Join me on Friday March 4, 2022 at 4pm US eastern time for a virtual curatorial walk-through of the Daily Ritual exhibition at Center for Book Arts.
Join the Curator and exhibiting artists of Daily Ritual for a virtual discussion about the themes of the show and the multimedia projects on view.
Register at Center for Books Arts site to receive the link.
Photo: Paul-David Rearick. Courtesy of Detroit Art Week
At Tinyscissors Tattoo Parlor Detroit, Iranian-American artist and politician Amy Khoshbin offers bespoke line drawing tattoos of non-violent imagery. Amy engages parlor visitors in conversations about gun violence in America, and the ways we can heal together moving forward, literally and figuratively, while they acquire a tattoo.
Tinyscissors Tattoo Parlor Detroit is an intimate setting in which to discuss and envision how we can shift culture towards compassion. Amy’s tattoos serve as a permanent reminder of the conversation in an operational tattoo pop-up shop where she is working with the body as the canvas for this participatory artwork.
Nearly 40,000 people died from gun violence in 2018, yet imagery of guns, weapons and violent acts pervade our media, sociocultural psyche, our bodies and walls of our tattoo parlors. How can we shift our culture towards an iconography of non-violence? Amy asks: what is the opposite of a weapon? Resulting drawings, prints and sculptures form the basis of tattoo designs.
Like any good tattoo parlor, we also offer art, merchandise, and custom prints of flash pages of tattoo designs. Check out the list of works available on ISSUU, or as a document online.
At YCNIV at Detroit Art Week, we also served tea in custom mugs made by Norma Khoshbin, Amy’s mother, and commissioned Detroit Candy Makers Bon Bon Bon to realize sweets using Amy’s tattoo designs.
Press:
My tinyscissors tattoo parlor instagram story
SWING FORWARD WHILE SWAYING BACK
October 3 to December 5, 2018
Longwood Art Gallery @ Hostos
450 Grand Concourse at 149th Street, Room C-190, Bronx, NY 10451
TUES – FRI, 1:00 to 7:00 pm.
Opening Reception: Wednesday, October 3, 5:30 to 8:30 pm
PARTICIPATING ARTISTS
Alicia Grullón | Blanka Amezkua | Fran Ilich | Francheska Alcantara | Walter Cruz | Yelaine Rodriguez
Curated by Amanda McDonald Crowley
The Hostos Center for the Arts & Culture, Bronx Council on the Arts and the Bronx Arts Alliance present Swing Forward While Swaying Back. Six Bronx artists realize collaborative installations that provocatively and poetically challenge their audiences. Each project simultaneously draws on rich and varied art, activist, and cultural histories to search for something beyond itself – whether in relation to economies of generosity and exchange, practical information about immigration rights, or complex conversations about cultural history.
“When I was drawing connections between the work by the artists in this exhibition, I was reflecting on Elaine Scarey’s book On Beauty and Being Just,” says McDonald Crowley. “Scarey writes: ‘[mental life] is porous, open to air and light, swings forward while swaying back, scatters its stripes in all directions and delights to find itself beached beside something invented only that morning or instead standing beside an alter from three millennia ago.’ It struck me that these Bronx artists all find beauty in their objective to make work that clearly positions itself with a goal to ensure a more just future, but they all also look to their varied pasts to draw connections and to stay grounded in the present.”
The artists in Swing Forward While Swaying Back collaborate with their audiences and with other artists to ‘complete’ their works. It is an exhibition that is about collaboration and invites participation.
Public Programs
Opening Reception
October 3
5:30 – 8:30 pm
Opening Reception with performances and interventions by Alicia Grullón, Fran Ilich with Gabriela Ceja, and Walter Cruz with Art Jones.
Diego de la Vega Coffee Co-op Activations
October 17, 31; November 28
5:00 – 7:00 pm
Diego de la Vega Coffee Coop: Against the Walls of Capital
Every other Wednesday evening, the Diego de la Vega Experimental Economies and Finance research group will host open meetings in response to a gift of 50 kgs of Zapatista coffee from Ejercito Zapatista de Liberación Nacional to find paths to organize, resist and create alternatives Against the Walls of Capital.
Film Screening of Love and Labor on October 31, 5:00 – 7:00 pm with filmmakers Stephanie Andreou & Sarah Keeling
Closing Reception
December 5
5:30 – 8:30pm
Closing Reception with performance directed by Yelaine with Melanie Gonzalez and Benton C Bainbridge.
Youth Programs
Bronx Council on the Arts also offers bespoke youth programs by appointment. For more information and to book youth group appointments with exhibiting artists or the exhibition curator, please contact Longwood Art Gallery @ Hostos at 718-518-6728.
