Tag: art

Benny Andrews

Saturday before Christmas we went to see Benny Andrews: Portraits, A Real Person Before the Eyes at the Michael Rosenfeld Gallery. These are very very powerful, strong images, created with paint on canvas and painted cloth and other materials (gesso?) that give them real depth. Well worth putting on a mask and making an appointment to go see.

More Bisa Butler: Portraits

I Am Not Your Negro
detail from To God and Truth
To God and Truth
Basquiat
detail from prior image
another detail
Broom Jumpers

As mentioned in the previous 2 posts, the Bisa Butler: Portraits exhibit at the Katonah Museum of Art through October 4th is absolutely must see. These pictures don’t fully do justice to the incredible power and visual impact of the works in person. They leap off the wall and shake you. Click any image to see them all enlarged. I remembered some of the titles and hope I didn’t get any of them wrong. There is an explanatory placard next to each quilt providing useful information about the history of the image and the materials and processes used. Just look at the bright contrasty colors with which the faces are constructed!

Click any image to see them all bigger.

Bisa Butler

A couple of weeks ago we went to see the Bisa Butler exhibition at the Katonah Museum of Art which is open to limited numbers with tickets reserved in advance. It will move to Chicago in October. If you can get tickets RUN, don’t walk to see this. The work is incredible and I’ll be posting some of my snapshots over the next few posts.

There’s material on the museum web site and videos that will provide more insight into her working methods and materials. While the work is very quilty, it also has a painted quality, remarkable use of color and contrast. The pieces are drawn from photographs of the black experience and are just unbelievably powerful both aesthetically and as social commentary.

Unfortunately, I didn’t manage to take a focused picture of the first piece which opens the exhibition but it will give you some idea of how she uses archival photographs (in this case from 1940s Chicago) to create her art. Click any image to see them all full sized.

Katonah Museum of Art, New York

Heavy Metal

Warehouse District, St Petersburg, Florida

We were planning on joining an Art Walk starting in the Warehouse District about a week and a half ago. By the time we got there it had been cancelled, the trolley garaged and the galleries shuttered. We found these compacted cubes of metal outside one of the warehouses of studios.

A couple more from Duncan McClellan

St Petersburg, Florida

I couldn’t find any placards to identify these, the top image is a set of glass globes from their students; the bottom one is a close-up of a metal sculpture in the gardens.

(These pictures were shot over a week ago – everything’s shut now and we’re complying with attempts to halt the spread of Covid-19 by not going out except for necessities).