Seattle-based artist Lisa Myers Bulmash creates collages, assemblages, and altered books focusing on African American and female experiences. She writes that her works aim “to expand the classical practice of using an individual narrative to illuminate the general human condition. My hope is that my symbolic language creates a much-needed magic for the viewer — especially those who experience a daily sense of erasure or isolation.”
She is currently showing work from her “Not Geo”series at Morton Fine Art’s group exhibition Creating a New Whole, up through February 4, 2023.
Interview by Interlocutor Magazine
What initially attracted you to the art form of altered books? Was there a particular exhibit or artist working in the medium that catalyzed you to begin experimenting with it?
Being a longtime bookworm, I think my attraction sprang from a horrified fascination. Here was an object I’d been taught to treat with care, almost reverence – but someone had cut right through the cover! Pages were missing and rearranged! Then I realized the book was still telling a story but speaking in a different way.
What types of books do you focus on for alterations and why?
Sometimes I’m actually judging a book by its cover: does it have an interesting texture, design, or a title that catches my eye? They’re always hardcover books, usually smaller than the average coffee table book but larger than a paperback. The book needs to be sturdy enough to support whatever lightweight, three-dimensional objects I add to it, plus the hanging hardware on the back. (Most of my altered books are wall-mounted.) I also look for books that are no longer under copyright, just in case I salvage one of its illustrations or text for another project.
There Is No White Without Black – Altered book diptych (pair) – Free-standing objet d’art, 7.75 x 21.5 x 1.75 inches – Hand-carved niches; covers and text block (pages) sealed closed
Could you talk about your typical methods of book alteration and what elements of the book itself you often focus on to change? Does the book’s text directly come into play within the work (i.e., do you directly reassemble any textual elements)?
First, I flip through the book to see if there are any pages I want to cut out and save. Then I seal part or all of the page block. I use a utility knife to cut a hole in the front cover. Then I cut into the page block, using my fingers to tear a rough niche down into the page block. The niche acts as a focusing device for the image or images I insert into the book.
It’s actually pretty rare for me to reassemble the textual elements of the original book into the resulting artwork, unless there’s a chapter title or phrase that stands out for some reason. I once altered a copy of Robinson Crusoe, thinking that the adventure story associations would make interesting commentary on an image of two little Black boys in the hand-torn niche. The kids would hover just behind a chapter title of “I have a terrible dream.”
The thing is, when you’re working with material this old (the novel was first published in 1719), there’s bound to be some casual racism and colonialism in the text. I pulled out text that read, “he set my foot upon his head,” a clear description of Friday’s submission to Crusoe. Added to the “terrible dream” text and the Black boys, the piece then became about anti-Black violence.
Bought & Paid For #1-triptych (trio) of altered books, mounted upon antique washboards – Hand-torn niches framed with rope – 24 x 13 x 2 inches
You’ve written, “as a visual artist, I am obsessed with joining elements that seem to have no relationship to each other.” What do you think the origins of this obsession are, and what do you believe is the most potent aspect of joining disparate elements?
The cognitive clash between two unrelated elements is exciting and often amusing – when a potential combination makes me cackle with delight, I know I’m onto something worth exploring. I couldn’t say exactly what the origins of the obsession are. But I believe the most potent aspect of joining disparate elements, as you say, is the feeling that I’ve manipulated the materials in a way that compels them to give up some sort of hidden meaning or potential.
TODAY, America. Today. Collage on hardback book cover – Wall-hanging objet d’art – 16.5 x 18.5 x 1.5 inchesThe Mountain – Original collage on Fabriano Artistico watercolor paper – 100% cotton paper: hot-pressed (smooth surface) and acid-free – 12 x 9 inches unframed
You are a part of the group show Creating a New Whole at Morton Fine Art, where works from your “Not Geo” series are offered. Could you discuss this series and how it aims to subvert National Geographic’s problematic depictions of Africans and non-Western people?
As humans, we still have a tendency to think if something’s written down (and illustrated, bound into a magazine and delivered to our doorstep), then it must be at least partly true. I think that holds true in virtual spaces too, even though an algorithm is producing content tailored to our own biases and interests.
The “Not Geo” series pushes back against taking things at face value, and the kind of categorization that harms Black people and others of color. The old illustrations were meant to be pseudo-scientific depictions of human “types” separated by racial boundaries. It indicates a certain inflexibility of thought, a hardness matched by the harshness that people of African descent have often had to endure. I wanted to counter that with the delicacy of lace paper and irregular patterns in marbled paper. It’s my way of supporting the radical notion that Black people, especially women, should be treated with justice, empathy, and a certain softness that the world rarely extends to us.
Not Geo – Girl, 2022, ink, hand-marbled and rice paper collage on watercolor paper, 12 x 9 inNot Geo – Woman, 2022, ink, hand-marbled and rice paper collage on watercolor paper, 12 x 9 inNot Geo – Crossed Arms, 2022, ink, hand-marbled and rice paper collage on watercolor paper, 12 x 9 in
Morton Fine Art is pleased to announce Creating a New Whole, a group exhibition of collage artwork by Michael Andrew Booker, Lizette Chirrime, GA Gardner, Hiromitsu Kuroo, Lisa Myers Bulmash, Amber Robles-Gordon and Prina Shah. Ranging in techniques, approaches and materials—from quilting, tapestry, fabric, paint and appropriated mass media—the artists in Creating a New Whole exemplify collage’s invitation to what Myers Bulmash has recognized as “a process of purposefully taking things out of context.” Constructing new contexts, forms and wholes, these artists’ practices are frequently as generative as much as they are reparative, seeking to draw connections to what was absent or ignored in their elements’ original context(s). Creating a New Whole, will be on view from January 4 to February 4, 2023 at Morton’s Washington, D.C. space (52 O St NW #302).
Continuing quilting techniques practiced by their respective ancestors, Booker, Chirrime, Gardner and Shah work with resonant materials that speak to the past while enabling the past to speak to the present. Kenya-based, Shah’s personally charged materials include paper, saree, bindis and block printing which she vividly combines using textures, colors and forms, the sum total creating new narratives and perspectives for her inner voice. DC-based Booker is influenced by the coded and colorful history of quilts, referencing them as sign markers, shields, portals and gateways to help secure safe passage to a parallel utopic, afro-futuristic community, what the artist has called “Afrotopia.” Intensely layering marks of fineliner pen, color pencil, collage and fabric, Booker conjures complex, multidimensional figurative works, his figures and forms cohereing together out of countless small acts.
Mozambican artist Chirrime sources scrap materials from her environment and immediate communities, using fabric, burlap, rope, paint, beads, leather and more to produce dynamic collages that speak to African womanhood, and more broadly, the human condition. Slicing and collaging Western printed media, Trinidad and Tobago-based Gardner appropriates both content and practice, “creating false images and out-of-context narratives” that ironically and seductively mirror the Western world’s misrepresentation of people of color. Likewise taking a critical, redemptive eye to Western mass media, Myers Bulmash’s “Not Geo” series, a cutting play on National Geographic’s nickname, seeks to rehabilitate and restore to dignity the publication’s now notorious rendering of Africans and other non-Western people.
Overall, a sense of construction charges the works in Creating a New Whole, whether that be the notion of renovating the present and past or extending out of the frame into sculptural dimensions. The latter can be seen in the sculptural geometric-like works of Robles-Gordon (pieces the artist recognizes as “temples, places of spiritual practice” and which reference her larger textile installations) and Kuroo, inspired by the tradition of origami in his native Japan, whose thickly layered applications of paint and canvas exist on the boundary between painting and three-dimensional art.
Abidingly constructive in spite of their rigorous interventions, the works in Creating a New Whole end up with more than they started with as a matter of process.
