BOMB Magazine interviews Deborah Buck

BOMB Magazine

Deborah Buck Interviewed by Tanya Merrill:  Painting a cast of characters, human and animal.  Oct 11, 2023

“I don’t want to be a windup girl,” Deborah Buck told me in her studio, pointing to a female creature with a crank sticking out of her back in the left-hand corner of a recent painting. Buck graciously walked me through the body of work heading to her solo show at La MaMa Galleria, a nonprofit gallery and an extension of the experimental theater club of the same name founded in 1961 by Ellen Stewart in New York City’s East Village. These are some of Buck’s most extensive works to date, and this is the first time she has gone beyond the two-dimensional format. She refers to them as murals, which she creates by dissecting elements from previous works and collaging them to produce layered scenes populated by hybrid figures occupying the panoramic drama of history painting. These creatures wear pearls around their necks; they chomp monster-like teeth that mimic the same string of ivory beads; their painted bodies drip down the paper’s surface. The context of La MaMa Galleria is fitting with its affiliation to the theater, as Buck speaks of these beings as a cast of characters.  —Tanya Merrill

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Deborah Buck Participates in Women and Humor

June 23 - September 1, 2024
Deborah Buck Stand Off, 2024 Acrylic and sumi ink on panel 38.25 x 50.25 in.

DEBORAH BUCK

Witches Bridge
May 16 - July 12, 2024
Deborah Buck on view in THE RAINS ARE CHANGING FAST at Heckscher Museum

Heckscher Museum: THE RAINS ARE CHANGING FAST

March 23, 2024 - September 1, 2024
Deborah Buck Heavy Is The Head, 2023 Acrylic, sumi ink on Archers paper 55 x 156 in. Detail

DEBORAH BUCK

INTO THE WILD: To Crash Is Divine
Sept 28 - Oct 27, 2023

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Janet Taylor Pickett is featured at the Denver Museum

DENVER ART MUSEUM

“And, She Was Born” by Janet Taylor Pickett is included in the upcoming All Stars: American Artists from The Phillips Collection, from November 12, 2023 to March 3, 2024 at the Denver Museum.

All Stars: American Artists from The Phillips Collection

November 12, 2023 – March 3, 2024

Denver Art Museum

https://www.denverartmuseum.org/en/exhibitions/all-stars-american-artists-phillips-collection

This landmark works encompass more than 140 years of unexpected visual conversations between American artists about what connects us as humans. With works by more than 50 artists, including Benny Andrews, Arthur G. Dove, Childe Hassam, Jacob Lawrence, Georgia O’Keeffe, Jackson Pollock, and more, the show explores American art from the birth of the modernist spirit at the end of the nineteenth century through post-war American painting in the mid-twentieth century and into the twenty-first century, with artists exploring the important issues of today.

The Work:

Janet Taylor Pickett

And, She Was Born, 2017

Acrylic, collage on canvas

30 x 30 in.

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Zhang Hongtu at Museo Picasso Málaga 

Zhang Hongtu at Museo Picasso Málaga 

Zhang Hongtu’s “Mao, After Picasso” is be included in the group exhibition:

The Echo of Picasso

October 3, 2023 – March 31, 2024

Museo Picasso Málaga

Curated by Eric Troncy

https://museopicassomalaga.org/en/exposiciones/the-echo-of-picasso

Pablo Picasso had an enormous influence on the art of the 20th century, working in a remarkable variety of styles. In addition to Cubism, his principal contribution to modern art was the freedom that characterizes every aspect of his painting, sculpture, and graphic production.

There is widespread agreement on his profound impact on the art world, allowing it to be said that no artist prior to Picasso had a comparable and massive group of followers, admirers, and art critics. The exhibition The Echo of Picasso – curated by Eric Troncy – centers around this effect exercised by his artistic practices on today’s world and, above all, in the current globalized art scene. It brings together the work of thirty artists in dialogue with the Malaga-born artist.

Zhang Hongtu

Mao, After Picasso, 2012

Ink, oil on rice paper, photo collage mounted on canvas

44.5 X 34.5 in.

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Zhang Hongtu at Museo Picasso Málaga 

Zhang Hongtu at Museo Picasso Málaga 

October 3, 2023 - March 31, 2024
Madison Ave New York Picasso, Welcome to America June 15 – July 31, 2023

PICASSO, WELCOME TO AMERICA

June 15 – Sept 27, 2023
Pitches & Scripts

PITCHES & SCRIPTS

Group Exhibition
January 20 - March 11, 2023
(DE)CONSTRUCTING IDEOLOGY: THE CULTURAL REVOLUTION AND BEYOND November 13, 2022 to March 12, 2023

Zhang Hongtu lectures and exhibits at the Wende Museum

November 13, 2022 - March 12, 2023
TANGO | Summer Exhibition | July 13 - August 17, 2022

