Whew!

I’m a sucker for Art that asks question (think Key to the City‘s, “how public is public space?”) which is why I feel particularly excited about the Public Art Fund’s latest offering. When I think of a statue, Rodin’s “The Thinker” and Michaelangelo’s Pieta come to mind. Statue-making is an art form steeped in tradition which raises the question, what does it mean for something to be “statuesque” in our modern times? Is it inextricably linked, a reference to, a bygone era to which we no longer have access? With Statuesque, the Public Art Fund has brought together six artists to create works that tip their hats to classical sculpture both through their use of traditional materials and the depiction of the human body while simultaneously subverting the form. Sculpture is brought out from the realm of the purely representational and into one of “myth, dream and fantasy.” Interesting stuff! Please drop us a line telling us about your experience with Statuesque down in City Hall Park.

As city agencies across the country are tightening their purse strings with the hopes of bouncing back from last year’s economic collapse, they need to know that cutting back on the Arts is not the way to go.

In response to the proposal, the New York Foundation for the Arts has teamed up with NYS Arts and their Save the Arts campaign, an initiative created to fight the cuts and to show Albany the potentially devastating effects of a reduction of Arts and cultural programming in New York State. Want to get involved? Find out what you can do by visiting the Save the Arts website.

Beautifying the City’s many public spaces has been on our minds since the founding of ArtBridge in the Fall of 2008 and we’re happy to know that it’s a top priority for the Department of Transportation, too. Just this week, they released a Request for Proposals for their latest initiative, reNEWable Times Square. Like ArtBridge, they are looking for artists to propose “surface treatments” for public space. The difference? While ArtBridge uses the surface panels of construction sheds that hang above street level as its canvas, reNEWable Times Square seeks to transform the asphalt surfaces beneath our feet.

Visit the reNEWable Times Square page within the Department of Transportation website for more information or download the Request for Proposals directly from the ArtBridge blog by clicking HERE. We look forward to seeing what innovative design scheme is ultimately chosen to be realized at the “Crossroads of the Universe.”

We’re very happy to introduce Dick Blick art materials as the first sponsor of ArtBridge! As we’ve been building this organization it’s been consistently important to us to partner with those companies and organizations we respect. Urban Samaritan, the incredible non-for-profit that employs homeless women to design and sew our fabulous tote bags was our first partnership of the year. We are proud to call Dick Blick, an art supply store that opened up shop (and by “shop” we mean kitchen, that’s where it all began- click HERE to read the full story) in 1911 with their first big hit best seller, the lettering pen.

A lot can happen in 100 years and happen it did for Dick Blick- they are now one of largest distributors of art supplies and teaching manuals in the world. And now they can add “ArtBidge Sponsor” to the list of all the neat things they’ve done. We’re tremendously grateful this partnership and with their help, look forward to bringing you many more ArtBridge Installations in the coming year.

Wow, what a wonderful evening! Thank you to all who attended and donated to help us reach our goal for the night of raising $1,000. With your help, we did it and will now be able to apply for the kinds of grants that will help us bring ArtBridge installations to construction sites throughout the city (perhaps even to one near you…!).

If you were unable to make last night’s event but would still like to donate, simply click HERE. If you’d like to keep abreast of ArtBridge news and events, why not join our mailing list? To join, click HERE. Of course, all email addresses we receive will never be sold to third parties or used for anything other than the occasional update about our progress as an organization that, although still in its infancy, plans to leave a big footprint on our City’s urban landscape that is forever undergoing construction and redevelopment.

Questions? Comments? Feedback? Please don’t hesitate to get in touch with me, Jordana, by emailing jordana [at] art-bridge.org.

Once again, thank you for your interest and continued support and we look forward to big things for 2010.

-Jordana, Program Director

]]> http://art-bridge.org/news/rsvp-and-join-us-for-the-first-artbridge-fundraiser-of-2010/feed/ 0 http://art-bridge.org/news/artbridge-installation-on-google-streetview/ http://art-bridge.org/news/artbridge-installation-on-google-streetview/#comments Tue, 12 Jan 2010 15:13:29 +0000 Jordana http://art-bridge.org/blog/?p=866

The title of this post says it all. Have a look for yourself HERE.

Seen any other public art around the City captured with Street View? Send us your screen shots and we’ll post a few of our favorites next week!

Even when painting, Argentina-born sculptor Dalia Haber recalls that things were “always coming out” of her canvasses. An art teacher at the School of Visual Arts (where she received her BA in Fine Arts) casually remarked one day in class that she drew “like a sculptor.” For one of her early art assignments, she was instructed to modernize an old work of art. Using an Old Master piece of a nude girl looking at herself in the mirror, she extended the velvet curtain in the painting by attaching fabric to the canvas. It became a sculpture.

Haber’s artwork, first paintings and drawings, now, her “structures,” is, more than anything, a means of communication. And it always was. When she moved to the United States from Argentina in her mid-teens, she spoke no English. Hoping to ease her into learning the language in an unintimidating environment, a guidance counselor suggested she enroll in an art class. “Ok,” she said. Unbeknownst to the guidance counselor, she hadn’t understood a word he had said. Nevertheless, once in class, she took to art making right away and found refuge in her projects. “That’s how I learned to communicate,” she tells me over hummus at the dining room table,  “because that was the only way that I didn’t have to speak.” She focused on art for the remaining three years of high school and, after a one-year stint at SUNY New Paltz (“I wanted the campus experience,” she says), was given a full scholarship to the School of Visual Arts for Painting.

