kinetic and economic warfare to contribute their own incisive commentary reflecting the ways that foreign and domestic policies and international cartels have impacted their personal lives. The music videos from Iran, Syria and America and photographs included in this exhibition provide insight into the abilities of the artists to recognize objective reality while at the same time making history and charting a course for the future.” Video directors include Elias Shalhoub, Sholeh Zahraei, Kamil Saldun, and Farzin. Cinematographers include Alireza Etemadi.
Handwritten Persian, Arabic and English rap verses on paper in this exhibition are contemporary poetic artworks referencing current events and history. Rakim mentions Ayatollah Khomeini; Immortal Technique references Zoraster, Ahura Mazda, and U.S.-supplied WMD; Kinetics compares inept rappers to hikers arrested inside the Iranian border; Sham MCs and Spiritual Mic record the shock of war in Syria, what it’s doing to their society, why it’s happening and people they’ve lost; Alonzo Brown (the original Mr. Hyde) is the founding father of political rap with his 1980 verse on “Rappers Convention” about the U.S. Embassy hostage crisis in Tehran. An immigrant child and 2013 National Student Poet, Aline Dolinh adds her own perspective on revolution and beauty. Saye Sky addreses the challenges faced by women who fall in love with women in Iran. Sajjad Aliyaghi‘s intense insights and unassuming manner have captured the attention of the underground Hip Hop scene in Iran.
About the Curator: Julie Ashcraft (Jigsawnovich) is a New York based curator, writer, artist and musician who traveled Iran in 2009. Her articles, news and poems have been published by Rolling Stone Middle East, New Musical Express, New In Chess, Yahoo Voices and Lungfull. She was the first female to make a rap record in Europe. It’s in the Cornell Hip Hop Collection. Her artworks have been published in books Definition: The Art and Design of Hip Hop and Fresh: Hip Hop Don’t Stop; and in VOGUE and Decco magazines. Ms. Ashcraft curated “The Jim Jones Group Show” at Alternate Gallery in Dallas, TX.
Rush Arts Gallery will present the works of Edgartista Gonzalez and Jed Foronda, the final national winners and awarded artists of the Bombay Sapphire Artisan Series. This exhibition will be on view from February 7th – March 15th 2013 at Rush Arts Gallery located at 526 W 26th Street, Suite 311, New York, New York.
Rush Arts is pleased to present a group exhibition of contemporary portraits. Taha Clayton, Kate Fauvell, Tatyana Fazlalizadeh, Jas Knight, and Sylvia Maier are contemporary portrait painters working in Brooklyn, NY. These works range in subject and size but create painted portraits of people around us in our everyday lives.
The genre of portrait painting has a rich and deep history. Often portraits were commissioned by rich patrons to remember historical moments or to capture a likeness of an esteemed individual. With a bourgeois history, oil painted portraits were a classic way for artists to have careers, and for the wealthy to be comemerated through a timeless medium. In Painted Portraits at Corridor Gallery the contemporary portrait is examined and celebrated, of every day people that are commemorated for being in the lives of the artists.
Taha Clayton is a self taught artist residing in Brooklyn raised in Toronto, ON and born in Houston, TX. His highly rendered portraits are not only detailed portraits of people in his life and community, but a statement about our community as a city. He brings together social and political issues, spiritual virtues and above all the portraits are painted with a universal love that is seen through his technical abilities and poetic compositions. The portrait of the artist’s pregnant wife titled “Womb Man” exudes his love as a husband and a father, capturing her in glorified confidence.
Kate Fauvell, born and raised in Queens, NY and currently living and working in Brooklyn paints from the heart as she says “about the heart of NYC, the greatest, roughest, most caring and careless city in the world.” For the past several years Fauvell has been a mentor for an intimate group of urban youth. She has re-experienced childhood with the group feeling the “fear, challenges, loss, inequalities, racism, fun, friendships, love, hate, violence, temptations, reality, jokes, and the search for self.” Her large group portraits are of the young people she mentors. Painted with an expressionist sensibility the paintings are raw portraits of being a contemporary urban youth.
Tatyana Fazlalizadeh is an African-American and Iranian artist originally from Oklahoma. She has recently been acclaimed for her project Stop Telling Women To Smile which has had a national presence. Her paintings are heartfelt portraits both of herself and people in relaxed situation in her life. The painting of “James” seems mid thought in intense conversation. Fazlalizadeh’s self portraits capture her strength as a woman which is also what sparked the Stop Telling Women to Smile project.
Jas Knight, from Bloomfield, CT and now also living in Brooklyn, NY, received his BFA at the Philadelphia Academy of Fine Arts. Knight strives to be as honest in his paintings as possible, which lead him to detailed rendering to be as universal as possible through the visual aesthetic language. His contemporary portrait Inbox 1 could be a window into any person checking their email, the gold gilded frame elevates the message by nodding to traditional portrait painting and saying hello from 21st C Brooklyn.
Sylvia Maier, a native New Yorker who lives and paints in Brooklyn, paints life size figurative works in urban settings. Inspired by cultural identities, ceremonies, tolerance, and her bi-racial heritage Maier brings universal messages to her large group portrait paintings and intimate embraces of couples. Her inspirational models include; an urban African Priest, Afro-punk musicians, hand drummers in parks, and the many friends and family members that make Brooklyn’s unique tapestry. Her ongoing project Currency was recently highlighted at the Corridor Gallery Project Space in 2013.