Black History Month and Women's History Month: Artist - Carrie Mae Weems

The Edgemont Art department would like to celebrate Black History Month (February) and Women’s History Month (March) by honoring Carrie Mae Weems (born April 20, 1953) an American artist working in text, fabric, audio, digital images and video, and is best known for her photography. She achieved prominence through her early 1990s photographic project The Kitchen Table Series. Her photographs, films and videos focus on serious issues facing African Americans today, including racism, sexism politics and personal identity.

She once said, "Let me say that my primary concern in art, as in politics, is with the status and place of Afro-Americans in the country." More recently, however, she expressed the view that "Black experience is not really the main point; rather, complex, dimensional, human experience and social inclusion ... is the real point." She continues to produce art that provides social commentary on the experiences of people of color, especially black women, in America.

Her talents have been recognized by Harvard University and Wellesly College, with fellowships, artist-in-residence and visiting professor positions. She taught photography at Hampshire Sollege in the late 1980s and shot the "Kitchen Table" series in her home in Western Massachusetts. Weems is one of six artist-curators who made selections for Artistic License: Six Takes on the Guggenheim Collection, at the Guggenheim museum in 2019/20.

For more images, click here:

Image from the Kitchen Table Series

Carrie Mae Weems

Native American Heritage Month: The Art of Raven Halfmoon

For the month of November, The EHS Art department honors Native American Heritage Month by showcasing the work of artist, Raven Half Moon. Raven Halfmoon currently has an exhibition at the Aldrich Museum that should not be missed! Raven Halfmoon’s practice spans torso-scaled and colossal-sized stoneware sculptures, with some soaring up to twelve feet and weighing over eight hundred pounds. With inspirations that orbit centuries from ancient Indigenous pottery to Moai statues to Land Art, Halfmoon interrogates the intersection of tradition, history, gender, and personal experience. Born and raised in Norman, Oklahoma, she learned about ceramics as a teenager from a Caddo elder. Working mainly in portraiture, Halfmoon hand builds each work using a coil method. Her surfaces are expressive and show deep finger impressions and dramatic dripping glazes—a physicality that presences her as both maker and matter. She fuses Caddo pottery traditions (a history of making mostly done by women) with populist gestures—often tagging her work (a reference to Caddo tattooing). Her palette is specific and matches both the clay bodies she selects and the glazes she fires with—reds (after the Oklahoma soil and the blood of murdered Indigenous women), blacks (referencing the natural clay native to the Red River), and creams. Sometimes she stacks and repeats imagery, creating totemic forms that represent herself and her maternal ancestry while also reinforcing the multiplicities that exist inside all of us. Her works reference stories of the Caddo Nation, specifically her feminist lineage and the power of its complexities. This exhibition will include a combination of new and borrowed works that vary in size and content from over the last five years.

Click image to visit museum website

Breast Cancer Awareness Month: The Art Department honors Hollis Sigler

To bring attention to Breast Cancer Awareness month, The Art Department honors Hollis Sigler. In 1985, Sigler was diagnosed with breast cancer. Her work from the 1990s until her death from cancer in 2001 dealt with the personal pain of the disease and its effect on society. In 2001, Sigler was honored with the College Art Association’s Distinguished Artist Award for Lifetime Achievement and the Chicago Caucus for Women in the Arts Lifetime Achievement Award.

Sigler said that she utilized a childlike, faux-naïf style as a reaction against a patriarchal culture that treated women as little more than children. Her style was also a means of conveying difficult emotional content in a way that viewers could easily understand.

Born in Gary, Indiana, Sigler earned her Master of Fine Arts from the School of The Art Institute of Chicago in 1973. Sigler established herself as part of Chicago’s art scene during a period when artists there were challenging New York City’s cultural hegemony. Familiar with Chicago’s Hairy Who group, which emphasized cartoons and other popular imagery, and the whimsical art of Florine Stettheimer, Sigler found quirky precedents for her own idiosyncratic approach.

