OPEN STUDIOS 2011

The Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts

Meet the artists. Witness the process. See where art is created.

Photos left to right: Hank Willis Thomas in his studio and Yuken Teruya in his studio during Open Studios 2010.

Thursday, October 13, 6-10 pm (opening reception)
Friday, October 14, 6-9 pm
Saturday, October 15, 1-6 pm

Open Studios 2011 is an annual event of the EFA Studio Program that invites the public to come explore and interact with our vibrant and diverse community of 76 contemporary artists.

EFA artists work in a wide range of media and artistic sensibilities, offering a significant slice of contemporary art culture. Rarely can the public visit so many internationally recognized artists working
under one roof in the heart of Midtown Manhattan.

Join us at EFA for Open Studios 2011!

323 W. 39th Street (btwn. 8/9 Ave.)
New York, NY 10018

Click here to get a sneak peek inside the studios of five different Studio Program artists

About EFA Studio Program: Founded in 1998 as a program of the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts, the EFA Studio Program was created to provide affordable studio space within a community of artists, facilitate career development, and promote public and critical exposure for our members. EFA Studios is housed on eight floors of the EFA building located in Midtown Manhattan’s Fashion District, in close proximity to the city’s primary gallery districts. Members are selected by a jury of respected arts professionals, through a competitive application process. EFA Studios facilitates interaction with dealers, curators, and critics to provide continued development for member-artists. Unique among studio programs
in New York City, EFA Studios is one of the few remaining arts organizations still providing long-term workspace in Manhattan.

ALSO ON VIEW:

“iraqimemorial.org”
THROUGH OCT. 22, 2011 at EFA PROJECT SPACE
iraqimemorial.org, conceived of by media artist Joseph DeLappe, was launched in 2007 as a web-based platform for artists, designers, and architects to propose concepts for imagined memorials to the unrecognized civilian casualties incurred during the war in Iraq. The website was initially created in reaction to the World Trade Memorial Competition website launched in 2004 to commemorate “the thousands of innocent men, women and children murdered by terrorists.” EFA Project Space presents an exhibition of plans and responses selected out of the pool that now exist on the iraqimemorial.org site. The proposal guidelines encourage participants to use a wide range of locations and mediums to create collective memory and unity, drawing upon traditional and expanded ideas of memorial.

“BLACKBURN 20 I 20 ANNUAL MEMBER SHOW”
THROUGH NOV. 6, 2011
OPENING RECEPTION: FRIDAY, OCT. 14, 6:00-9:00pm
Blackburn 20|20 is an exhibition space operated by the Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop(RBPMW.) RBPMW 2011 Annual Member Show is an exhibition featuring the work of current RBPMW members showcasing a variety of fine art printmaking techniques: lithographs, etchings, woodcuts, artist books and digital prints.

FASHION DISTRICT ARTS FESTIVAL
Open Studios 2011 is in conjunction with The Fashion District Arts Festival.
Visit their website for more information.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts (EFA) is a 501 (c) (3) public charity. Through its three core programs, EFA Studios, EFA Project Space, and the Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop, EFA is dedicated to providing artists across all disciplines with space, tools and a cooperative forum for the development of individual practice.

Open Studios 2011 is supported in part by the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, Vasari

Classic Artists’ Oils, and many generous individuals.

EFA Studios
A Program of The Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts
323 W 39th Street, 3rd Floor
212-563-5855 x221
www.efanyc.org
studios@efanyc.org

Artists:

