Congratulations to LISA MYERS BULMASH for the rich review of her solo exhibition “The Home Inside My Head” in today’s print edition of The Washington Post by Mark Jenkins. (Arts & Style Section 12/27/20)
Lisa Myers Bulmash
Also spurred by pandemic-era exile from everyday life, Lisa Myers Bulmash conceived a Morton Fine Art show “The Home Inside My Head”. The Seattle artist combines found and personal objects into 3-D collages that conjure both African American history and her family’s own story. The pieces juggle the antiquarian and the immediate to express what Bulmash’s statement calls “a Black and female viewpoint”.
One series, “Rare & Exquisite,” places oversize models of endangered butterflies atop maps of regions of the United States collaged from Colonial-era (and thus not entirely reliable) charts. The effect is to correlate the threatened species — affixed with heavy railroad spikes that evoke hard labor –with Black people whose place in this country has always been at risk.
Examples of another antique tool, the wooden washboard, serve as frames in the “Bought and Paid For” series. The washboards hold books and ovals made of twine, which enclose overlapping transparencies of family photos. The pictures depict various old structures, including houses, and children at play. Again, Bulmash contrasts rough materials with fragile beings.
It seems apt that another piece is based on a torn piece of old sheet music repaired by kintsugi, the Japanese technique of using gold to both accentuate and exalt the cracks in a broken vessel. Bulmash’s assemblages can be seen as a bid to mend history.
Cauldron 11, 2016, 60″x60″, acrylic, silkscreen and sumi ink on paper
Crest 3, 2019 Acrylic, sumi ink and collage on paper. 60 x 100 in
Fallow, 2013 Acrylic and sumi ink on paper. 60 x 140 in
Ley, 2019, 45″x55″, acrylic, sumi ink and collage on paper
My work’s abstractions arise from the subjects I portray: ecological and geological cycles, processes of chemical corrosion and natural efflorescence. With roots in traditions of Chinese landscape painting, my monumentally sized paintings and installations evolve a fantastic, abstract vision of the natural world. My latest work confronts the challenge: the resuscitation of landscape painting in a world where “landscape” is represented and defined through an ever-widening field of digital, graphic, and visual forms. How can a painting capture flux, abundance, waste, fertility, and the collision and collusion of diverse forms? How can it respond to the pressure we place on our era’s fragile ecosystem? My paintings explore both questions by sustaining tension between what is artificial and what is natural, between what is chemical and what is biological, between organic and inorganic. The paper on which I paint is not only a recognition of a tradition of Chinese painting; it is also a medium of vulnerability and expansiveness, susceptible to crease and tear as well as to collage and collation. My own role in the creation of the paintings strikes a balance between the purposive and the protective. I trust to process, chance, and change, but I encourage, direct, and facilitate all of these. In my most recent work, I hope to live in the tradition of landscape painting, experiencing it for what it has always been: an occasion for radical experimentation and confrontation with the world, in the broadest sense of the term that sustains us. – KATHERINE MANN
Prizm Art Fair gives a platform to African Diasporic perspectives
Coinciding with Miami Art Week, Prizm Art Fair is championing and examining the intersections of African cinema traditions and visual art
Sthenjwa Luthuli, Reaching For Stars (2020)
In spite of widespread coronavirus-related hurdles, 2020 has offered glimmers of hope for the art world, particularly in the steps taken to highlight, and rectify the lack of diversity across the industry.
One art fair, Prizm, has been spotlighting diverse voices in contemporary visual art since 2013, with a core mission to widen the scope of international contemporary art from Africa and the African Diaspora.
By carving out a space for cross-cultural exchange in Miami and beyond, the fair seeks to address socio-political and cultural issues pertinent to people of African descent, while educating and nurturing the city’s inhabitants.
Victor Ekpuk, Mother Series #1 (2019) as seen at Prizm Art Fair. Image courtesy of Morton Fine Art
‘African Diasporic communities have attempted repeatedly to blanket themselves from a host of incessant obstacles – systemic injustice, racism, economic disparity, gender inequality – while the goal post of progress stretched farther away with each giant leap made towards it,’ says Mikhaile Solomon, founder and director of Prizm.
