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Artists and Scholars on "blue." A Virtual Talk with Artist Susan Vecsey 
This is a virtual program through ZOOM
Thursday, September 10
4 pm
$10 members, $20 non-members

Now a rising star in the Hamptons art community, Susan Vecsey was a student of Graham Nickson at the New York Studio School and a visiting artist at the American Academy in Rome in 2012. With solo museum and gallery shows, she has garnered such critical raves in the arts press for her “virtuoso painting.” Grab a favorite cocktail and join us for this lively and informative session in the comfort of your home.

At the same time, quarantine has compelled artists to connect with their communities in new ways. Jeremy Dennis, a tribal member of the Shinnecock Indian Nation, is known for his photographs exploring issues of Indigenous identity and cultural assimilation. With exhibits and photoshoots cancelled, he now works with his father to restore the family’s house on the Shinnecock reservation. It will serve as his home, studio and as a communal art space for an artist residency. Roz Dimon works with the Children’s Museum of the East End to bring art to kids within the Latin American community, Zooming with them, and encouraging them to express their fears and joys. But unlike these artists, Mike Solomon had to leave town in February and head to Florida to care for his 102-year-old mom. While there, he met first responders at the Multicultural Health Institute, an organization dedicated to health care for African Americans. The gripping reality of Black physicians risking their lives—first on the pandemic’s front lines, and then again, walking along the street as people of color—moved Solomon to honor them. In a departure from his abstract paintings and sculpture, he has produced a compelling series of pencil drawings, portraits of Black physicians that unfurl the disturbing personal and political imperatives underlying this coronavirus saga.

This evolving archival project hanging on a video grid invites us into artists’ studios, to glimpse their stuff amidst their artworks, to glean the curator’s response to today’s predicament for artists and museums, and to preserve an intimate anthology of artists’ stories during the pandemic.

Christine Berry appointed as part of the Awards Committee for the New York Studio School 2020 Alumni Exhibition: Mercedes Matter Awards Announcement & Discussion

The New York Academy of Art is taking up a five-month residency at the Southampton Arts Center, where it will present 2020 Vision, a spectacular exhibition featuring over 60 artists and writers. Co-curated by Academy President David Kratz and Stephanie Roach of the FLAG Art Foundation, and edited by Emma Gilbey Keller, 2020 Vision will be on display from Saturday, July 25 through Sunday, December 27.

"The pain, loss and uncertainty of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. The awakening cry for social justice following the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery and many others. The unnerving possibility of global recession. 2020 has already experienced seismic events that are shifting values and shaping our choices as citizens and as creators," Kratz and Roach noted. "Artists and writers are always the antennae of our society, all the more so at a time as challenging as this one.  They have an opportunity—some might say, a duty—to interpret this moment and imagine the world not only as it is, but also as it could be."

2020 Vision will encompass visual artworks from art students and rising stars to contemporary icons, as well as a myriad of texts, such as poetry and essays, and video diaries.

"This is the guiding challenge of the group exhibition, 2020 Vision.  We asked artists, writers, and creative thinkers to consider three questions of critical importance: Our lives will never be the same, but what will change look like? What do we want to keep as we rebuild? And what must we guard against?" they said.

“In Between,” the title of Susan Vecsey’s show, refers both to the strange period of quarantine we currently find ourselves living in, as well as the double nature of the painter’s work, in which she floats an acquaintance with artists such as Mark Rothko and Helen Frankenthaler and their landscape-influenced abstractions with her own experience of non-objective art in response to the natural world (Vecsey lives part of the time in East Hampton). The work is subtle, deliberately beautiful, and historically cognizant of the New York School and its history during the past half-century, in particular the ongoing perceptions of a Color Field predilection. If one felt compelled to make a choice, it can be said that the works tend to lean in the direction of landscape; their simplicity makes them strong in an abstract sense, but we never lose the implication that we are close to land, to water, and to the sky. Individually, the paintings are attractive, but there is also a cumulative effect, in which the paintings work a sympathetic magic by creating a pastel-like mood and atmosphere, in which both the beauty of nature and also of art are handled with a notable measure and restraint.

The condition of being in between needs to be remarked upon; much of good painting today plays with the idea that an imagery can share aspects of stylistic genres that play off of difference in their essence. Yet it can be noted that nothing is purely abstract nor entirely figurative. Elements or parts of the painting can flow in and out of meanings that take on both styles. It is hard to see both approaches occurring in the same moment; we remember those visual paradoxes where, looked at one way, the image represents one kind of object; and then, when the mental intelligence shifts, another image comes into being--but both images cannot be processed at the same time. Perhaps Vecsey’s general achievement is to render a visual system that jumps from a particular manner of looking into another. While this process is not new--we have the extraordinary achievement of Rothko, mentioned above--its innate complexity and willingness to occupy different ways of seeing within the same composition make it wonderfully current, not to mention extraordinarily interesting as art.

Sam Gilliam, Ribboned II, featured on Widewalls newsletter

 
Frank Wimberley
All About Ronnie

Susan Vecsey
Untitled (Yellow / Lavender)

In this video, Jill Nathanson gives a tour of her studio in Hoboken, New Jersey, featuring some of her paintings in progress.