Contributed by John Mendelsohn / In 1971, Mike Robinson (as he called himself then) and I were in Adja Yunkers’s drawing class at Barnard College. At the end of the semester, Yunkers asked the class, “Who is going to be an artist?” Walter and I raised our hands, and were invited to Yunkers’s studio.
Contributed by David Carrier / Over the years, I got to know Graham Nickson, the splendidly original English figurative artist who ran the New York Studio School and recently passed away, visiting his studio and writing a catalogue essay for him. Starting in the late 1980s, I lectured now and […]
Contributed by David Carrier / Just to the left of my writing desk is a painting of a magnificent tree with bright orange blossoms. Below it is a now faded postcard of a drawing of Barbara Westman, who died earlier this year at age 95, and her husband Arthur Danto […]
Even though making art is often an experience that happens in the solitude of one’s studio, it rarely occurs in a vacuum. Artists rely on each other for support, reinforcement, inspiration, and challenge, forming communities to avoid feeling like fish out of water in this world. Tim Gowan was one of those artists who cherished being part of a community and played a role in its formation.
Louise McCagg, a member of the A.I.R. gallery, exhibited widely, both in the United States and internationally. She also collaborated with a new generation of Hungarians on many projects, one of them being part of the Hungarian Pavilion of the 2009 Venice Biennale.
Contributed by Medrie MacPhee / Susanna Heller and I have been friends going all the way back to the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design [NASCAD] in Halifax from which I graduated in 1976, and Susanna in 1977. Our first studios in New York were our first apartments, mine on 3rd St. in the East Village and hers on 5th. Our lives consisted largely of many a night of visiting each other’s studios, museum and gallery visits, and talking painting, painting, painting.
By the time Paul Vexler chose to pursue his art full time in 2006, he already had decades of experience and a unique command over his favored material. Observing nature and the movement of trees, Paul understood the flexible properties of wood and created sculpture of remarkable elegance and beauty with seemingly impossible arrays of loops and knots.
Conrad Vogel grew up in Briarcliff Manor, New York, graduated from Sarah Lawrence in 1977, traveled in Italy, and then moved to New York City where he lived as an artist for more than forty years.
Contributed by John Mendelsohn / Fred Gutzeit died on January 3, 2022 at the age of 81, leaving a legacy of inventive paintings, watercolors, prints, and installations. Over six decades, his art embodied a love for the visible world, and a spirit of inspired enquiry into the invisible energies that lie beneath it. This notion of exploring “deep nature” and the discoveries of modern physics were animating forces throughout his career. He spent his life as an artist in Lower Manhattan, living and working in a loft on the Bowery, and was a vital part of the downtown art scene from the 1960s until his passing.
Contributed by John Fritsch and Jen Pepper / Shari Urquhart, artist and educator, died on November 21, 2020. She was born in Racine, Wisconsin and grew up in Kenosha, just a few miles south. Although her first media were painting and printmaking, she ultimately found her true medium in fiber to express her take on popular culture and art history.
Contributed by Alessandrio Teoldi / Angelo Vasta’s exhibition “Luci Spente” (Lights Off) at Tappeto Volante in Tribeca centers on a simple gesture: turning down the light. Not removing it, not rejecting color, but softening its intensity. For an artist whose visual language has often featured bright, vibrant palettes, this is a bold shift of deliberate subtraction.
Contributed by William Corwin / Depictions of spirits and monsters are often combinations of the diagrammatic and the visceral: attributes packaged in an erotic or terrifying container. Amorelle Jacox’s luminous female presences in “Mothers of Time,” now on view at Management, are unassuming and recessive beings peering out between throbbing bands of color and eerie cones of light. She populates her large-scale canvases with measurement devices – rulers, color wheels, and sundry visual and geometric rubrics that guide the viewer’s interpretation of the powers invested in each of the goddesses or muses she has invented.
Contributed by Sharon Butler / In June, in the wake of an exhausting month of fairs, NYC galleries are again presenting a full slate of exhibitions. At Field of Play, look for a survey of paintings by Lee Sherry (1947–2012). She had close ties with the Language Poets and was part of an avant-garde painting circle in Soho but never gained wide recognition. If old reconfigured texts and quirky materials that subvert narratives…