Esperanza and Irwin welcome artist Mike Solomon. Mike had an extraordinary childhood, growing up as the son of Syd and Annie Solomon. Syd was part of the Ab-Ex movement, and while he was a painter of great renown, the salons Annie hosted in her home were legendary. Mike, who is an important painter in his own right, shares the stories of what went on in the East Hampton in 1960's and 70's East Hampton.

LISTEN HERE: https://ourhamptonspodcast.com/

Mike Solomon, the Founding Director of the Alfonso Ossorio Foundation, examines the shared artistic aims and the unlikely affinity between the wealthy, worldly, Harvard-educated Filipino-American artist Alfonso Ossorio and Jackson Pollock, son of an Iowa farm family and high school dropout.

The Art of Relationships is a series of Zoom talks in conjunction with the exhibition “Creative Exchanges: Artists in Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner’s Address Books” on view at the Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center through July 30, 2023.

Date: 06/11/2023

Time: 5:00 pm - 6:00 pm

Please click here to register for this event on Zoom.

Berry Campbell: Community
August 11 - 14, 2022
Berry Campbell at Ashawagh hall
780 Springs Fireplace Road
 East Hampton, New York 11937

Preview Exhibiton

Chelsea to Springs

Chelsea’s Berry Campbell Gallery takes over Ashawagh Hall in Springs from today through Sunday with a large group exhibition of artists, past and present, with strong East End connections.

The show includes works by Mary Abbott, Alice Baber, Nanette Carter, Dan Christensen, Eric Dever, Elaine de Kooning, Perle Fine, Grace Hartigan, Raymond Hendler, John Opper, Charlotte Park, Betty Parsons, Mike Solomon, Syd Solomon, Hedda Sterne, Susan Vecsey, Lucia Wilcox, Frank Wimberley, and Larry Zox.

Gallery hours are today through Saturday, 11 a.m. to 7 p.m., and noon to 6 on Sunday.

Architect Max Strang will guide a tour of Leedy’s architecture and share intimate stories about his time with the legendary architect

Gene Leedy, a founding father of the Sarasota School of Architecture, led a long and decorated career in midcentury modern architecture and beyond. He’ll be celebrated with a weekend tour of his work which will also kick off a three-week-long Leedy-focused exhibition. The event is led by Architecture Sarasota, a nonprofit dedicated to preserving the Sarasota School of Architecture style.

Although the bulk of Leedy’s work is in Winter Haven, Florida, where, in 1954, he moved his practice, Leedy started his career in Sarasota and left a lasting legacy.

At just 16 years old, he enrolled at the University of Florida and graduated with a degree in architecture. He then moved to Sarasota and worked under the tutelage of Paul Rudolph, an internationally acclaimed architect and a founder of the Sarasota School of Architecture style that emerged in the 1940s. Also called Sarasota Modern, the style is known for its Florida-sensitive design that often incorporates what were at the time avant-garde elements, like sliding floor-to-ceiling glass doors, roof overhangs to increase shade and expansive living areas that encouraged air circulation before many homes had air conditioning. It was a mindset that nurtured innovations in engineering, displayed in Leedy’s approach to his projects.

He’s best known for his use of precast concrete and double-T shaped beams, at the time engineering marvels that allowed for strong, lofty, large spaces like the 9,000-square-foot president’s residence at the University of South Florida in Tampa he designed in 1990. Leedy applied the same new wave of thinking when it came to his residential works.

“He designed modular and scalable homes that could easily be added to, so a couple could have a starter home that could grow. Some of his houses are still on Drexel Avenue in Winter Haven,” says Architecture Sarasota executive director Anne-Marie Russell. “Many still don’t have air conditioning  because they worked so well with his passive system for shading and cooling.”

In Sarasota, Leedy designed Brentwood Elementary School in 1958, the House for Contemporary Builders in 1950 and two residential projects. One of them, the Solomon Residence & Studio, on Big Pass on Siesta Key, was built in 1970 and will be highlighted at the exhibition.

Syd Solomon was an abstract painter, and the home served as the site of Sarasota’s “beach culturati,” a subtropical salon where artists, writers, intellectuals, scientists and playwrights gathered. “That house became the location of Sarasota’s brain trust and shows how great architecture can create a platform for creativity,” says Russell. “It did what great architecture always does—inspires new ways of thinking, being and living.” Continue Reading

Syd Solomon: Concealed and Revealed
Berry Campbell, New York

newly discovered materials from the artist’s archive detail how his World War II camouflage designs and other early graphic art skills were key to his unique approach to Abstract Expressionism

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NYC-ARTS Top 5 Picks

NYC-Arts Top Five Picks: January 7 – January 13



Syd Solomon: Concealed and Revealed
Thu, Jan 06, 2022 - Sat, Feb 05, 2022

In this video, Christine Berry speaks on Abstract Expressionist, Syd Solomon.

