Art & Culture Lecture: Wei Dong
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| Two Girls, 48 in. x 36 in., oil/acrylic/canvas, 2006 (Nicholas Robinson Gallery) |
Artist “Wei Dong explores through painting the space where heritage and modernity coexist. His works set up a dialogue, present a confrontation and explode a good number of conventions. In a disruption of tradition Wei Dong has taken this male dominated domain and subjected it to domination by women.”
– http://www.chinesecontemporary.com/
All lectures are free and open to the public, so don’t miss it!
Next up: Donald Kuspit, Wednesday, September 29
Click here for a complete schedule
of 2010 Fall Art & Culture Lectures
The NYAA Library has these resources available exclusively for NYAA students.
- Related books, including Flowering in the Shadows: Women in Chinese and Japanese Painting, Ingres’s Eroticized Bodies: Retracing the Serpentine Line, and Boticelli: Images of Love and Spring.
- Additional titles on the Mannerists and other related artists, Chinese-American Art, and traditional Chinese landscape painting.
- Access to scholarly articles and reviews through Gale and Infotrac.
- Images in ArtStor, collected in the Wei Dong image group for easy retrieval.
Different Gardens
by Emily Adams (MFA 2011)
The Terra Foundation residency has come to a close. On the flight back I watched from the plane window as Paris morphed from a city to a Mondrian painting, and then to some kind of off-kilter fractal in shades of green as we moved over the countryside, over Giverny.
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| West Texas crop circles |

This is the superman garden, I thought; the garden whose boundaries are dictated in offices and whose water is pumped through miles of pipeline and complex irrigation projects. This is, at least, what accounts for the appearance of around 40% of American landscape. (http://www.ers.usda.gov/statefacts/us.htm)
It seemed that the French aerial agricultural view was a bit more organic in form than its American counterpart (fewer grids, fewer perfect geometrical forms). Perhaps the French 18th and 19th century love of the garden has somehow translated into contemporary farming practices. Empress Josephine, originally called Rose, once hired an artist, Pierre-Joseph Redouté, to live in her palace and make a drawing of every rose in her collection of over 250 varieties collected form around the world.
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| People in line – entrance of the Louvre |
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| Wall paper at an abandoned house in Giverny |
So the rose is still in, agricultural fields out.
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| A painting I started in Giverny, not yet titled |
But the paintings I started at the Terra Foundation are an attempt to explore the relationship between these two loaded images. I painted on photographs in part because the degree of separation of the material from the artist seemed the most appropriate technical approach for the subject matter.
In the last few days in Giverny, most of us forsook time in Monet’s gardens and the French countryside for the interior of our studios. Two weeks proved to be a surprisingly fertile amount of time for the development of our work— I have expanded my associations with ‘the garden’ to include the creative workspace.
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| Final Critiques |
Snapshots in Giverny: Cows, Caves, St. Barnabas
Faculty guide Wade Schuman fiinishes his photographic tour through the Giverny countryside.
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| In Veerle’s cave, which dates to the 1400s |
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| “Classic French Cows” |
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| Detail of Veronese’s St. Barnabé in Rouen |
Inaugural Exhibitions at the End of the Recession
A Review by Maria Kozak (MFA 2011)
The New York Times has officially declared The Recession over. This is great news for the art world. Let’s celebrate with an impressive new location for old staple Sperone Westwater and the opening of new contender RH Gallery.
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| (concept for Sperone Westwater) |
On Wednesday, Sperone Westwater opens doors at its new spot on the Bowery. The building, down the street from the New Museum, is new museumish and nearly its size. Designed by renowned British architects Foster + Partners, the building is eight stories with a movable viewing space that hopes to pioneer new ideas in exhibiting art with a novel approach to vertical movement. The first show will be a series of new paintings from Argentinian artist Guillermo Kuitca. 
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| Deborah Kass, Forget Your Troubles, 2010 oil,acrylic/canvas, 72 x 60 in. |
Thursday night, go to the opening of NYAA visiting artist Deborah Kass‘s show at Paul Kasmin in Chelsea. The show, MORE feel good paintings for feel bad times, is aptly titled. Kass’s work incorporates words, colors, and appropriation to comment on current affairs and pop culture. The opening is from 6-8 pm.

 
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| Micah Ganske, Tommorow Land: Greenpoint, NY, 2010 acrylic on muslin, 120 x 168 in |


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| Carolina Nitsch, Do Not Abandon Me 2009-2010 Archival dyes printed on cloth, 24 x 30 in |

Also if you haven’t had a chance, go see the Louise Bourgeois + Tracey Emin show at Carolina Nitsch. The collaboration originated with Bourgeois’ 16 gouache drawings on paper of male and female torsos in profile. Emin ‘responded’ by adding handwritten text, line drawings and gouache. It is one of the final projects of Louise Bourgois, a prolific artist with a profound impact on the nature of art and the first female artist to have a retrospective show at MOMA. In Do Not Abandon Me, both confessional artists explore sexuality, identity, birth, gender and ultimately the need to feel attached to the “Other.â€
The Year Begins… from Deutschland to my Studio
by Aliene de Souza Howell (MFA 2011)
Back for my second and final year at the Academy, I am greeted by Will Kurtz’s newspaper motorcycle woman, Neoplatonism and a fourth floor window studio. I returned from the Leipzig residency and subsequent backpacking trip in the German Alps feeling refreshed for the first day of school and with ideas buzzing rooted in the work I created there.
The year has ignited with an opening for the stirring work of the third year fellows, Panni Malek, Will Kurtz, and Peter Mühlhäußer. And my classes began with John Jacobsmeyer’s Narrative Printmaking Seminar (being offered for the first time this year!) and Vincent Desiderio‘s painting elective. Jacobsmeyer pushed our creative canons with selected woodcuts from his book, More Than Human, and his personal print collection as I began to formulate ideas for my own series. Desiderio inaugurated class with a philosophical lecture about artist as intellectuals with its origins in Neoplatonism. From there he came to each student’s studio and gave individual homework assignments based his or her Thesis ideas; he was enthusiastic regarding my concepts and work, instructing me to keep experimenting.
On the heels of his advice, I delved into dioramas and sketches in preparation for my large scale Thesis works to come! I am continuing the series I started this summer about the disconnect between daily life and the string of global natural disasters that have happened recently. I can’t wait to manifest the sketches and brainstorming of this week into action! As Delacroix said in regards to creating, ” If I am not quivering like a snake in the hands of Pythoness, I am cold…”

