Great Advice on Grants, Residencies for All, and Zooming with Charlotte Jackson
If you were fortunate enough to join us last Monday, August 23, Praxis founder and director Brainard Carey offered a complete step-by-step tour of how to apply for grants (especially the plum prizes—the Pollock-Krasner and Guggenheim awards), as well as some enlightening info on lesser-known resources, like the Awesome Foundation. Brainard went over the basics, the importance of a good statement and researching past winners, and took us through some of the niceties of applying for residencies. What is Praxis (officially the Praxis Center for Aesthetic Studies), you may ask? It’s an amazing resource Carey has been developing for more than two decades, some of which is available only to members, but much of which is free, like the updated listings of grants and residencies and the Yale University interviews with notable people from the art world—artists, writers, architects, curators, and poets. If you haven’t investigated Praxis yet, I urge you to do so. And if you missed our Zoom meeting with Brainard and are curious about what he had to say, please email me and I’ll send you the recording (ajlandi33@gmail.com).
And speaking of residencies, I have spent a fair amount of time in the last few years researching all those working respites out there, especially the lesser known. You can simply do a search for residencieson the site and pull up about 25, for which I solicited inside information from artists who have attended these retreats. Before the pandemic pushed us all indoors, I was writing longer posts on places like The Studios of Key West and Michael David’s immersive experiences in Brooklyn, and I will get back to these in the near future. One of these days I’ll apply for a few for myself, and let you know what’s out there for writers.
I’ve been thoroughly enjoying these Zoom meetings and intend to continue with them through the months ahead. It’s a way for me to get to know both the art world and V21 members better, and some have said they find this a great opportunity to connect with others in the community. Next up is Charlotte Jackson, a dealer from the Santa Fe area whose artists and aesthetics I’ve long admired. I don’t have a specific date yet (most likely the second or third week in September), but I hope to find out more about her 30-plus years in the Southwest and what she sees in our post-pandemic future. I will send out smoke signals as soon as I have a date.
And now let’s turn to the late-summer news from members….
Three Vasari21 members are taking part in a two-venue group exhibition called “Winter Over” sponsored by Joyce Goldstein Gallery in Chatham, NY, from August 28. The first part of the show is mainly small sculpture studies and drawings at the gallery at 19 Central Square (through September 25). The second is large-scale sculpture that’s “constructed so it will deteriorate over the 10 months the show is up,” says the announcement. “This deterioration is a metaphor for what is going on around us. The Big Lie, the attempt to overturn the election, the bungled response to COVID, the attack on the Capitol and the resulting deaths are the most obvious examples. In mid-October the sculpture will be moved to TSL at 434 Columbia Street in Hudson for the winter where it will be displayed outside, exposed to inclement winter weather. In the spring each artist will have to decide if the deteriorated work reflects where we are as a country or should the work be rebuilt to reflect a better national life. Time will tell.”
Gelah Penn’s Havisham #1 (2020) is named for the Dickens character in Great Expectations, and made from polyester mesh, fabric and polyester tubing, plastic garbage bags and ties, Mylar, tape, metallic fabrics, acrylic paint, staples, eyelets, T-pins on paper lantern, 44 by 38 by 6.5 inches
Pamela Blum has two works in the show, Dowel and Blossom, which will be in the outdoor iteration. “Like many works in outdoor sites, I find Blossom more powerful in the indoor process photos [shown here],” she writes. “This time I plan to document the work, born to die in rain sleet and snow until…we’ll find out.”
Mimi Graminski’s piece from the outdoor sculpture show at Joyce Goldstein is called Stacked, from her “Logs and Lace” series.” The logs came from an elm tree which was riddled with insects and disease and had to be cut down,” she writes. “By the time it was felled, the bark had fallen off and the bare logs provided me with a smooth canvas for paint. I combine the logs with lace I've collected from many sources, much of which is antique. I wonder about the lacemakers and their intricate patterns made from hundreds of stitches. What stories did they imbue into each stitch? As the patterns become joined with the logs those stories become part of the environment.” The work is from 2021, and 40 by 50 by 15 inches
Monroe Hodder will be showing at David Richard Gallery in New York, from September 8 through October 9. ‘The long season of the pandemic left the artist Monroe Hodder secluded in her basement to paint,” says the gallery’s press release. “Finally, she has returned to her spacious studio in the Bronx in search of more air and light for her work. Her new show of paintings and a handmade book is called ‘Rising Tides and Fragile Hope.’ Her abstract paintings consist of luminous slabs of oil paint that hover over a geometric ground made of bright-toned acrylics. She moves paint around her canvas with a palette knife, scraping and blending, swirling and edging. Her color mixtures in oil paint have been honed over the years into richly striated patterns and the rough swipe of her stroke gives an urgency to her mark-making. In her current work, Hodder has found a new balance between her surface paint slabs and their ground.”