For Hollis Sigler, breast cancer was deeply rooted in her family’s history. Both Sigler’s great-grandmother and mother died from the disease prior to her own diagnosis in 1985 at the age of 37. Though the artist underwent a mastectomy and chemotherapy, by 1993, the cancer had spread throughout her body.

Despite these difficulties, Sigler almost immediately began creating artwork that engaged with her illness. In 1992, having already spent years living with breast cancer, she remarked in an interview that she knew she would someday die of the disease, a realization that she said transformed the way she approached her art practice. 

https://nmwa.org/art/artists/hollis-sigler/

Hollis Sigler, Some Kind of Love (1992). Photo courtesy MCA Chicago.

National Hispanic Heritage Month - Artist: Frida Khalo

To celebrate National Hispanic Heritage Month, we focus on the painter, Frida Khalo. Frida Kahlo began to paint in 1925, while recovering from a near-fatal bus accident that devastated her body and marked the beginning of lifelong physical ordeals. Over the next three decades, she would produce a relatively small yet consistent and arresting body of work. In meticulously executed paintings, Kahlo portrayed herself again and again, simultaneously exploring, questioning, and staging her self and identity. She also often evoked fraught episodes from her life, including her ongoing struggle with physical pain and the emotional distress caused by her turbulent relationship with celebrated painter Diego Rivera.

Such personal subject matter, along with the intimate scale of her paintings, sharply contrasted with the work of her acclaimed contemporaries, the Mexican Muralists. Launched in the wake of the Mexican Revolution and backed by the government, the Mexican Muralist movement aimed to produce monumental public murals that mined the country’s national history and identity. An avowed Communist, like her peers Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, and David Alfaro Siqueiros, Kahlo at times expressed her desire to paint “something useful for the Communist revolutionary movement,” yet her art remained “very far from work that could serve the Party.”1 She nonetheless participated in her peers’ exaltation of Mexico’s indigenous culture, avidly collecting Mexican popular art and often making use of its motifs and techniques. In My Grandparents, My Parents, and I, for example, she adopted the format of retablos, small devotional paintings made on metallic plates. She also carefully crafted a flamboyant Mexican persona for herself, wearing colorful folk dresses and pre-Columbian jewelry, in a performative display of her identity.

Kahlo’s early recognition was prompted by French poet and founder of Surrealism André Breton, who enthusiastically embraced her art as self-made Surrealism, and included her work in his 1940 International Exhibition of Surrealism in Mexico City. Yet if her art had an uncanny quality akin to the movement’s tenets, Kahlo resisted the association: “They thought I was a Surrealist but I wasn’t,” she said. “I never painted dreams. I painted my own reality.”2

STEAM STUDIO - addresses logo design, branding, and eco friendly initiatives!

STEAM STUDIO - addresses logo design, branding, and eco friendly initiatives!

STEAM STUDIO recently kicked off its “Logo and Branding” project within the Art & Commerce Unit. Students studied the company, Patagonia, and their signature Flying Fish logo as a point of departure to talk about branding that visually and conceptually embodies environmental ethics, and green initiatives that students believe establish the fabric of the brand.  Students watched videos on the revolutionary Yulex wetsuits (not made from petroleum) and the fishing net recycling program,  “Net Plus” to talk about companies with a cleaner, more responsible way of running a business. Students took note of how companies like Patagonia make commitments to green initiatives that they care about while putting their hearts in front of profits and think about the health of our planet.

videos can be seen here :

https://www.patagonia.com/stories/net-positive/story-88629.html

https://www.patagonia.com/yulex-natural-rubber-wetsuits/

Art 21: Tanya Aguiñiga in "Borderlands"