Prina Shah, Unlock and Awaken, 2022, 25″x25″, paper, saree, bindis, block printing and acrylic on canvas
Opening Reception: Saturday, January 14 from 2pm to 4pm
Morton Fine Art is pleased to announce Creating a New Whole, a group exhibition of collage artwork by Michael Andrew Booker, Lizette Chirrime, GA Gardner, Hiromitsu Kuroo, Lisa Myers Bulmash, Amber Robles-Gordon and Prina Shah. Ranging in techniques, approaches and materials—from quilting, tapestry, fabric, paint and appropriated mass media—the artists in Creating a New Whole exemplify collage’s invitation to what Myers Bulmash has recognized as “a process of purposefully taking things out of context.” Constructing new contexts, forms and wholes, these artists’ practices are frequently as generative as much as they are reparative, seeking to draw connections to what was absent or ignored in their elements’ original context(s). Creating a New Whole, will be on view from January 4 to February 4, 2023 at Morton’s Washington, DC space (52 O St NW #302).
Collage Artwork by Michael Andrew Booker, Lisa Myers Bulmash, Lizette Chirrime, GA Gardner, Hiromitsu Kuroo, Amber Robles-Gordon & Prina Shah
About Creating a New Whole
Continuing quilting techniques practiced by their respective ancestors, Booker, Chirrime, Gardner and Shah work with resonant materials that speak to the past while enabling the past to speak to the present. Kenya-based, Shah’s personally charged materials include paper, saree, bindis and block printing which she vividly combines using textures, colors and forms, the sum total creating new narratives and perspectives for her inner voice. DC-based Booker is influenced by the coded and colorful history of quilts, referencing them as sign markers, shields, portals and gateways to help secure safe passage to a parallel utopic, afro-futuristic community, what the artist has called “Afrotopia.” Intensely layering marks of fineliner pen, color pencil, collage and fabric, Booker conjures complex, multidimensional figurative works, his figures and forms cohereing together out of countless small acts.
Mozambican artist Chirrime sources scrap materials from her environment and immediate communities, using fabric, burlap, rope, paint, beads, leather and more to produce dynamic collages that speak to African womanhood, and more broadly, the human condition. Slicing and collaging Western printed media, Trinidad and Tobago-based Gardner appropriates both content and practice, “creating false images and out-of-context narratives” that ironically and seductively mirror the Western world’s misrepresentation of people of color. Likewise taking a critical, redemptive eye to Western mass media, Myers Bulmash’s “Not Geo” series, a cutting play on National Geographic’s nickname, seeks to rehabilitate and restore to dignity the publication’s now notorious rendering of Africans and other non-Western people.
Overall, a sense of construction charges the works in Creating a New Whole, whether that be the notion of renovating the present and past or extending out of the frame into sculptural dimensions. The latter can be seen in the sculptural geometric-like works of Robles-Gordon (pieces the artist recognizes as “temples, places of spiritual practice” and which reference her larger textile installations) and Kuroo, inspired by the tradition of origami in his native Japan, whose thickly layered applications of paint and canvas exist on the boundary between painting and three-dimensional art.
Abidingly constructive in spite of their rigorous interventions, the works in Creating a New Whole end up with more than they started with as a matter of process.
About MICHAEL ANDREW BOOKER Michael Andrew Booker (b. USA) is a mixed media artist originally from Jackson, Mississippi who currently resides in Maryland. He received his BFA in Studio Art – Painting from Mississippi State University in 2008, and received his MFA in Studio Art from University of Maryland in 2012. He has exhibited in various galleries across Mississippi, Alabama, North Carolina, Maine, Maryland, Virginia and Washington DC. His work has been acquired by the David C. Driskell Center in College Park, MD. Currently, he is an Assistant Professor of Art at Montgomery College Takoma Park/Silver Spring.
Booker has been represented by Morton Fine Art in Washington, DC since 2019.
About LISA MYERS BULMASH Lisa Myers Bulmash (b. USA) is a collage and book artist who works primarily in acrylics, paper and found objects. Informally trained, Myers Bulmash began her career making handmade cards. After her father’s death in 2006, the artist felt compelled to take more personal risks in her creative life. Questions of identity, trust and the imperfect memory now drive most of her work. The artist aims to nudge the viewer into recognizing our shared stories, especially those narratives that are usually experienced in isolation.
Myers Bulmash exhibits her work in group and solo shows throughout the Seattle metro area. She has been represented by Morton Fine Art since 2020.
About LIZETTE CHIRRIME Lizette Chirrime (b. Mozambique) creates intricate fabric collages on canvas that are at once celebratory and soul-stirring, as the artist flirts between figuration and abstraction to develop a unique—and distinctly African—visual language. Stitching together printed fabrics, beads, and other familiar objects in Southern Africa, Chirrime transforms simple materials into autobiographical and narrative tableaux freighted with deeply felt emotion and patterns of meaning. Many of her collages center maternal figures and stories of African motherhood, honoring their millennia-long legacy of strength and grace and positing their representation as a symbolic device.
After receiving a three-month residency at Greatmore Studios in Cape Town in 2005, Chirrime spent the next 16 years of her practice in South Africa. In 2021, she made a return to her home country of Mozambique, where she now lives and continues to create.
She has been represented by Morton Fine Art since 2021.
About GA Gardner GA Gardner (b. Republic of Trinidad and Tobago) uses print media content to create an intimate viewpoint of his intercultural experience. Through the lens of his Caribbean heritage, he dissects, covers up, reveals, layers, and re-contextualizes the material in the print publications he uses, to construct pieces that specifically discuss issues of politics, race, culture, and identity.
The publications are a natural fit for Gardner, as they offer random vibrant color palettes, much like that of a typical Caribbean environment, and a great mixture of text and professionally photographed images. However the colors are universal and allow a conceptual approach to finding the common ground among all cultures. The artist combines these media depictions and information with natural paper and synthetic materials to aid in his message. By deconstructing the images into strips, or bits of torn paper, and assigning new overlays of unifying colors to the materials, Gardner erodes the original content at various levels often reducing them to shades with traces of random colors. The image that was once a bold headline new banner, or the newest eye catching product now struggles to be seen; muted, it now plays a secondary role to layers of paint and other mediums. The resulting serendipitous visual construction is an unsystematic reconfiguration and re-purposing to discuss culture, heritage and the symbolism of color.
He has been represented by Morton Fine Art since 2012.
About HIROMITSU KUROO Hiromitsu Kuroo (b. Japan) is a Japanese collage painter working in the tradition of origami. In his work, the canvas serves as the paper, and the gentle manipulation of its surface conveys intricate textural landscapes. The multiple layers of colors in his folded canvases are revealed by sanding the canvas surface. Interested in the juxtaposition and vitality of collaged pieces of canvas, he uses them to accentuate other emerging shapes in his compositions.
Kuroo earned both a BFA and MFA from Tohoku University of Art & Design and has had solo exhibitions at the New York based Tenri Cultural Institute, Gloria Kennedy Gallery, MIKIMOTO NY, Makari and Bronx Community College, as well as the Tokyo-based Gallery Yamaguchi and G-Art Gallery. He was awarded Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grants in 2010 and 2019, Adolph & Esther Gottlieb Foundation Grant in 2022 and the artist residency program for The Golden Foundation in 2019. In 2020, he was interviewed for Forbes Magazine. He has been represented by Morton Fine Art since 2022.
About AMBER ROBLES-GORDON Amber Robles-Gordon (b. Puerto Rico) completed her Masters of Fine Arts from Howard University in November 2011, where she has received annual awards and accolades for her artwork. Her exhibitions and artwork has been reviewed and/or featured in many esteemed publications including the Washington Post, the Miami Herald, Huffington Post and Callaloo Art & Culture in the African Diaspora.
Robles-Gordon was commissioned to create temporary and permanent public art installations for numerous art fairs and agencies such as the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities, DCCAH; Northern Virginia Fine Arts Association (NVFAA); Humanities Council of Washington, D.C.; Howard University, James C. Porter Colloquium; Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture; the Washington Projects for the Arts; Salisbury University; Martha’s Table; DC Department of General Services and Democracy Fund.
