Vonn Sumner’s ambiguous characters, often seen in makeshift costumes, are part of an ongoing narrative that the viewer is invited to dissect. Are they enthusiastic hobbyists? Deadly serious vigilantes? What is obvious is the painter’s ability to evoke mystery and elegance through these unlikely heroes. Sumner was last featured on HiFructose.com here.
“Through this playful ambiguity, Sumner’s cast of characters draws us into their cryptic narratives, as seen in the cabal series of wall portraits,” a recent statement says. “Defined as a group of people united in some close design together, a cabal promotes their private views or interests, often through intrigue and in secret. This plays into the idea of secret societies, although Sumner’s series of portraits are more humorously enigmatic than sinister.”
The once-white walls of the Washington Project for the Arts in D.C.’s Shaw neighborhood are covered with crayon, paint and little fingerprints. Office furniture and supplies have been pushed aside to make room for bean bags, blankets, children’s books and a little wooden table and chair set.
But that’s just one side of the office space. On the other side, behind a dividing curtain, three mothers are hard at work creating art.
This is Artist Mother Studio, a nine-week-long experimental artists’ residency that comes to an end on Nov. 17. The program provided three women artists with a remarkable string of benefits, including studio space, childcare and a sense of community in the heart of D.C.
Anne Smith holds her daughter, Kiko, in the company of fellow artist Leah Lewis.Tyrone Turner / WAMU
“We’re interested in changing the way society functions, if that doesn’t sound too grandiose,” said Amy Hughes Braden, the program’s creator and curator. “Women get asked, ‘Oh, well, what are you going to do now that you have kids?’ Nobody asks men these questions.”
Braden modeled the program off of a similar residency in Amsterdam, Mother in Arts, that took place last year. In the first iteration of the D.C. project this past spring, she and two other women artists would drop off their kids at a daycare provider’s house each day and then work out of studio space at Rhizome in Takoma Park, D.C.
Then, with about $20,000 of funding from the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities, the Washington Project for the Arts and individuals donors, she started a second iteration this fall.
Anne Smith works with charcoal and pencils in her studio. The charcoal dust wouldn’t be healthy for her infant daughter, she says.Mikaela Lefrak / WAMU
The half-dozen Washington Project for the Arts staff members agreed to work at a communal table for the length of the program so that their office and gallery space could serve three artists and their combined four children.
A daycare provider, Dani Simms, takes care of the children from 11:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. each day. That’s a huge plus for any artist, but particularly ones in the District. According to Child Care Aware of America, center-based care for a single child in D.C. can cost more than $23,000 a year — one of the highest rates in the country. That amounts to about 35 percent of a median D.C. family’s income.
All three of the artists in the program — Anne Smith, Leah Lewis, and Katherine Mann — said that while they each have supportive and involved partners, they’re the ones who typically handle the bulk of childcare.
Lewis’s fiance is also an artist, and because he brings in more money than she does, she ends up spending more time caring for their three-year-old son, Biko. She makes art in her living room or kitchen whenever she finds the time.
After a few hours in the studio, artist Katherine Mann crossed the curtain divide to play with her son and daughter.Mikaela Lefrak / WAMU
“I was kind of cloistered in my little bubble that did not include any mom artists,” Lewis said. “It was the perfect time to get this [residency], because I could hang out with other artists who are moms. You don’t feel like you’re alone.”
Mann used to rent her own studio space, but gave it up once she had her second child.
“Until this, it was just me with the kids, and I was making my work during nap time or in the middle of the night,” she said. At Artist Mother Studio, her children Calvin, 3, and Mae, 1, can easily come into her studio if they need her. Even so, Mann said, she has “the most freedom and space that I’ve had for a really, really long time.”
Smith is a new mom, and her four-month-old daughter Kiko still breastfeeds. Smith rents studio space in Mount Rainer, Maryland, but she doesn’t like the baby to be too close to some of her materials, like charcoal dust.