TANGO

Summer Exhibition
July 13 - August 17, 2022
Zhang Hongtu

VAN GOGH / BODHIDHARMA

Zhang Hongtu
March 25 - April 27, 2022
LOVE DIFFERENCE

LOVE DIFFERENCE

Eric Brown, Janet Taylor Pickett, Zhang Hongtu
May 15 - June 15, 2021

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Zhang Hongtu is featured at the Asia Society in Texas

Zhang Hongtu participates Summoning Memories: Art Beyond Chinese Traditions Summoning Memories: Art Beyond Chinese Traditions at the Asia Society Texas, February 10 - July 2, 2023

Zhang Hongtu participates in Summoning Memories: Art Beyond Chinese Traditions at the Asia Society in Texas,

February 10 – July 2, 2023

Summoning Memories: Art Beyond Chinese Traditions highlights works by over 30 contemporary artists of Chinese descent who reinterpret traditions in dynamic and innovative ways. Across painting, sculpture, and photography, these works were created by both established and emerging artists of different generations who use experimentation to draw on both Eastern and Western art-making practices and materials. They push boundaries that manipulate traditional materials and develop unique fabrication processes. The artworks focus on experimental ink painting, calligraphy, deconstructed language, landscapes (real and imaginary), cityscapes, and celestial patterns. Landscapes borrow from time-honored imagery, but the artists in this exhibition subvert their visual language and meaning. They respond to our present-day concerns about urbanization, the fragmentation of landscapes created by the degradation of the environment, and the rapid pace of China’s modernization, among other urgent issues. Ultimately, these artists summon memories of the past to move beyond its specter, forging new artistic ground on which to build. 

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Zhang Hongtu at Museo Picasso Málaga 

Zhang Hongtu at Museo Picasso Málaga 

October 3, 2023 - March 31, 2024
Madison Ave New York Picasso, Welcome to America June 15 – July 31, 2023

PICASSO, WELCOME TO AMERICA

June 15 – Sept 27, 2023
Pitches & Scripts

PITCHES & SCRIPTS

Group Exhibition
January 20 - March 11, 2023
(DE)CONSTRUCTING IDEOLOGY: THE CULTURAL REVOLUTION AND BEYOND November 13, 2022 to March 12, 2023

Zhang Hongtu lectures and exhibits at the Wende Museum

November 13, 2022 - March 12, 2023
TANGO | Summer Exhibition | July 13 - August 17, 2022

TANGO

Summer Exhibition
July 13 - August 17, 2022
Zhang Hongtu

VAN GOGH / BODHIDHARMA

Zhang Hongtu
March 25 - April 27, 2022
LOVE DIFFERENCE

LOVE DIFFERENCE

Eric Brown, Janet Taylor Pickett, Zhang Hongtu
May 15 - June 15, 2021

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Jaye Moon is included in the New York Foundation for the Arts exhibition

Jaye Moon included in New York Foundation for the Arts exhibition

Jaye Moon is included in A View from the Mountaintop, curated by the New York Foundation for the Arts, at 45 Rockefeller Plaza, October 30, 2022 to October 29, 2023.

“It is not our differences that divide us. It is our inability to recognize, accept, and celebrate those differences.” -Audre Lorde in “Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches,” 1984, book, quoted in Braille in the work. 

Viewers will experience the work of Jaye Moon through her deployment of brilliant colors, bold patterns, and the novelty of using universally appealing, unpolitical, mathematical toys as an art medium. Moon’s LEGO paintings contain messages transcribed in Braille, encoding the intricate human stories that we share. 

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Adam Simon reviews Sharon Butler’s “Next Moves” in the October 2022 issue of The Brooklyn Rail

Adam Simon reviews Sharon Butler’s NEXT MOVES on The Brooklyn Rail

ON VIEW

JENNIFER BAAHNG GALLERY

NEXT MOVES

September 15 – November 15, 2022

New York

Many of Sharon Butler’s Instagram followers are aware that most of the paintings she’s been making over the past six years began as daily cell phone sketches starting in 2016, using a program called PicsArt, that she posted daily. That her subtle explorations of painting vernacular began as digital sketches is just one of the disjunctions in her current exhibition, NEXT MOVES, at Jennifer Baahng Gallery.

Butler’s approach is an open embrace of rule breaking and the mismatched. The large four-panel piece, Four Days (2019–21) that takes up most of the first wall on the right when you enter the gallery, manages to appear simultaneously as a multi-panel piece and as four independent works. It’s possible to just appreciate the rich colors and nuanced paint handling, the monumentality of simple forms against atmospheric grounds. But it’s hard not to wonder if Butler isn’t also testing how strong the mental, perceptual glue is that binds paintings whenever two are contiguous. Is the glue strong enough that we assume the four panels were painted at the same time and were intended as one piece, or do we wonder instead if any or all the four could have been swapped out for different works?