Additionally, she has been commissioned to teach workshops, give commentary and present about her artwork by the Smithsonian Anacostia Museum; Luther College; WETA Television; Al Jazeera; WPFW 89.3 fm; WAMU | American University Radio; The Kojo Nnamdi Show; Howard University, James A. Porter Colloquium; David C. Driskell Center; the Phillips Collection; the African American Museum in Philadelphia; McDaniel College; Salisbury University; Harvey B. Gantt Center; American University and National Museum of African American History and Culture. Her solo exhibition, Successions: Traversing US Colonialism, curated by Larry Ossei-Mensah, was hosted by the American University Museum at the Katzen Arts Center in 2021. She has been represented by Morton Fine Art since 2016.
About PRINA SHAH Prina Shah (b. Kenya) is a contemporary artist currently living in Nairobi, Kenya. Born in Kenya to Indian parents, Shah also grew up partially in the U.K.; her artistic work embraces the indeterminacy of her national identity, including a fascination with the formation of selfhood as it relates to a specific cultural context. In a creative practice spanning mixed media—including sculpture, painting, glasswork and less traditional materials such as human hair—Shah’s art challenges the notions of individualized identity within a communal whole. Shah uses meditation as the impetus and foundation of her work, drawing the viewer into a personal narrative and inviting the participant to share in her visual journey of interconnection as she explores what it means to be one among many.
Shah’s work has been included in numerous national and international exhibitions and has been acquired by the permanent collections of Finland’s Poikilo Kouvola Art Museum and the I&M Bank Collective in Kenya, as well as numerous private collections. She has been represented by Morton Fine Art since 2022.
About Morton Fine Art Founded in 2010 in Washington, DC by curator Amy Morton, Morton Fine Art (MFA) is a fine art gallery and curatorial group that collaborates with art collectors and visual artists to inspire fresh ways of acquiring contemporary art. Firmly committed to the belief that art collecting can be cultivated through an educational stance, MFA’s mission is to provide accessibility to museum-quality contemporary art through a combination of substantive exhibitions and a welcoming platform for dialogue and exchange of original voice. Morton Fine Art specializes in a stellar roster of nationally and internationally renowned artists as well as has an additional focus on artwork of the African Diaspora.
Morton Fine Art founded the trademark *a pop-up project in 2010. *a pop-up project is MFA’s mobile gallery component which hosts temporary curated exhibitions nationally.
GA Gardner. So You, 2014. 42 x 65 in. Mixed media on mylar.
WASHINGTON, DC.-Morton Fine Art is presenting Creating a New Whole, a group exhibition of collage artwork by Michael Andrew Booker, Lizette Chirrime, GA Gardner, Hiromitsu Kuroo, Lisa Myers Bulmash, Amber Robles-Gordon and Prina Shah. Ranging in techniques, approaches and materials—from quilting, tapestry, fabric, paint and appropriated mass media—the artists in Creating a New Whole exemplify collage’s invitation to what Myers Bulmash has recognized as “a process of purposefully taking things out of context.” Constructing new contexts, forms and wholes, these artists’ practices are frequently as generative as much as they are reparative, seeking to draw connections to what was absent or ignored in their elements’ original context(s). Creating a New Whole, will be on view until February 4, 2023 at Morton’s Washington, D.C. space (52 O St NW #302).
Continuing quilting techniques practiced by their respective ancestors, Booker, Chirrime, Gardner and Shah work with resonant materials that speak to the past while enabling the past to speak to the present. Kenya-based, Shah’s personally charged materials include paper, saree, bindis and block printing which she vividly combines using textures, colors and forms, the sum total creating new narratives and perspectives for her inner voice. DC-based Booker is influenced by the coded and colorful history of quilts, referencing them as sign markers, shields, portals and gateways to help secure safe passage to a parallel utopic, afro-futuristic community, what the artist has called “Afrotopia.” Intensely layering marks of fineliner pen, color pencil, collage and fabric, Booker conjures complex, multidimensional figurative works, his figures and forms cohereing together out of countless small acts.
Mozambican artist Chirrime sources scrap materials from her environment and immediate communities, using fabric, burlap, rope, paint, beads, leather and more to produce dynamic collages that speak to African womanhood, and more broadly, the human condition. Slicing and collaging Western printed media, Trinidad and Tobago-based Gardner appropriates both content and practice, “creating false images and out-of-context narratives” that ironically and seductively mirror the Western world’s misrepresentation of people of color. Likewise taking a critical, redemptive eye to Western mass media, Myers Bulmash’s “Not Geo” series, a cutting play on National Geographic’s nickname, seeks to rehabilitate and restore to dignity the publication’s now notorious rendering of Africans and other non-Western people.
Overall, a sense of construction charges the works in Creating a New Whole, whether that be the notion of renovating the present and past or extending out of the frame into sculptural dimensions. The latter can be seen in the sculptural geometric-like works of Robles-Gordon (pieces the artist recognizes as “temples, places of spiritual practice” and which reference her larger textile installations) and Kuroo, inspired by the tradition of origami in his native Japan, whose thickly layered applications of paint and canvas exist on the boundary between painting and three-dimensional art.
Abidingly constructive in spite of their rigorous interventions, the works in Creating a New Whole end up with more than they started with as a matter of process.
Michael Andrew Booker (b. USA) is a mixed media artist originally from Jackson, Mississippi who currently resides in Maryland. He received his BFA in Studio Art – Painting from Mississippi State University in 2008, and received his MFA in Studio Art from University of Maryland in 2012. He has exhibited in various galleries across Mississippi, Alabama, North Carolina, Maine, Maryland, Virginia and Washington DC. His work has been acquired by the David C. Driskell Center in College Park, MD. Currently, he is an Assistant Professor of Art at Montgomery College Takoma Park/Silver Spring.Booker has been represented by Morton Fine Art in Washington, DC since 2019.
Lisa Myers Bulmash (b. USA) is a collage and book artist who works primarily in acrylics, paper and found objects. Informally trained, Myers Bulmash began her career making handmade cards. After her father’s death in 2006, the artist felt compelled to take more personal risks in her creative life. Questions of identity, trust and the imperfect memory now drive most of her work. The artist aims to nudge the viewer into recognizing our shared stories, especially those narratives that are usually experienced in isolation.Myers Bulmash exhibits her work in group and solo shows throughout the Seattle metro area. On the East Coast, Myers Bulmash has been represented by Morton Fine Art Gallery in Washington, DC since 2020.
Lizette Chirrime (b. Mozambique) creates intricate fabric collages on canvas that are at once celebratory and soul-stirring, as the artist flirts between figuration and abstraction to develop a unique—and distinctly African—visual language. Stitching together printed fabrics, beads, and other familiar objects in Southern Africa, Chirrime transforms simple materials into autobiographical and narrative tableaux freighted with deeply felt emotion and patterns of meaning. Many of her collages center maternal figures and stories of African motherhood, honoring their millennia-long legacy of strength and grace and positing their representation as a symbolic device.After receiving a three-month residency at Greatmore Studios in Cape Town in 2005, Chirrime spent the next 16 years of her practice in South Africa. In 2021, she made a return to her home country of Mozambique, where she now lives and continues to create.She has been represented by Morton Fine Art since 2021.
GA Gardner (b. 1969, Republic of Trinidad and Tobago) uses print media content to create an intimate viewpoint of his intercultural experience. Through the lens of his Caribbean heritage, he dissects, covers up, reveals, layers, and re-contextualizes the material in the print publications he uses, to construct pieces that specifically discuss issues of politics, race, culture, and identity.The publications are a natural fit for Gardner, as they offer random vibrant color palettes, much like that of a typical Caribbean environment, and a great mixture of text and professionally photographed images. However the colors are universal and allow a conceptual approach to finding the common ground among all cultures. The artist combines these media depictions and information with natural paper and synthetic materials to aid in his message. By deconstructing the images into strips, or bits of torn paper, and assigning new overlays of unifying colors to the materials, Gardner erodes the original content at various levels often reducing them to shades with traces of random colors. The image that was once a bold headline new banner, or the newest eye catching product now struggles to be seen; muted, it now plays a secondary role to layers of paint and other mediums. The resulting serendipitous visual construction is an unsystematic reconfiguration and re-purposing to discuss culture, heritage and the symbolism of color.He has been represented by Morton Fine Art since 2012.
