Richard Keen

The Garage Art Center recently showed an exhibit of Richard’s work titled Around the Edges. He draws inspiration from Maine’s natural and man-made surroundings, including waterfronts, island shapes, and horizons, and he incorporates these into his work through distorted shapes and skewed perspectives. Completing several pieces at a time allows him to establish continuity in his works.

#richardkeen

Liz Markus

For her seventh solo in New York and her first with Shrine Liz Markus continues her Hippies series.  Her iconic hippie heads are each marked by Markus reaching for something – waves of energy, galaxies of stars, lush rainforests, vibrations of form, two-color pulsing auras. While Markus calls these subjects “hippies”, she almost obliterates their original countenance to create completely new emblems of freedom, living your own way and going with the flow

#lizmarkus

Lygia Pape

Lygia Pape (7 April 1927 – 3 May 2004) was a Brazilian visual artist, sculptor, engraver, and filmmaker, who was a key figure in the Concrete movement and a later co-founder of the Neo-Concrete Movement in Brazil during the 1950s and 1960s. Along with Hélio Oiticica and Lygia Clark, she was an important artist in the expansion of contemporary art in Brazil and pushed geometric art to include aspects of interaction and to engage with ethical and political themes.

I saw below at the Art Institute in Chicago recently, part of an exhibition of her prints.

#lygiapape

Awe

One of the (many) ways my community is awesome is Jean Gray, and one of the ways Jean Gray is awesome is a discussion group she’s recently started, Discourse and Dialogues. And “yes” this article is a form of endorsement, next event is 5/24 for Raleigh folks (and you can put a reminder on your calendar that they meet every 4th Wednesday). FYI, I’ll be leading the discussion this time around as we dig into what formalism can possibly mean in 2023. If you miss it, I will definitely cover the topic in a future update.

As part of participating in this group, I found out about another awesome, new organization in Raleigh that you all should be following, Small School, a new, art-based alternative educational platform. Primarily focused on lectures/discussions to start, the plan is to offer… more, down the road. Check out their site, sign up for their list, and show up for an artist talk. The one I attended with Killeen Hanson and Leslie Vigeant was amaze balls- big surprise that it drew me in with a title like How Do We Pay Attention to What We’re Paying Attention To?

Through the Discourse and Dialogues discussion group, and participation by the Small School staff, I learned about Akiko Busch, the next visiting artist, who is also an author of several books, including How to Disappear. I’m getting there… the book touches on this study by Paul K Piff and others that explores “awe” as an “emotional response to perceptually vast stimuli that defy one’s accustomed frame of reference in some domain” (generally, in specifically, experience as part of viewing art) and pro-social behavior. I’m just now beginning to dig in on this work (for the ;tldr crowd def click on the hyperlink to the recording of Paul’s talk) but the high-level take-away as the kids say these days is that the study is actual, hard science, focused on “awe felt during experiences with religion and spirituality, nature, art, and music” which often centers upon two themes “the feeling of being diminished in the presence of something greater than the self, and the motivation to be good to others.“

Anyway…

Ruth C. Smith

Ruth states that her creative process begins with “designing my work digitally. This gives me the opportunity to experiment and make mistakes while also setting up my designs to be laser cut in the process. These designs are typically geometric in nature, surfacing the hidden yet simple structures behind people or moments – a person sitting in a chair or a moon rising over a rooftop.”
#ruthcsmith