It’s a delicate high-wire act that has us falling neither to one side nor the other. This balancing act is played out differently throughout the exhibition, a constant shifting between appreciating the work visually and thinking about the decisions that were made. For example, also in the first room, Bedfrence (2022) consists of two joined panels, the smaller of the two looking very much like an afterthought, as if Butler wanted the two orange vertical lines at the bottom to be longer than the canvas would allow, and so stuck on a smaller canvas to accommodate. Why not? And then, she shifted them to misalign those orange lines. It is a simple but powerfully effective move.

Two works that anchor the show, Quasi-Believer and Addenda (both 2022), remind me of the surrealist drawing game “exquisite corpse.” Butler is aware of the human mind’s ability to create coherence and she uses that to her advantage. It’s interesting to parse out how the individual panels connect and how they don’t.

Several of the larger works employ a background grid of small squares. Knowing the history of this series, the most obvious connection would be to the pixelation that might occur when the PicsArt drawings were scaled up to create the paintings. But there’s a dilapidated aspect to these backgrounds that just as easily conjures mosaic on subway walls. Positioning isolated geometric forms against these grounds feel associative, a dreamscape that references nothing specific.

Not to be missed is the grouping of smaller works, drawings, and ephemera in the back room. Here, Butler’s humor and idiosyncrasy are on full display. One collage piece is made up of newspaper headlines. It takes a moment to realize that they are referencing not Sharon, the artist herself, but the former prime minister of Israel.

NEXT MOVES doesn’t have any of the kind of abstraction that seems to be having a resurgence, the high-energy Ab-Ex moment held in suspension. Butler’s restlessness and penchant for disequilibrium also doesn’t lend itself to the kind of contemplation that tends to be associated with geometric abstraction. Her work can seem more theatrical than pictorial, her forms enacting some indecipherable narrative against a pixelated stage. You don’t get Matisse’s armchair (“I dream of … an art of balance, of purity and serenity …  something like a good armchair…”). What you get instead is a seat at the table in the next room, where there is a lively conversation taking place of forms that sometimes agree but often don’t, full of innuendo and wit and bad table manners.

Contributor, Adam Simon

Adam Simon is a painter living in Brooklyn. 

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Pitches & Scripts

PITCHES & SCRIPTS

Group Exhibition
January 20 - March 11, 2023
Sharon Butler

NEXT MOVES

Sharon Butler
Sept 15 - Nov 15, 2022
TANGO | Summer Exhibition | July 13 - August 17, 2022

TANGO

Summer Exhibition
July 13 - August 17, 2022

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Brooklyn Museum is showcasing MOTIVE, a film by Michael McClard

Brooklyn Museum is showcasing MOTIVE, a film by Michael McClard

Michael McClard’s film, MOTIVE, is included in the Jimmy DeSana: Submission exhibition at Brooklyn Museum in New York, from November 11, 2022 to April 16, 2023.

As part of punk aesthetics and its symbolic forms of resistance, Jimmy DeSana and his peers sought to forge art communities outside of official institutions. During the late 1970s and early 1980s, DeSana was heavily involved in New York’s punk and No Wave scenes and photographed prominent creatives for album covers and alternative publications. The
Jimmy DeSana: Submission exhibition at Brooklyn Museum will be the first to feature DeSana’s portraits of art and music luminaries such as Kathy Acker, Laurie Anderson, Kenneth Anger, Patti Astor, David Byrne, John Giorno, Debbie Harry, and Richard Hell. The Jimmy DeSana: Submission exhibition will also be showcasing MOTIVE, a film starring Jimmy DeSana, and made by Michael McClard.

 

For More Information:

https://www.brooklynmuseum.org/exhibitions/jimmy_desana

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TANGO | Summer Exhibition | July 13 - August 17, 2022

TANGO

Summer Exhibition
July 13 - August 17, 2022
Michael McClard

BIZARRE DELIGHT

Michael McClard
Jan 26 - Feb 28, 2022

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Zhang Hongtu lectures and exhibits at the Wende Museum

(DE)CONSTRUCTING IDEOLOGY: THE CULTURAL REVOLUTION AND BEYOND November 13, 2022 to March 12, 2023

 

Zhang Hongtu is featured in (De)constructing Ideology: The Cultural Revolution and Beyond exhibition at The Wende Museum in California, from November 13, 2022 to March 12, 2023.

 

 

The Wende Museum is an art museum, a historical archive of the Cold War, and a center for creative community engagement based in Culver City, CA.  The (De)constructing Ideology: The Cultural Revolution and Beyond exhibition examines the visual culture of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, with a focus on ceramics produced in Jingdezhen.  The exhibition also looks at the afterlife of the movement through contemporary art, wherein Chinese artists have appropriated and adapted the iconic images from this period for their own use today.