Hiromitsu Kuroo (b. Japan) is a Japanese collage painter working in the tradition of origami. In his work, the canvas serves as the paper, and the gentle manipulation of its surface conveys intricate textural landscapes. The multiple layers of colors in his folded canvases are revealed by sanding the canvas surface. Interested in the juxtaposition and vitality of collaged pieces of canvas, he uses them to accentuate other emerging shapes in his compositions.Kuroo earned both a BFA and MFA from Tohoku University of Art & Design and has had solo exhibitions at the New York based Tenri Cultural Institute, Gloria Kennedy Gallery, MIKIMOTO NY, Makari and Bronx Community College, as well as the Tokyo-based Gallery Yamaguchi and G-Art Gallery. He was awarded Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grants in 2010 and 2019, Adolph & Esther Gottlieb Foundation Grant in 2022 and the artist residency program for The Golden Foundation in 2019. In 2020, he was interviewed for Forbes Magazine. He has been represented by Morton Fine Art since 2022.
Amber Robles-Gordon (b. Puerto Rico) completed her Masters of Fine Arts from Howard University in November 2011, where she has received annual awards and accolades for her artwork. Her exhibitions and artwork has been reviewed and/or featured in many esteemed publications including the Washington Post, the Miami Herald, Huffington Post and Callaloo Art & Culture in the African Diaspora.Robles-Gordon was commissioned to create temporary and permanent public art installations for numerous art fairs and agencies such as the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities, DCCAH; Northern Virginia Fine Arts Association (NVFAA); Humanities Council of Washington, D.C.; Howard University, James C. Porter Colloquium; Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture; the Washington Projects for the Arts; Salisbury University; Martha’s Table; DC Department of General Services and Democracy Fund.Additionally, she has been commissioned to teach workshops, give commentary and present about her artwork by the Smithsonian Anacostia Museum; Luther College; WETA Television; Al Jazeera; WPFW 89.3 fm; WAMU | American University Radio; The Kojo Nnamdi Show; Howard University, James A. Porter Colloquium; David C. Driskell Center; the Phillips Collection; the African American Museum in Philadelphia; McDaniel College; Salisbury University; Harvey B. Gantt Center; American University and National Museum of African American History and Culture. Her solo exhibition, Successions: Traversing US Colonialism, curated by Larry Ossei-Mensah, was hosted by the American University Museum at the Katzen Arts Center in 2021. She has been represented by Morton Fine Art since 2016.
Prina Shah (b. 1973, Kenya) is a contemporary artist currently living in Nairobi, Kenya. Born in Kenya to Indian parents, Shah also grew up partially in the U.K.; her artistic work embraces the indeterminacy of her national identity, including a fascination with the formation of selfhood as it relates to a specific cultural context. In a creative practice spanning mixed media—including sculpture, painting, glasswork and less traditional materials such as human hair—Shah’s art challenges the notions of individualized identity within a communal whole. Shah uses meditation as the impetus and foundation of her work, drawing the viewer into a personal narrative and inviting the participant to share in her visual journey of interconnection as she explores what it means to be one among many.Shah’s work has been included in numerous national and international exhibitions and has been acquired by the permanent collections of Finland’s Poikilo Kouvola Art Museum and the I&M Bank Collective in Kenya, as well as numerous private collections. She has been represented by Morton Fine Art since 2022.
Creating A New Whole: A Group Exhibition of Collage Artwork Featuring Michael Andrew Booker, Lizette Chirrime, GA Gardner, Hiromitsu Kuroo, Lisa Myers Bulmash, Amber Robles-Gordon and Prina Shah. Morton Fine Art January 4 to February 4, 2023 Morton’s Washington D.C. space (52 O St NW #302)
Morton Fine Art is pleased to announce Creating a New Whole, a group exhibition of collage artwork by Michael Andrew Booker, Lizette Chirrime, GA Gardner,Hiromitsu Kuroo, Lisa Myers Bulmash, Amber Robles-Gordon and Prina Shah. Ranging in techniques, approaches and materials—from quilting, tapestry, fabric, paint and appropriated mass media—the artists in Creating a New Whole exemplify collage’s invitation to what Myers Bulmash has recognized as “a process of purposefully taking things out of context.”
Constructing new contexts, forms and wholes, these artists’ practices are frequently as generative as much as they are reparative, seeking to draw connections to what was absent or ignored in their elements’ original context(s). Creating a New Whole, will be on view from January 4 to February 4, 2023 at Morton’s Washington, D.C. space (52 O St NW #302).
Prina Shah Untitled, 2022 25 x 25 in.Paper, sarees, bindis, block printing and acrylic on canvas
Continuing quilting techniques practiced by their respective ancestors, Booker, Chirrime, Gardner and Shah work with resonant materials that speak to the past while enabling the past to speak to the present. Kenya-based, Shah’s personally charged materials include paper, saree, bindis and block printing which she vividly combines using textures, colors and forms, the sum total creating new narratives and perspectives for her inner voice.
DC-based Booker is influenced by the coded and colorful history of quilts, referencing them as sign markers, shields, portals and gateways to help secure safe passage to a parallel utopic, afro-futuristic community, what the artist has called “Afrotopia.” Intensely layering marks of fineliner pen, color pencil, collage and fabric, Booker conjures complex, multidimensional figurative works, his figures and forms cohereing together out of countless small acts.
Mozambican artist Chirrime sources scrap materials from her environment and immediate communities, using fabric, burlap, rope, paint, beads, leather and more to produce dynamic collages that speak to African womanhood, and more broadly, the human condition.
Slicing and collaging Western printed media, Trinidad and Tobago-based Gardner appropriates both content and practice, “creating false images and out-of-context narratives” that ironically and seductively mirror the Western world’s misrepresentation of people of color. Likewise taking a critical, redemptive eye to Western mass media, Myers Bulmash’s “Not Geo” series, a cutting play on National Geographic’s nickname, seeks to rehabilitate and restore to dignity the publication’s now notorious rendering of Africans and other non-Western people.
Lizette Chirrime The Boy Who Stopped the Snake, 2014 58 x 50 in. Fabric collage
Overall, a sense of construction charges the works in Creating a New Whole, whether that be the notion of renovating the present and past or extending out of the frame into sculptural dimensions. The latter can be seen in the sculptural geometric-like works of Robles-Gordon (pieces the artist recognizes as “temples, places of spiritual practice” and which reference her larger textile installations) and Kuroo, inspired by the tradition of origami in his native Japan, whose thickly layered applications of paint and canvas exist on the boundary between painting and three-dimensional art.
Abidingly constructive in spite of their rigorous interventions, the works in Creating a New Whole end up with more than they started with as a matter of process.
Exhibition opening : Saturday, January 14, 2023 from 2-4pm. Several artists will be in attendance. RSVP to info@mortonfineart.com
Morton Fine Art is pleased to announce Creating a New Whole, a group exhibition of collage artwork by Michael Andrew Booker, Lizette Chirrime, GA Gardner, Hiromitsu Kuroo, Lisa Myers Bulmash, Amber Robles-Gordon and Prina Shah. Ranging in techniques, approaches and materials—from quilting, tapestry, fabric, paint and appropriated mass media—the artists in Creating a New Whole exemplify collage’s invitation to what Myers Bulmash has recognized as “a process of purposefully taking things out of context.” Constructing new contexts, forms and wholes, these artists’ practices are frequently as generative as much as they are reparative, seeking to draw connections to what was absent or ignored in their elements’ original context(s). Creating a New Whole, will be on view from January 4 to February 4, 2023 at Morton’s Washington, D.C. space (52 O St NW #302).