The setup in Shaw allows her to be close to Kiko throughout the day while still having enough space to do her work.
Mann and her daughter share a quiet moment in the studio.Tyrone Turner / WAMU
While the program has been a success from the perspective of the artists, it’s time-intensive for Braden and space-intensive for the Washington Project for the Arts, which sees itself as just a temporary incubator for ideas like Braden’s. Braden plans to take the next few months to create a shareable template for the program and brainstorm how to scale it.
She isn’t aware of any other programs like this in D.C. or in the rest of the country. But she thinks the demand is out there.
“Everybody has a struggle to get to the studio,” she said. “And the only way that I’ve been able to be a parent myself — I have a two-year-old — is with community.”
For over a decade now, through highly acclaimed exhibitions of his work, OSI AUDU has maintained a strong professional presence in the United States, Great Britain, Korea, Japan, Italy, Germany, Austria and Africa.
His work has been exhibited at, and collected by public institutions including the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of African Art in Washington DC, The Newark Museum in Newark, New Jersey, USA, The British Museum and the Horniman Museum both in London, and the Wellcome Trust Gallery in Euston London. His work has also been exhibited at the Tobu Museum and Setagaya Museum both in Japan, the Liverpool Museum in Great Britain, The Science Museum London; and acquired for corporate collections including Sony Classical New York, and the Schmidt Bank in Germany.
He received a B.A. (Fine Art) degree with First Class Honors from the University of Ife in Nigeria, and an M.F.A. degree in Painting and Drawing from the University of Georgia, Athens, Georgia, USA.
The Pollock-Krasner Foundation, Inc. was established in 1985 for the sole purpose of providing financial assistance to individual working visual artists of established ability through the generosity of the late Lee Krasner, one of the leading abstract expressionist painters and the widow of Jackson Pollock.
The Foundation is pleased to report that since its inception in 1985, it has awarded over 4,400 grants totaling over 71 million dollars to artists in 77 countries.
Please join us for VICTOR EKPUK’s book signing party this Saturday, September 1st from 2pm-4pm. We will be celebrating the near 500 page, mid career retrospective titled “Victor Ekpuk : Connecting Lines Across Space and Time”, Edited by Toyin Falola. This incredible book includes fascinating writings by 13 scholars and countless images of Victor’s brilliant creations.
For more than a decade, artist Maya Freelon has created striking abstract sculptures and installations from tissue paper and water stains. Her technique — letting water gently drip so the paper’s color bleeds organically — arose from happenstance, when, as an MFA student, she discovered a stack of old tissue paper in her grandmother’s basement.
Freelon’s assemblages reside in collections around the world, from U.S. Embassies in Madagascar, Swaziland, and Rome, to the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill and the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture. This month, she’s installed a monumental, interactive tissue paper sculpture for the first annual By The People International Festival at the Smithsonian’s Arts and Industries Building. Named “Reciprocity Respite & Repass,” her artwork is one of a selection of immersive and interactive art installations at the AIB, the headquarters for the festival. By the People will also feature a series of workshops and talks with experts.
As for Freelon, however, there is perhaps no better introduction to her than the late poet Maya Angelou, who described the tissue paper artwork as “visualizing the truth about the vulnerability and power of the human being.”
When did you discover your medium, working with tissue paper and water?
In 2006, I was in graduate school in Boston at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, now part of Tufts Museum School. At the time, I lived with my grandmother and it was a found artist’s dream treasure trove because she did not throw anything away. Queen Mother Frances J. Pierce said, “We grew up a family of sharecroppers that never got their fair share.” She would always speak in rhymes and her sayings come up often as titles in my work, such as Bloom Where You’re Planted. She was very proud of her African heritage and really embraced it before it was cool. She followed the original Black Panthers. And she had stuff everywhere— books, papers, magazines stacked to the ceiling. She just collected and collected. There were journals and Confederate money I found, just things that had not seen the light of day in 50 or 60 years. Eight track tapes. Hot combs (the original kind that you put in the oven stove). Thousands of keys and pens.