Syd Solomon (1917–2004), who described himself as an ‘Abstract Impressionist’, made the city of Sarasota in Florida his home from 1946 until his death, establishing the Institute of Fine Art at New College, which brought artists such as Philip Guston and Larry Rivers to teach in Sarasota. He was also the first living artist to have work in the collection of the Ringling Museum. Find out more from the Ringling’s website.

The retrospective of the longtime Sarasota artist’s work opens this weekend.

Prior to the public opening of the exhibition Syd Solomon: Concealed and Revealed, at the John & Mable Ringling Museum of Art this Sunday, Dec. 15, events open to museum members provided a preview of this retrospective of the work of the longtime Sarasota artist.

Solomon lived and created here for many years, including a long stint at the home and studio on Midnight Pass Road he shared with his wife Annie. He’s famed for his abstract paintings, often involving nature, the beach, wind, the shoreline and more. But the exhibit also allows museumgoers the chance to see earlier works, some figurative, some portraits, and to learn more about Solomon’s background. Both his time spent as a camouflage artist during World War II (concealing Allied planes and troops to prevent enemy attack) and as a commercial artist (creating sign lettering and graphic design) are on view here, along with personal photos and items from the vast Solomon family archive.

"Painter, camouflage artist, and cultural connector Syd Solomon is emerging as an important figure in Abstract Expressionism." 

Art & Antiques

SYD SOLOMON AT THE RINGLING  Camouflage and Calligraphy

For Sarasota’s art aficionados and culture vultures, the works of acclaimed abstract expressionist Syd Solomon are well known. And for locals, his time here remains a source of cultural pride and a milestone in the area’s artistic history. But a new exhibition opening this December at The Ringling Museum—Syd Solomon: Concealed and Revealed—proposes to dive deeper into the artist’s early life and inspiration than ever before, presenting a definitive origin story for a man who became a local legend.

Dominating the Searing Wing, Concealed and Revealed brings not only several of Solomon’s paintings to the museum, but also several artifacts from the artist’s early life, most importantly his service in World War II and professional start as a graphic designer and calligrapher in Sarasota, on loan from the Solomon Archive. His son, the artist Mike Solomon, has been working on the archive for five years now, and even he has been surprised by what they’ve found. “The general knowledge was always there,” he says, “but the surprise was in the details, and how it connected to his painting.” When the elder Solomon served in World War II, his camouflage designs hid men, tanks and supplies from German air raids following the Normandy invasion. Fake trees on wheels disguised Allied planes resting on makeshift airstrips. And when Solomon and his fellow soldiers liberated the French town of Roye, they held a big celebration with a parade and a printed poster. That original poster will be on display. And when Solomon moved to Sarasota in 1946, he turned his talents to signage for local businesses and layout work for local newspapers. “And a lot of the look of Sarasota in the ‘40s, in terms of advertising and signage, he made,” Mike says. But more than that, both of these experiences—Solomon the camouflagist and Solomon the calligrapher—would greatly influence the celebrated abstract expressionist he became. “For the people who think they know Syd Solomon’s work, they’ll realize it’s a lot more complex than they thought,” Mike says. “It wasn’t just about nature. It’s expressionism. It’s a personal, autobiographical thing.” Syd Solomon: Concealed and Revealed opens at The Ringling this December.

Discussion with Mike Solomon about Syd Solomon: Views from Above
Cocktails & Collections
Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg
Thursday, November 15, 2018
5 - 7 PM
RSVP

What made Mike Solomon’s talk about Alfonso Ossorio and the Creeks so captivating was that, as he put it, “It is a personal as well as a cultural history.” An overflow audience packed the Baldwin Family Lecture Room at the East Hampton Library to hear Mr. Solomon, an artist and founding director of the Ossorio Foundation, discuss Ossorio’s art, his generosity, and his influence in the art world of the 1950s and beyond.

The Solomon family — Syd, an important abstract painter, his wife, Annie, and their two children, Mike and Michele — lived at the Creeks, Ossorio’s 57-acre estate on Georgica Pond in East Hampton, for three months in 1959. Thirty years later, Mike returned to East Hampton with his wife and 2-year-old son to work as Ossorio’s studio assistant. After the artist’s death a year later, he became the director of the foundation established by Ted Dragon, Ossorio’s life partner and heir.