Continuing quilting techniques practiced by their respective ancestors, Booker, Chirrime, Gardner and Shah work with resonant materials that speak to the past while enabling the past to speak to the present. Kenya-based, Shah’s personally charged materials include paper, saree, bindis and block printing which she vividly combines using textures, colors and forms, the sum total creating new narratives and perspectives for her inner voice. DC-based Booker is influenced by the coded and colorful history of quilts, referencing them as sign markers, shields, portals and gateways to help secure safe passage to a parallel utopic, afro-futuristic community, what the artist has called “Afrotopia.” Intensely layering marks of fineliner pen, color pencil, collage and fabric, Booker conjures complex, multidimensional figurative works, his figures and forms cohereing together out of countless small acts.
Mozambican artist Chirrime sources scrap materials from her environment and immediate communities, using fabric, burlap, rope, paint, beads, leather and more to produce dynamic collages that speak to African womanhood, and more broadly, the human condition. Slicing and collaging Western printed media, Trinidad and Tobago-based Gardner appropriates both content and practice, “creating false images and out-of-context narratives” that ironically and seductively mirror the Western world’s misrepresentation of people of color. Likewise taking a critical, redemptive eye to Western mass media, Myers Bulmash’s “Not Geo” series, a cutting play on National Geographic’s nickname, seeks to rehabilitate and restore to dignity the publication’s now notorious rendering of Africans and other non-Western people.
Overall, a sense of construction charges the works in Creating a New Whole, whether that be the notion of renovating the present and past or extending out of the frame into sculptural dimensions. The latter can be seen in the sculptural geometric-like works of Robles-Gordon (pieces the artist recognizes as “temples, places of spiritual practice” and which reference her larger textile installations) and Kuroo, inspired by the tradition of origami in his native Japan, whose thickly layered applications of paint and canvas exist on the boundary between painting and three-dimensional art.
Abidingly constructive in spite of their rigorous interventions, the works in Creating a New Whole end up with more than they started with as a matter of process.LEARN MORE
A Group Exhibition of Collage Artwork by Michael Andrew Booker, Lisa Myers Bulmash, Lizette Chirrime, GA Gardner, Hiromitsu Kuroo, Amber Robles-Gordon and Prina Shah
Washington, D.C. – Morton Fine Art is pleased to announce Creating a New Whole, a group exhibition of collage artwork by Michael Andrew Booker, Lizette Chirrime, GA Gardner, Hiromitsu Kuroo, Lisa Myers Bulmash, Amber Robles-Gordon and Prina Shah. Ranging in techniques, approaches and materials—from quilting, tapestry, fabric, paint and appropriated mass media—the artists in Creating a New Whole exemplify collage’s invitation to what Myers Bulmash has recognized as “a process of purposefully taking things out of context.” Constructing new contexts, forms and wholes, these artists’ practices are frequently as generative as much as they are reparative, seeking to draw connections to what was absent or ignored in their elements’ original context(s). Creating a New Whole, will be on view from January 4 to February 4, 2023 at Morton’s Washington, D.C. space (52 O St NW #302).
Amber Robles-Gordon , The Temples of My Familiars: Identity Totem, 2019 23 x 17 in. Mixed media collage and found objects on canvas
Continuing quilting techniques practiced by their respective ancestors, Booker, Chirrime, Gardner and Shah work with resonant materials that speak to the past while enabling the past to speak to the present. Kenya-based, Shah’s personally charged materials include paper, saree, bindis and block printing which she vividly combines using textures, colors and forms, the sum total creating new narratives and perspectives for her inner voice. DC-based Booker is influenced by the coded and colorful history of quilts, referencing them as sign markers, shields, portals and gateways to help secure safe passage to a parallel utopic, afro-futuristic community, what the artist has called “Afrotopia.” Intensely layering marks of fineliner pen, color pencil, collage and fabric, Booker conjures complex, multidimensional figurative works, his figures and forms cohereing together out of countless small acts.
Mozambican artist Chirrime sources scrap materials from her environment and immediate communities, using fabric, burlap, rope, paint, beads, leather and more to produce dynamic collages that speak to African womanhood, and more broadly, the human condition. Slicing and collaging Western printed media, Trinidad and Tobago-based Gardner appropriates both content and practice, “creating false images and out-of-context narratives” that ironically and seductively mirror the Western world’s misrepresentation of people of color. Likewise taking a critical, redemptive eye to Western mass media, Myers Bulmash’s “Not Geo” series, a cutting play on National Geographic’s nickname, seeks to rehabilitate and restore to dignity the publication’s now notorious rendering of Africans and other non-Western people.
Lisa Myers Bulmash, Not Geo – Sitting Man, 2021 12 x 9 in. Ink, hand-marbled and rice paper collage on watercolor paper
Overall, a sense of construction charges the works in Creating a New Whole, whether that be the notion of renovating the present and past or extending out of the frame into sculptural dimensions. The latter can be seen in the sculptural geometric-like works of Robles-Gordon
(pieces the artist recognizes as “temples, places of spiritual practice” and which reference her larger textile installations) and Kuroo, inspired by the tradition of origami in his native Japan, whose thickly layered applications of paint and canvas exist on the boundary between painting and three-dimensional art.
Abidingly constructive in spite of their rigorous interventions, the works in Creating a New Whole end up with more than they started with as a matter of process.
Lizette Chirrime, Synchronization in the Blood, 2022 38.50 x 60.50 in. Fabric and mixed media stitched on canvas
Morton Fine Art
Founded in 2010 in Washington D.C. by curator Amy Morton, Morton Fine Art (MFA) is a fine art gallery and curatorial group that collaborates with art collectors and visual artists to inspire fresh ways of acquiring contemporary art. Firmly committed to the belief that art collecting can be cultivated through an educational stance, MFA’s mission is to provide accessibility to museum-quality contemporary art through a combination of substantive exhibitions and a welcoming platform for dialogue and exchange of original voice. Morton Fine Art specializes in a stellar roster of nationally and internationally renowned artists as well as has an additional focus on artwork of the African Diaspora.
Michael Andrew Booker (b. USA) is a mixed media artist originally from Jackson, Mississippi who currently resides in Maryland. He received his BFA in Studio Art – Painting from Mississippi State University in 2008, and received his MFA in Studio Art from University of Maryland in 2012. He has exhibited in various galleries across Mississippi, Alabama, North Carolina, Maine, Maryland, Virginia and Washington DC. His work has been acquired by the David C. Driskell Center in College Park, MD. Currently, he is an Assistant Professor of Art at Montgomery College Takoma Park/Silver Spring.
Booker has been represented by Morton Fine Art in Washington, DC since 2019.
Lisa Myers Bulmash (b. USA) is a collage and book artist who works primarily in acrylics, paper and found objects. Informally trained, Myers Bulmash began her career making handmade cards. After her father’s death in 2006, the artist felt compelled to take more personal risks in her creative life. Questions of identity, trust and the imperfect memory now drive most of her work.
The artist aims to nudge the viewer into recognizing our shared stories, especially those narratives that are usually experienced in isolation.
Myers Bulmash exhibits her work in group and solo shows throughout the Seattle metro area. On the East Coast, Myers Bulmash has been represented by Morton Fine Art Gallery in Washington, DC since 2020.
Lizette Chirrime (b. Mozambique) creates intricate fabric collages on canvas that are at once celebratory and soul-stirring, as the artist flirts between figuration and abstraction to develop a
unique—and distinctly African—visual language. Stitching together printed fabrics, beads, and other familiar objects in Southern Africa, Chirrime transforms simple materials into autobiographical and narrative tableaux freighted with deeply felt emotion and patterns of meaning. Many of her collages center maternal figures and stories of African motherhood, honoring their millennia-long legacy of strength and grace and positing their representation as a symbolic device.
After receiving a three-month residency at Greatmore Studios in Cape Town in 2005, Chirrime spent the next 16 years of her practice in South Africa. In 2021, she made a return to her home country of Mozambique, where she now lives and continues to create.
