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NAWA’s recent exhibition at One Art Space in the heart of New York City’s Tribeca district was a testament to their tenacity and truly something to celebrate. The diversity, originality and sheer excellence of artworks on display were a stunning achievement. Although a sizable number of awards are given out every year, it’s a daunting responsibility for the highly professional curators chosen for each annual.
A three-dimensional sensibility is at work at the Guggenheim’s first ever artist-curated exhibition, Artistic License: Six Takes on the Guggenheim Collection. The first dimension is the initial shock of the viewer confronting the artworks; the second is the awareness as you move from one selection to the next, that there’s another mind, the curator’s, at work. The third dimension as you move through the six levels of the rotunda, is the merging of the viewer’s take along with the curator’s own into a rich, sometimes disorienting, dizzying impression.
The eye moves warily over images that at first feel disjointed, even disorienting. The black and white photos are intentionally left uncropped, their black borders adding to their mystery and power. Even the dates the shots were taken and produced are a noteworthy item of interest to the artist. A series of clouds seen from a plane window; aerial images of a New York City landscape, somehow make the grid of buildings below appear removed and anonymous from the life that you know pulsates below.
The National Association of Women Artists, Inc. (NAWA) in NYC is currently exhibiting through March 28, 2018, Celebrate Women! in Honor of Women’s History Month. Six member artists, Sandra Bertrand, Nancy Coleman Dann, Susan G. Hammond, Natalia Koren Kropf, Leah Raab and Carol Richard-Kaufmann have chosen to interpret this theme in a variety of arresting ways.
To Kayleigh Starr, photography, painting, and framing are all equally vital in shaping the discussion about one’s personal relationship with the world around them. Her work surrounds the context of a window into a different reality through an object as opposed to an image. She layers her pieces with a tangible surface that is abstracted in a way that plays with perception, moving between the space of the real and the imagined.
Thanks to No Longer Empty, a New York-based nonprofit involved in pumping new life into community spaces abandoned or left behind, the Old Bronx Borough Courthouse is opening its doors once again. Only this time, after being shuttered for 37 years, its walls no longer resound with the smack of a judge’s gavel. Instead, artists, performers, and the community-at-large can enter its cavernous space and call it home.
A studio visit with Connor is an experience in itself. In lieu of a stuffy warehouse studio in Bushwick, the artist chose to work from her bright and cheery Dumbo loft. The walls are covered salon style with her whimsical portraits of ballet dancers, ruminating women, kissing couples, decadent interiors and stylized landscapes. Upon entering, you are greeted with a warm hug, cup of spiced coffee and invited to relax as you take in the sheer complexity of Connor’s diverse body of work.
If you think paying a visit to your local museum exhibit is a relatively safe endeavor, then beware. It’s likely you have not visited the The Studio Museum of Harlem’s current exhibit, Trenton Doyle Hancock: Skin and Bones, 20 Years of Drawing. Chronicling the evolution of his comical, often nightmarish universe, it’s a show that may alternately delight and repel but guaranteed, one you will not soon forget.