A very eclectic creative force
Updated: 2 days ago
This week, we held a productive AYB Board Meeting that has us raring to go for the season ahead! Board members are working to find a museum home for the AYB Doll House, explore new funding opportunities, and help facilitate a new NYC-based partnership. We’re even planning to get the search button on our Recap page up and running!
Meanwhile, the season’s first ART YARD Art Matters in the School exhibition is installed, and Advanced Studio explored movement through drawing and the creation of linear sculptures. Plus, we have more art news, books and opportunities to share and a save the date for our next field trip.
ART YARD Art Matters In The School
Dennis reports: “On Tuesday, Denzel and I prepped and installed samplings of the Hilma af Klint and Sol Lewitt lessons at PS 34, The President Barack Obama School.
While there is no official exhibition space (for now!) at the school, we've been asked every year to decorate bulletin boards throughout the hallways. While at first I wasn't a gigantic fan of colored-paper-covered bulletin boards, I have now become quite fond of them. I really enjoy entering the school and seeing our students’ work proudly presented. The students love the displays too!
On our arrival, we noticed that Ms. Carpena had posted signs on the boards saying "Art Yard Update Coming Soon". It really served as excellent publicity - while we were installing, teachers (whose students were not in our program) stopped and said "Oooooh, I was wondering what Art Yard meant". I loved it. Sort of like the "Coming Soon" signs outside the movie theatre.
Denzel took the reins quickly upon our arrival and we went through tons of art. We then measured and cut the mats, wrote the students names and classroom numbers on the backs (of the mats - for future identification), centered and attached the works with double stick removable tape - and laid them out to curate. Denzel was a tremendous help and worked methodically and as if he'd been installing art exhibits for decades!
Evelyn wrote the Hilma af Klint label and I followed suit with the Sol Lewitt label and a short blurb about our organization and its in-school programs, which we hung along with the respective projects.
Next up for Art Yard at PS 34 is the Fall Festival event where we will host very short art making lessons (kind of like speed dating!). More on that in the next two weeks.”
Congratulations to ART YARD partnership school PS 6 Principal Apruzzese on being featured in The Hudson County Chronicles for Italian Heritage & Culture!
This week in Advanced Studio on Zoom Leah Eliopulos presented Line In Motion focusing on the depiction of energy and movement in art inspired by the work of Ernie Barns, Giacomo Balla, and Charles Henry Alston.
Leah describes the inspiration and manifestation of the session: “Over a trip home to Ohio the week prior, I visited the Cincinnati art museum and was given an extensive breakdown of a couple paintings by one of the advisors. He instructed me to look within a piece and not just at it and it inspired this lesson to be a reflection of that movement and world within a work of art. The students studied the plain of motion, the direction in which a subject is moving within a piece.
I wanted the AYB artists to really look into the examples presented and observe the movement within them and the usage of the space and how they could utilize those examples to create works of their own. They were free to use whatever surface they had available and fill it with the energy of movement. I enjoyed how each of them took inspiration from the examples given, and really embraced experimenting with the subject they chose.
Marilyn, Karla and my own (Leah) work, for example, was a clear depiction of a diagonal and horizontal plain.
Leah Eliopulos, Line In Motion
Flows work was a great depiction of vertical movement.
Ed and Vyomica use shadow to enhance their work.
Luna and Meridith create swirls of movement.
Aaron called to mind tree imagery from the presentation.
Kevin describes the inspiration for his drawing: “Leah's lesson inspired me to draw inspiration from my own life. I recently went Salsa dancing at Chelsea piers, and I distinctly remember how joyous my dance partner was. She was very patient despite it being my first time dancing, and it really felt magical. I wanted to capture that same moment as we were moving to the music, with a gorgeous view of Jersey city in the distance.”
Vee turns their work into an effective political poster.
Leah concludes: “Overall I wanted the artists to experiment with intentional directional movement to fill the space and I think each artist executed that idea beautifully.”
On Tuesday because of HVAC issues in the space we use at 180 Franklin Avenue, and chillier weather making working outside on the roof deck less appealing, we held Advanced Studio in Person at Meridith’s house. Chris Allen did a great job quickly re-working his lesson to work in the smaller space, without our usual supplies.
Chris recaps: “This Tuesday we did an abridged version of a lesson I taught this past summer referencing Ruth Asawa’s practice of abstracting the human and other organic forms through wire sculpture.
Artists were prompted to create forms that replicated the features of flora or fauna using galvanized steel and brass wire. Despite a location change and less time available than our summer sessions, the class was able to create a wide array of sculptures depicting the human figure and other natural forms. Wire sculpture is a medium many of the participants were not familiar with which opened the floor for experimentation and quick intuitive decision making on what to create and how to form it.
Use arrows to scroll images of artists at work.
From constructing sculptures of people riding horses, to bees pollinating flowers the class did a great job adapting to an unfamiliar process and working environment.”
Wire sculpture by Briana Camacho, Margaret Hardigg, Chris Allen, Molly Willis, Sebastian LaBossiere, Kevin Anderson, Fisola Famuyiwa, and Florian Kiniffo-Neven du Mont
During critique we noticed that Molly's form called to mind Buckminster Fuller's geodesic dome, and the related wire toy many of us played with. There is also a strong connection to the domed sculpture in the African Architecture show Bob saw at MoMA (see more about that below)!
