Huffington Post’s Black Artists: 30 Contemporary Art Makers Under 40 You Should Know – MAYA FREELON ASANTE

Maya Freelon Asante, Boom, 53”x35”, tissue ink monoprint

Morton Fine Art’s MAYA FREELON ASANTE – Image #17 !

Posted 2/26/13

As Black History Month comes to a close, we’ve picked 30 young black artists who are contributing to the ongoing conversation of race and representation in contemporary art. Whether through sculpture, photography, video or performance, each artist illuminates the complexity of the self with a unique and bold vision.

From Kalup Linzy’s soap opera shorts to Kehinde Wiley’s traditional portraits updated with black models, the following young artists show there is no single way to address race in contemporary culture. Playful or meditative, sarcastic or somber, the following artists tackle the subject with a ferocious curiosity, passion and vulnerability.

Congratulations, Maya!

To view available work by the artist, please click HERE

GA GARDNER & ANDREI PETROV’s “Fragmenta​tion & Integratio​n” opens 3/8/13

Fragmentation and Integration

An Exhibition of new work by GA GARDNER & ANDREI PETROV

March 8th, 2013 – April 2nd, 2013

OPENING RECEPTION

Friday, March 8th from 6pm-8pm

**Both artists will be in attendance.**

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Morton Fine Art is pleased to present an exciting exhibition of new work by artists GA GARDNER and ANDREI PETROV.

The exhibition will be on display from March 8th, 2013 through April 2nd, 2013. The opening reception will be held on Friday, March 8th from 6 to 8 pm.  Both artists will be in attendance.

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About Fragmentation and Integration:

The show explores how two artists, GA Gardner (Washington, DC b. Trinidad) and Andrei Petrov (NYC, b. USA), utilize mediums, additive and subtractive processes, patterns and scale to create abstracted organic works of art. ______________________________

About GA GARDNER (Washington, DC/ Brooklyn, NY b. Trindad; mixed media on mylar):

GA Gardner, Red, White and Blue, 72″x42″, mixed media on mylar

GA Gardner was born in 1969 in the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago, and migrated to the USA in 1988 where he earned his BA in Visual Arts and MA in Educational Technology from San Francisco State University. He also received a Ph.D. in Art Education from The Ohio State University. There he focused on Computer Art Education. When he emerged in 1995, he was already considered an international expert on the subjects of Computer Art Education, Computer Graphics and Animation, and a pioneer in the the area of large format digital fine art. Gardner created crisp and detailed three-dimensional images on water color paper that discussed the social elements of Caribbean cultures.

His work has been exhibited at various museums and galleries in the USA, Asia and the Caribbean, including the James E. Lewis Museum of Art; Paterson Museum, New Jersey; Nanjing College of Art, China; Caribbean Museum Center for the Arts, St Croix, USVI, Bergen Museum, New Jersey and Morton Fine Art, DC. He has been the subject of numerous articles and catalog essays. He has been awarded artist residencies in the Caribbean and Asia.

GA Gardner currently lives and works in Washington DC and Brooklyn NY.

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About ANDREI PETROV (NYC, b. USA; layered oil on canvas):

Andrei Petrov, Morrocan Field Trip, 48″x60″, oil on canvas

Andrei Petrov explores memory in his organic abstract paintings. His paintings probe the distortion, incompleteness and rare moments of clarity in the shadows of memory. Each piece portrays the intrinsic struggle and selective inclusion or exclusion of details in the process of recollection. At times, sharpness occurs in the rear of the picture plane while the out of focus, obscured areas, exist in a larger scale toward the foreground and make reference to the inscrutable nature of long and short term memory.

Petrov’s paintings have been exhibited nationally and internationally in prestigious collections and can be viewed at The Four Seasons Hotel in both Washington, DC and Punta Mita, Mexico, The Fairmont Hotel in Chicago and The Conrad Hotel, Miami. His paintings have also had cameos in the following films, The Royal Tenenbaums, Autumn in New York, Kate and Leopold, The Business of Strangers and Words and Lyrics.