The binational artist Tanya Aguiñiga pushes the power of art to transform the United States-Mexico border from a site of trauma to a creative space for personal healing and collective expression. Reflecting the cultural hybridity and community of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, the artist discusses her upbringing in Tijuana, her training as a furniture and craft designer, and her artistic beginnings with the Border Art Workshop/Taller de Arte Fronterizo collective. From her studio, the artist and her team produce objects like jewelry and housewares to fund their social-justice-based projects, workshops, and performances. Aguiñiga returns to the site of one of these projects, titled Border Quipu, where she and her team recorded the stories of daily commuters from Tijuana to San Diego. This segment also follows Aguiñiga as she prepares for Metabolizing the Border, a performance and personal reckoning with the pain caused by the border wall. The work is a demanding physical feat: the artist walks along the border wall in a glass suit that is designed to break, in order to express the effects of the wall as wounds on her body and to symbolize the struggle of the migrant experience. Aguiñiga demonstrates how art can be both a personal “physical and emotional outlet” and a vehicle to help others “empathize and think about how we’re all connected to each other.”

Art 21: Charles Gaines - Systems and Structures

Investigating the production of knowledge and culture, artist Charles Gaines uses rule-based systems to create paintings, drawings, musical compositions, and sculptures. Culminating in the completion of Moving Chains (2022), a 100-foot-long public sculpture on Governors Island in New York City, this film traces the connections Gaines makes between our lived experiences and the systems that shape them.

Gaines’ works are crafted to reveal the process of their own creation, making visible the “rules” that dictate their final forms. In Walnut Tree Orchard (1975-2014), Gaines uses a numerical system to turn photographs of 26 walnut trees into silhouette drawings, which are then shown individually and layered atop one another. In his work with music, the artist employs another system of translation, turning written text into musical notation. Using the text of the Dred Scott v Sandford decision made by the United States Supreme Court in 1857, along with a letter written by Frederick Douglass in response, Gaines composed Manifestos 4 (2021). In the summer of 2022, the piece was performed at Times Square alongside the public sculpture Roots (2022), a series of seven Sweetgum trees planted upside down in the middle of New York City’s busiest neighborhood. 

These works are the first chapter in a three-part work called The American Manifest, presented by Creative Time, Governors Island Arts, and  Times Square Arts, which includes Moving Chains as well as a 2023 performance along the Ohio River. In Moving Chains, Gaines constructs a massive metal and wooden structure resembling the hull of a ship along the shoreline of New York’s Hudson River. As viewers walk through the structure, nine large chains rotate above in relation to the speed of the river currents, clanging loudly against the metal and wood supports. Exploring the long history of enslavement and its aftermath in the United States, Moving Chains and The American Manifest make clear the structural entanglement of capitalism, enslavement, and the injustices we witness today. 

“How do we improve the world? How do we improve life for everybody? Well, I don’t know if that’s possible.” says Gaines, “But when the bad things happen, we’ve got to complain about them in order to reduce them.”

Andy Warhol’s , “Marilyn” sells for $195 Million

Andy Warhol’s , “Marilyn” sells for $195 Million

Students in 2D install new self portrait collages!

Mr. Coffin’s Studio in 2D recently completed a unit in Self Portraiture, Collage and Digital Photography. Works were inspired by art historical figures, Henri Matisse, Hannah Hoch, Joseph Cornell, and the Starn Twins. Murals are currently on view in the E-Building.

Students Exhibit at Westport Museum of Contemporary Art

The following students have been chosen to exhibit their artwork at the Westport Museum of Contemporary Art, in Westport, CT.... in the student exhibition "Hindsight is 2020"

The Hindsight is 2020 High School Student Art Exhibition features submissions created during the year 2020, illustrating a diverse portrait of what young people experienced during these challenging and unique times.

The exhibition features close to 200 entries from across Connecticut and New York, including painting, photography, digital art, drawings, sculpture, and more.

• Illiana Dimopoulos

• Rachel Dinces

• Eliza Kaeding

• Maddison Glotzer

• Kate Anderson

• Iris Liang

• Raphael Cai

• Priya Saxena

• Augustus Kai

The exhibition will open January 23, and reservations can be made for timed and limited entry into the museum to safely see the exhibition.

• An exciting note: Raphael Cai's painting, "Plasma", was chosen to be part of the press release for the exhibition! (It is the painting on the top left of the grid in the release.)

