Two-gallery installation by Crosstown Arts’ inaugural resident artist, Lance Turner.
Tag: Visual Arts
Exhibition organized by Mary Jo Karimnia
Join us for KRONOS, a snap-shot Bolivian/American artist Keiko Gonzalez’s prolific and ever evolving practice. Keiko has been honing his craft and showing his work throughout South America, Europe and North America for over 30 years. His continual painting and scraping leaves rich surfaces that both obstruct and reveal the history of the work, inviting the viewer into a wondrous process.
Friday, November 13: Reception 6-8 pm, with live performance at 7 pm
Saturday, November 14: Paintings on view 11 am-5 pm, with artists talk at 2 pm
Organized by Yancy Villa Calvo and the artists
Mexico and Memphis will come together for a multimedia fusion exhibit where Aztec rhythm and classical arts will intersect through expressionism abstract paint and video.
“Mexicanísimo” is a new exhibit by four Mexican-born, Memphis resident artists that sets the stage for the intersection of pre-colombian Aztec rhythm and the classical arts. Memphis is the home of opera singer Bethania Baray, Aztec dancer Agustín Díaz, ballet dancer Alberto Gaspar and visual artist Yancy Villa-Calvo.
“We come together to portray the beauty of our roots and what we bring to the Memphis community as Mexican immigrants,” says Villa-Calvo who has lived in Memphis for 20 years. Gaspar, a company member of Ballet Memphis adds, “Our work is not restricted or limited to folklore. We like to be identified first and foremost as artists.” However, in this show they are focusing on their heritage, hence the title of the exhibition. “We are showcasing the contributions that Mexican artists bring to the Mid-South, which is seldom talked about,” says Baray.
The exhibit features artwork by Villa-Calvo, which includes canvases that have been painted by Gaspar’s and Díaz’s feet while dancing classical ballet and moving to Aztec rhythms. Villa-Calvo then interjected painting strokes to capture the musical variations of Baray’s opera singing, which helped bring all four art forms (opera, ballet, painting, and Aztec dance) together. In addition, an installation by Brazilian videomaker André Silveira will feature the creative inspiration provided by the interaction of the artists.
According to Díaz, this is a modern representation of the Ollin, an Aztec glyph that represents “the search of unity and balance – the movement of a universal understanding among the opposites.” At a time when Mexican immigrants are perceived by some as “liabilities” and fitted often into stereotypes, the artists invite the Memphis community to be amazed and discover the unexpected.
Families are welcome
Free Admission
This workshop will be facilitated by Maysey Craddock and Mary Jo Karimnia, members of the ArtsMemphis Artist Advisory Council, and 2015 grant recipient, Johnathan Payne. The session will focus on grant requirements and what makes a strong proposal, with Q&A and conversation.
Application deadline is January 5, 2016.
ArtsMemphis’ ArtsAcclerator Grant program consists of five $5,000 incentive grants awarded to visual artists working in any media living in Shelby County.
Image: Stephanie Cosby in her studio
OPENING RECEPTION: FRIDAY, OCTOBER 30, 6-9 pm
Featuring work by Andrea Morales, Yasmine Omari, Louis “Ziggy” Tucker, Stephanie Wexler, and a collaboration by Carla Worth & Andrew Gafford.
“Life and death are mirrors. To talk about one is to talk about the other, despite the distance in the language between them: life with its fragility, versus death and its finality.
We choose to remember because we want to feel who we loved that came and passed before us. It’s for our own benefit to do so. We keep the dead alive in our dreams and photographs. We see them where we used to live, we see them where they were last seen. We see them as we last saw them. Our circles grow closer, tighter and are sometimes preserved and strengthened by death.
Why we come to life, how we leave at death, how we are remembered: our questions shape the narrative of the ultimate. We turn the questions into rituals. Chief among them is our memory.
