I am delighted to announce a two-person show with Melissa Cowper-Smith opening Saturday, June 2 from 6–8pm at Sweet Lorraine Gallery in Red Hook. There will also be a closing reception on Friday, June 29 from 7–9pm. The gallery is open by appointment throughout the month. Melissa is a founding member of the tART Collective (I have been an active tART member since 2006) and is currently based in Arkansas, where she created this body of work. I worked from my studio in Red Hook and we exchanged images over the last year to keep an active dialog about our ideas, motivations and creations.
I created a new installation “Inner Workings,” comprised of source material along with paintings, drawings, mixed-media works and sculptures from 2004–2012 for this exhibition at Jamaica Center for Arts & Learning
Jamaica, New York, March 28, 2012 — Collectivity: Art-making in a Collective will open on April 4, 2012 at Jamaica center for Arts & Learning from 6—8pm. The exhibition featuring selected members of the tART Collective will run through June 6, 2012. The exhibition examines ways in which being a part of an artists’ collective influence their work individually. For example, what is the impact of peer studio visits, collaborations and the ongoing critiques by fellow artists have on a particular artist’s body of work.
Heng-Gil Han, curator at the Jamaica Center for Arts and Learning, will explore these issues and draw some conclusions through a curated exhibition of a select group of tART Collective members. The exhibition will examine work created prior to members’ inclusion in the collective alongside current work, looking at ways that an artist’s style and subject matter has changed and affected their aesthetic sensibility; thus providing an opportunity to appreciate the significance of collaboration and collective endeavors to individual artists’ aesthetic and conceptual shifts, constants, and changes.
Considering the recent proliferation of collaborative projects and collective groups of artists, we believe that this type of exhibition is appropriate, relevant, and lends itself to a better understanding of the current state of art.
The artists to be featured include: damali abrams, Liz Ainslie, Julia Whitney Barnes, Suzanne Bennett, Suzanne Broughel, Anna Lise Jensen, Katherine Keltner, Jodie Lyn-Kee-Chow, Susan Ross, Nikki Schiro, Yasmin Spiro, Melissa Staiger, Rosemary Taylor, Petra Valentova.
For more information at http://www.jcal.org/visual/event.html and www.tartnyc.org/news
This exhibition is supported by individual donations.
About Jamaica Center for Arts and Learning (JCAL):
For almost 40 years, the Jamaica Center for Arts and Learning (JCAL) has served as an arts oasis in a section of New York City where cultural opportunities are extremely limited. Created in 1972 as part of an effort to revitalize Jamaica, JCAL has earned a reputation for inspiring youth to take an interest in the arts, showcasing the talents of up-and-coming local artists and performers, and creating dynamic multicultural programs and workshops that have been embraced by the community. Each year, tens of thousands of visitors of all ages, backgrounds and skill sets pass through its doors to attend classes and workshops, view art exhibitions, attend performances or immerse themselves in an art residency.
For further information, visit http://www.jcal.org.
The Jamaica Center for Arts & Learning is housed in landmark buildings owned by the City of New York and are funded with public funds provided through the New York State Council on the Arts, celebrating 50 years of building strong, creative communities in New York State’s 62 counties; the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs with support from Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg; Cultural Affairs Commissioner Kate D. Levin; the New York City Council; Council Speaker Christine Quinn; the Queens Delegation of the Council; Deputy Majority Leader, Councilman Leroy Comrie; Councilman James F. Gennaro; Councilman James Sanders, Jr.; and Queens Borough President Helen M. Marshall.
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/535484180/collectivity-art-making-in-a-collective
Cover story interview with Mike Weiss published in the weekly edition on February 23 & daily paper February 24, 2012.
http://www.brooklyneagle.com/articles/brooklyn-artist-julia-whitney-barnes-paintings-ceramics-murals
“The works by Julia Whitney Barnes indicate a desire for a more harmonious relationship with nature. Barnes combines organic imagery—think abstracted clouds and roots —with renderings of man-made materials. In a mixed-media piece, Barnes affixes an image of a tree house over a dusky forest scene. The house melts easily into the trees, creating a touching visual balance between what is wild and what is not. The piece seems to almost sigh—if only it was this easy in real life.” – by Deirdre Hering
http://www.thelmagazine.com/newyork/artists-imagine-inhabitable-habitats/Content?oid=2207419
IN-HABITAT
Julia Whitney Barnes
Gregory Curry
Lisa DiLillo
Kim Holleman
January 20-February 26 (show extended)
Opening Reception Friday January 20th, 7-9pm
Hours Fri-Sun 1-6 and by appt.
Front Room Gallery is proud to present, “In-Habitat” an exhibition of new works by: Julia Whitney Barnes, Gregory Curry, Lisa DiLillo, and Kim Holleman. In the exhibition “In-Habitat” each artist takes a unique perspective of the concept of habitat, and what it is to inhabit this world.
Gregory Curry‘s paintings relate his postulations of a post human environment inspired by and extrapolated from the various dynamic conditions now impacting on the human animal. The environments and entities that populate his paintings seem imbued with pure energy on a primordial level, set against a background of contrasting complimentary colors. Curry utilizes familiar modes of representation such as rendering, perspective and classic spatial relationships in a way that draws the viewers into these uncanny realms, relating our temporality within an environment of elemental particles and genetic materials.