Sculpture by Molly Willis, 1949 summer session at Black Mountain Geodesic Dome, Architects of Liberation installation view and wire toy screen shot.
An added bonus to the location is that Lola attended her first in person (in feline?) Advanced Studio Session. She, like many AYB cats and a few dogs, is a loyal zoom participant.
What We Are Reading
I (Meridith) am rereading The Slip: The New York City Street That Changed American Art Forever, Prudence Peiffer (Harper, 2023) a well-told biography of Coenties Slip, an out of the way throwback of a street, almost a piazza or cul-de-sac the water’s edge in lower Manhattan, where artists moved into dilapidated boat sail making lofts.
Artists including Agnes Martin, Lenore Tawney, Robert Indiana, Ellsworth Kelly, James Rosenquist, Delphine Seyrig, and Jack Youngerman all made their live/work spaces here from 1956 to 1967. Barely heated, with recycled wood burned in wood stoves, making use of the showers at the Sailors rooming house (topped with a lighthouse dedicated to the Titanic!) at the end of the block the buildings were raised to create the Lower Manhattan business mega-sky scrapers we know now. I was particularly taken with Prudence Peiffer’s ability to write the place into a place one could imagine entering. Equally compelling was the sense of community conveyed in what might seem like a very eclectic creative force. You know, like us!
Agnes Martin, Jack Youngerman, and Ellsworth Kelly on the roof of 3-5 Coenties Slip, New York, 1958.
Photograph by Hans Namuth and book cover
Other Art News
Vee Tineo shares: "I got the amazing opportunity to exhibit with my professor Rosanna Ebner! A piece I created 2 year ago, is in collaboration with her new piece!"
Exhibition installation and Vee with Rosanna Ebner .
Abriel (bob) Gardner shares a new horse inspired drawing!
Exhibitions, Shows, & Places to See
Marie Roberts, Nati Amos and I (Meridith) went to see Mozart’s Così fan tutte at the Metropolitan Opera. Composed in 1790 by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, this comic opera is overflowing with gorgeous melodies which are meant to evoke the emotional complexity of love and human nature.
This current production transports the action to Coney Island in the 1950s, transforming the opera into a colorful boardwalk spectacle. The sets are terrific: a stylized, flattened, illuminated Cyclone, sideshow murals, and a spinning motel that shifts between its interior and exterior. The amusement-park setting is a perfect match for the opera’s emotional roller coaster plot.
But what we loved most was seeing so many familiar faces from the sideshow community performing in the cast! In particular, I was thrilled to see Sage Sovereign, fire breather, onstage. Sage has modeled for AYB Advanced Studio, and we have made a point to catch her shows around town, and it was just wonderful to see her lighting up the Met!
Sage Sovereign modeling for Advanced Studio, drawings by Ed Rath, Marie Roberts, Kevin Anderson, Jane Huntington, Fatima Traore, and Ed Rath.
Kevin Anderson writes: "I would like to share a link for the Brooklyn Conservatory of Music. I think it’s expanded offerings and new location will be of interest to the AYB community!” Located on Grand Army Plaza, across from the Brooklyn Public Library and Prospect Park, at One Prospect Park West houses BKCM’s new Music Therapy Institute.
Abriel (Bob) visited Architects of Liberation: Modernism in Western Africa, currently on view at MoMA. The exhibition brings together drawings, photographs, charts, models, archival images, and related print materials exploring the role of architecture during the period of African liberation and decolonization in the 1950s and 1960s. Focusing on newly independent nations across Western Africa, the exhibition examines how modern architecture became a way to express aspirations for a progressive, cosmopolitan, and distinctly African future, engaging with ideas of Pan-Africanism and Africanization.
Installation views of Architects of Liberation: Modernism in Western Africa.
Photos by Abriel (bob) Gardner and from MoMA website.
Jacob Rath recommends Zoya Cherkassky’s exhibition American Cooking at Fort Gansevoort a three story gallery located on 9th Ave and Gansevoort Street in Manhattan.
Zoya Cherkassky: Vegetables, The Sandwich Shop, The New American Gothic, A Family at the Table, and Alexander Galper is Reading His Stories. Photos by Jacob Rath.
Jacob explains: “The exhibit tells an interesting story about lineage, fittingly as our topic for the next exhibition at 180 Franklin, and totally fits many of the themes we have focused on in the past including migration, and food, and home, and community!”
Art Opportunities
OPEN CALL: NYC Parks’ 44th Annual Wreath Interpretations Exhibition features creative variations on the traditional holiday decoration in all varieties of materials and subjects. Artists are invited to commemorate the holiday season by handcrafting a whimsical wreath using inventive, unexpected objects. To submit your wreath for consideration, please send a proposal according to the guidelines below & click image link to more information.
Save the Date - We are planning an Advanced Studio field trip to the High Line lead by Jacob Rath on Saturday October 24th from 3:30-5:30pm. Fort Gansevoort is right near the High Line and you might double dip and check out the American Cooking exhibition then.
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