It’s a comfort that the world does not empty of people. We welcome the ghosts as evidence of life. This show collects works that examine that memory through photography, video and mixed media by a group of local artists.” – Andrea Morales
Co-curated by Andrea Morales in collaboration with Crosstown Arts
Image:
INDIANOLA, MS – May 29, 2015: at the public viewing for B.B. King at the B.B. King Museum and Delta Interpretive Center on Friday morning.
Credit: Andrea Morales for The New York Times
Organized in partnership with Creative Growth Art Center (Oakland, CA)
Curated by Tom di Maria, Director of CGAC
Opening Reception: Friday, December 11, 6-9 pm
Curator Talk: Saturday, December 12, 2 pm
Crosstown Arts is pleased to partner with Creative Growth Art Center to present the upcoming exhibition Extra Celestial. Founded in Oakland, California in 1973, Creative Growth serves adult artists with developmental, mental, and physical disabilities, providing a professional studio environment for artistic development, gallery exhibition and representation, and more.
In Extra Celestial, Creative Growth artists Luis Aguilera, David Albertsen, Terri Bowden, Susan Janow, Allan Lofberg, Dan Miller, Donald Mitchell, William Scott, Ruth Stafford, William Tyler, Merritt Wallace and Ed Walter explore concepts of inner and outer space.
This ethereal grouping of works on paper presents an otherworldly and highly personal view of inner explorations and celestial journeys. Often abstract, always visionary, these colorful and dynamic paintings and drawings serve as maps to a galaxy of dreams and to compelling utopian realities.
An important component of Extra Celestial is the gallery premiere of Starquarius, the new space exploration video from the Creative Growth Video Production Workshop that reflects and re-considers the iconic sci-fi films of our lives.
Curator Talk: Saturday, December 12, 2 pm
In conjunction with the exhibition, please join Creative Growth Director Tom di Maria for his gallery talk, From the Margins to the Mainstream: Artists with Disabilities Today. The talk will review the history and leadership of Creative Growth Art Center’s work as the world’s oldest and largest art center for people with disabilities. He will review the Center’s studio art practice, the evolution of several key artists, and its relationship to so-called Outsider Art and to the contemporary art world.
About Creative Growth
Creative Growth Art Center is the nation’s oldest and largest artist-run space for artists with disabilities, offering a professional art studio, exhibition opportunities, and a supportive artistic community for 154 adult artists with developmental, physical, emotional, and mental disabilities. Founded in 1974 on the idea that all people can gain strength, enjoyment and fulfillment from experiences in the arts and are capable of producing works of high artistic merit, CGAC’s studio program offers, at no cost, 74 ongoing workshops led by artists in a range of media. Our year-round Saturday Youth Art program provides 16 young adults with access to our award-winning studio. As a role model organization, CGAC has fostered the development of over 20 similar centers worldwide.
Critical to CGAC’s success is its landmark/adjoining gallery. Started in 1978 with a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts as the world’s first gallery for artists with disabilities, this museum-quality space, with its six extraordinary annual exhibitions, serves as a portal to the larger community of viewers and collectors. Over 12,000 people visit our gallery each year.
CGAC’s artists are thriving in the mainstream art world, making significant contributions to the field of contemporary art, and becoming recognized among the outstanding contemporary artists of our era. Recent accomplishments include:
– CGAC artist Judith Scott became our third artist (Dan Miller and William Scott are the others) to have work acquired by the Museum of Modern Art, New York. These are the only three artists with developmental disabilities with work in the Museum of Modern Art’s permanent collection.
– Participation in over 20 outside exhibitions and art fairs, including our artists’ first presence at: Art Fair Tokyo, Japan; D’Dessin Paris Contemporary Drawing Fair, France; and the Codex Book Fair, Richmond, CA.
– CGAC artists Kerry Damianakes and William Scott received 2015 Wynn Newhouse Awards, given to artists of excellence who also happen to have disabilities.
– “Bound and Unbound,” a major 5-month retrospective exhibition of CGAC artist Judith Scott’s eighteen years of sculpture making, was presented at the Brooklyn Museum.