For More Information: 

 

ART AND IDEOLOGY: A CONVERSATION WITH ARTIST ZHANG HONGTU

Zhang Hongtu, one of the most important contemporary Chinese artists, weaves elements from Chinese and Western art. Join us for a conversation between the artist and Wende Museum’s assistant curator, Jamie Kwan. Zhang will speak about his experience living through the Cultural Revolution and its effect on his art, especially his iconic “Material Mao” and “Long Live Chairman Mao” series. 

Zhang Hongtu was born and raised in a devoted Chinese Muslim family. Zhang entered the Central Academy of Arts and Crafts in Beijing in 1964 and graduated in 1969, but due to unrest during the Cultural Revolution, remained at the school until 1973. In 1980, he went to the Mogao Caves in Dunhuang, Gansu Province, to study wall paintings, which left a lasting influence on his art practice. He moved to New York in 1982 and received the painting prize from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation in 1991. He has exhibited internationally, and his work is housed in renowned institutions and private collections, such as the National Museum of Art, Beijing, China; Guangzhou Art Museum, Guangzhou, China; Bronx Museum of the Arts, NY; Princeton University Art Museum, NJ, Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, among many others.

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Zhang Hongtu at Museo Picasso Málaga 

Zhang Hongtu at Museo Picasso Málaga 

October 3, 2023 - March 31, 2024
Madison Ave New York Picasso, Welcome to America June 15 – July 31, 2023

PICASSO, WELCOME TO AMERICA

June 15 – Sept 27, 2023
Pitches & Scripts

PITCHES & SCRIPTS

Group Exhibition
January 20 - March 11, 2023
(DE)CONSTRUCTING IDEOLOGY: THE CULTURAL REVOLUTION AND BEYOND November 13, 2022 to March 12, 2023

Zhang Hongtu lectures and exhibits at the Wende Museum

November 13, 2022 - March 12, 2023
TANGO | Summer Exhibition | July 13 - August 17, 2022

TANGO

Summer Exhibition
July 13 - August 17, 2022
Zhang Hongtu

VAN GOGH / BODHIDHARMA

Zhang Hongtu
March 25 - April 27, 2022
LOVE DIFFERENCE

LOVE DIFFERENCE

Eric Brown, Janet Taylor Pickett, Zhang Hongtu
May 15 - June 15, 2021

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Whitehot Magazine of Contemporary Art, Jaye Moon Soars On Wings of Desire by Paul Laster | April 27, 2022

White Hot Magazine of Contemporary Art

Whitehot Magazine of Contemporary Art

Jaye Moon Soars On Wings of Desire

by Paul Laster | April 27, 2022

“What do braille, a tactile writing system used by people who are visually impaired, and Lego, a line of plastic construction toys, have in common?  Most people would think nothing, but in the hands and mind of an artist, anything is possible.  Over a period of time the artist Jaye Moon discovered a link and for the last ten years has been making art that merges these two disparate things.” 

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Janet Taylor Pickett is featured in “For the Culture, By the Culture: 30 Years of Black Art, Activism, and Achievement” at the Morris Museum

Morris Museum

Janet Taylor Pickett is featured in the “For the Culture, By the Culture: 30 Years of Black Art, Activism, and Achievement” exhibition at Morris Museum in New Jersey, from May 25 to September 25, 2022.

 

Jennifer Baahng Gallery artist Janet Taylor Pickett’s three works – Melancholy & Memory (2021), Memory of Water II (2021), and Memory of Water III (2021) – are featured in Art in the Atrium’s thirtieth-anniversary exhibition For the Culture, By the Culture: 30 Years of Black Art, Activism, and Achievement at the Morris Museum in Morristown, NJ.  This exhibition is a group retrospective that spans 30 years and highlights established Black artists who have contributed to Black culture by creating impactful works for decades.  The exhibition will run from May 25 through September 25, 2022.   For the Culture, By the Culture showcases 41 works by 19 selected artists: Alonzo Adams, Benny Andrews, Bisa Butler, Leroy Campbell, Elizabeth Catlett, Viki LeBeaux Clark Craig, James Denmark, David Driskell, Jerry Gant, Richard Haynes, Norman Lewis, Russell A. Murray, Rosalind Nzinga Nichol, Janet Taylor Pickett, Faith Ringgold, Joe Sam, Cedric Smith, William Tolliver, and Deborah Willis.  This exhibition is curated by Charles D. Craig, Nette Forne’ Thomas, Onnie Strother with Michelle Graves, Managing Curator, Morris Museum.

For More Information:
https://morrismuseum.org/events/for-the-culture-by-the-culture/

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