Opening Reception
Photos: Joe Conzo Jr
“Maman Brigitte Activation: We are here, because you were there”, was a site-specific performance by Bronx-based collaborative Yelaine Rodriguez, Melaine Gonzalez, Benton C Bainbridge. This activation was performed on December 05, 2018 for the exhibition finissage.
Maman Brigitte came alive in a projected environment of translucent fabrics. The work is inspired by a quote by cultural theorist Stuart Hall and is a commentary of the existences of a new Black culture created from The New World. Concentrated in Haitian and Dominican roots and traditions this performance looks at Maman Brigitte, the death loa in Hoodoo, the protector of cemeteries and graves. She guards spirits in the transition from life to their death. Maman Brigitte is from an ongoing series which celebrates the loa in costume, dance and events.
Rodriguez, Gonzalez, Bainbridge make mixed media, installations, and performances at the intersection of wearable art, performance art, and media art. Conceptual design/sculpture by Yelaine Rodriguez; Cinematography and Video Projection visuals by Melanie Gonzalez; Media Design by Benton C Bainbridge. ‘Maman Brigitte’ was performed by Gina Goico.
Background about the exhibition, the artworks, and the artists is also available as a PDF here:
Swing Forward While Swaying Back background information.
L: Alicia Grullón, Empanar!
R: Gonzalo Fuenmayor, GENESIS VIII
March 6 — 12, 2018
4 Times Square, NYC (Chashama), Entrance at 140 West 43rd Street
From March 6 – 12 I will have a project at SPRING/BREAK Art Show during Armory Arts Week. My response to the theme STRANGER COMES TO TOWN is a project I’ve titled (En)Coded Conversations.
List of works at SPRING/BREAK Art Fair site, on consignment through April 30!
Chloë Bass, Juanli Carrión, Gonzalo Fuenmayor, Alicia Grullón, and Riitta Ikonen are storytellers, who specifically engage their audiences in conversation, and who make work that speaks to strangers helping one another navigate new terrain. Sometimes these conversations are awkward and uncomfortable, but they are always about making connections and navigating safe pathways.
Carrión grew up in regional Spain in a farming and wine growing county: members of the community knew one another, and everyone was connected. The butcher and the baker were essential community members; no one was a faceless stranger. When he moved to New York City he struggled to find ways to participate directly in his communities. As he navigated New York, he started to think about communities as ecosystems and his role, and our role, as plants in those ecosystems, and thus the idea of OSS gardens was born. The drawing for (En)coded conversations questions the text of the USA Immigration and Nationality Act by coloring individually its 148,123 characters to create botanical illustrations of the plants selected by immigrants interviewed for #OSS Manhattan.
Alicia Grullon, serves up empanada and knowledge with her project Empanar! – a mobile art project working off Bronx street food culture and traditions from El Taller Gráfico Popular. Along with empanada, Grullon distributes flyers that provide information to immigrants on their rights and where to seek counsel.
Gonzalo Fuenmayor’s Papare series examines ideas of exoticism and the complicit and amnesic relationship between ornamentation and tragedy. Opulent Victorian chandeliers and other elements, reminiscent of a decadent colonial past, proliferate from banana bunches, alluding to a tragic and violent history associated with Banana trade worldwide. The theatricality and dramatic nature of the imagery, subordinate the contradictory into a delicate and imaginative order, evoking a certain kind of reconciliation or tense harmony between disjointed realities.
For Gather the house around the table, Bass produced a line of domestic materials that she uses to interact with her audiences – sometimes in plain sight, and sometimes nearly imperceptibly. Visitors are invited to take their place in at the table, using her objects to enact everyday poetry and share food.
Riitta Ikonen’s photographs in which she costumes herself, and places herself in awkward conversation with built and natural environments are disguises. She is visible in plain sight, while also in conversation with a landscape. The works ask as to think about the costumes (or disguises?) we wear help us navigate new territory.
Individually, these works speak secrets to specific audiences. Collectively, they help us navigate new terrain and make conversation with new communities.
Beautiful Obsolescence
Cluster Gallery
March 2 — March 30, 2018
Opening Reception: Friday March 2, 7 — 9pm
CLOSING RECEPTION: Friday March 30, 5 — 7pm
Cluster Gallery: 200 6th Street 3E, Brooklyn, NY 11215
I am delighted to have been invited by Cluster Gallery to curate Beautiful Obsolescence, a group exhibition featuring photographic works by Jeanette May and Adrianne Wortzel, as well as sculpture by Mary Mattingly.
Our contemporary lives are filled with redundant technologies and consumer goods. To make sense of the technologies and objects that fill our lives, the artists in Beautiful Obsolescence reimagine consumer goods. By recontextualizing our view on these objects the artists bring a fresh eye to how these objects affect us, giving them new lives.