Samira Abbassy, Nina Chanel Abney, Amina Ahmed, Miriam-Josephine Alcott, Clytie Alexander, Ebitenyefa Baralaye, Marianne Barcellona, Jaq Belcher, Rhona Bitner, Jimbo Blachly, Martha Burgess, Patty Cateura, Noa Charuvi, Heejung Cho, Cecile Chong, David Collins, Vicky Colombet, Michael Eade, Stella Ebner, Cui Fei, Suzan Frecon, Beth Ganz, Del Geist, Lauren Gohara, Ana Golici, Nicolae Golici, Mahmoud Hamadani, David, Greg Harth, Pablo Helguera, Marietta Hoferer, Alice Hope, Jeff Hoppa, Catherine Howe, Eunjung Hwang, Hong Seon Jang, Susan Jennings, Richard Jochum, Tamiko Kawata, Jane Kent, Jena H. Kim, Noah Klersfeld, Kristian Kozul, Greg Kwiatek, Sarah Leahy, Patricia Leighton, Dan Levenson, Dominic Mangila, Katinka Mann, Morgan O’Hara, Dane Patterson, Gary Petersen, Thomas Pihl, Armita Raafat, Jaye Rhee, Aristides Ruiz, Carolyn Salas, Hilda Shen, Karina Skvirsky, Adam Parker Smith, Howard Smith, Jenny Snider, Suzanne Song, Xin Song, David Storey, Sali Taylor, Dannielle Tegeder, Scott Teplin, Yuken Teruya, Austin Thomas, Hank Willis Thomas, Liselot van der Heijden, Carlos Vega, Marjorie Welish, Bryan Whitney, Saya Woolfalk, Shai Zurim

Click here for more information on participating artists.

EFA Studios
323 West 39th St, 3rd Floor
NY, NY 10018
btw. 8th and 9th Ave.

Hours  Tues-Fri., 10-6pm 
Contact
212-563-5855×221  studios@efanyc.org 

Other EFA Programs:

EFA Project Space
projectspace@efanyc.org

Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop

rbpmw@efanyc.org

Mental territories

Busy, busy & busy. You can find a short guest post over on the fototazo blog. Tom asked a group of 50 curators (gallery owners, blog writers, photographers, academics and others actively engaged in photography) to pick two photographers that deserve (more) recognition. I selected the lovelyAwoiska van der Molen & inspiring Lauren Henkins. Then over at this is the what you’ll find an interview with yours truly – Thanks Kate.

I would like to apologize to all the artists who submit their work to UYW. I look at every submission carefully, but currently I have over 367 artists to show in my folder, and simply not enough time. Over time UYW has become a full time job and currently I am looking at different ideas and ways to make it sustainable. Please be patient.

On another note, I have been meaning to share the work of Massimo Cristaldi with you for a while. I think his work goes well with this great quote from T.S. Eliot

We shall not cease from exploration and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started… and know the place for the first time.

 Via: blog.unlessyouwill.com

We welcome Jessica who will be working with us Tuesday through Friday helping us manage the office at Ken Allen Studios.

Paragraphs in Photography

Other than his art, Francois-Marie Banier (1947), a novelist, playwright, photographer and artist, is well noted for his high profile acquaintances. Salvador Dali used to send his car to bring the then 16 year old Banier to his hotel, to discuss art. He knew Picasso, Yves Saint Laurent, Pierre Cardin, Samuel Beckett, Kate Moss and Johnny Depp, among others.

Being a writer and photographer, we present here Mr. Banier’s work in the combination of the two, for him, interdependent practices. His photographs show a completed story in the culmination, which he then expands with spontaneous writing on large-format black and white prints. The main protagonists of these multimedial stories are, and in spite of Mr. Banier’s social profile, anonymous but quite memorable people of the streets – bearing complex life stories that yet are strikingly obvious for an accomplished photographer and artist.

 

Via: www.wellmades.com

Martin Klimas translates music by Mouse on Mars, Kraftwerk and Carl Orff into images.

by ALISON ZAVOS

Martin Klimas was born in 1971 in Lake of Konstanz, Germany. He received his degree in Visual Communications from Fachhochschule Dusseldorf and has had many exhibitions in Germany and abroad. He is represented by Foley Gallery in New York and Bransch for commercial assignments.

In this series Klimas experimented with the arrangement of different colors, like a painter’s palette, on top of a speaker diaphragm, in order to translate music into vivid action imagery. Sounds from music by Paul Hindemith, Carl Orff, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Mouse on Mars, and Kraftwerk vibrated into these animated leaps of color.

via: www.featureshoot.com

‘In the Throes of Creation’: Color Photos of New York from the 1940s

A set of rare images captures the city’s classic buildings along with its timeless spirit

All photos courtesy of the Charles W. Cushman collection at Indiana University

In 1905, after years of living in Paris, Atlantic author Alvan Sanborn came home to a New York City that was, he wrote, “a wilderness of sprawling ugliness.” In Lower Manhattan, new 20-story skyscrapers were ruining the view, blocking the elegant spires of Trinity Church and the swoops of the Brooklyn Bridge. Even the city’s stateliest sections lacked Paris’s charm and symmetry, Sanborn complained; the buildings seemed to be “turn[ing] their backs most impolitely on one another.”