Mike Solomon at East Hampton Library
East Hampton Public Library
September 15 - October 10, 2018

Opening Reception
September 15, 2018
7 PM

The Creeks: Epicenter of the 1950s Hamptons Art Community
East Hampton Library | Baldwin Family Lecture Room
Saturday, September 15, 2018 
6 - 7 pm

RSVP

Artist Reception and Lecture
Saturday, September 15, 2018 
6:00 pm  
RSVP  

A lecture by artist Mike Solomon, Ossorio Foundation founding Director:  The Creeks: Epicenter of the 1950 Hamptons Art Community

How do you mark the miraculous milestone of a 100th birthday? If you’re Annie Solomon, renowned hostess and party giver extraordinaire, you welcome guests to your bayfront condo with plenty of great food and drink, plus a very special piece of clothing and a group photograph.

An Abstract Expressionist painter, Syd Solomon, held important roles in the art communities of Sarasota, Florida, and East Hampton, New York. He began painting in high school in Wilkes Barre, Pennsylvania, where he was an All-American football player. He studied at the Art Institute of Chicago from 1935 to 1938. Before the attack on Pearl Harbor, he joined the war effort. He was assigned to the 924th Engineer Aviation Regiment of the US Army where he was able to hone his artistic skills by creating camouflage from the air, which protected the airfields being built by the battalion.

On my last visit to Chelsea, a must-see was the Syd Solomon show at the Berry Campbell gallery. Surveying all the paintings in this show, one can quickly see that Syd Solomon, an abstract painter who from 1959 and for the next thirty-five years split his time between Sarasota and the Hamptons, lived to paint. These works, from the ’70s and ’80s, today still look fresh and energetic; the aerosol enamel and acrylic paint he used is vibrant. The paintings are composed of exuberant swaths of color, his northern and southern coastal imagery melding together, collage-like. In “Morning Light Signs” the flotsam and jetsam of pink and orange recede and return to the foreground as if floating. There is an excitement to Solomon’s abstraction, as in “Lunareach,” where ribbons of orange and yellow tangle in an infinite darkened distance.

In this exhibition's museum-quality catalogue, Gail Levin makes a plausible case that we don't know Syd Solomon better only because he enlisted. The mildly infirm and the conscientious objectors were able to form their art in the modernist heyday of early-1940s New York City while Solomon was off earning Bronze Stars and contracting frostbite in the Battle of the Bulge.

When 99-year-old Annie Solomon attends an opening at an art gallery, she’s as much of a focal point as the paintings on the walls. Artists, art lovers, students and retirees all want to hang out with her.

Some admire her because she’s a vibrant link to Sarasota’s days as an arts colony in the 1940s, ’50s and ’60s. The widow of abstract expressionist painter Syd Solomon, she has clear memories of those bohemian times, when she and Syd hosted parties for local artists, writers and musicians, as well as famous visitors such as Kurt Vonnegut, Elia Kazan and Betty Friedan.

There is a natural tendency among art historians, critics, curators, and even in human nature to place people, places, and things in categories, eras, styles, periods. It helps make sense of how ideas and objects fit into a continuum, or where they fall along the timeline. At the centenary of Syd Solomon’s birth, it is time to free the artist from these constraints and celebrate him for his unique contributions, which is what “Syd Solomon: Time and Tide,” a show at the Berry Campbell Gallery in New York City, does eloquently.

Celebrating the centenary of the artist’s birth, “Syd Solomon: Time and Tide” showcases his renowned works. Born in Pennsylvania and a student of the Art Institute of Chicago, Solomon used his artistic skill to create camouflage instruction manuals during WWII. After the war, Solomon experimented with new synthetic media, the precursors to acrylic paints, which put him at the forefront of technical innovations in his generation

“Syd Solomon: Time and Tide,” a centenary exhibition of paintings by the influential Abstract Expressionist, will open tonight at 6 with a reception at the Berry Campbell Gallery in Chelsea. It will run through Nov. 11.

Berry Campbell Gallery announces an exhibition of paintings by Syd Solomon to celebrate the centenary of his birth. Syd Solomon: Time and Tide will open on October 12 and run through November 11, 2017. This centenary exhibition precedes the artist’s traveling museum retrospective to open at Guild Hall Museum, East Hampton, New York, in October 2018. The retrospective, which will also travel to the John and Mable Ringling Museum in Sarasota, Florida, is accompanied by a 96-page exhibition catalogue with essays by Dr. Gail Levin, Michael Auping, Mike Solomon, and George Bolge. 