“The production of a painting begins with a pencil or ink drawing on paper which I extrapolate from and edit as I work the canvas. First with pencil or charcoal and then with color washes done with acrylic or ink, I map the raw canvas and allow it to be ingrained with the materials. Once satisfied with the composition and balance, the surface is sealed with a clear acrylic so as to allow the use of oil based pigments. Handmade tools are used to drag, apply, scrape and blend the paint across the canvas plane creating a contrast of textures which resemble collaged elements. Sandpaper and rags also propel the evolution of the work. The addition and subtraction of paint are meant to act as a metaphor for the intentions and motives for which the paintings are based.” – Andrei Petrov

Morton Fine Art featured in Adams Morgan Promo Video

A special thanks to the wonderful DC team at Morton Fine Art for holding down the fort (and video footage) while we were working at Aqua Art Miami! The video features MFA’s logo at the beginning as well as MFA artist KESHA BRUCE and staff in the closing segment, “Come for the Art!”.

Cheers!

VICTOR EKPUK’s Artist Talk at UMUC Sunday, 24 Feb 2013 from 3-5pm

Don’t miss this exciting 4 month exhibition (February 12-May 12, 2013) titled Diaspora Dialogue: Art of Kawbena Ampofo-Anti, Alexander Boghassian and Victor Ekpuk at UMUC (University of Maryland University College)!

Bicycle Song, 17.5″x12″, acrylic & ink on paper

Location:

UMUC, 3501 University Boulevard East, Adelphi, Maryland

Artist Reception & Discussion: Sunday 24, February, 2013. 3:00PM-5:00PM

“Ethiopian painter Skunder Boghossian (1937-2003) is exemplary of African modernism’s Pan-Africanist ideological ambitions, its multilayered signification on diverse ancient and modern African, European, Arab and New World artistic and cultural traditions”. … – Chika Okeke-Agulu.

“Ghanian born, Ampofo-Anti’s sculptures are insistently architectonic, with each of them assuming the form of a mysterious tower or monument. But even as they seem to be products of a pure architectural fantasy, they also bear telling marks—in both their form and subject matter—of the artist’s capacious meditation on architectural models from Africa and the Americas”. – Chika Okeke-Agulu

“Nigerian artist Victor Ekpuk tests the limits of this afro-modernist heritage, even as it shows new possibilities of afrological aesthetics in the age of globalization. Ekpuk, like bebop artists in the United States, developed an improvisatory aesthetics but the motivations for this were different.         Where the formal tactics of bebop derives in part from the longstanding strive to forge a black art and culture from the European, African, Native American cultures brought into intense proximity by transcontinental migration, colonization, and slavery, Ekpuk’s script-based paintings and drawing-performances inspired by nsibidi ideographic forms from southeastern Nigeria anchors him to a specific historical and symbolic place and thus allows him to differentiate his work from a myriad of other similar conceptual and formal practices in the globalized, contemporary art world.” – Chika Okeke-Agulu.

“If there is anything the art of Boghossian, Ampofo-Anti, and Ekpuk tells us, it is that works of art reflect the complex, multiple consciousness and diversely constituted identities of the artists. It inevitably compels us to ponder anew that memorable question posed nearly a century ago by Countee Cullen, the Harlem Renaissance poet: “What is Africa to me?” To the extent that their individual responses are inscribed in their art, it is safe to say that as with their African American counterparts past and present, Africa remains for its artists a site of powerful imaginaries, a historical place to which they are bound by ancestry, and an idea that elicits powerful aesthetic and symbolic action”. – Chika Okeke-Agulu

Full color catalogue with essay by Chika Okeke-Agulu, MFA, PhD Dept. of Art & Archaeology / Center for African American Studies Princeton University

Join MFA at MAYA FREELON ASANTE’s Open Studio Days in Baltimore

Interested in viewing MAYA FREELON ASANTE’s working studio? 

Brilliant Children, tissue ink monoprint

Please join MFA in hosting her open studio on the following dates:

Saturday, March 2nd

Saturday, April 6th

Saturday, May 4th

Saturday, June 1st

All open studios run from 1pm-5pm.

Bromo Seltzer Arts Tower, Baltimore

Studio Location:

Bromo Seltzer Arts Tower
Studio 302
21 S Eutaw St
Baltimore, MD 21201

Bound, tissue paper spirals, dimensions variable

Brain Wave (2009) Tissue Paper & Ink, 29″x20″

Seedling, tissue paper installation, dimensions variable