Lisa DiLillo engages with the noctural forest, illuminating aspects of woodland wilderness with fire, sparks and smoke. Her layered images capture the transformative nature of experiencing woods at night. DiLillo conveys the fear and fascination of the forest environment that has inspired a long history folklore, mythologies and literature. DiLillo’s process involves shooting smoke, fire, and other light sources in these landscapes and using luminosity as a visual correlation to the vitality within.
Rooted simultaneously in science while evoking the fantastic, Julia Whitney Barnes creates works that reinterpret life and the natural environment. Her paintings explore the complex relationship and power struggles of humans with nature, and the contradictions in which our society gives life to and reveres nature while abusing and overlooking it. Her large scale oil painting depicting a tree house abstracted with layers transparencies and lush patches of color, transposes elements of the forest and individual trees with the interior panels of a the structure, relating her desire for a more balanced relationship with nature.
Kim Holleman relates environmental issues of contamination of our natural resources, brought on by radioactive fallout, chemicals seeping into ground water, oil spills and the ephemera in our petro-chemical environment. She infers the impact of these elements and the increasing toll on our natural environment, presenting an installation of displays and scenes, colliding natural and artificial reality, both fantastical and frightening, into a curio collection gone awry. This faux-scientific archive shows us beautiful, sometimes-toxic parks, public spaces, visions of nostalgic environments and constructions straining towards natural growth, but spinning out of control, coated to saturation which threatens their very existence.
The Front Room Gallery is located at 147 Roebling Street in Williamsburg Brooklyn. Gallery hours are Friday-Sunday 1-6PM and by appointment. Press contact: Daniel Aycock 718-782-2556
I will be participating in Seniors Partnering with Artists Citywide (SPARC) at Sirovitch Senior Center in the East Village through a grant from the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council (LMCC) and the Department of Cultural Affairs (DCA), from January through July 2012.
Seniors Partnering with Artists Citywide (SPARC) is a community arts engagement program that places artists-in-residence at senior centers across the five boroughs of New York City. The program provides selected artists with access to workspace in senior centers and a stipend in exchange for the creation and delivery of arts programming for seniors. Participating seniors will be engaged in an art project or series of cultural programs over the course of the residency, which will also include a public program component – a series of exhibits, open houses and other cultural interactions open to the surrounding community. This initiative seeks to connect artists with seniors in senior centers and positively impact the well-being of seniors through arts-based activities.SPARC is a collaboration among the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, the Department for the Aging and the City’s five local arts councils situated in each borough – Brooklyn Arts Council, Bronx Council on the Arts, Council on the Arts and Humanities of Staten Island, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council and Queens Council on the Arts. It was developed as part of Age-Friendly NYC, a citywide effort to make the City more livable for seniors, and previously ran as a successful pilot called Space for Art. The program is supported, in part, by funding from the National Endowment for the Arts.
Front page article by Michael Cesarczyk:
“The Renaissance Women of tART”
tART Collective Year 8, Arts@Renaissance
September 9 – October 14, 2011
opening reception: Friday, September 9, 7-9pm
***closing reception: Friday, October 14, 7-9pm
2 Kingsland Avenue (@ Maspeth Avenue) Garden Level
Brooklyn, NY 11211 (L train to Graham Ave)
I am creating a new edition of vessels for Fuse Works. I created two plaster molds and cast nine pieces each out of english porcelain slip. The pieces were handshaped after being removed form the molds and embossed with JWB on the bottoms. The first firing was to cone 6 and then underglazed and glazed and fired to cone 05.
New comission from by the New York City Department of Transportation Urban Art Program comprised of a 2,000 foot long mural starting at 155th Street & Harlem River Drive in Manhattan completed on May 1, 2011. The mural was painted on 3 foot tall cement barriers with the assistance from hundreds of volunteers from New York Caresand NYC Community Cleanup.
volunteers from NYC Community Cleanup priming the barriers
volunteers from New York Cares transferring the designs onto the primed barriers
volunteers from New York Cares painting the barriers
I will be speaking about the tART Collective with fellow members Anna Lise Jensen and Nikki Schiro in Porland, Oregon on Saturday, May 14.
The Open Engagement conference is an initiative of Portland State University’s Art and Social Practice MFA concentration. Directed by Jen Delos Reyes and planned in conjunction with Harrell Fletcher and the Art and Social Practice students, this year’s conference features internationally renowned artists Julie Ault, Fritz Haeg, and Pablo Helguera. The work by these artists’ touch on subjects including democracy, group work, the boundary (or lack there of) between art and life, education, and transdisciplinarity. In addition, Open Engagement will play host to the Bureau for Open Culture, the Bruce High Quality Foundation University, and a summit on art and education. The summit features students and faculty from MFA programs focusing on public and social art, including OTIS College of Art and Design, the University of California Santa Cruz, and the California College of the Arts.
This year’s Open Engagement sets out to discuss various perspectives on art and social practice. Through conversations, interviews, open reflection on experiences, and related projects created for or presented at the conference we will be looking at five themes that encompass ideas connected to social practice: Peoples and Publics, Social Economies, In Between Places, Tracking and Tracing, and Sentiment and Strategies
