WILLIAM MACKINNON’s painting “Exit” acquired by the State Library of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia

Congratulations to Australian artist WILLIAM MACKINNON for the acquisition of his painting “Exit” in the permanent collection of the State Library of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia.  The artist’s other outstanding achievements in recent months include finalist in The Fleurier, The Arthur Guy Painting Prize, and the Basil Sellers (staged at the Ian Potter Centre, a museum at Melbourne University).

Exit.
200 x 360 cm
Oil on linen 2013
Collection of The State Library of Victoria.

 

Please view the following slideshow of current available work by exceptional international painter WILLIAM MACKINNON. Contact Morton Fine Art for pricing at +001 (202) 628-2787 or mortonfineart@gmail.com

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Call for visual artists – THE CLOTHESLINE MUSE

 

Calling all Artists!

About The Clothesline Muse:

The Clothesline Muse is a multi-discipline theater project that explores the clothesline as a metaphor of our community lifeline and its ties to our environment. The performance includes dance, percussive music, spoken word, interview text, video and interactive art. The cast features 6 dancers and jazz vocalist Nnenna Freelon as “The Muse.” We will honor our ancestors by transforming the task of washing clothes by hand into beautiful imagery, dance and song.

Maya Freelon Asante will use still and moving projections as reflections of the history and future of the clothesline. Her colorful tissue paper art will hang on the clothesline, alluding to laundry drying in the sun. Kariamu Welsh’s choreographed movements are inspired by hand washing, drying, folding and ironing. When detached from their original roles of domestic work, the motions of washing, pressing and wringing take on a new empowered significance. Our composer, Nnenna Freelon, is inspired by the soundscape of washing clothes in an outdoor environment and work song.

Clothesline Musings: Art Inspired by The Clothesline

An interactive multimedia exhibition exploring
contemporary visual artists’ relationship to the Clothesline.

Visual artists have long found inspiration in the grind and grace of domestic life. This open call to visual artists inspired by the Clothesline, hand washing and line drying, clothesline games and memories, and the environmental impact of taking in the wash. Philadelphia’s The Painted Bride is seeking visual art submissions, including painting, drawing, sculptures, mixed media and digital art — imagery can be literal, figurative or abstract. The exhibition will feature art from the set of multimedia theatrical production, The Clothesline Muse, works of fine art, historical documents, archival images, artifacts, visual projections and sound recordings.

EXHIBITION DATES | MARCH 7 – APRIL 12, 2014
@ THE PAINTED BRIDE | 230 VINE ST. PHILADELPHIA, PA

REQUIREMENTS

• All submissions must be entered on our website, via EntryThingy. USE THIS LINK: http://theclotheslinemuse.com/?p=382

• All works submitted for display must be ready to install/hang

• SUBMISSIONS DUE BY FEBRUARY 7, 2014

Please spread the word! Thanks for supporting our dream.

VICTOR EKPUK’s “Auto-Graphics” exhibition at Krannert Art Museum featured in Contemporary And

 

Victor Ekpuk Composition No. 1 (detail), 2009 Graphite and pastel on paper Courtesy of the artist and Smithsonian Institution, National Museum of African Art © Victor Ekpuk

24 January 2014 – 27 July 2014 /

Auto-Graphics: Recent Drawings by Victor Ekpuk

Krannert Art Museum and Kinkead Pavilion, Champaign, IL, United States

Krannert Art Museum and Kinkead Pavilion (KAM) presents  Auto-Graphics: Recent Drawings by Victor Ekpuk from January 24 through July 27, 2014. The artist will be present at the exhibition opening public reception, which will be held on Thursday, January 23 from 6–7 pm, and will return to KAM on March 13 to give a gallery conversation.

Nigerian-born artist Victor Ekpuk is best known for his improvisational use of nsibidi, a form of ideographic writing associated with the powerful Ekpe men’s association of southeastern Nigeria. As a student of fine arts at Obafemi Awolowo University in Ife in the mid-1980s, Ekpuk worked in a pedagogical environment informed by onaism, a Yorùbá aesthetic philosophy that urged students to explore the logics of pattern and design in indigenous African art forms. Ekpuk’s early fascination with nsibidi during these years—its economy of line and encoded meanings—led to his broader explorations of drawing as writing, and to the invention of his own fluid letterforms. As a mature artist, Ekpuk has so internalized the rhythm and contours of his “script” that it flows from his hand like the outpouring of a personal archive.

In recent years, Ekpuk’s approach to mark making has come to flourish through his investigations of scale, motion, surface, and form. Auto-Graphics features selections from several of Ekpuk’s new bodies of work, including collage, digital prints, and his supersized drawings—bold, vibrant, yet restrained compositions in which nsibidi signs are cropped, abstracted, and glided beyond the frame through the illusion of magnification. Their dense grounds of micro-script and bristling opaque forms contrast with the more figural works on view. Ekpuk’s compositions are not tentative or ambivalent, and are drawn with no erasure. Like nsibidi, which communicates through both visual mark and gesture, Ekpuk’s immersive drawings seem to be choreographed with the full force of his body. This will become readily evident to visitors when, upon entering the museum, they are greeted by one of Ekpuk’s works drawn directly onto the gallery wall—an ample surface on which to explore the infinite potential and ephemeral fate of the hand-drawn line.

Victor Ekpuk has held numerous residencies at art institutes and universities throughout the US and in Nigeria, the Netherlands, and France. He currently lives and works in Washington D.C.

The exhibition is curated by Allyson Purpura and sponsored in part by the Lorado Taft Lectureship on Art Fund/College of Fine + Applied Arts and Krannert Art Museum and partially supported by a grant from the Illinois Arts Council Agency.