Please feel free to pass this information along. Web link here: https://mocawestport.org/exhibition/hindsight-is-2020/

Edgemont Student, Hayden Plattus featured at the Bronx Museum

Edgemont artist, Hayden Plattus - Featured at the Bronx Museum in the exhibition, “Reverse Reverse: Bring It Back, Bring It Back.” This exhibit was curated by the 2019-20 Teen Council cohort at The Bronx Museum of the Arts. REVERSE REVERSE: BRING IT BACK, BRING IT BACK invited teen artists throughout New York City to submit work reflecting their experiences, memories of, and nostalgia for the last two decades.

 (click to visit The Bronx Museum)

Museum Mondays! Photography's last century @ The Metropolitan museum

This exhibition will celebrate the remarkable ascendancy of photography in the last century, and Ann Tenenbaum and Thomas H. Lee's magnificent promised gift of over sixty extraordinary photographs in honor of The Met's 150th anniversary in 2020. The exhibition will include masterpieces by the medium's greatest practitioners, including works by Paul Strand, Dora Maar, Man Ray, and László Moholy-Nagy; Edward Weston, Walker Evans, and Joseph Cornell; Diane Arbus, Andy Warhol, Sigmar Polke, and Cindy Sherman.

The collection is particularly notable for its breadth and depth of works by women artists, its sustained interest in the nude, and its focus on artists' beginnings. Strand's 1916 view from the viaduct confirms his break with the Pictorialist past and establishes the artist's way forward as a cutting-edge modernist; Walker Evans's shadow self-portraits from 1927 mark the first inkling of a young writer's commitment to visual culture; and Cindy Sherman's intimate nine-part portrait series from 1976 predates her renowned series of "film stills" and confirms her striking ambition and stunning mastery of the medium at the age of twenty-two.

Museum Mondays! conversation with artist, Kara Walker

Kara Walker explores the raw intersection of race and gender in her work, crafting vivid psychological narratives from a contemporary perspective on historical conditions. Over the past two decades, Walker has unleashed the traditionally Victorian medium of the silhouette onto the walls of the gallery, creating immersive installations that envelop the viewer. Walker’s multi-media work—which includes drawing, watercolor, video, and sculpture—often reconsider grotesque caricatures, probing their persistence in popular culture and reclaiming their subjugating power to alternative ends.

In a candid one-on-one conversation, Kara Walker and composer/musician Jason Moran discuss their collaboration for the Prospect.4 triennial in New Orleans, “Katastwóf Karavan” (2018). Installed at Algiers Point on the bank of the Mississippi River and activated daily across three days in February 2018, the work featured a thirty-two-note steam calliope performed by Moran and housed in a wagon developed by Walker.

A contemporary calliope, “Katastwóf Karavan” uses the mechanics of American manufacturing to uplift the voices it once suppressed. Historically this “music is used for people who are captive” Moran notes, eliciting feelings of both celebration and distress. “As a stationary object, it always needs to be activated,” Walker explains. “When you have monuments or commemorative things that just exist, they sit there and they disappear.”

Walker and Moran share how performing “Katastwóf Karavan” at Algiers Point pays tribute to Africans who were brought there to be sold into slavery in the 1700s. The calliope will honor “millions of ancestors, in a way that we aren’t sure about what we’re about to touch,” says Moran. Not intended to live in one place, Walker hopes to tour the monument to other locations similar to Algiers, noting “there are many places like that in the Americas and I think that it’s worthwhile to explore.”

Museum Mondays! the Museum of Modern Art - "The Shape of Shape"

In The Shape of Shape, Amy Sillman—an artist who has helped redefine contemporary painting, pushing the medium into drawing, installations, video, and zines—has created a revelatory Artist’s Choice installation drawn from the Museum’s collection. “Even though shape is everywhere,” she reflected, “we don’t talk about it much; it’s not a hot topic in art, like color or systems. So I decided to look for works in MoMA’s collection in which shape does prevail over other considerations…. Often eccentric, poetic, or intimate, these works are like bodies that speak, operating at the hub of language and matter, signs and sensations.” The Shape of Shape features works that span vastly different time periods, places, and mediums, many rarely seen. Here, Sillman presents a highly personal exploration of shape—the ever-shifting boundaries that define what and how we see—in modern art.