Jeanette May’s Tech Vanitas photographs of precariously stacked gadgets address the anxiety surrounding technological obsolescence. As May observes, we live in an age filled with devices that make domestic life faster, smarter, easier, and yet, more complicated. The more we yearn to keep current — the newest phone, computer, camera, audio system, coffee maker — the more we produce, consume, and discard. Tech Vanitas references the 17th Century vanitas paintings which celebrated The Netherlands’ new wealth. Just as Dutch Golden Age still lifes portray the abundance afforded a prosperous culture, Tech Vanitas embraces luxury, honors design, and acknowledges the fleeting nature of earthly pleasures.
In Adrianne Wortzel’s EX SITU CONSERVATION: Colony Relocation for Electronic Detritus an inventory of machine parts and electronic elements are photographed as surviving artifacts of technologies facing obsolescence. Objects are arranged in nature, perhaps even as species threatened with extinction. Her photos are an ironic attempt at reverse psychology — a reverence of technology at any price to the environment.
Mary Mattingly’s DRUM from her series Blockades, Boulders, Weights is a sculpture created from mass-produced objects the artist has collected over the years. Her goal is to create structures of bundled objects so that she is really faced with everything on which she relies and consumes. “And it’s a lot”, she says. Mattingly hopes to get people thinking about what we’re taking from the earth, how we can use what we already have to our best advantage. Her sculptures show just how much we’d have to carry if we bundled our objects on own backs.
The artists in Beautiful Obsolescence simultaneously critique and celebrate the multitude of objects we accumulate, to make sense of the stuff we collect in our lives. “May, Wortzel, and Mattingly are all storytellers”, says McDonald Crowley. “Through arranging objects, they compose narratives that help us to make sense of the technologies and belongings that we gather around us, immortalizing them as art objects and compositions: what might be considered trash becomes beauty.”
November 3 – December 3, 2017
11-8:00pm Tuesday-Saturday
12-5:00pm Sunday
Little Metal Print is please announce View Finder, a solo show of new works by MaryKate Maher for our inaugural exhibition. Organized by guest curator Amanda McDonald Crowley, Maher will debut new sculpture and relief forms created with dye sublimation prints.
Maher draws inspiration from nature and the post-industrial environment. Exploiting materials that reference landscape, Maher focuses on how we visually perceive space as both flat and dimensional.
Maher plays with expectations of form, and disrupts perceptions of volume and weight. She manipulates her materials to obscure their origins: resins are cast, sanded and weathered to look like stone; a patinated copper surface reveals itself to be concrete and foam; dye sublimation prints are cut and inlaid into sculptural forms, altering the negative space.
For View Finder, Maher is presenting new relief works based on light refractions in water and frozen air pockets in ice. “I am interested to experiment with light to produce unique sculpture reliefs that have slight bends and curves to their form,” says Maher.
McDonald Crowley says “for this first exhibition at Little Metal Print, it is really exciting to be working with Maher who is pushing the custom printing techniques offered at the studio, and manipulating materials to make forms that are at once beautifully poetic and simultaneously disconcerting in their abstraction. The works allude to the vastness of open landscapes, but it is unclear whether it might be tundra, or desert; sky, sea, or ice. Maher finds beauty in both natural and industrial landscapes which is expressed through her color palette, and collaging techniques.”
Opening Reception
November 3, 2017 6-8:00pm
Artist Talk
November 19, 2017 2:00pm
Little Metal Print is the brainchild of fine-art printer Ken Allen of Ken Allen Studios. He says “I am very excited to be the first to bring a brick-and-mortar store to Williamsburg, where people can see and be part of the process of creating little metal prints for themselves.”
Media Contact: Dylan Staniszewski
917 – 588 – 5294
dylan@littlemetalprint.com
Installation shots. Photos by Dylan Staniszewski
Studio visit with Mary Kate: video by Dylan Staniszewski
Opening Reception
November 3, 6:00 – 8:00pm
Artist Talk
November 19, 2:00 – 3:00pm
Little Metal Print is please announce View Finder, a solo show of new works by MaryKate Maher for our inaugural exhibition. Organized by guest curator Amanda McDonald Crowley, Maher will debut new sculpture and relief forms created with dye sublimation prints. Maher draws inspiration from nature and the post-industrial environment. Exploiting materials that reference landscape, Maher focuses on how we visually perceive space as both flat and dimensional.
51 South 1st St., Brooklyn, NY 11249
(917) 588 – 5294
info@llittlemetalprint.com
November 3 – December 3, 2017
Little Metal Print is an artist run studio and experimental exhibition space that provides a personalized approach to fine art printing that is easily accessible to the public.