She has been represented by Morton Fine Art since 2021.
GA Gardner (b. 1969, Republic of Trinidad and Tobago) uses print media content to create an intimate viewpoint of his intercultural experience. Through the lens of his Caribbean heritage, he dissects, covers up, reveals, layers, and re-contextualizes the material in the print publications he uses, to construct pieces that specifically discuss issues of politics, race, culture, and identity.
The publications are a natural fit for Gardner, as they offer random vibrant color palettes, much like that of a typical Caribbean environment, and a great mixture of text and professionally photographed images. However the colors are universal and allow a conceptual approach to finding the common ground among all cultures. The artist combines these media depictions and information with natural paper and synthetic materials to aid in his message. By deconstructing the images into strips, or bits of torn paper, and assigning new overlays of unifying colors to the materials, Gardner erodes the original content at various levels often reducing them to shades with traces of random colors. The image that was once a bold headline new banner, or the newest eye catching product now struggles to be seen; muted, it now plays a secondary role to layers of paint and other mediums. The resulting serendipitous visual construction is an unsystematic reconfiguration and re-purposing to discuss culture, heritage and the symbolism of color.
He has been represented by Morton Fine Art since 2012.
Hiromitsu Kuroo (b. Japan) is a Japanese collage painter working in the tradition of origami. In his work, the canvas serves as the paper, and the gentle manipulation of its surface conveys intricate textural landscapes. The multiple layers of colors in his folded canvases are revealed by sanding the canvas surface. Interested in the juxtaposition and vitality of collaged pieces of canvas, he uses them to accentuate other emerging shapes in his compositions.
Kuroo earned both a BFA and MFA from Tohoku University of Art & Design and has had solo exhibitions at the New York based Tenri Cultural Institute, Gloria Kennedy Gallery, MIKIMOTO NY, Makari and Bronx Community College, as well as the Tokyo-based Gallery Yamaguchi and G-Art
Gallery. He was awarded Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grants in 2010 and 2019, Adolph & Esther Gottlieb Foundation Grant in 2022 and the artist residency program for The Golden Foundation in 2019. In 2020, he was interviewed for Forbes Magazine. He has been represented by Morton Fine Art since 2022.
Amber Robles-Gordon (b. Puerto Rico) completed her Masters of Fine Arts from Howard University in November 2011, where she has received annual awards and accolades for her artwork. Her exhibitions and artwork has been reviewed and/or featured in many esteemed publications including the Washington Post, the Miami Herald, Huffington Post and Callaloo Art & Culture in the African Diaspora.
Robles-Gordon was commissioned to create temporary and permanent public art installations for numerous art fairs and agencies such as the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities, DCCAH; Northern Virginia Fine Arts Association (NVFAA); Humanities Council of Washington, D.C.; Howard University, James C. Porter Colloquium; Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture; the Washington Projects for the Arts; Salisbury University; Martha’s Table; DC Department of General Services and Democracy Fund.
Additionally, she has been commissioned to teach workshops, give commentary and present about her artwork by the Smithsonian Anacostia Museum; Luther College; WETA Television; Al Jazeera; WPFW 89.3 fm; WAMU | American University Radio; The Kojo Nnamdi Show; Howard University, James A. Porter Colloquium; David C. Driskell Center; the Phillips Collection; the African American Museum in Philadelphia; McDaniel College; Salisbury University; Harvey B. Gantt Center; American University and National Museum of African American History and Culture. Her solo exhibition, Successions: Traversing US Colonialism, curated by Larry Ossei-Mensah, was hosted by the American University Museum at the Katzen Arts Center in 2021. She has been represented by Morton Fine Art since 2016.
Prina Shah (b. 1973, Kenya) is a contemporary artist currently living in Nairobi, Kenya. Born in Kenya to Indian parents, Shah also grew up partially in the U.K.; her artistic work embraces the indeterminacy of her national identity, including a fascination with the formation of selhood as it relates to a specific cultural context. In a creative practice spanning mixed media—including sculpture, painting, glasswork and less traditional materials such as human hair—Shah’s art challenges the notions of individualized identity within a communal whole. Shah uses meditation as the impetus and foundation of her work, drawing the viewer into a personal narrative and inviting the participant to share in her visual journey of interconnection as she explores what it means to be one among many.
Shah’s work has been included in numerous national and international exhibitions and has been acquired by the permanent collections of Finland’s Poikilo Kouvola Art Museum and the I&M Bank Collective in Kenya, as well as numerous private collections. She has been represented by Morton Fine Art since 2022.
Michael Andrew Booker. Sonder Gardens, 2022. 18 x 13 in. Fineliner pen, color pencil, fabric and collage on paper
Morton Fine Art is pleased to announce Creating a New Whole, a group exhibition of collage artwork by Michael Andrew Booker, Lizette Chirrime, GA Gardner, Hiromitsu Kuroo, Lisa Myers Bulmash, Amber Robles-Gordon and Prina Shah. Ranging in techniques, approaches and materials—from quilting, tapestry, fabric, paint and appropriated mass media—the artists in Creating a New Whole exemplify collage’s invitation to what Myers Bulmash has recognized as “a process of purposefully taking things out of context.” Constructing new contexts, forms and wholes, these artists’ practices are frequently as generative as much as they are reparative, seeking to draw connections to what was absent or ignored in their elements’ original context(s). Creating a New Whole, will be on view from January 4 to February 4, 2023 at Morton’s Washington, D.C. space (52 O St NW #302).
Creating a New Whole Collage Artwork by Michael Andrew Booker, Lisa Myers Bulmash, Lizette Chirrime, GA Gardner, Hiromitsu Kuroo, Amber Robles-Gordon & Prina Shah January 4th – February 4th, 2023
Opening reception 2-4pm on Saturday, January 14th, 2023.Several artists will be in attendance. Please RSVP to info@mortonfineart.com .
Contact the gallery for viewing by appointment, price list, additional information and acquisition. (202) 628-2787 (call or text) info@mortonfineart.com
PRINA SHAH, Unlock and Awaken, 2022, 25″x25″, paper, saree, bindis, block printing and acrylic on canvas
About Creating a New Whole
Continuing quilting techniques practiced by their respective ancestors, Booker, Chirrime, Gardner and Shah work with resonant materials that speak to the past while enabling the past to speak to the present. Kenya-based, Shah’s personally charged materials include paper, saree, bindis and block printing which she vividly combines using textures, colors and forms, the sum total creating new narratives and perspectives for her inner voice. DC-based Booker is influenced by the coded and colorful history of quilts, referencing them as sign markers, shields, portals and gateways to help secure safe passage to a parallel utopic, afro-futuristic community, what the artist has called “Afrotopia.” Intensely layering marks of fineliner pen, color pencil, collage and fabric, Booker conjures complex, multidimensional figurative works, his figures and forms cohereing together out of countless small acts.
MICHAEL ANDREW BOOKER, Sonder Gardens, 2022, 18″x13″, fineliner pen, color pencil, fabric and collage on paper
Mozambican artist Chirrime sources scrap materials from her environment and immediate communities, using fabric, burlap, rope, paint, beads, leather and more to produce dynamic collages that speak to African womanhood, and more broadly, the human condition. Slicing and collaging Western printed media, Trinidad and Tobago-based Gardner appropriates both content and practice, “creating false images and out-of-context narratives” that ironically and seductively mirror the Western world’s misrepresentation of people of color. Likewise taking a critical, redemptive eye to Western mass media, Myers Bulmash’s “Not Geo” series, a cutting play on National Geographic’s nickname, seeks to rehabilitate and restore to dignity the publication’s now notorious rendering of Africans and other non-Western people. LIZETTE CHIRRIME, Synchronization in the Blood, 2022, 38.5″x60.5″, fabric collage and mixed media stitched on canvas
GA GARDNER, Nothing is Out of Bounds, 2019, 24″”x36″, mixed media collage on paper
LISA MYERS BULMASH, Not Geo – Sitting Man, 2022, 12″x9″, ink, hand-marbled and rice paper collage on watercolor paper
Overall, a sense of construction charges the works in Creating a New Whole, whether that be the notion of renovating the present and past or extending out of the frame into sculptural dimensions. The latter can be seen in the sculptural geometric-like works of Robles-Gordon (pieces the artist recognizes as “temples, places of spiritual practice” and which reference her larger textile installations) and Kuroo, inspired by the tradition of origami in his native Japan, whose thickly layered applications of paint and canvas exist on the boundary between painting and three-dimensional art.
