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Renowned American artist Frank Stella discusses his friend and contemporary Walter Darby Bannard’s paintings.

The appearance of effortless beauty is not easy to produce. But this is the aspiration of Susan Vecsey's current show at Berry Campbell, an exhibition of twenty recent paintings, including her largest to date.

The artist has been working on this series of abstractions from nature for over a decade. She pours one layer at a time over a textured Belgian linen, creating subtle variations on the surface. Every next pour is a new layer of calculated risk.

Untitled (Blue/Gold) (all are 2018) is a six-foot square, most of which is a light gray. Across the lower edge, bands of vibrant gold, blue, and blue-black create a wide expanse that envelops the viewer.

The dark blues and deep reds in Untitled (Nocturne) are a new experiment. That composition and Untitled (Nocturne II) extend her range as a colorist, with wide spaces that shimmer with iridescence. 

Vecsey's paintings are entirely concerned with color, light, and surface. They require looking at up close, in person.

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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

We are preparing for our Walter Darby Bannard exhibition, opening on November 15, 2018. Please read our online catalogue to learn more about the artist and his career.

Walter Darby Bannard: Paintings from 1969 to 1975
November 15 - December 21, 2018

Opening Reception
November 15, 2018
6 - 8 PM

Guild Hall Museum, East Hampton
Saturday, November 3, 2018
12:00 pm
Free Admission
RSVP

Join Gail Levin, Ph.D., in the Boots Lamb Education Center for a lecture on the artist Syd Solomon (1917-2004) whose work is on view in the exhibition Syd Solomon: Concealed and Revealed. Levin is a primary contributor to the exhibition catalogue. She has also authored Lee Krasner: A Biography, in addition to many other works.

Gail Levin (Ph.D., Rutgers University) is Professor of Art History, American Studies and Women Studies at Baruch College and the Graduate Center of CUNY. She is an art historian specializing in art of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, with diverse research interests that include the work of Edward Hopper, Marsden Hartley, Yasuo Kuniyoshi, Judy Chicago, women artists, Jewish artists, Chinese emigre artists, and contemporary art of the United States, Europe, and Japan, as well as American Studies and the cinema. 

You may not have heard of Syd Solomon (but we bet you have), but his presence, even posthumously (he died in 2004) still vibrates through Sarasota. He came to Sarasota because of the Battle of the Bulge. For real — he was an aerial camouflage specialist in WWII, and he came away from the Battle of the Bulge with a nasty case of frostbite. After that, no one could blame him from wanting to keep warm, and so, in 1946, he and his bride decided to call Sarasota home. 

He was the driving force behind the Fine Arts Institute at Sarasota's New College, not only helping to start the Institute but also encouraging his friends — all artists — to teach there. Those friends? Conrad Marca-Relli (1913-2000), Larry Rivers (1923-2002) and Philip Guston (1913-1980).

No shocker, then, that the John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art accessioned his art — marking the first time that the Ringling accessioned a living artist. 

Come see Views from Above, a collection of Solomon's abstract expressionist work, at St. Petersburg's Museum of Fine Arts. The work starts in 1945 and runs through the 1980s, and it's all influenced by his chosen home (Florida!). One of his works ("Westcoastalscape") is pictured above and part of the MFA's permanent collection.

Amar Singh’s eponymous Islington gallery has a simple but laudable ethos, specializing in exhibitions of LGBTQ and female artists with diverse, progressive narratives. Raised in London but a member of the royal Kapurthala family of Punjab, Singh was one of many political campaigners who made up a global coalition that last month recorded a landmark legal victory in India, overturning the country’s 2013 criminalization of gay sex. Now, Amar Gallery is turning to one of the lesser-known histories of art, with an exhibition of the women behind Abstract Expressionism in 1950s and 60s America. Lynne Mapp Drexler, Elaine de Kooning, Joan Mitchell, Grace Hartigan and myriad others take pride of place in Hiding in Plain Sight, which explores the female painters who have been neglected in favour of their more barnstorming counterparts—the Rothkos, the Pollocks and the Newmans. There’s a pioneering spirit to the paintings, be they the natural blooms Drexler cultivated on her canvases, or the liquid colour-field stains of Helen Frankenthaler, made all the more engrossing by the fact that many of these artists have never been exhibited in the U.K. before.

The American Abstract Artist movement was founded in 1936 in New York City, at a time when abstract art was met with strong critical resistance. Women played an integral part in forming the AAA, and Murray State's Clara M. Eagle gallery is housing an exhibit that honors these groundbreaking female artists. Emily Berger, an abstract artist featured in the exhibit, and T. Michael Martin, director of university galleries, visit Sounds Good to discuss the traveling exhibit. 

The Murray State University Galleries and the department of art and design present Blurring Boundaries: Continuity to Change - The Women of AAA 1936-2018through the beginning of November. In the first exhibition dedicated exlusively to the intergenerational group of women artists of American Abstract Artists, Blurring Boundaries traces the history of AAA's female founding members through present-day artists. The exhibition highlights approximately 45 works, emphasizing each artist's approach to central tenents of abstraction - composition, color, content, and material. Well-known founders and early members of AAA, such as Perle Fine, Esphyr Slobodkina, Gertrude Greene, Alice Trumbull Mason (featured above), and I. Rice Pereira, are included in the exhibit. Their classic works will be displayed beside contemporary abstract artists such as Sharon Brant, Merrill Wagner, Cecily Kahn, Alice Adams, and Emily Berger.

“Please Send To: Ray Johnson” is predominently a collection of “Mail Art” Johnson sent to Ted Carey, left to the museum by Tito Spiga as part of his bequest. “Syd Solomon: Concealed and Revealed” operates as a retrospective of the artist, who died in 2004, using his archive to provide new context to his output from his early days before and after World War II, when he devised camouflage techniques for the military, to late work from the early 1990s. Finally, “Sara Mejia Kriendler: In Back of Beyond” will showcase the artist’s Colombian roots with sculptures in terra-cotta, plaster, and gold leaf that also reference today’s consumer culture. Ms. Kriendler was the recipient of top honors in the 2016 members show.