So one day, I went to the basement and discovered this tissue paper that was water damaged. It must have been a leaky pipe or something because it was right under the bathroom. There was a watermark from a constant drip, which had to be years ago, on this rainbow pack of colored tissue paper.
What was so powerful about the visual manifestation of this leak for you?
The watermark is a familiar sign to most people in the entire world. It just means: water was once here. You can see that in a lake that has receded. You can see it in the desert. You can see it in a rainforest, creek bed, even the Grand Canyon. It’s a marker of time or evaporation — a familiar sign to all human beings. I felt the commonality and a kind of interconnectedness of our humanity. This beautiful little accident sparked a world of discovery for me.
And three weeks after I found the stained tissue paper, Hurricane Katrina wiped out the Gulf Coast. So, I’m finding a parallel between water moving color literally and water as destruction. Seeing the images in the media and simultaneously watching water push ink out of tissue paper, I was struck by how a constant drip of water can dilute pure color— and I reflected on the fragility of life. I also questioned the hierarchy of art materials. My grandmother used tissue paper in elementary school art classrooms, and there I was, discovering and using tissue paper for my graduate art class.
Did the fragility of tissue paper require copious trial and error?
When I first used the tissue paper I didn’t know what do with it. I tried to mimic the water mark and couldn’t. I was pouring carefully, using a watercolor brush, trying to get it right. But it didn’t work. It just looked like a mess. So then I got a water balloon, and put a pin in it, and let it slowly drop on the tissue paper, simulating a drip that might come from a leaky faucet. That’s when I realized, oh my gosh: it’s not a steady stream. It’s a drip process that pushes the ink to the outer edges. At that moment, I also thought about middle school. I always knew I was going to be an artist, and I remember looking up at the dropped ceiling and often there’s a brown water stain on the tile. In my boredom as a child, I remember thinking, what’s happening up there?
I think about how brown paper in front of buildings that are getting renovated gets wet and leaves a stain. You see it also in dried up puddles. It’s just so beautiful to me. It reminds me of the macro and the microscopic.
But aren’t there unique conservation challenges with such delicate material?
When I started, I was feeling a little self-conscious about tissue paper. It’s fun to experiment in art school, but the point is you want to know how to make a living as an artist. You want your art to sell, and the ephemeral nature is part of my work.
Creating an installation, a temporary sculpture, or even a performance is one thing. But a collector wants to know, how long is this going to last? Now I actually enjoy that part of my art, that feeling that makes folks a little wary and uncomfortable. Well, it is in a gallery so it must be worth something, right? But if tissue paper is on an elementary school floor of an art room, you just sweep it up and put it in the trash can. So my question as an artist is: What fuels our desire to preserve or protect something?
You know, we buy flowers— beautiful bouquets for hundreds of dollars sometimes. They die. They’re dead actually and we enjoy that. It’s something that we invest in. We spend hundreds of dollars on a delicious night out of food. What we appreciate and why we appreciate something is interesting to me.
What work are you presenting at the By The People Festival ?
The great thing about festival is that they specifically sought artists that have interactive components to their art. And what’s great about tissue paper is I can work with anyone from under 1 year old to over 100 years old. I use the most simple materials so anybody can interact and join in. I’ve done collaborative tissue quilt-making a few times, once at the North Carolina Museum of Art. You sit down next to somebody and you start looking at bits of torn tissue paper, which is interesting because of all the colorful stains. You pick your favorite color and you start connecting the papers with just a simple glue stick— Elmer’s. My materials are not a surprise or a secret. You’re sitting; you’re building, piece by piece. And as you get bigger, you bump into your neighbor on the right, your neighbor on the left, your neighbor at the table in front of you. You are joining and talking because the action is pretty simple, like a quilting bee.