But after a month at home, Sanborn’s disgust gave way to giddy excitement. He realized that the American city was “in the throes of creation,” growing a new body to match its emerging mind:

Materially, mentally, and morally, New York is growing helter-skelter, very much as the untouched forest grows,–big trees and little trees, straight trees and crooked trees, saplings, bushes, brakes, ferns, flowers, mushrooms, and toadstools in a bewildering tangle,–and it exhales a similar aroma of unjaded life, which cannot fail to thrill every man who has a drop of red blood in him.

After a generation of immigration, jazz, and Art Deco, that jumble of buildings sprouted into a true city. Its robust atmosphere comes through in these photos by Charles W. Cushman, an Indiana photographer who visited New York in 1941 and 1942. Cushman was one of very few photographers who shot on expensive color Kodachrome, and his pictures look disarmingly recent: the stones glow with real sunlight, and the people have the ruddy skin tones of living human beings.

A modern New Yorker will see at a glance how the city has changed since Cushman snapped these photos. Some of the most iconic buildings were demolished long ago, and neighborhoods like the Lower East Side have transformed beyond recognition. But certain features are unmistakably familiar: the wry smiles on the faces, the charm of the street vendors, even the hodge-podge of old and new architecture. At a time when Americans are remembering the fall of New York’s tallest edifices, these images remind us that a great city has a spirit that grows up alongside its buildings, and ultimately transcends them.

NEW YORK IN THE 1940S

 

via:www.theatlantic.com

Early 1900s in Colour

In the early part of the 20th century French-Jewish capitalist Albert Kahn set about to collect a photographic record of the world, the images were held in an ‘Archive of the Planet’. Before the 1929 stock market crash he was able to amass a collection of 180,000 metres of b/w film and more than 72,000 autochrome plates, the first industrial process for true colour photography

www.albert-kahn.fr/english/

Autochrome was the first industrial process for true colour photography. When the Lumière brothers launched it commercially in June 1907, it was a photograhic revolution – black and white came to life in colour. Autochromes consist of fine layers of microscopic grains of potato starch dyed either red-orange, green or violet blue combined with black carbon particles, spread over a glass plate where it is combined with a black and white photographic emulsion. All colours can be reproduced from three primary colours.

www.albertkahn.co.uk

A few photos from the collection.

Portraits

Algeria

Dahomey – now Benin

Bosnia

Brasil

A Letter from London: Signs of a Struggle – Photography in the Wake of Postmodernism

David Bate in his brilliantly concise bo0k Photography- The Key Conceptsallows the idea of ‘Postmodernism’ little more than 15 lines of text. Seemingly fed up with the cyclical debate around the troubled movement, Bate sums it up as the application of codes and conventions of commercial photography to current art photography. This combined with an influx of female artists opposing male domination within the arts at the end of the 1970’s seems to be enough for Bate to draw a line under this unending debate. However Bate is just one person, and there are vastly differing views on this dense and convoluted subject¹. (more)

In Signs of a Struggle – Photography in the Wakeof Postmodernism, a foretaste of the V&A’s new super-exhibition Postmodernism: Style and Subversion 1970-1990, the V&A simplify their premise for an exhibition of photographic postmodernism to imagery that makes reference to itself. It was Gustave Flaubert who said “The artist must be in his work as God is in creation, invisible and all-powerful; one must sense him everywhere but never see him.”² Flaubert was the great literary precursor to modernism, a major influence on such important modernist writers as Franz Kafka, and this quote, the antonym of the V&A’s new exhibition, makes for a simplified and engaging juxtaposition to the proposed foundation of photographic postmodernism.

The narrow, dimly lit Gallery 38A provides the setting for this exhibition, with 28 photographers represented, each typically showing one image. This exhibition covers a multiplicity of genres, concepts and vastly differing aesthetic approaches. Out of the 28 photographers, just under half are women, but with Clare Strand’s Signs of a Struggle occupying an entire open-ended room at the rear of the gallery.