AMBER ROBLES-GORDON, The Temples of My Familiars: Lace, Marbles and Sacred Places Within, 2019, 24″X18″, mixed media collage on canvas
HIROMITSU KUROO, Pink & Ivory, 2021, 17″x14″, bleach, acrylic and textile collage on canvas
Abidingly constructive in spite of their rigorous interventions, the works in Creating a New Whole end up with more than they started with as a matter of process.
Michael Andrew Booker (b. USA) is a mixed media artist originally from Jackson, Mississippi who currently resides in Maryland. He received his BFA in Studio Art – Painting from Mississippi State University in 2008, and received his MFA in Studio Art from University of Maryland in 2012. He has exhibited in various galleries across Mississippi, Alabama, North Carolina, Maine, Maryland, Virginia and Washington DC. His work has been acquired by the David C. Driskell Center in College Park, MD. Currently, he is an Assistant Professor of Art at Montgomery College Takoma Park/Silver Spring. Booker has been represented by Morton Fine Art in Washington, DC since 2019.
Lisa Myers Bulmash (b. USA) is a collage and book artist who works primarily in acrylics, paper and found objects. Informally trained, Myers Bulmash began her career making handmade cards. After her father’s death in 2006, the artist felt compelled to take more personal risks in her creative life. Questions of identity, trust and the imperfect memory now drive most of her work. The artist aims to nudge the viewer into recognizing our shared stories, especially those narratives that are usually experienced in isolation. Myers Bulmash exhibits her work in group and solo shows throughout the Seattle metro area. She has been represented by Morton Fine Art since 2020.
Lizette Chirrime (b. Mozambique) creates intricate fabric collages on canvas that are at once celebratory and soul-stirring, as the artist flirts between figuration and abstraction to develop a unique—and distinctly African—visual language. Stitching together printed fabrics, beads, and other familiar objects in Southern Africa, Chirrime transforms simple materials into autobiographical and narrative tableaux freighted with deeply felt emotion and patterns of meaning. Many of her collages center maternal figures and stories of African motherhood, honoring their millennia-long legacy of strength and grace and positing their representation as a symbolic device. After receiving a three-month residency at Greatmore Studios in Cape Town in 2005, Chirrime spent the next 16 years of her practice in South Africa. In 2021, she made a return to her home country of Mozambique, where she now lives and continues to create.
She has been represented by Morton Fine Art since 2021.
GA Gardner (b. Republic of Trinidad and Tobago) uses print media content to create an intimate viewpoint of his intercultural experience. Through the lens of his Caribbean heritage, he dissects, covers up, reveals, layers, and re-contextualizes the material in the print publications he uses, to construct pieces that specifically discuss issues of politics, race, culture, and identity. The publications are a natural fit for Gardner, as they offer random vibrant color palettes, much like that of a typical Caribbean environment, and a great mixture of text and professionally photographed images. However the colors are universal and allow a conceptual approach to finding the common ground among all cultures. The artist combines these media depictions and information with natural paper and synthetic materials to aid in his message. By deconstructing the images into strips, or bits of torn paper, and assigning new overlays of unifying colors to the materials, Gardner erodes the original content at various levels often reducing them to shades with traces of random colors. The image that was once a bold headline new banner, or the newest eye catching product now struggles to be seen; muted, it now plays a secondary role to layers of paint and other mediums. The resulting serendipitous visual construction is an unsystematic reconfiguration and re-purposing to discuss culture, heritage and the symbolism of color.
He has been represented by Morton Fine Art since 2012.
Hiromitsu Kuroo (b. Japan) is a Japanese collage painter working in the tradition of origami. In his work, the canvas serves as the paper, and the gentle manipulation of its surface conveys intricate textural landscapes. The multiple layers of colors in his folded canvases are revealed by sanding the canvas surface. Interested in the juxtaposition and vitality of collaged pieces of canvas, he uses them to accentuate other emerging shapes in his compositions. Kuroo earned both a BFA and MFA from Tohoku University of Art & Design and has had solo exhibitions at the New York based Tenri Cultural Institute, Gloria Kennedy Gallery, MIKIMOTO NY, Makari and Bronx Community College, as well as the Tokyo-based Gallery Yamaguchi and G-Art Gallery. He was awarded Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grants in 2010 and 2019, Adolph & Esther Gottlieb Foundation Grant in 2022 and the artist residency program for The Golden Foundation in 2019. In 2020, he was interviewed for Forbes Magazine. He has been represented by Morton Fine Art since 2022.
Amber Robles-Gordon (b. Puerto Rico) completed her Masters of Fine Arts from Howard University in November 2011, where she has received annual awards and accolades for her artwork. Her exhibitions and artwork has been reviewed and/or featured in many esteemed publications including the Washington Post, the Miami Herald, Huffington Post and Callaloo Art & Culture in the African Diaspora.
Robles-Gordon was commissioned to create temporary and permanent public art installations for numerous art fairs and agencies such as the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities, DCCAH; Northern Virginia Fine Arts Association (NVFAA); Humanities Council of Washington, D.C.; Howard University, James C. Porter Colloquium; Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture; the Washington Projects for the Arts; Salisbury University; Martha’s Table; DC Department of General Services and Democracy Fund.
Additionally, she has been commissioned to teach workshops, give commentary and present about her artwork by the Smithsonian Anacostia Museum; Luther College; WETA Television; Al Jazeera; WPFW 89.3 fm; WAMU | American University Radio; The Kojo Nnamdi Show; Howard University, James A. Porter Colloquium; David C. Driskell Center; the Phillips Collection; the African American Museum in Philadelphia; McDaniel College; Salisbury University; Harvey B. Gantt Center; American University and National Museum of African American History and Culture. Her solo exhibition, Successions: Traversing US Colonialism, curated by Larry Ossei-Mensah, was hosted by the American University Museum at the Katzen Arts Center in 2021. She has been represented by Morton Fine Art since 2016.
Prina Shah (b. Kenya) is a contemporary artist currently living in Nairobi, Kenya. Born in Kenya to Indian parents, Shah also grew up partially in the U.K.; her artistic work embraces the indeterminacy of her national identity, including a fascination with the formation of selfhood as it relates to a specific cultural context. In a creative practice spanning mixed media—including sculpture, painting, glasswork and less traditional materials such as human hair—Shah’s art challenges the notions of individualized identity within a communal whole. Shah uses meditation as the impetus and foundation of her work, drawing the viewer into a personal narrative and inviting the participant to share in her visual journey of interconnection as she explores what it means to be one among many. Shah’s work has been included in numerous national and international exhibitions and has been acquired by the permanent collections of Finland’s Poikilo Kouvola Art Museum and the I&M Bank Collective in Kenya, as well as numerous private collections. She has been represented by Morton Fine Art since 2022.
Founded in 2010 in Washington, DC by curator Amy Morton, Morton Fine Art (MFA) is a fine art gallery and curatorial group that collaborates with art collectors and visual artists to inspire fresh ways of acquiring contemporary art. Firmly committed to the belief that art collecting can be cultivated through an educational stance, MFA’s mission is to provide accessibility to museum-quality contemporary art through a combination of substantive exhibitions and a welcoming platform for dialogue and exchange of original voice. Morton Fine Art specializes in a stellar roster of nationally and internationally renowned artists as well as has an additional focus on artwork of the African and Global Diaspora.