Art & Culture Lecture: Hilary Harkness
Tuesday, September 21, 7:30 pm
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| Iowa Class, 14″ by 22″ oil/linen, 2003 |
All lectures are free and open to the public. See you there!
Click here for a complete schedule of 2010 Fall Art & Culture LecturesThe NYAA Library has the following resources available exclusively for NYAA students.
- 9 related books including: Power and Beauty: Images of Women in Art, Representing Women, and The Female Nude: Art, Obscenity, and Sexuality.
- Additional titles on women artists, representation of the body, and contemporary artists.
- Access to scholarly articles and reviews about Hilary Harkness through Gale and ProQuest.
- Images in ArtStor, collected in the Hilary Harkness image group for easy retrieval.
Oooh La LA!
by Jessie Brugger (MFA 2010)
The hills are alive with the sound of music! Okay, wrong country, but it was a true story here in Giverny, too. The Musicians for the Chamber Music Festival moved into their residency a few days before we left… and we woke up to nature humming and classical musicians playing away. Don’t get me wrong, its no Tupac Shakur or Biggie Smalls, but it’s very awesome and not a bad way to start the day in the morning!
The other day I went to Rouen, the city where Van Gogh spent the last years of his life. Seeing it explains a lot of how his paintings look. Van Gogh was not exaggerating when he painted the buildings looking like they were caving in on one another (okay, maybe a little) but the imperfection on the lines on the buildings and the wood makes it such an intriguing visual puzzle. It is also the home of the famous Cathedral paintings by Monet. The Cathedral stands in the city like a huge beautiful beast alive with stained glass windows and fantastic gothic architecture. Ah, the power of architecture!
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| Everyone at dinner |
On the last night, we were treated to a fantastic dinner in the French countryside from Veerle Thieleman, Wade Schuman’s good friend. Wade, his wife Kate Javens, the whole host crew from Terra Foundation and the neighbors showed us New Yorkers how the French do dinner and it was extremely impressive! There was so much to take in – a beautiful country view, a lily pond with frogs and flowers, horses in the yard, and Amber even caught a hedgehog. Wade played his harmonica for us in a cave outside of Veerle’s house that dates back to the 1400s. The sound of the harmonica and the candle light in the cave was surreal and yet So Real.

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| Amber Hany |


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| Ian Healy |

Lightning Rod – Saya Woolfalk
Saya Woolfalk is a New York artist who re-imagines the world in multiple dimensions (sculpture, installation, painting, performance and video). She has exhibited at PS1/MoMA; Deitch Projects; Contemporary Art Museum, Houston; Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the Studio Museum in Harlem; Momenta Art; Performa09; and has been written about on Art21’s blog. With funding from the NEA, her solo exhibition The Institute of Empathy, will open at Real Art Ways in the fall of 2010.
What can we achieve by representing the body in art today?
Art & Culture Lecture: Isabelle Bonzom
Tuesday, September 14, 7:30 pm
Artist and art historian Isabelle Bonzom is a painter of the flesh. She will discuss her research, both as a painter and a scholar, on the representation of the flesh based on two iconographic characters: Judith and Salomé. Through dramatic images showing women with male heads, Bonzom will talk about the cutting of body, image and composition. She will examine how Michelangelo, Caravaggio, Gentileschi and Klimt treat those subjects and how Brancusi, Matisse and Fischl evoke the question.
Born in France, Isabelle Bonzom views painting as a living body. She is primarily concerned with revealing relations between the matter and the image. Bonzom is also one of the rare contemporary artists to master buon fresco. She has authored a reference book on the art and technique of fresco, and since 1989 she has been a lecturer at the Pompidou Center in Paris.
All lectures are free and open to the public, so bring a friend!
Next up: Hilary Harkness, Tuesday September 21
Click here for a complete schedule of 2010 Fall Art & Culture Lectures
The NYAA Library has the following resources available exclusively for NYAA students.
- 12 related books including Artemesia Gentileschi: The Image of the Female Hero in Art, Salome, la Belle Dame Sans Merci, and The Body in Pieces: Fragment as Metaphor for Modernity
- Additional titles on Gentileschi, Michelangelo, Caravaggio, Klimt, Fischl, Brancusi, and Matisse
- Electronic access to 27 related scholarly articles through Gale and ProQuest
- 253 images in ArtStor image database, collected in the Isabelle Bonzom image group for easy retrieval
Snapshots in Giverny: Rheas, Toads, Studios
Wade Schuman, faculty instructor and guide on the Giverny residency at Terra Foundation, always finds interesting things!
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| A “nice French toad.” |
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| Rheas, flightless birds similar to the ostrich, lounging by a stream. |
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| Artists in the Studio. |