Cindy Sherman and Richard Prince are represented by one image each from their most renowned works, Untitled Film Stills and Untitled Cowboys, respectively. Prince and Sherman, the two artists who most plainly and widely represent the shift to postmodernism, supply these iconic images only for them to struggle to stand alone; isolated from their series, and drowned in imagery on all sides, they fail to appear as revolutionary, as avant-garde as they are widely accepted to be.

Works by Jeff Wall and Keith Arnett vie for attention between other works of limited interest. Jeff Wall’s elaborately constructed tableau images, customarily displayed to advertising proportions and backlit -bus shelter like- by a light-box, are here displayed small, within a frame and blunted by the weak lighting of the gallery. The very things that make Wall’s work so necessary when looking at the postmodern in photography have here been overlooked.

Past the plethora of postmodern imagery Clare Strand’s Signs of a Struggle is given ample display in a dedicated space at the back of the gallery. Nine black and white seemingly archival crime scene photographs are displayed on tattered backing card, yellowing and ripped at the edges from years of storage. Tip-ex numbers and arrows mark the spots where remnants of crimes – fingerprints, trails of blood and perhaps more – are found and recorded. Are these images scenes from a police archive, or just elaborately constructed sets? This question plays on our minds whilst viewing the pictures. Fascinated by the gritty flash-lit scene frozen before us, one wonders where, when and what, and in a very postmodern fashion, ‘if’.

Like Strand’s Signs of a Struggle, one leaves this exhibition with more questions than answers; the chasm that is postmodernism plays on one’s mind, still unanswered, confusing, a toxic waste ground for easy theoretical categorization. If this exhibition is a survey of postmodernism, the implication here is that it has finished and been abandoned to the lions of history. However if we were to take this as truth, what then has filled the abyss left by this theoretical melting pot?

~Christopher Thomas (cmlthomas88@yahoo.co.uk)

Signs of a Struggle – Photography in the Wake of Postmodernism is at theV&A London, until 27th November 2011. Admission is free.

(images kindly provided by V&A – thank you!)

via:http://jmcolberg.com/weblog/

ANYTHING BUT SQUARE

• This house belongs to an old man who has only ever left the island once – to go to war. And each time I pass his house on my way home to Edinburgh I think about how much I want to stay. And how one day I just might.
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  via: http://www.photographyserved.com

A Closer Look — Supreme Vice

 

from the book Supreme Vice

Last week I embarked on a trip through the deserts of Death Valley and Western Nevada. This was my first time in either place and I couldn’t help but think I had been in this God forsaken landscape before. This desolate environment created an otherworldly sense of isolation and paranoia. Sure, it could have been the thousands of acres of underground US military facilities I was driving over and the sporadic black SUVs one would catch a glimpse of from a distant hill that sent chills down my spine in the triple digit heat, but I think it had more to do with the bleak view of this mountainous region that not only felt unfamiliar… there was a sense I had somehow found my way into another dimension.

After finding my way back to reality and settling into the comfort of my book filled office I picked up a copy of Tereza Zelenkova’s Supreme Viceand while absorbing the images had an immediate flashback to last week’s experience. Come to find out, the landscapes in this book were taken in the deserts of the American West, specifically in Death Valley. Zelenkova’s book conveys a detachment from reality that is structured through her desolate depictions of the barren desert. This structure suits the book well given the artist’s vision of weaving her Gnostic view of occult symbolism and mysterious landscapes together. This is a series that uses simplistic imagery in a manner that creates a powerful narrative, a narrative that depicts a deeply rooted undertone of isolation and a sense of spiritual exploration.

from the book Supreme Vice

from the book Supreme Vice

Supreme Vice is another stunningly printed object published by Morel Books. While modest in design, this book is thoughtfully crafted and tightly edited. In many ways, the editing of this series sharpens the focus of the story Zelenkova has set out to tell. It is a series that grabs at the viewer and forces a connection that transcends multiple levels. Whether it is a connection to the spiritual symbolism of the images or the drastically different depictions of the American West this young Czech photographer has created, this is a book of thoughtful intrigue and beautiful design. — Antone Dolezal

Purchase a copy of Supreme Vice