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.
Artist NATE LEWIS was featured in a recent review on Hyperallergic.
A show in Harlem takes on the human form with some surprising results.
It’s difficult to surprise art audiences with figurative work these days. But at a new exhibition at Art in Flux Harlem, Terrestrial Resonance, I see work that genuinely astonishes me. Nate Lewis’s “Uninhibited Movements” (2016) and “Conductor II” (2017) both are hand sculpted paper photo prints that meld the material of the photographic paper and the body depicted on that paper to work together as a field of graphic and textural exploration. Lewis, delicately and with a staggering degree of detail, makes cuts into the underlying image of a nude black male body in “Uninhibited Movements” to create a landscape that is tattooed with patterns like waves, a flock of birds wheeling in the night sky, or tribal beadwork incised into the skin. The picking done to create these vistas is so fine that I bounce back and forth between admiring the metaphor of the body as canvas for the decorative impulse and admiring the facture of the work.
To see the rest of the article, click HERE.
To see more of NATE LEWIS’ works, visit his page on our website HERE
WASHINGTON POST ~ In the galleries ~ April 21, 2017
Natalie Cheung: Increments in Time and Nate Lewis: Tensions in Tapestries On view through April 26 at Morton Fine Art, 1781 Florida Ave. NW. 202-628-2787. mortonfineart.com.
Natalie Cheung’s “31 Hours,” cyanotype on paper, on view through April 26 at Morton Fine Art. (Natalie Cheung/Courtesy of Morton Fine Art)
To judge by their titles, change must be the subject of Natalie Cheung’s cyanotypes. Each picture in her Morton Fine Art show, “Increments in Time,” is named after a period of as little as one and as many as 76 hours. This is how long it took water to evaporate from the photographic paper, yielding studies in blue, black and white. The D.C. artist has turned the process, once used for architectural blueprints, into something abstract and unpredictable. Her pictures may resemble Rorschach tests and microscopic views, but all they truly illustrate is the process by which they were made. Their poetry is an accident of chemicals and duration.
Nate Lewis’s “Signals II,” hand-sculpted paper photo print, at Morton Fine Art. (Nate Lewis/Courtesy of Morton Fine Art)
To Nate Lewis, whose “Tensions in Tapestries” also is at Morton, the African American body is a landscape to be transformed. He cuts and scrapes black-and-white photographic portraits, removing pigment while adding patterns and flocked textures. The effect recalls African weaving and skin embellishment, but also reflects the influence of the D.C. artist’s job as an intensive-care nurse, seeking to heal the most damaged. In pieces such as “Funk and Spine,” the surface of a woman’s body is almost entirely remade, yet sinew, bone and essence endure.
– Mark Jenkins
Natalie Cheung: Increments in Time and Nate Lewis: Tensions in Tapestries On view through April 26 at Morton Fine Art, 1781 Florida Ave. NW. 202-628-2787. mortonfineart.com.
We are very excited to announce that artist MAYA FREELON ASANTE and her brilliant tissue paper and ink artwork has been featured in Cadillac’s new ad campaign “The Art of Daring”!
You can watch the video featuring Maya and her work below:
For Maya’s available works, please visit her page on our website or contact the gallery.
NATHANIEL DONNETT
Philando, graphite, synthetic and real hair on paper, 11.5″ x 11.5″
EXHIBITION LOCATION
Morton Fine Art (MFA)1781 Florida Ave NW (at 18th & U Sts)Washington, DC 20009
HOURS
Tuesday – Saturday 11am – 6pmSunday 12pm-5pm
Click here for available artwork by CHARLES WILLIAMS.
Morton Fine Art, 1781 Florida Ave NW, Washington, DC 20009
(202) 628-2787, mortonfineart@gmail.com
ARTS & CULTURE »
June 7, 2015
Caption: Two paintings from Charles Williams’ Swim series.
There is a moment, a second before a frosty blue-green wall of Atlantic Ocean wave crashes over you, where your body braces — you close your eyes, pull your arms into yourself and take a deep breath. Then comes a crash, muffled turbulence and silence… followed by the re-emergence of warm sun and the slowly recognizable sounds of gulls, waves and beach.
