Conversations with Friends (and Artists); Bob Richardson Gets Real; Zoom Meetings with Lesley Heller and Kate Ware
Occasionally, during the insomniac’s hour between about two and four in the morning, I fantasize about whom I would invite to an ideal dinner party, maybe mixing up Andy Warhol with Oscar Wilde with Georgia O’Keeffe and Emily Dickinson. What sorts of questions would I pose to them? Would Andy consider collaborating with Oscar on a production of Salomé? Would Emily enjoy a visit to Ghost Ranch? Would any of them care to weigh in on the Oprah interview with Meghan and Harry?
If I limited the group solely to visual artists, I would most likely have even more pointed sorts of questions, like asking Braque and Picasso how they got so impatient with the Western pictorial tradition that they started tearing their subjects apart. Or quizzing Vermeer about whether he used lenses and other optical devices.
And so I threw the notion out to Vasari 21 members: “If you could talk to any artist, dead or alive, whom would you choose? What would you ask?” The answers surprised me, ranging from William Norton’s desire to pay a visit to cave painters to Christopher Benson’s fantasy of a boozy meet-up between Willem de Kooning and J.M.W. Turner. You can read more here:
For an intimate chat, Marina Cappelletto chose Agnes Pelton, whose canvas Winter is above
You may wonder how and why I choose the artists I do for “Under the Radar” or “Portfolio,” and I would have to say there’s really very little rhyme or reason. I have to like the work, of course, but beyond that I don’t pay much attention to age, sex, looks, income, or personality. That said, it felt to me like a long time since I’d featured the male of the species, and even longer since I’d met up with a painter who pursues a realist impulse. So I chose an artist in my own backyard, Santa Fe, and paid a studio visit to Bob Richardson about ten days ago, the first such visit I’ve made in more than a year since we’ve all been shut down for the pandemic. It just so happened to be a gloriously sunny day—I even captured snatches of bird song on my tape recorder—and I was delighted that the work lived up to my expectations. A late starter, Richardson has pulled together a remarkable body of work in just the last ten years, bringing to his subjects (many from difficult walks of life) an eye that is both sympathetic and affectionate. Check out the artist’s work here.
Bob Richardson, Miss California, oil on canvas, 26 by 60 inches
And now for members in the news this week…
Marietta Leis is part of “Breath Taking,” a show of 18 artists at the New Mexico Museum of Art in Santa Fe, curated by Kate Ware (who will be a Zoom guest for Vasari21 members on April 14—see below for details). “Breath…is one of the first things we do in life and one of the last, but in between we generally don’t give it much thought,” says the announcement. “In this exhibition, contemporary artists find inventive ways to express this fundamental and elusive act by measuring it, scanning it, enclosing it, evoking it, and reminding us of our own vulnerability. Several artists approach the subject from a personal, meditative perspective while others consider the scientific and social justice ramifications, directly addressing threats to breath that have been at the forefront of public consciousness over the past year, including the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic and the use of choke-holds as a method of restraint for people of color.” Leis’s airy photos on silk seem like analogues for the ephemeral nature of the simple act of breathing.
Marietta Leis, Breath 1 and Breath 2, archival inkjet prints on Habotai silk, 41 by 54 inches
Leslie Kerby is in a couple of shows this month. One called “Deadlocked and Loaded: Disarming America" (through April 18) raises the simple question, “What does America value? Life or Liberty?” The other, titled “Page Turner” and curated by Ellen Hackl Fagan as part of Odetta Digital’s ambitious program during the pandemic, “is an overview of this community of artists,” says the website. “What used to happen in the gallery, artists stopping in, introducing themselves to me, making sure we connected, has been happening online. This community is comprised of driven individuals whose desire to connect has forced us all out of our natural shyness, and removed any negative associations of self promotion. Transparency is key, and sharing of information with the community.” The show can be seen herethrough June 10.