This exhibition is currently being presented here as part of our Virtual Views series, as we “museum from home.” Hear directly from Amy Sillman and Michelle Kuo, the Marlene Hess Curator of Painting and Sculpture, during a live Q&A, and experience The Shape of Shape through a downloadable artist’s zine, video, installation views, and more.

Museum Mondays! - visit with sculptor Tim Hawkinson

Is it Science? Is it Engineering? Is it Music? Is it Sculpture? Is it Art? … Meet sculptor Tim Hawkinson and his strange, weird, mechanically driven kinetic and audio sculptures! Meet for an open discussion regarding Tim Hawkinson’s oddball/genius artworks on Wednesday between 1 -2 pm in a Google Meet. Link to be shared in Google Classroom.

Tim Hawkinson tinkers with everyday materials to build surprising mechanical art works. “I guess it comes from early on in childhood, a fascination with moving parts and sort of the magical,” he suggests.

In his studio, Hawkinson explains how he used gears, switches, nozzles, buckets, and pie tins to build a drumming machine that captures random drips of rain, amplifies them, and organizes them into music. “It’s not even electronics. I don’t know what it is,” he admits. One of Hawkinson’s largest projects, Überorgan, is an inflatable installation in a space the size of a football field. For a version of the artwork the artists created a score for the organ using old church hymns.

From "Museum Mondays! (even though it's not Monday!)

Take a 360 degree tour of the Metropolitan Museum in NYC! (I suggest touring the Temple of Dendur…) Enjoy!

Museum Mondays! studio visit with Chris Ware, cartoonist/illustrator

For Museum Mondays, we will spend time with cartoonist and illustrator, Chris Ware. Known for his New Yorker magazine covers, Chris Ware is hailed as a master of the comic art form. His complex graphic novels tell stories about people in suburban Midwestern neighborhoods, poignantly reflecting on the role memory plays in constructing identity. Stories featuring many of Ware’s protagonists—Quimby the Mouse, Rusty Brown, and Jimmy Corrigan—often first appear in serialized form, in publications such as The New York Times, the Guardian, or Ware’s own ongoing comic book series Acme Novelty Library, before being organized into their own stand-alone books.

Between the hours of 1-2 pm. on Wednesday, Mr. Coffin will host an open discussion on the work and process of Chris Ware, the importance of Books in a digital age, and the importance of the graphic novel. Link to the discussion will be posted in Google Classroom.

Flip Grid Fridays! - Optical Illusion Challenge

Ms. Carey and Ms. Amorosa have posted their new Friday Flip Grid - the Optical Illusion Challenge!

https://flipgrid.com/ehsart

Museum Mondays! Studio Visit with Leonardo Drew, sculptor

This week “Museum Mondays!” features a visit to the studio of sculptor, Leonardo Drew. Click on image for access to his Art 21 feature page. Join us on Wednesday in Google Meet, for an open discussion starting at 1:00 pm. Details to be announced in Google Classroom. Join us as we discuss found objects, personal history, culture, and science’s role in art making.

Leonardo Drew was born in Tallahassee, Florida in 1961, and grew up in Bridgeport, Connecticut. Although often mistaken for accumulations of found objects, his sculptures are instead made of “brand new stuff”—materials such as wood, rusted iron, cotton, paper, and mud—that he intentionally subjects to processes of weathering, burning, oxidation, and decay. Whether jutting out from a wall or traversing rooms as freestanding installations, his pieces challenge the architecture of the space in which they’re shown.

Memories of his childhood surroundings—from the housing project where he lived to the adjacent landfill—resurface in the intricate grids and configurations of many of his pieces. Never content with work that comes easily, Drew constantly reaches beyond “what’s comfortable” and charts a course of daily investigation, never knowing what the work will be about but letting it find its way, and asking, “What if….”