Tag: gallery

Billie Zangewa

The first stop on our gallery tour yesterday was Lehman Maupin to see Billie Zangewa’s Wings of Change. These are works of a South African artist, working in silk collage, dealing with the world of Covid-19 isolation. I’ve tried to pair most of the works with a close-up, detail shot to show how these magnificent works were created.

You may be reminded of the work of Bisa Butler, a quilting artist I highlighted a few months ago in this post.

  • Heart of the Home
    Heart of the Home
  • Detail
    Heart of the Home detail
  • An Angel at My Bedside
    An Angel at My Bedside
  • An Angel at my Bedside detail
    An Angel at my Bedside detail
  • Free Spirit
    Free Spirit
  • Free Spirit detail
    Free Spirit detail
  • A Fresh Start
    A Fresh Start
  • A Fresh Start detail
    A Fresh Start detail
  • Faithfully
    Faithfully
  • Faithfully detail
    Faithfully detail
Every Day Miracle

Mother and Son Show

Had great fun (and not a little work) this weekend hosting a Pop-up Gallery show of my photographs and my mother’s paintings at Contra Studios in Chelsea. the pivot of the show was a set of 4 images you can see if you look quickly in the video (around the 20-second mark): a snowy photo of mine and my mother’s painting of it and a painting my mother did of some marsh grass in New Jersey and a photograph I took without knowing about hers, which nevertheless has a striking resemblance.

Also in attendance was a large group of my former classmates from PS 198’s class of 1968. I brought our middle school yearbooks, our class photo and set up a screen running a continuous loop of images I shot for the yearbooks back then, our 50th reunion get-together and some random shots around New York in those days. Most of the pictures here are of these friends and were shot by Peter Calvert, a professional artist and/or his wife Suzanne who is a stained glass artist – many thanks Peter and Suzanne!

I also set up an iMac to run loops of slide shows of my street photography set to music which you can see very briefly right at the end of the video (and hear in the background).

Also appearing, a surprise visit from my workshop friend Markus John from Alex Webb and Rebecca Norris Webb‘s Finding Your Vision workshop last Spring, in NY on a brief trip from Germany.

(Click any picture to see them all enlarged and a few captions.)

Ann, Kenneth, Melissa and Peter
This time with me in the pic
Now with Woyman, Magdamari and Valerie
from R-L Peter, his wife Suzanne and older brother Jonathan
Here I am with my mother and son Evan who arranged the gallery space for us
After dinner with the 198 crew
Markus John stopped by on Saturday

I’d also like to thank numerous other friends who stopped by: Frank Burrows, Joe Silver, Gary Shoemaker and Kathleen Chan, Laura Tietjen and Steve Moore, Wayne Parsons and others and my mothers friends from her painting class, her quilting group and her neighbors who were very gracious in their appraisal of the show.

Pop-Up Show

[UPDATE] – We’ve just had a location change (dates and times unchanged). We’ll now be at:

Contra Studios,
122 West 26th Street, 7th floor
New York, NY 10001

I’m pleased to announce that I’ll be participating in a pop-up gallery show next month. On the evening of Friday, October 25th and during the day on Saturday, the 26th you can see some of my work at Mother & Son an exhibition of my mother’s paintings (S F Stern) with my photographs.

Mailing-Brochure v2

for more information, don’t hesitate to contact me: adam@islerweb.com.

Lynette Yiadom-Boakye

But the highlight of the Chelsea gallery crawl has to have been seeing, for the first time, the brilliant work of Lynette Yiadom-Boakye at the Jack Shainman Gallery, In Lieu of a Louder Love. I can’t recommend this more highly. Unfortunately, it closed on the 16th, the day we were there, but if you can get to see her work somewhere, run, don’t walk. Here are just a couple of examples and the photographs don’t begin to do justice to the quality of the painting, the texture and the depth of feeling.

Jack Shainman Gallery, West 20th Street, New York

Stairwell and Skylight

David Zwirner Gallery, West 20th Street, New York

The James Baldwin exhibit was in Zwirner’s 19th Street gallery. At the 20th Street building, stairwell shown here, we saw an interesting Josef Albers exhibit. Many of his green and grey square paintings reminded me of the work of friend of the family, Gert Berliner.

We saw the incredible work of Charles White upstairs, four monumentally scaled ink and charcoal drawings made by the artist as studies for the figures in his mural Mary McLeod Bethune, completed in 1978 for the Dr. Mary McLeod Bethune Regional Library in Exposition Park, Los Angeles… more

Perfect Pie

Hales Gallery, 20th St and Eleventh Avenue, New York

Last weekend we went down to the Zwirner Galleries to see Hilton Als’ exhibition on James Baldwin, long a hero of mine for The Fire Next Time and Go Tell It on The Mountain. Watching old YouTube videos of him in debates or on talk shows is another good way to see his rhetorical brilliance displayed and enjoy watching his white interlocutors squirm. Unfortunately we went down on the last afternoon and the place was packed (with old white people) making it almost impossible to appreciate the exhibit. In particular it was hard to get to the tiny explanatory placards here and there to understand the context, so we abandoned it and went into a number of other Chelsea galleries.

I confess to a certain Philistinism when it comes to this kind of work (Richard Slee’s Perfect Pie at Hales Gallery).

Cloacal Captures

While in Seattle we took the ferry to Bainbridge Island and visited the historical museum. Bainbridge Island was host to a vibrant Japanese community and was the source of the first internees during WWII. They had an exhibit of portraits by Ansel Adams who later felt like his work had been misused for propagandist purposes.

Also, an exhibit of a local portrait photographer’s work in the bathroom… (space was at a premium, I guess)

Bainbridge Island, Washington

Art from the Side

Spring Street, New York
Spring Street, New York

This is the side view of 2 artworks that are made up of items embedded in layers of lucite (perspex), creating a an interesting 3-dimensional effect when viewed from the front. I can’t remember the name of the artist or the gallery and couldn’t recover them on the web.