 

Krannert Art Museum and Kinkead Pavilion

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

College of Fine and Applied Arts

500 E. Peabody Drive | Champaign, IL 61820

p. 217 333 1861 | f. 217 333 0883 | kam.illinois.edu

 

New work by GA GARDNER

 

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QUESTION BRIDGE : BLACK MALES at the Corcoran through February 16, 2014

Question Bridge: Black Males

December 7, 2013–February 16, 2014

Question Bridge: Black Males is a collaborative, transmedia project that complicates traditional views of identity by exploring the full spectrum of what it means to be “black” and “male” in America.  In video-mediated exchanges, 150 black men of different social, economic, political, and generational backgrounds from across America respond to questions posed by one another about issues that unite, divide, and puzzle them.  Framed as an internal conversation within a group too often defined externally, Question Bridge uses candid discussion to expose the diversity of thought and identity among black males, challenging monochromatic views of “blackness.”  The wide-ranging conversation touches on family, love, masculinity, discrimination, community, education, violence, and the past and future of black men in society.

The public is invited to engage with the Question Bridge: Black Males project in a variety of ways.  In addition to the five-channel video installation in the main gallery, the project includes an installation at the Corcoran’s Community Gallery at THEARC in Southeast D.C., a website, custom tablet application, educational curriculum, and roundtable conversations with members of the local community.

Question Bridge: Black Males was created by Chris Johnson, Hank Willis Thomas, Bayeté Ross Smith, and Kamal Sinclair.  The Executive Producers are Delroy Lindo, Deborah Willis, and Jesse Williams.

Question Bridge: Black Males is a fiscally sponsored project of the Bay Area Video Coalition (a 501c3 notforprofit organization) and supported in part by a grant from the Open Society Institute: Campaign for Black Male Achievement, Ford Foundation, The California Endowment, The Tribeca Film Institute, the LEF Foundation, The Center for Cultural Innovation, and the California College of the Arts. The project was supported by the Sundance Institute’s New Frontier Story Lab.

Media sponsorship for Question Bridge: Black Males is provided by

 

Colours and Motion – Art Workshop with MAYA FREELON ASANTE in Lesotho, Africa

The Hub

December 30, 2013 · by merihyoky

On the 19th of December, 2013, Maya Freelon Asante – award winning artist and daughter of jazz musician Nnenna Freelon – held a one-of-a-kind art workshop in Morija, Lesotho. The workshop took place at Linotšing art studio, adjacent toMaeder House – one of the oldest recorded buildings in Lesotho – and involved 35 local youth between the ages of 4 -25.

Throughout the afternoon, young people were given the chance to discover and create with a range of materials. In the space of a few hours, Linotšing was transformed into a bustle of activity as the children discovered the myriad of exciting creations that could be made by combining paper, water and multi-coloured tissue paper. Finally, working together under Maya’s guidance, the children helped to glue and stitch together a quilt of tissue paper, which will be used by Maya and Nnenna in their multi-discipline theater project – Clothesline Muse – set to premiere in the US in April, 2014.

At the end of the workshop, as the children contemplated the final creation, Maya said to them: “with your hands, hearts and your energy, you have made art that is going to help your community.”

The workshop coincided with a fundraising concert titled A night with the King. It was held to benefit the renovation of Morija Scott Hospital, where Nnenna, invited by King Letsie III, was the headline performer. Auctioned at the concert were two collages, created by Maya and the group in Morija the day before, with proceeds also going to Scott Hospital.

More information about Maya Freelon Asante:

Maya Freelon Asante is an award‐winning artist whose artwork was described by poet Maya Angelou as “visualizing the truth about the vulnerability and power of the human being,” and her unique tissue paper work was also praised by the International Review of African American Art as a “vibrant, beating assemblage of color.” She was selected by Modern Luxury Magazine as Best of the City 2013 and by the Huffington Post’s “Black Artists: 30 Contemporary Art Makers Under 40 You Should Know“.

Maya has exhibited her work nationally and internationally including Paris, Ghana, and US Embassies in Madagascar, Italy, Jamaica, and Swaziland. She has been a professor of art at Towson University and Morgan State University. Maya has attended numerous residencies including Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, the Korobitey Institute and Brandywine Workshop. She earned a BA from Lafayette College and an MFA from the School of Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

More info: www.mayafreelon.com | theclotheslinemuse.com | http://www.mortonfineart.com

photo credit: Meri Hyoky Photography

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KESHA BRUCE “The Guardians” featured in the Washington Post

Galleries Section, The Washington Post, January 3rd, 2014

by Mark Jenkins

Kesha Bruce

Spurred by a vision of a figure she saw standing at the foot of her bed, Kesha Bruce has executed nearly 200 mixed-media paintings of creatures she calls “The Guardians.” The Iowa-bred artist, who lives in France, draws on African iconography for these pictures, some of which are at Morton Fine Art. Most of the figures are ghostly, often faceless, like things seen in a half-awake state. Such guardians as “Thanos,” its blue head atop an elongated neck, evoke Africa’s traditional sculpture and decorative motifs. “Kiska,” its head apparently on fire, seems an outright hallucination.

Thanos, 24″x24″, mixed media on canvas

Yet the specters become palpable because of their hot, earthy colors and forceful brushwork. Indeed, the vigor suggests another tradition altogether: abstract expressionism. While the pictures are clearly representational, they’re also exercises in sheer painting. Areas of clean, bold color abut mottled regions; scraps of collaged fabric and textile-like circular patterns contrast the figures’ streamlined forms. Brown’s guardians may be dream-time wisps, but her painting makes them solid and potent.

Kesha Bruce: The Guardians

On view through Jan. 8 at Morton Fine Art, 1781 Florida Ave. NW; 202-628-2787;mortonfineart.com