As we head into the last week of 2024, here is an abbreviated AYB recap featuring fun seasonal exhibition to see, artistic accomplishments, an excellent art memoir, and a heads up on an upcoming art adventure!
Have you noticed that I usually title our recap with evocative text from the body of that particular recap? Can you find this week's title?
AYB has been selected to adjudicate works submitted to Region-at-Large of the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards. We are particularly pleased as the aim of the award is to identify and celebrate the next generation of young artists! A team of AYB Artists will be spending the day tomorrow carefully considering thousands of applications, reviewing the art work and making recommendations for the final level of the competition.
Dennis reports: “Every year in December, the Arsenal in Central Park hosts a "Wreath Interpretations" exhibit in their gallery. I always see it - and this year I was especially happy to see a wreath by ART YARD BKLYN teaching artist Giannina (Gia) Gutierrez!
The Arsenal is on the Fifth Avenue border of Central Park in the 60's - opposite the Zoo and the beautiful Delacorte Clock. It was built for military use in the 1850's but it became NYC Parks Dept property and has had many lives over the decades (police precinct, American Museum of Natural History, a menagerie) and now is mostly administrative offices for the Park.
The lobby has gorgeous murals depicting recreational activities found in parks (not sure who the artists were - the person at the desk could only tell me that Allen Saalburg was the art director at the time the murals were painted) and a very elaborate chandelier. The security guard saw me taking photos and walked over to me - I thought she was going to tell me that photos were not permitted - instead she offered to take my photo looking up at the chandelier.
Gia's wreath, "Home", is made of paint brushes, wire, recycled studio materials, and resin. It's really the shining star of the exhibit (in my somewhat biased opinion!) altho all are beautiful.
Two sort of fit our Year Of Literacy theme: "Vital Parks For All And To All A Good Night" by a team of artists (Team CSD) as a sort of homage to Clement Clarke Moore (a NYer!) and his "A Visit From St. Nicholas" (which gave Santa's reindeer the names that we know them by today) AND Lenonora Retsas' "Something To Write Home About" made entirely of red Bic pens.
Others shown here are Noreen Dean-Dresser's "A Robin's Dream Of Peace With Brass Bells For All Cats", "Ode To An Owled Friend" by Yekaterina Gluzberg, Graham Willner, and Grayson Jean, and "Beautiful Queen Sheena" by various artists. Several were created by groups or teams - without individual artists’ names mentioned.
The exhibit's up until January 2nd. The Arsenal Gallery is located at 64th Street and Fifth Avenue inside Central Park, Third Floor of the Arsenal Building. Gallery hours are 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m., Monday through Friday. (Closed municipal holidays.) Admission is free.
It's something really nice to add to your list of 'things to see in NY at Christmas time'.
While we were drawing with Iviva on a field trip in Prospect Park a few months ago, AYB Artist Kevin Anderson mentioned that he had started singing lessons. We all enthusiastically chatted about trying new art forms, and the process of learning new skills.
I was thrilled to hear from Kevin he sang in an online choral recital! Kevin instructs: “Watch the beginning of the video and the about 32:30” in the video.
What We Are Reading
AUDREY FLACK: With Darkness Came Stars, A Memoir (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2024).
Native New Yorker Audrey Flack (1931-2024) knew how to tell a good story. Plus she seems to have known everyone! Flack attended the High School of Music & Art, going on Cooper Union and Yale when the art department was led by Josef Albers. An early abstract expressionist who became one of the leaders if the photo realist painters and branching into sculpture of often enormous figurative public work.
Audrey Flack in front of painted self portrait, in studio with Willem de Kooning and book cover.
In this memoir Flack unflinchingly describes her personal struggles as the daughter of a compulsive gambler and mother of a non-verbal autistic daughter, while forging an art career at a time when women artists were completely ignored. She was one of the three (not a typo) women that Jansens Art History textbook deigned to add to its oppressively macho pages in 1986.
Flack closes the book with this particularly resonant paragraph: “Art is a gift we are given, a gift that no one can take away. On its highest level, it bypasses the profane and deals with the sacred. Art kept me alive and still helps me cope with the most heartbreaking situations in my life. Art does that; it is the ultimate healer. In the midst of all the darkness that life can bring, art reminds us that darkness can come stars.”
Filled with excellent art images and photos, most from the artists collection, I recommend the book! Available at the Brooklyn Public Library.
Thank you to Dennis who added laminated images of my paintings of my Beloved Rik on the pet memorial tree in Central Park.
Pet Memorial Tree in Central Park, 2024. Details of Memorials for Beloved Rik, and Dennis Dear Hazel and Olive. Photos Dennis Buonagura.
This unique tree manifests for six or eight weeks every year starting in late November. Hundreds of pictures of creatures great and small who have passed are hung on the tree, often inscribed with personal memories and messages.
If you'd like to add a picture to the tree, just bring a laminated photo of a pet that has passed. Make sure to add a hole at the top, above the picture. You'll also need a ribbon or string to hang it with.
Upcoming field trip!! AYB Advanced Studio will take advantage of the Museum of Modern Art’s FREE first Fridays and meet up Friday, Jan 3rd, 4-6pm to see Vital Signs: The Artist and The Body.
“Throughout the 20th century, artists have imagined the body and ideas of the self as fluid and open to ongoing transformations. Vital Signs includes over 100 works by artists who question what it means to be an individual within a larger society—and how socially sustained categories such as gender, race, and sexual identity are rooted in abstraction.” (From the exhibitions promotional copy)
Check your email for more details and to RSVP!
Comentários