Syd Solomon (1917-2004), the gifted abstract-expressionist painter, was well recognized as an artist in the middle of the last century, especially in the early 1960s. He kept studios in East Hampton and Sarasota in Florida, spending time in both places during the course of the year. Solomon established an art presence in Sarasota, bringing in artists such as James Brooks and Larry Rivers to participate in the community there, as well as teaching at Sarasota’s Institute of Fine Art, the educational center he founded at New College. In the East Hamptons, he met Pollock, de Kooning, and Kline. His work, an attractive amalgam of bright colors and mostly organic shapes, feels as if it were heavily influenced by his experience of landscape. As a noted member of the abstract expressionists’ first generation, Solomon played a distinctive role as an artist who brought people together, at the same time developing a compelling style of his own. This style can’t be clearly tied to any particular colleague, but takes part in a playfully exuberant use of color only barely contained by the natural forms that they fill. Living as Solomon did in places of unusual beauty, it seems inevitable that his art would reflect his surroundings. 

Berry Campbell Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of paintings by SYD SOLOMON (1917-2004) to celebrate the centenary of his birth. Syd Solomon: Time and Tide will open on October 12 and run through November 11, 2017. This centenary exhibition precedes the artist’s traveling museum retrospective to open at Guild Hall Museum, East Hampton, New York, in October 2018. The retrospective, which will also travel to the John and Mable Ringling Museum in Sarasota, Florida, is accompanied by a 96-page exhibition catalogue with essays by Dr. Gail Levin, Michael Auping, Mike Solomon, and George Bolge. The opening reception for Syd Solomon: Time and Tide is Thursday, October 12 from 6 to 8 pm.

It was New Year’s Day of 1946 when Annie Solomon and her husband Syd, who had finished his service as a camoufleur — a specialist in the design and implementation of camouflage — in the war, arrived in Sarasota, where they intended to start their new life together. They’d met five years earlier, just after Pearl Harbor, at a distant cousin’s wedding when Annie, a graduate of Ohio State, was 21.

Those familiar with the Sarasota visual arts scene will immediately know the name of painter Syd Solomon, whose large-scale, colorful abstract works have drawn attention and collectors for decades. But they may not fully realize how Solomon’s work was influenced by his days as an aerial camoufluer in World War II. An exhibition opening April 29 at the Museum of Art in DeLand, Syd Solomon: Concealed and Revealed: Camouflage & Lettering in the Artist’s Work, aims to change that.

A Traveling Museum Exhibition of 36 paintings and works on paper with a hardcover catalog with essays by Michael Auping – Chief Curator of the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, George Bolge- Director, Museum of Art in Deland, FL and the eminent Art Historian, Dr. Gail Levin. 

Are you ready for some strong color? Go west, young paintaholic, to Chelsea for the two most ecstatically chromatic shows in New York. Both feature artists using acrylic (nothing gives the bounce of hue, value and chroma like it) who were bold-faced names by the 1970s: Larry Poons at Danese/Corey, and Syd Solomon at Berry Campbell. Syd Solomon was a fixture on the Hamptons scene beginning in the glory days when giants roamed the beaches, including his friends Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning and Alfonso Ossorio. It was Syd Solomon who hosted the first artists vs. writers softball game in 1966.

Charles A. Riley II reviews Syd Solomon: Swingscape, Paintings from the 1970s at Berry Campbell Gallery (through May 23) and Larry Poons: New Paintings at Danese/Corey, New York (through May 29).

Are you ready for some strong color? Go west, young paintaholic, to Chelsea for the two most ecstatically chromatic shows in New York. Both feature artists using acrylic (nothing gives the bounce of hue, value and chroma like it) who were bold-faced names by the 1970s: Larry Poons at Danese/Corey, and Syd Solomon at Berry Campbell. Syd Solomon was a fixture on the Hamptons scene beginning in the glory days when giants roamed the beaches, including his friends Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning and Alfonso Ossorio. It was Syd Solomon who hosted the first artists vs. writers softball game in 1966.

Structure and Imagey
A Contemporary Art Blog by Paul Behnke
Syd Solomon @ Berry Campbell

ART HAPS Exhibition

Syd Solomon

Swingscape | Paintings from the 1970s

CHELSEA

Opening from Thu Apr 23, From 6:00 PM to 8:00 PM

On view Thu Apr 23 - Sat May 23

Berry Campbell Gallery | 530 W 24th Street

Curated by Christine Berry, Martha Campbell