Leslie Kerby, Stimulus 2 (2020), graphite on paper, 30 by 22 inches
Anne Trauben wrote to let me know about a Call for Entry at the Drawing Rooms in Jersey City, NJ, called “Rewriting Her Story: Making the World Better" (open through December 31). So far the artworks include terrific likenesses of Hillary Clinton, Kamala Harris, and Ilhan Omar, along with Gail Winbury’s freewheeling abstraction She Told Them No (2018). More from the online show are here, and for how to submit, click here. Drawing Rooms, says the Artsy site, “is a nonprofit art space in the Topps Building in Jersey City. We show two- and three-dimensional works by emerging and mid-career artists in NJ and the NY metropolitan area. We provide a place where artists can gather, connect and advance their careers. Our innovative and exciting exhibitions, public programs and publications enrich the lives of our community through an appreciation of and involvement with contemporary visual art.”
Kimberley Wiseman, I Eat No for Breakfast (2020)
Through April 30, Leah Poller is part of a three-person show (with Elan Cadiz and Giannina Gutierrez) called “At Home,” which she writes is “installed salon style in a Harlem brownstone [and] explores how we live at home, as a family, as neighbors, as friends and as lovers. Three women artists, a sculptor, a painter and a mixed-media artist take us back to Dad’s favorite chair growing up, waking up in our own bed, working from home in this moment in time and the emotions connected to the people and places that home is.” The venue is called Living with Art and it’s at 17 West 121st Street in New York. Private viewings by appointment (email connieleecdg@gmail.com).
Leah Poller, Spool Bed, bronze, 9 by 6 by 9 inches
Octavia Gallery in New Orleans, LA, is featuring Vasari21 member Barbara Friedman as part of a two-person show with Philemona Williamson (through March 27). “Friedman’s painting process is exploratory,” says the announcement. “She paints to discover and likes to be surprised by her work. She sometimes paints over her old paintings while retaining certain areas and allows images to emerge from the almost fluorescent underpainting, which glows through with an ethereal light. Dislocation is a consistent theme in Friedman’s paintings, and she relies on landscape and portraiture traditions to provide the contexts in which the dislocations occur. She also lets the formalist concerns of modernist abstraction guide her. Many paintings featured in this exhibition are from Friedman’s Dutch ruff collar works. These ‘Big Collar’ paintings take their inspiration from Old Master portraits but the play of scale and color moves the collars into contemporary discussions of bodies and gender.” For a few more days (through March 20), you can also catch Friedman’s work in the virtual show “Art from the Boros VII,” organized by Denise Bibro Gallery in New York.
Barbara Friedman, Early Bird, oil on linen, 44 by 37 inches
“Out of Hibernation” is the very apt name for a group show including long-time V21 member Jonathan Morse at Exhibit/208 in Albuquerque, NM, through April 30. “For me, marks create a kinship with generations past all the way back to cave painters,” the artist writes. “My work explores the interaction of analog and digital marks and their interface with organic forms such as flowers, through which I choreograph the ongoing dance between our human selves and our digital partners as we become increasingly and willingly cyborg, thereby enhancing and extending ourselves through our ever-changing technical abilities...marching joyfully, and sometimes fearfully but pliably, into the AI/robotic future we cannot fully perceive. Even marks created digitally help me as an artist to plant my flag on the trembling soil, the shifting sand, of our present and uncertain planet.”
Jonathan Morse, Channels 3 (2020), archival pigment print, 24 by 36 inches
“A year on from the first lockdown’s being imposed around the world, we are facing the reality that ‘unless we act now, the pandemic could set women’s rights back by decades’ (United Nations 2020),” says the announcement for an online exhibition at Spilt Milk called “If Not Now, When?” “This past year has seen systems of oppression rise to the surface once more, and has uncovered inequalities which can no longer be overlooked. The artists in part one express the complex and unique challenges mothers are facing during this unprecedented time; the grief, the weightiness of domestic confinement, the loneliness while never being alone, and the pressure to be all things at once.” Vasari21 member Kate Fauvell is in part two of the show, in which artists “challenge current systems of oppression by elevating the role of mothering work in our society, by celebrating the power of community resilience and resistance. Whether through healing and mending our past, or breaking and smashing the glass ceilings, we cannot return to what was, but must look toward new beginnings and a post-pandemic world that works for us all.” Both parts can be accessed here.