Monroe Hodder, The Lighthouse (2021), oil over acrylic on canvas, 60 by 60 inches
From September 10 through November 8, Fern Apfel will be showing works at the Albany International Airport in Colonie, NY, as part of a juried exhibition by artists of the Mohawk Hudson Region (other venues showing 143 works by 96 artists include the Albany Center Gallery and the Opalka Gallery). “An important thing to know about my paintings is that they are not collage,” Apfel writes. “Each letter, envelope, stamp and piece of paper is painted with many layers of acrylic paint. All the writing and fine detail work is done with archival pens. Most of the letters in my paintings can be read. They come from different decades and locations, but their content is amazingly and endearingly timeless. A box of old playing cards can remind us of a past time and, carefully placed, an empty notebook can evoke an elusive and often ambiguous new meaning.”
Fern Apfel, The Joker (2021), acrylic and pen on wood panel, 24 by 20 inches
Eveline Luppi has a solo show called “Coming Out 2021” from September 3 to 16 at the Cross Rip Gallery in Harwich Port, MA. “This new color field work is a transition in style from years of painting geometric abstraction,” she says. “It has evolved from feelings for a new sense of freedom in the work during the peak of the Covid-19 pandemic. It reflects my ability to paint in vastly different ways from highly structured work to a more fluid and spontaneous approach.”
Eveline Luppi, River Islands (2021), acrylic on canvas, 24 by 24 inches
Through October 9, John Fitzsimmons is part of the group show “In Person” at the Schweinfurth Art Center in Auburn, NY. As the center’s website notes, the four artists included—Fitzsimmons, along with Lacey McKinney, Holly Greenberg, and Donalee Peden Wesley—“focus on the human figure or stand-ins….With the recent loss of life from the pandemic, their artwork resonates anew.” Says Fitzsimmons: “When I am painting, I am digging, looking for a kernel, a seed, and essence that is in there, I just need to find it. My work implies stories, but they are stories that can’t be told with words, only images.”
John Fitzsimmons, Wind (2021), oil on panel, 72 by 30 inches
Carole Kunstadt’s installation Pressing On (highlighted in the newsletter a few weeks back as part of a show at the Wellfleet Historical Center in Wellfleet, MA) has been named a winner in the Kingston Annual 2021, the second yearly fine-arts exhibition and competition hosted by the Kingston Midtown Arts District and the Arts Society of Kingston. As the artist noted of the concurrent installation in Massachusetts. “I have combined fragments of pages from a book published anonymously in 1791 with antique sad irons, textiles and thread. Hannah More (1745-1833) was an abolitionist, social reformer, philanthropist, writer and feminist. More's convictions were moral, social and political, inspiring us to raise one's voice to injustice.”
Through September 25, Diana Creighton’s work is part of “All Art Arizona” at Art Intersection in Gilbert, AZ. These two paintings are from a series I’ve been working on since 2019 called Borders and Crossings. “I’m looking at the everyday reality of our border with Mexico and how our shared culture and commerce shows up in daily life,” the artist writes. “I am painting people and traffic, ICE checkpoints, ports of entry, and the effect of the border on our lives, not from a political point of view, but from the ordinariness of it. I like the dailyness of life — the quotidian world.”
Diana Creighton, San Luis POE (Prepare to Stop), oil on canvas, 25 by 30 inches
Claire Seidl is part of a two-person show (with Jenny Brillhart) at Corey Daniels Gallery in Wells, ME, through October 2. She’s showing recent paintings and photography, the latest in a 40-year career that has encompassed both mediums. “In both my painting and photography, I explore the same formal concerns, creating work that draws the viewer into my world, encouraging contemplation and challenging our perception of the often thin line between reality and abstracted memory,” she writes on her website. “I have no pre-conceived ideas or plans when I paint and adhere to no set of procedural givens. My relationship to painting is not settled, but dynamic and evolving. Each painting is resolved according to its own exigencies and my job is to look hard and long enough to see them. I seek new ways to mesh surface and space convincingly and always look for new pictorial resolutions.”
Claire Seidl, The Poet’s Eye Is Like a Candy (2021), oil on linen, 30 by 28 inches
Niki Ketchman is part of a second show at the Hammond Museum and Japanese Sculpture Garden in North Salem, NY, called Bloom II (Bloom I was written up in the August 2 newsletter). “The methods by which I make sculptures include welding, sewing, weaving, braiding, winding, draping and decorating,” Ketchman writes on her website. “Ideas about what comprises ‘women's work’ and questions of where art, function, craft and design intersect are on my mind. Because of my method of creation, does that make my work feminine or feminist? Many of my sculptures are composed of a combination of industrial and domestic materials. Others are all soft. Some are appropriate for outdoor use, some for indoor use only and some can be used either indoors or out….Although sometimes humorous, my sculptures, digital prints, drawings and collages make allusions to such issues as the passage of time, the digital age, or gender roles.”