For its eighth edition, coinciding with an unsurprisingly scaled-down Miami Art Week, the fair’s online programme will feature 47 artists in ‘Noir, Noir: Meditations on African Cinema and its Influence on Visual Art’, an exhibition curated and organised by Solomon and interdisciplinary artist William Cordova. Noir, Noir references the African avant-garde film tradition and encourages a deeper understanding of global African identities through the intersection of cinema and contemporary visual art. Elsewhere, highlights include a programme of film screenings and talks led by leaders in Diasporic Visual arts.
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John Baloyi, Lititha 4 (2020). Courtesy of Dyman Gallery
Participating galleries hail from eleven countries including the United States, Caribbean and the African continent including Barbados, Ethiopia, Haiti, Jamaica, Martinique, Saint Maarten, South Africa and Trinidad. Featured artists include Victor Ekpuk, Yanira Collado, Sthenjwa Luthuli, Alicia Piller, Justice Mukheli, Versia Harris and Milena Carranza Valcárcel. Prizm will also spotlight emerging Miami-based artists who engage in socio-political issues pertinent to people of African descent, and in the city’s growth as a cultural hub.
Peter Wayne Lewis, Suite in Grey # 13 (2010)
Yanira Collado, Untitled (2020)
Justice Mukheli, Departure (2019). Courtesy of Dyman Gallery
Francisco Maso, Obtuse Exercises for Dissenting Bodies (2018 – ongoing)
Milena Carranza Valcárcel, Serie ’Afroperuvian Eggun’ (2010)
Prizm Art Fair will be accessible online until 21 December 2020. prizmartfair.com
Virtual tour and artist narration of LISA MYERS BULMASH’s first east coast solo exhibition, “The Home Inside My Head” at Morton Fine Art in Washington, DC.
“For most of this year, we’ve had to make a home inside our heads — because a virus was blocking the way out to “normal” life. That was fine by me at first: home is my castle and retreat. But there’s no vacation from yourself, or the deepest fears for your children’s future. Even a rich interior life becomes over-stuffed with emotions, memories and uncomfortable truths. The works in “The Home Inside My Head” reflect this ambivalence. The “Bought and Paid For” series was born from the love and deep gratitude for my ancestors’ struggles to give me greater opportunities. But even during my sheltered childhood, I recognized not every house feels like home as I experienced it. Not every parent prepares their child for ugly realities like institutional racism. As a 21st century Black woman, I need to make work that explores my disillusionments as well as my hopes for America. Collages like “One Nation, Under Reconstruction” are my attempts to name these experiences as truthfully as I can. I center a Black and female viewpoint in my work, as examples of a specific story illuminating the general human condition. But there’s something else. We can’t continue to tell each other the same stories featuring the same old heroes. Those icons accomplished amazing things everywhere but at home. We need to imagine our next home before we can live in it: this is the place where we build new narratives.” – LISA MYERS BULMASH, 2020
“Katherine Hattam’s work sees the terrain of language as a wilder and more intimate place. This is not a home or a homeland, it is a landscape that belongs to itself. Perhaps it belongs to no one, but lives as all beings live, against the possibility of being owned by another…”
-Dr. Anne Norton
Stacey and Henry Jackson President’s Distinguished Professor of Political ScienceUniversity of Pennsylvania, USA
Selected Collections include:
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, ACT
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, VIC
Ian Potter, Melbourne University, VIC
Bendigo Art Gallery, VIC
Warrnambool Art Gallery, VIC
Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, QLD
Mornington Art Gallery, VIC
Grafton City Art Gallery, NSW
National Bank of Australia
Potter Warburg Collection
Hummerston Clark Collection
Bankers Trust Collection
Smorgon Collection
Queen Victoria Hospital Collection
George Patterson Collection
The Darling Foundation
Box Hill City Art Gallery, QLD
Hamilton City Gallery, VIC
Minter Ellison Collection
Artbank
Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne, VIC
Art Gallery of NSW, Sydney, NSW
Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, VIC
Art Gallery of SA, Adelaide, SA
RACV Collection
University of Queensland, Brisbane, QLD
LaTrobe University (LUMA), VIC
“Anger and Tenderness”, 2020, 19″x25″, mixed media collage
“A Woman’s Work is Never Done”, 2020, 17″x21″, mixed media collage
“Fly Away”, 2020, 15″x19″, mixed media collage
“Kangaroo Side On”, 2020, 17″x15″, mixed media collage
NOIR, NOIR: MEDITATIONS ON AFRICAN CINEMA AND ITS INFLUENCE ON VISUAL ART PRIZM 2020 – dedicated to exhibiting international artists from the African Diaspora – returns with its eighth edition, taking place from December 1 to 21, 2020. A VIP preview week will take place from November 24 to 30, 2020. PRIZM Art Fair 2020 will be available for online viewing through the PRIZM website and Artsy.net. Film screenings and PRIZM’s panel talks program will be available through the fair’s website.For its eighth edition, PRIZM will present a curated exhibition entitled Noir, Noir: Meditations on African Cinema and Its Influence On Visual Art curated and organized by William Cordova, and Mikhaile Solomon. The special section will include 45 artists from various global locales including, Congo, Haiti, Jamaica, Barbados, Nigeria, Trinidad and Tobago, Saint Maarten, Ethiopia, Sierra Leone, South Africa, and the United States.
