Bayeté Ross Smith: Passing at The Halls at Bowling Green
Organized by New York based writer and curator Kalia Brooks Bayeté Ross Smith: Passing was on view from Jan 28 - Mar 5, 2010.
In Ross Smith’s show, the artist takes the historic African-American cultural practice of the show’s title and expands it to a global context. By repeating the same few people’s images alongside varying personal data on simulated travel documents from multiple countries, Ross Smith challenges viewers to examine their presuppositions about race, nationality and gender. In the process, he seeks to reveal how globalism has exploded these notions.
Source
Glen Cunningham, Mark Dagley, Laura Fayer, Molly Herman, Lori Kirkbride, Ben LaRocco and Rachael Wren
Organized by Susan Ross and Melissa Staiger
April 22nd through May 28th, 2010
Source is organized by curators Melissa Staiger and Susan Ross.
The group show features work by seven contemporary abstractionists who share concerns of feminine influence, antecedent and identity.
Abstraction may seems like an outmoded relic to some. Yet Staiger and Ross have brought to bear not only a keen understanding of where it’s been but a positive sense of where it’s going. The result makes abundantly clear the extent to which even relatively recent styles are being freed from their presumed periods.
These seven artists all exhibit roots in the concept or experience of femininity–whether a 19th Century Swedish mystic, Palm Beach fashion designer Lily Pulitzer, the work of Helen Frankenthaler or the Yin-oriented Japanese aesthetics known as wabi-sabi. They each trace their work back to some decisively feminine factor.
The very diversity of influences the artists acknowledge belies the simplification of placing them all under the umbrella of “Abstraction”. The seven—Lori Kirkbride, Glen Cunningham, Mark Dagley, Molly Herman, Rachael Wren, Ben LaRocco and Laura Fayer—while all nominally abstractionists, range in approach from Kirkbride’s preoccupation with color and pattern to LaRocco’s almost mystical appropriation of forms from the psyche.
Paper Assets: Thinking Sculpturally, Drawing Locally
Karen Bausman spoke at City College about muscular sculpture, contemplative drawings and the subtleties that separate the two.
GALLERYbeat: Teasing out the Best
It’s Official! PowerHouse Projects inaugural run of GALLERYbeat was a crowd pleaser. In our drive to not only present cutting edge artists beyond the white box but to also expose patrons to galleries that exemplify excellence, on June 20th PowerHouse did a test run of GALLERYbeat. What did our patrons get ?
Williamsburg stalwart, Joe Amrhein of the incomparable Pierogi, cutting-edge, punk diva Leah Stuhltrager of Dam Stuhltragerand the cool, refined Tracy Causey-Jeffery of Ch’i Contemporary Fine Art, among others, spoke about the artists that drive their programs in Williamsburg, the great outpost of the NY art world.
For more information about the fall line-up of GALLERYbeat, please contact us