Roni Sherman Ramos is having a solo show called “Escapes” at the Atlantic Gallery on West 28th Street in New York, from September 7 through September 25, with an opening on the 9th and an artist’s talk on the last day, from 2 to 5 pm. “The paintings of Roni Sherman Ramos over the past 1 ½ years are evidence that the creation of art reached beyond the constraints of COVID and the global political turmoil,” says the gallery announcement. “The paintings are not unlike a diary of personal expression transformed into a portfolio of color and form.”
Roni Sherman Ramos, Escapes 11 (2020), oil on linen mounted on panel, 24 by 24 inches
“’Staring Into the Fire, my solo exhibition at the University of Colorado Art Museum (CUAM), is now open to the public,” writes Kate Petley. “Curated by Executive Director Sandra Firmin, the show presents 14 pieces, including canvases, photographs and large works on paper. The culmination of several years of planning, it deepens my exploration of the luminous surface and its potential for transformation.” Notes the curator: “Petley’s will to transform and mesmerize guides her image-making process. Sculptures assembled from castaway materials such as cardboard and colored gels are placed into intensely lit arrangements and photographed. Corrugated and pitted surfaces undergo a startling shift when presented as photographs or printed on canvases....Using mechanisms of contemporary technology, Petley counters the quick pace of viewing images on devices. She leverages physiological responses to color and light, inviting absorption in brightly hued geometries and cast shadows.” The gallery is in Boulder, CO, and open to the public, 11 a.m. to 3 p.m., Tuesday through Saturday. As with many other indoor spaces these days, masks are required. Below, an installation shot.
I had the pleasure of seeing Dora Dillistone’s recent work at the Stables Gallery here in Taos in a concise but rewarding show that has her working in two different veins: her familiar weather-driven abstractions and a series of deeply affecting portraits of horses, like the one shown here. When I asked why the switch, she rather mysteriously answered: “No change in direction. Revisiting paint and working in tandem with the elements.” I guess it’s a Gerhard Richter kind of thing—but either way, totally compelling and eerily beautiful.
Dora Dillistone, And I Saw a White Horse (2021), oil on canvas, 36 by 36 inches
Throughout the summer, Susan Eley Fine Art, Hudson, in upstate New York, has been presenting a series of exhibitions, “each fostering an intimate and dynamic dialogue between two artists based in the greater Hudson Valley region,” according to the press announcement. The third artist pairing of the season is Barbara Marks and Joe Sultan. “Each artist shines independently; then, contextualized alongside one another, their works manifest both interstices and interconnections.” For this show, Marks “fabricated a series of or ‘upcycled’ drawings and paintings on collapsed, disassembled packaging material, notably cardboard boxes [and] also created an ‘Isolation Journal,’ a series comprised of more than 52 accordion-fold volumes of drawings that document her time and the minutiae of daily life in Covid isolation.” Below, an installation shot.
I was delighted to see my interview with Bonnie Collura spread out over 12 generously illustrated pages of the September/October issue of Sculpture magazine. I was first introduced to Bonnie’s work when I wrote a post called When Apparel Meets Artway back in March of 2017, so it was a pleasure to spend time talking to her and learning more about her sculpture, her career, and her activities as a teacher at Penn State (for which she won the International Sculpture Center Outstanding Educator Award in April). This is the third sculptor I’ve been introduced to through Vasari21 membership whose career has sufficiently intrigued the magazine to assign what it calls a “conversation.” It’s not yet online, but may be soon, since I see Jamie Hamilton is now up and running on the site. Below, a spread about Collura from the magazine.
Our faithful correspondent in Connecticut, Sandra Filippucci, has not entirely abandoned her quest for the ultimate NFT, but she has been crazy busy with renovating a “bakery barn” into the ultimate live/work situation for herself. So I’ve cut her some slack and guaranteed her an extra nice Christmas bonus. She promises to get back to us with an update in two weeks.
Having knocked off a 7200-word chapter for the book proposal, I’m now ready to get back to our regular programming on the site as soon as my overextended digits recover. So look for more Under the Radar, more info about residencies, more Ripe for Rediscovery, more Fantasy Curating….and all the other wonderful content you’ve come to expect from Vasari21.
And, of course, there's still more Rotten Romance. Don't miss the last installment of "A Brief Experiment with Married Men," from my unrepentant but entertaining past. Just click here for the archive and scroll down through any post to subscribe..
Till next time,
Top: Bonnie Collura in performance as "The Prince."
Claire Seidl, The Poet’s Eye Is Like a Candy (2021), oil on linen, 30 by 28 inches