“Noir Noir…” revisits and contemplates the layered rendering of complex communal histories through the lens of African/Diasporic filmmakers past and present, seeking a deeper understanding of global African identity through an evaluation of its intersections with contemporary visual art. Noir, Noir will examine how these films have functioned as harbingers of global African/Diasporic liberation movements and expound on the intersections between contemporary art practice and the spectrum of African/Diasporic film traditions. Noir, Noir references the African avant-garde film tradition as well as contemporary African/Diasporic filmmakers to explore how visual artists have created bodies of work inspired by narratives, aesthetics, cultural notes, and social commentaries poetically rendered in the various cinematic modalities.
Woman in the Mirror, 2019, 36″x28″x6, powder coated steel, edition of 8
The Politician 2018, 36″x28″x6, powder coated steel, edition of 8
Fish For Lunch, 2020, 48″x40″, acrylic on panel
Royals and Goddesses, 2019, acrylic on canvas, 60″x48″
The Prophet, 2019, 36″x28″x6, powder coated steel, edition of 8
Woman Dancing in the Mirror, 2019, 36″x28″x6, powder coated steel, edition of 8
Hip Sista #11, 2015, 60″x48″, acrylic on canvas
Mother Series 1, 2019, 25.5″x20″, acrylic, graphite and collage on paper
Mother Series 3, 2019, 25.5″x20″, acrylic, graphite and collage on paper
Mask Series 1, 2018, 24″x18″, acrylic on canvas
Mask Series 2, 2018, 24″x18″, acrylic on canvas
Victor Ekpuk is a Nigerian-American artist based in Washington, DC.
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 that results in the interplay of art and writing.
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”.
Mr. EKPUK’s artwork can be found the permanent collection of the following museums and institutions:
Smithsonian National Museum of African American History & Culture, Washington, DC
Smithsonian Museum of African Art, Washington DC, USA
Krannert Art Museum, USA
Hood Museum, USA
Brooks Museum, USA
Arkansas Art Center, USA
Newark Museum, New Jersey, USA
The World Bank, Washington DC, USA
University of Maryland University College Art Collection, USA
The U.S. Department of State
He has been represented by Morton Fine Art in Washington, DC since 2012.
The profound influence of Wayne Thiebaud on a new generation of artists is front and center in this celebration of the longtime UC Davis art professor’s centennial. Pairings explore how Thiebaud forecast the future of painting through his personal journey to find meaning and reinvention in the medium’s history in ways that are both current and timeless. Works by contemporary artists who have been inspired by Thiebaud as a fellow painter as well as those of former students reveal unexpected connections and sources of inspiration.
Curators: Rachel Teagle and Susie Kantor
An exhibition featuring Andrea Bowers, Julie Bozzi (’74, MFA ’76), Christopher Brown (MFA ’76), Robert Colescott, Gene Cooper, Richard Crozier (MFA ’74), Fredric Hope, Alex Israel, Grace Munakata (’80, MFA ’85), Bruce Nauman (MA, ’66), Jason Stopa, Vonn Cummings Sumner (’98, MFA ’00), Ann Harrold Taylor (MFA ’85), Michael Tompkins (’81, MFA ’83), Clay Vorhes, Patricia Wall (’72), Jonas Wood and Lynette Yiadom-Boakye
Channeling subjects such as dream imagery, imagined landscapes, geodes, outer space and The Big Bang, LIZ TRAN explores the shapes of nature, with the infusion of fantastical, pulsing synthetic hues. The psychedelic visuals are harvested from the place where inner-verse meets outer-verse, where optical misfires combine with a vacuum pull moving at the speed of light. Through painting, sculpture and installation, she creates atmospheres that aim to activate.