For McColl Center Artist-In-Residence Charles Williams, these moments are the most sacred. When Williams was 11 years old, he joined his cousins for a family reunion in Myrtle Beach to play in the surf. His father forbid him to go, but he went anyway despite his sub-par swimming ability. Williams remembers the crash, muffled turbulence, and silence but not the warm sun, nor the familiar sounds of his cousins playing. A torrential rip current pulled him out to sea, and — unable to swim free — a helpless Williams would have drowned if his uncle and father had not arrived in time to rescue him.
Williams would go on to great things, including a stint at Savannah College of Art and Design and a successful career as a brand manager, designer and marketer. Two things remained constant for him though: uneasiness around water, and dissatisfaction with his career path. In one bold stroke, though, Williams decided to confront both and recapture both his desire to be a painter and a deeply personal understanding of his own struggle with water, as well as the psychological barriers and bigotry associated with swimming and black youth.
“How we handle traumatic experiences,” says Williams, “both shapes and molds our identities.”
But his step away from the corporate creative world and into his own studio to confront these feelings has not impeded his success. His more recent achievements include participation in the Hudson River Landscape Fellowship, selection as a keynote speaker at CPCC’s Sensoria 2016, featured work in the Artists Magazines 28th Annual Art Competition, and honorable mention fromSouthwest Art magazine’s “21 Emerging Under 31” competition. Williams’ works have been shown inAmerican Art Collector, Empty Magazine, Charleston Magazine, Grand Strand, Studio Visit, Bluecanvas and other national publications. He was recently interviewed on an NPR segment entitled “Nature through the Eyes of an Artist.” His contemporary landscapes have been exhibited in group and solo exhibitions in galleries in New York, Vermont, California, Georgia, South Carolina and other southeastern states, with more planned, including a featured place at Miami’s Art Basel 2015. His stay in Charlotte has brought him to a residency at the McColl Center for Arts + Innovation through August, with a show in the McColl’s galleries planned at some point during his stay.
The process of personal change is the primary focus of the summation of Williams work, his Swim series. Previously featured (all too appropriately) at the Myrtle Beach Art Museum, Swim consists of eight (and counting) large oil paintings. These canvases are home to incredibly detailed, hyper-realistic seascapes. Painted from reference photographs taken by Williams himself, Swim represents the ocean at its most imposing or forbidding moments — before the crash of a wave, or at night, swallowed by darkness. Others capture the sea at its most beautiful, lightly foaming in shades of bronze and teal and washed in sunlight. Each composition is stunning in the most physical sense of the word. Williams’ compositions force the audience to stop, imparting the weight of the chest-deep ocean onto onlookers.
The sub-series Lost and Found features familiar South Carolina coastline at night. The first additions in this series are painted entirely in black. The waves are carved in striking ebony with a palette knife. Natural light plays off the raised texture imparted by the wet-on-wet process and the strokes of the palette knife, creating incredible visual depth and movement along the contours of the water’s surface. As the series continues, light breaks through into the compositions, seemingly lit only by Williams’ lone flashlight and the flash from his camera. The yellow aura from the flashlight bleeds through the bristling water and out into complete darkness. Williams’ use of compositional whitespace highlights the simple, powerful beauty of the ocean but encloses it in a suffocating field of darkness. Every canvas is a confrontation between the artist and his fear on a grand scale, the light pushing back terrible dread.
Aesthetically, his work is impossibly beautiful — individual bubbles rise from fields of foam sitting atop murky ocean. It’s easy to mistake his canvases for the photographs they reference. There is a captivating spectrum present across Swim, between complete darkness and stark daylight. Sky gracefully frames an ocean depicted with great reverence and respect, and at the same time an immutable uncertainty — a fear that can’t help but make its way through Williams’s brush strokes to the onlooker.
But Williams, has more planned for his audience than a glimpse into his phobia and striking waves. “These paintings serve as a personal testimony of my decision to begin a journey toward freedom,” he says. He stresses the importance of his paintings going beyond just inspiring awe, but moreover an understanding of embedded social racism surrounding aquaphobia and the inability to swim. Williams hopes that Swim marks not only a pivotal point in his own life — a step closer to defeating a fear that has robbed him of his own freedom — but a step closer to stemming the tide of institutionalized racism.
Link to the article: http://www.charlotteviewpoint.org/article/3403/CharlesWilliamsSwimSeries
Please contact Morton Fine Art for available work by CHARLES WILLIAMS.
Morton Fine Art, 1781 Florida Ave NW, Washington, DC 20009
(202) 628-2787, mortonfineart@gmail.com, http://www.mortonfineart.com
Morton Fine Art: curator's notes 