Commissioned by Art Connects New York, Invisible in Plain Sight is an Augmented Reality exhibition developed specifically for Senior Planet in NYC with work by artists who are also members of Senior Planet: Menny Borovski; Amy Epstein; Erica Feld; Arthur Fornari; John Leicmon; Anna Link; Marilyn Pappas; Geraldine Scalia; Henry Soto. The exhibition was conceived in collaboration with Jeff Crouse and Sebastian Bach; works have been developed in collaboration with Jeff Crouse and Peter Lester; and Crouse had additionally developed the ArtConnectsAR app, built in the Unity game engine using the Vuforia AR platform, by which the exhibition is accessible.
The exhibition opens up a space to suspend disbelief and reimagine space in the built environment in New York City. Exploring the urban landscapes of the city including all of its nooks and crannies, Invisible In Plain Sight includes new ephemeral digital works specifically for the Augumented Reality app. Drawing on their experience as painters, photographers, sculptors, holographers, illustrators, and poets, the artists reimagine our cityscape.
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Invisible in Plain Sight
A Permanent Exhibition for Senior Planet Exploration Center
Curated by Amanda McDonald Crowley
Opening Reception with the Artists:
Thursday, November 17
6 – 8pm
Senior Planet Exploration Center
127 West 25th Street, New York, NY, 10001
The Fifth House and PointB are pleased to announce the exhibition The Skypod Project, an exhibition of sculpture, photographic, and audio-visual works by artist Mark Parrish.
Open Reception:
Friday, September 16th, 7 – 11 PM
Fifth House 198 N. 4th St, Brooklyn, NY
near the Bedford L Train Station
The Centerpiece of the exhibition, the Skypod itself is a collapsible light-weight tent structure capable of hanging from trees, cliff faces, telephone poles or building facades allowing for suspension over diverse terrains.
This portable experience structure creates a mobile habitat for site-specific projects to evolve. At The Fifth House we will exhibit a working prototype of the Skypod that explores the context for the piece and situates the research Mark is concurrently doing at Dreamland – a creative community, the Fifth House’s sibling organization, in the deep woods of upstate New York. Night skies, frog songs, Vista Tunnels (constructed poetics views into the wetlands and woodlands at Dreamland) will frame the work.
Inspired by recent trips to various locations around the world where he has been researching urban and natural settings for artistic and creative retreats, Parrish has returned to a project that has long been in gestation: designing portable habitats where individuals or like-minded groups can immerse themselves in a range of contexts from natural settings, to interstitial zones, and temporary spaces – to create, contemplate, and build cohesive communities.
“Parrish builds social sculptures, in a very literal sense”, says curator for the exhibition, Amanda McDonald Crowley. “Moreover he equally activates personal experience and group dynamics. It is exciting to see him alternate this thinking between urban contexts and out into nature – where so many of his personal creative interventions have operated in intimate settings – while continuing to develop conceptual frameworks that are equal part about social interaction, and solitary contemplation.”
The Skypod Project, Parrish’s first solo gallery exhibition in 20 years, combines his experiences building social sculptures as live-work spaces, with his ongoing project to make in-situ works in natural contexts, and his passion for creating ‘portable experience structures’ – artworks that operate as an enabling apparatus for his audiences, and often also collaborators and co-conspirators, to engage with their surroundings.
Artist: Mark Parrish
Creative Collaborator: Sebastian Bach
Curator: Amanda McDonald Crowley
Project Manager: Lauren Comito
All-Night Party at Marcy North (upstairs) to follow the opening!
Exhibition dates: September 16 through October 30. Gallery Hours are Saturdays from 11:00 am-1:00 pm or by appointment.
About Mark Parrish
Mark Parrish is an American visionary, designer, and artist from Texas who has lived in New York since the 80’s. Primarily self-taught, Parrish started his own studio in Austin in the mid 70’s. His practice often involves analysis of movement and portability, cultural norms and systems of living. His work takes form in sculptural systems and synergetic architectural space, designed both as tools and as experiential spaces. For the last 20 years, Parrish founded and established an international artist community called PointB, which created short-term co-habitational spaces for mid-career creative professionals. Parrish also spearheads, the non-profit organization, PointB International, which continues to establish new locations worldwide.
About PointB
The PointB vision is a world enriched by the collaboration between global and local creative professionals questioning and transcending their familiar viewpoints while immersed in the social, scientific, and culturally enlightening challenges and inspiration of the moment.
Gallery Hours are Saturdays from 11:00 am-1:00 pm or by appointment.
1993 - 2024 Amanda McDonald Crowley : Public Art Action
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