Happy Earth Day!
Updated: Apr 25, 2022
We are thrilled to announce that BWAC invited ART YARD BKLYN to include our work in their spring exhibition! You can find our work on display in the café in the back of the second floor, which we use as our studio for in-person ART YARD sessions. Please join us for the opening reception Saturday April 30th from 1-6pm.
I installed the exhibition with ART YARD Artists Alison Guinet and Vera Tineo on Tuesday. I fear ART YARD Advanced Studio in-person working with Teaching Artist Ed Rath had to listen to my tap-tap-tap-bang-tap of installation while they worked.
Ed summarizes the session: “We opened this week’s lesson with a short discussion of the work of American painter Burgoyne Diller. A disciple of Piet Mondrian, Diller used vertical and horizontal elements to organize the picture plane into rectangular shapes of primary colors, black gray, and white. In a 1961 notebook, Diller diagrams how these simple elements generated three distinct themes in his work. Like Mondrian, Diller saw the vertical and horizontal as elements of movement and constant opposition.
Next, we looked at several oil paintings by Hans Hoffman, and reviewed his Push/Pull color theory.
Hans Hoffman, Memoria in Aeternum, 1962; Sanctum Sanctorum, 1962; Combinable Wall I and II, 1961; Morning Mist,1958; August Light, 1957.
The crux of Hoffman’s thirty plus years of teaching can be summed up as follows:
The painter has to take into account three things:
1. Nature and its laws;
2. The medium and its inherent qualities;
3. The artist’s psychological, spiritual, intuitive, and imaginative feeling.
We then set to work to emulate the ideas in Hoffman’s work, contrasting sharp edged cut paper with soft edge water color to create the Push-Pull effects found in Hoffman’s oil paintings.
At critique we discussed how knowledge passed on by master artists like Hans Hoffman continues to shape the work of subsequent generations, including our own.”
This week in ART YARD Advanced Studio on Zoom Teaching Artist Jane Teaching Artist Jane Huntington presented a wonderful session titled Rirkrit Tiravanija: Art & the Revolutionary Act of Sharing Food.
The class started with showing several slides of Rirkrit Tiravanija and his work in exhibitions where he cooks traditional Thai food– pad thai and green curry, and moved on to other installations that brought into the discussion protests between the red and yellow shirts in his native Thailand for “Who’s afraid of Red, Green, and Yellow?” (a nod to Barnett Newman’s “Who’s afraid of Red, Yellow, and Blue?) where in addition to giving visitors curry, he had art students draw a mural in charcoal based on photos of the protest. Then I showed other series of interactive work: the tea house and bamboo maze, his ping pong tables, and work from “do we dream under the same sky”.
Eloquently Zeke expresses his thoughts about the lesson: "I thought having food and games at an exhibit was interesting because at first it seems a little silly to show something as common and simple as making food or playing a game. But, I think putting something like that in an exhibit puts it in an isolated state where we can look at it more closely without any other noise, and see what really makes these communal practices tick."
Jane explains: “We discussed the power of sharing something personal with the community at large, and the healing aspect of interacting with others. The assignment was to do a piece on what you would like to share with others–it didn’t have to be food–and it could be in whatever medium you wanted, including 3-D.
For the 1st 24 minutes of our hour work time I showed a video on Rirkrit and his work.
The students created stunning and deeply personal pieces. Meridith did a water color based on the story of stone soup, Alison created a paper lasagna.
Maraya did a couple of water color postcards based on her grandmother’s apron’s pocket.
Maraya Lopez, Revolutionary Act of Sharing Food
Fatima’s depicted an intricate hairdo sprouting into indigenous African food staples. Fatima shared with the group the practice of hiding seeds in hair to secretly carry food and ultimately the endurance of edible culture.
Karla working on recycled photo album page in white ink created. a drawing about seed sharing.
Zeke made a paper hockey rink that you play with coins.
Marilyn a watercolor of her Seder. Depicting the table top as a single huge piece of matzoh!
Jane referenced important family food tradition with her grandmother’s delicious orange cake recipe collaged onto her own photograph of night trees in Prospect Park.
Assata did a watercolor of her favorite food – ramen!
Vera tells the story of the plantinos, a vital crop in the Dominican Republic.
Vera Tineo, Revolutionary Act of Sharing Food
The experience of teaching this lesson blew me away -- the stories that each of these pieces told–deeply felt and personal, were rooted in history and generosity.”
Karla adds: “Jane’s lesson was a great exercise drawing from a more performance/experiential based artist and creating individual interpretations of shared experience. Great variety of materials both two- and three-dimensional!”
This week ART YARD Teaching Artist Sarah Gumgumji joined me as a guest teaching artist for my class Making & Seeing Art in NY at Wagner College. I am excited to share the mixed media painted collages created in this session!
</