Morton Fine Art founded the trademark *a pop-up project in 2010. *a pop-up project is MFA’s mobile gallery component which hosts temporary curated exhibitions nationally. Gallery hours: By appointment only.
Morton Fine Art is pleased to present Strange Country, Strange Times, a solo exhibition of paintings and prints by the artist Katherine Hattam. Incorporating literary and art-historical elements into her work, Hattam’s interiors offer materialist explorations of ultimately psychic space. The artist’s first solo exhibition with the gallery, Strange Country, Strange Times will be on view through December 20, 2022 at Morton Fine Art’s Washington, D.C. space.
The Pinch, 2022, 30 x 22 in. – Jigsaw woodblock print on paper – Edition 14/15Strange Country, 2022, 30 x 22 in. – Jigsaw woodblock print on paper – Edition 4/5
Curatorial Statement by Amy Morton:
Katherine Hattam is an internationally-renowned artist and recent finalist for Australia’s prestigious Archibald Prize. We have worked together for over a decade, so it is a great honor to be able to share so much of her incredible artwork in one exhibition, made even more special by the fact that Strange Country, Strange Times is Hattam’s first U.S. solo exhibit at Morton Fine Art and first ever solo exhibition in the U.S.
Hattam’s work is unmistakable. Brightly shaded walls and windows, collaged book spines and iconographic depictions of native Australian fauna and flora make up much of her painterly practice – a lifelong investigation with the domestic interior as its focus. She incorporates literary and art-historical elements, focusing on materialist explorations of ultimately psychic space. Acknowledging a centuries-long preoccupation with domestic space as both the imaginative location and societal bounds of female artistic production, Hattam conjures doubly imbued sites of domestic labor and imaginative longing, full of totemic kitchen tables and charged dining-room chairs. Although uniquely Australian, Hattam’s canon inspires and relates within a global feminist dialogue.
A Strange Country, 2022, 49 x 60.5 in. – Mixed media on linenPerhaps, 2022, 21.5 x 25.5 in – Mixed media on linen
Artist Statement – by Katherine Hattam:
A painter and printmaker, my practice encompasses works on paper, collages and straightforward oil on linen. Since my mother—a great reader—died, I began to often incorporate books into my work, repurposing them to make a grid as the support in my paper or linen pieces.
The genesis of this exhibition, Strange Country, Strange Times, was the time of Covid and lockdowns. I created six new works during this period, stretching from 2020 to 2021. As an artist with my studio out the back of my house, I was fortunate in being able to work from my studio and—more than that—to revel in the time lockdowns opened up.
I found myself reflecting on the physical and geographic nature of my country, the islandness of Australia. Initially, this relative isolation protected us against the spread of the virus, but not for long. Nevertheless, it did make very clear what a strange island and what strange times that period was and is.
My Blue Pantheon, 2022, 30 x 23 in. – Oil on lineLove From, 2022, 11 x 13 in. – Mixed media on linenWomen’s Estate, 2022, 29 x 19 in. – Mixed media on linenThis Strange Island, 2022, 31 x 23 in. – Mixed media on linen
Katherine Hattam, This Strange Island, 2022. 16.5 x 12 in. Mixed media on linen Courtesy Morton Fine Art and the artist.
Morton Fine Art is presents “Strange Country, Strange Times,” a solo exhibition of paintings and prints by the artist Katherine Hattam. Incorporating literary and art-historical elements into her work, Hattam’s interiors offer materialist explorations of ultimately psychic space. The artist’s first solo exhibition in the U.S., “Strange Country, Strange Times” will be on view from November 16 – December 20, 2022, at Morton Fine Art’s Washington, D.C. space.
Brightly shaded walls and windows, collaged book spines and iconographic depictions of native Australian fauna and flora make up much of Hattam’s painterly practice, a lifelong investigation with the domestic interior as its focus. Acknowledging a centuries-long preoccupation with domestic space as both the imaginative site and societal bounds of female artistic production, Hattam’s totemic kitchen tables and charged dining-room chairs recur as motifs throughout her artistic practice, doubly imbued as locations of domestic labor and sites of imaginative longing.
Often, windows look out onto fantastic landscapes – a rueful rumination on experiences proffered but withheld. In “Strange Country, Strange Times,” the vibrancy of Hattam’s window-views infiltrates into the domestic interior, reflecting the seeping isolation of the recent pandemic years, when means of travel and discovery were often confined to the mind. Hattam was well-equipped for such conditions: her domestic spaces have always been inveterately imaginative, expanded by (and often literally constructed from) the pages and covers of the books she’s been reading. Her frank pastiche of passing literary and artistic influences onto these interior landscapes discloses the extent to which Hattam views the perception of space as an inherently psychological construction, with internal influences and personal histories governing the way we make sense of even the most familiar room.
In 2019, Hattam received a fellowship grant to study at the Australian Print Workshop undermaster printer Martin King, where she began learning the method of jigsaw woodcut printing, a technique of classical Japanese art that was later adopted by Edvard Munch and Paul Gauguin. Several works in this exhibition were first made at that workshop in the months immediately preceding the pandemic. One of this show’s title works, Strange Country, sets Australian animal life in a landscape originally taken from Giotto. Reflecting on these portentous prints, Hattam notes that the pandemic allowed her to recognize the isolation implicit to living in Australia, a condition of being which she has often imposed into her art.
Hokusai’s Great Wave off Kanagawa (1831), another woodblock print, is inserted regularly throughout Hattam’s work here, alternately as window views or paintings-within-paintings, and represents for the artists a mentality of time – waves of feminism, waves of coronavirus – that embraces natural rhythms based on a sense of tidal flow.
A longstanding image for Hattam is that of a wood-backed dining room chair, which the artist has drawn and even reconstructed as sculpture since the 1990s. The persistence of chairs, tables and books stand in for family members and personal influences, like portraits in absentia. Despite the inveterate cerebrality of her interior compositions, Hattam insists that her works are always “about actually being there: they exist because someone has been there to see it.”
Her furniture, despite its symbolically potency and personal resonance, is also steadfastly literal, and represents a window into the broader material world. Through her compositions, Hattam asks: How much of one’s daily life is a mixture of what’s going on in your head and what’s going on outside?
About the Artist
Katherine Hattam (b. 1950) is a Melbourne-based Australian artist. Literature was a passion for Hattam’s mother, who first read Freud in adolescence, later passing her appreciation down to her daughter. Hattam graduated from Melbourne University in 1974 with a BA in Literature and Politics and a focus on psychoanalytic theory.
Literary references abound in her work; some of the books used in her compositions derive from her mother’s extensive collection, while others are scoured from second-hand stores. Works on paper – drawing, printmaking and collage – are a continuing thread in her practice.
Hattam’s work is in the collections of the National Gallery of Australia, National Gallery of Victoria, Queensland Art Gallery, University of Queensland, Queensland University of Technology, Artbank, Heide, Art Gallery of South Australia, Deakin and La Trobe Universities, Warrnambool Art Gallery and Bendigo Art Gallery. In 1992 she was awarded an MFA by the Victorian College of the Arts, and in 2004 she was awarded a PhD by Deakin University.
She has been represented by Morton Fine Art since 2011.
Morton Fine Art
Morton Fine Art Founded in 2010 in Washington D.C. by curator Amy Morton, Morton Fine Art (MFA) is a fine art gallery and curatorial group that collaborates with art collectors and visual artists to inspire fresh ways of acquiring contemporary art. Firmly committed to the belief that art collecting can be cultivated through an educational stance, MFA’s mission is to provide accessibility to museum-quality contemporary art through a combination of substantive exhibitions and a welcoming platform for dialogue and exchange of original voice.
Morton Fine Art specializes in a stellar roster of nationally and internationally renowned artists as well as has an additional focus on artwork of the African Diaspora.
GA Gardner. So You, 2014. 42 x 65 in. Mixed media on mylar.
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Morton Fine Art: curator's notes 