Public collections of Tran’s work include the City of Seattle’s Portable Works Collection, Capital One, Vulcan Inc., Baer Art Center, Camac Art Centre, The El Paso Children’s Hospital, Harborview Medical Center, The King County Public Art Collection and The Child Center. Tran has completed multiple special projects and installations, including work for VH1Save the Music Foundation, The Upstream Music Fest, The Seattle Art Museum, The Brain Project Toronto, Public Art at The Aqua Art Fair Miami and Vulcan Inc.
She has been awarded multiple fellowships and grants; including a Grant for Artist Projects (GAP) from Artist Trust, Clowes Fellowship for residency at the Vermont Studio Center, the Nellie Cornish Scholarship and residency at The Camac Art Centre in France, The Baer Art Center in Iceland, Jentel, Millay Colony for the Arts and The Center for Contemporary Printmaking. She resides in Seattle, WA. She has been represented by Morton Fine Art since 2020.
“Solidarity 6” (2020) by Meron Engida. Acrylic on canvas, 68.50 x 67.50 in. (Courtesy of the Artist and Morton Fine Art)
“Solidarity 11” (2020) by Meron Engida. Acrylic on canvas, 36 x 36 in. (Courtesy of the Artist and Morton Fine Art)
Meron Engida
By Mark Jenkins Oct. 16, 2020 at 7:00 a.m. EDT
Color, pattern and family are what Ethiopia-bred D.C. painter Meron Engida remembers about her homeland. Or at least that’s what the neo-expressionist emphasizes in “Solidarity” at Morton Fine Art, her first U.S. solo show. Most of Engida’s canvases are crowded with women in domestic scenes, their faces rendered in simple black lines, except for the bright red oblongs that often represent lips. Children appear in many of the vignettes, and one of the few pictures that depicts just two people shows a mother and infant. It’s a self-portrait, but then that’s essentially what all these paintings are.AD
The circles, florals and zigzags that decorate their clothing also appear around and atop the figures, either painted or incised into the pigment, merging subject and embellishment. That unity suggests the influence of fabric design, as does the flatness of Engida’s style. Bright reds and blues punctuate the compositions, but the dominant tones are earthy. The tans and browns express a range of skin tones in ethnically diverse Ethiopia. In Engida’s stylized vision of that country, the landscape is primarily human.
Meron Engida: Solidarity Through Oct. 28 at Morton Fine Art, 52 O St. NW, No. 302. Open by appointment.
KATHERINE TZU-LAN MANN’s wall wrap installation at the Kreeger Museum
We are delighted to welcome visitors back into the galleries, beginning on September 23 with the opening of our special exhibition, TRACES.
A Unique Gallery Experience Spend up to 50 minutes alone in the galleries with your group. Visitors will need to obtain a free timed-entry pass to enter the Museum. Each timed-entry session is limited to a single household group or quarantine pod that will be able to enjoy the galleries with only their group during their 50-minute window. Advanced reservations are required.
TRACES features regional artists Billy Friebele, Roxana Alger Geffen, Rania Hassan, Sebastian Martorana, Katherine Tzu-Lan Mann, Antonio McAfee, Brandon Morse, and Johab Silva. Guest curated by Sarah Tanguy, the show explores how the past evokes shifting memories while suggesting new and present narratives. Rich in representation and abstraction, TRACES encompasses painting, photography, mixed media, sculpture, sound, and video, and includes several site-responsive installations. As the artists dialogue with their source materials, they mine the many meanings of “trace” as noun and verb, and engage the themes of displacement, connectivity and transformation. Variously inspired by personal and cultural history, the natural and built environments, and the human condition, they offer an impassioned take on the issues of the day and suggest possible futures to come.