Kate Fauvell,The Streets Belong to Us (2020), photographs, collage, and acrylic on canvas, 30 by 40 inches
Max Baseman, director of 5. Gallery in Santa Fe, is showing one of my favorite artists from the gallery’s roster, Roger Walker, who works on a small scale to produce mesmerizing works in ink or graphite on paper. He “began making his drawings over 20 years ago as a way to pass time,” says the Lannan Foundation's website. “He started out with blank crossword puzzles that he would accurately fill in with ballpoint pen. When the puzzle was finished, he methodically covered the horizontal and vertical entries in repetitive diagonal strokes until the puzzle was completely covered and all that remained were pen strokes. Wes Mills, a Missoula, Montana, gallery owner, first encountered Walker making his drawings at the local library. At the prospect of an exhibition, his first at the age of 52, Walker began buying paper, but still used his trusted ballpoint pens of the office supply variety. Roger Walker was not formally trained as an artist and may fall into the category now termed 'Outsider Art,' saying, ‘I’ve been doing these puzzle pages for twenty years before somebody finally called it art.’” Below, a couple of Walker’s untitled works from the show.
Karen Fitzgerald is part of an “evolving installation” in Long Island City celebrating the notion of LIC as “a galaxy, both diverse and unified…. Twenty fiberglass spheres were manufactured by LIC-based fabricator, Sculpture House NYC. Five Queens-based artists were selected through an open call from Culture Lab LIC and commissioned to design and paint four planets each, with twenty total spheres representing our galaxy.” These stunning gems, each about 20 inches in diameter, will be on view for about four more months. Below are from Fitzgerald.
The indefatigable curator and artist William Norton announces his final show at Peepshow Space in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, through March 28 (Saturdays and Sundays, 12 to 6 p.m.). “Firing cannon shots loaded with confidence across the passive bows of complacent artistic canons, Daniel John Gadd invests his shattered reflections and dreams of our age with an assassin’s cold-eyed clarity,” says the press release. “Chris Ketchie’s multi paneled, multilayered abstractions built from wooden panels would not survive in a studio of soft canvas. Attacking his surfaces with testosterone-enhanced ferocity, he demonstrates a meat eater’s ravenous execution of the meek upon the altar of his desire.” Clearly there’s good reason the show is called “In Cold Blood.”
Daniel John Gadd, Elephant (2021), oil, mirrored glass, copper, steel, string, flowers, plexiglass and plaster on wooden panel, 82 by 50 by 26 inches
Chris Ketchie, Fillide (2020), acrylic on wood on oil on canvas, 30 by 28 by 2 inches
Arlene Rush has studio space to rent in her building on West 26th Street (the site of a couple of Vasari21 parties). It’s bright and quiet and available May 1: a 325-square-foot area in a 1250-square-foot space with other artists. Semi-private, large windows, and well-ventilated, with14-foot ceilings and fans and 24/7 access. It’s a well-kept building with galleries and artists, large freight elevators, and slop sinks, and everyone’s been vaxxed. $1425 a month includes electric and wifi. For more info: Email: rejectionrejectre@gmail.com Cell: 646-285-8706
This Thursday, May 18, at 5 Eastern Time we will be having a Zoom meeting with Lesley Heller, an art dealer for more than 20 years (and former director of one of my favorite galleries on the Lower East Side). Lesley will talk to us about her many years in the business and about making the transition to art coaching. I’ve got a pretty full roster, but if you’d like to sign on for the waiting list, there is always the possibility of cancellations.
Then, on April 14, we will be Zooming with Kate Ware, curator of photography at the New Mexico Museum of Art in Santa Fe, and the aforementioned organizer of “Breath Taking.” There are quite a few spots left for this one, so email me at ajlandi33@gmail.com if you’re interested.
I will be taking about a month’s break starting five minutes ago to work on a book proposal (because, my friends, memberships in this site scarcely keep body and soul together), but I will continue to send out the newsletters and organize Zoom meetings, and hope to be back to generating more sparkling editorial in mid-April.
And there’s more “Rotten Romance” this week, as I get ever more involved with the Gary Cooper lookalike and the radio show premieres on a day of global tragedy. Click here for the latest, and send me your email address if you’d like to join other subscribers on Substack. (My old buddy Natalie Angier, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Woman: An Intimate Geography, called me a “fabulous, hysterical writer”….so you don’t want to be missing out.)
As always, stay tuned.
To: Bob Richardson, Again (2020), oil on canvas, 62 by 48 inches