During her four years at SVA, Haber’s work continued to push out and into the dimensional. By her third year she was sewing fabric onto her canvasses and in her final year began to incorporate a variety of man-made materials into her work. Her pieces were designed to hang on a wall as a painting would but they had tremendous depth, bursting from their bases and resembling organic molecular shapes. It was a few years later when she took a welding class that “everything came together” for Haber; “finally I had a structure for everything I was sewing.”

One of her multicolored welded plastic and fabric structures is hanging on the wall just behind us and I have to admit, it’s difficult for me not to reach out and touch it. “Everybody wants to touch it,” although she assures me her two children know “the rules.” But what a great educational toy for kids, I tell her. What a creative way to introduce them to concepts of shape and color, soft and hard, full and empty.

Although not deliberately geared towards children, these are the very dualities Haber seeks to explore with her pieces and her (presumably) adult viewers. With them she addresses gender and sexuality (“hard frame, soft fabric”) and the relationship between presence and absence; empty space plays a prominent role in her work.  Haber draws my attention to the shadow cast on the wall by the frame of her structure– I hadn’t noticed it at first but the shadow shape adds yet another dimension to the piece; it becomes part of it. The shadows shift as the light does and while she has yet to incorporate lighting design into the presentation of her work, she always considers the shadow her structure will cast as she assembles it.

There’s a pile of fabric in front of us on the table and the combination of colors and textures stacked on top of one another look very “Dalia Haber:” bright purple, coral, pink, vinyl. She spent her early years in Argentina’s garment district- her family owned a tulle textile factory. “My memories are of the trunk of our car filled with rolls of fabric. For toys I had a bag of remnants of tulle in my closet.” Thinking of her origins, her journey, and the fabric stack in front of us, I’m reminded of the quote from Edward Albee’s The Zoo Story, “Sometimes it’s necessary to go a long distance out of the way in order to come back a short distance correctly.” Considering her past in light of her present, she smiles, “it seems that I landed right where I was supposed to land.”

Brooklyn-based mixed-media artist Melissa Cowper-Smith laments society’s collective move towards an “IKEA Culture,” the expendability of the objects in our lives that she remembers as at one time “being sacred for longer.” “People like something for a while and then they simply give it up,” she tells me during our studio visit, packed with plants, mementos and books.  It’s only as I write this now that I see the direct link between this sentiment and the way James, Cowper-Smith’s husband, introduced me to their live/work apartment; as he showed me around, he emphasized the fact that save one armoire, all of the furniture in the apartment was found, gifted, or passed down. Each preserved piece carries with it a sense of history.

The objects and furniture scattered about Cowper-Smith’s often large-scale painting and photography collages of domestic spaces (both real and imagined) possess this same quality: nothing is brand new. Although there are no human figures in her work, the objects that she chooses to “leave out in the open” suggest a strong presence of the people who she imagines inhabit each space. “What kind of people are they,” I ask her? They have an “earthy quality,” she tells me, and perhaps most potently, they “allow for decay.”

What’s refreshing to me about Cowper-Smith’s perception of decay is that it’s something to be celebrated. Rather than positioning it as a “beginning of the end,” it functions as a mark of living things, proof that we’re still here. Interior walls merge with forests and oceans, reminding us that nature is too.

That plants and flowers feature so prominently in her work is not surprising. Cowper-Smith grew up in Calgary, Canada, spending time with her grandparents on their cattle ranch and later attending Art School on pristine Vancouver Island. This summer, she worked as wrangler in South Dakota and she rides horses in nearby Prospect Park 4-5 times a week (horses in Brooklyn? Who knew?). For Cowper-Smith, maintaining a strong connection to nature is essential, and as with other city-dwelling artists, she acknowledges that she’ll often “paint from a lack.” If she needs a nature fix, she paints greenery into her pieces.

As she pulls out big canvases for me to see, I notice similarities to the work of both Bonnard and Cézanne.  Like Bonnard, Cowper-Smith “Wants you to feel like you enter a room and get the whole of it at once.” A traditional fixed vantage point perspective is tossed out in favor of painting what amounts to the sum total of every angle a person might see were they to have a thorough look around each space. Cowper-Smith’s multi-perspectival approach is more than just an aesthetic tip of the hat to her Cubist predecessors, however; it’s her way of making tangible the way we remember places and experiences of the past, and, as she puts it, “how we experience forgetting.”

We expand on the theme of memory, of dreams. Do we see the things around us from one fixed perspective?  Sometimes I do. Cowper-Smith’s memories are often “point-of-view-less.” The juxtaposition of painting and photography in her pieces provides us with two versions of remembering: how things actually (and factually) look (represented by the photographed sections) and how we might remember them to look (represented by the looser, dreamier, more abstract parts of the collage). Photography becomes a counterpoint to painting, filling in what our memory might have selectively left out.

Cowper-Smith intends to use painting and collage to continue to explore the ideas she’s been drawn to since completing her MFA at Hunter College in 2005. Although she hopes that her art will eventually become, “more emotional,” right now her work reveals that there’s much to be gleaned from an empty room.

Melissa Cowper-Smith’s work can be seen as part of the ArtBridge: First Exposure 2009 Installation on 23rd Street between 9th and 10th avenues as well as on her website, www.cowpersmith.com.