Your mind kind of shuts off and it’s almost like a form of mediation. Some people are very quiet and work very meticulously. Some people are sloppier and just talking. But once you get in the groove of things, you have permission for your mind to take off a while, doing this task that is repetitive. But it’s also about that unity, that togetherness, that strength and power of joining together as opposed to being one piece flying off by itself.
How do you feel about being labeled a female or African-American artist (or both), rather than simply “an artist” as say, Picasso or Warhol is?
First of all, I am like Picasso and Warhol. I have vision and a dream and an overwhelming desire to create. I love that question, mainly because my favorite thing to say to picky young artists is: okay, you don’t want to identify as female? You don’t want identify as Black? Well, I’m going to apply to those grants, and I’ll take them. You don’t have to take them. Get in line for the generic ones. You don’t have to identify as anything. I know that there are historical inaccuracies and inadequacies. I know that it’s not fair and that other people are getting opportunities in this closed inner circle.
But these grants for artists that are underprivileged, or underserved, or minorities— whatever you want to call it— this is an attempt to level the playing field; to offer opportunities to see new perspectives; to honor different cultures; to embrace that otherness. It doesn’t matter if you don’t say a thing. You will still have some sort of identity, and for me, I embrace the myriad of my otherness. Recently, I began to identify as a queer artist as well.
One of my mentors is the contemporary painter Beverly McIver, who is a professor of art, art history and visual studies at Duke University. When I was 14, I used to sit in her studio and clean her paint brushes. She was the very first Black, female artist and professor that I met in person. I want to be that motivating source for someone else who has a dream and a passion.
What role should artists take in times of political and cultural division?
Artists are always at the forefront of revolution. They are the ones that push the buttons that make us stop and say, this isn’t right. They spark dialogue. We aren’t held back by, what will my town think? Am I going to get fired? Is this okay? Your job as an artist is to utilize your freedom to speak your mind and inspire. And at the same time, be ready for backlash, or the people that you are going to anger.
For me, my place of peace is always back in the commonality of us all. We can all agree that this is a watermark, right? I dislike you and you dislike me, can we find some common ground? Can we agree that this piece of art is beautiful?
Halcyon’s “By the People Festival” takes place June 21 – 24, 2018, at five official sites and numerous satellite locations throughout Washington, D.C. A list of more than 100 art installations, performances and talks, and to register for a free four-day pass, can be found here.
As part of global celebration of the 60th anniversary of Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, Nigerian-American artist based in Washington, DC, Victor Ekpuk, will hold an exhibition featuring artworks used as book cover books, including TFA, in the United States.
The exhibition will hold at the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art on March 15, 2018. The event will also feature a panel discussion featuring Prof Nwando Achebe – Jack and Margaret Sweet Endowed Professor of History at Michigan State University – Ekpuk and others.
Ekpuk’s art reflects his experiences as a global artist. “The subject matter of my work deals with the human condition explained through themes that are both universal and specific: family, gender, politics, culture and Identity” says Ekpuk on his works.
His art, which began as an exploration of nsibidi “traditional” graphics and writing systems in Nigeria, has evolved to embrace a wider spectrum of meaning that is rooted in African and global contemporary art discourses.
Guided by the aesthetic philosophy nsibidi, where sign systems are used to convey ideas, Ekpuk re-imagines graphic symbols from diverse cultures to form a personal style of mark making those results in the interplay of art and writing.
We are pleased to announce that two pieces by artist NATE LEWIS have been included in an Art in Embassies exhibition in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. There is a catalog with the exhibition that features images and a write up about the work, which you can see below.
If you would like a PDF of the the introduction and Nate’s work, please contact the gallery.
Mikaela Lefrak
/https://public-media.smithsonianmag.com/filer/d3/92/d392a4ba-6269-4697-b3d5-8ce1be25881f/day_one_preview_004.jpg)
