“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.
North Carolina visual artist Maya Freelon balances strength and fragility in her massive water-stained tissue paper installations. by Liza Roberts | photography by Chris Charles
Maya Freelon’s tissue paper sculptures are abstract, a confluence of kaleidoscopic color and organic shape. They move with a breeze, the passing of a person, the opening of a door. They make powerful, lasting statements with impermanent, inexpensive materials. Most of all, they are inquisitive. What is art? they ask. What’s it made of? Who gets to make it? Who decides?
The work is about “challenging norms—social norms, economic norms and art norms—by turning tissue paper into a fine work of art,” says Freelon. “It’s about the fragility of life, and transformation, and the ability to see beauty in a lot of different things.”
Often made in collaboration with groups of people, her work celebrates “the communal aspect… the ancestral heritage, the connection to quilt-making in my family and the African-American tradition of making a way out of no way.” Metaphorically and literally, Freelon’s work is a manifestation of its maker: beautiful and forthright, vulnerable but unflinching; lithe, elegant and defiantly individual.
RETURN TO THE TRIANGLE
This month, Freelon’s massive water-stained tissue paper quilts, including pieces made by as many as 100 far-flung community collaborators, will hang from the walls and ceilings of Raleigh’s Contemporary Art Museum (CAM) as part of the Durham artist’s first solo museum exhibition in North Carolina. Also on view will be her tissue ink monoprints, images of streaking color and motion that capture the dripping ink of saturated tissue paper through a process Freelon patented. Some of these include archival family photos, some are on traditional rectangular canvases, some have been crafted in asymmetric shapes and coated in a thick epoxy glaze. Even if the museum can’t open for the public to view these works in person, the show will be installed and shared virtually, says CAM director Gab Smith.
Freelon’s fans around the country and the globe will be glad to hear it. At Miami Art Week last year, she was named one of five young artists to watch. In 2018, she installed massive, wafting tissue paper stalactites at the Smithsonian Arts and Industries Building in Washington, D.C. She’s lived and worked in Madagascar, Eswatini and Italy as part of the U.S. State Department’s Art in Embassies program. She’s collaborated with Google and Cadillac, and her work is in the collections of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, the University of Maryland and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, among others.
Back here in Raleigh, locals helped Freelon use torn tissue and glue sticks to make quilts to hang from the trees outside the North Carolina Museum of Art (NCMA) to celebrate the museum’s expanded African art gallery in September of 2017. NCMA chief curator Linda Dougherty commissioned Freelon’s “quilting bee” installation after seeing a sculpture she’d created for one of the embassies. “Maya had done this beautiful, suspended piece, and I was amazed,” Dougherty says. “I love the ephemeral nature of her materials… they’re meant to be there for the moment, intentionally. It gives her a freedom to experiment. I love that open-endedness.”
INHERITANCE
Freelon’s talent and expressive ability were apparent early on, and she comes by both naturally as the daughter of two renowned artists and the great-granddaughter of another. Her mother, the jazz singer Nnenna Freelon, is a six-time Grammy Award nominee. Her father was revered architect Phil Freelon, the architect of record of the African-American History and Culture Museum on the Mall in Washington, D.C. His own grandfather was Allan Freelon, a noted Impressionist painter whose work was celebrated during the Harlem Renaissance. Her namesake and godmother was the poet Maya Angelou (“Auntie Maya”), a close friend of “Queen Mother” Frances Pierce, Freelon’s beloved grandmother. Angelou once described Freelon’s work, which she bought for her own collection, as “visualizing the truth about the vulnerability and power of the human being.”
Freelon was a precocious teenage talent at Williston Northampton School in Massachusetts, where she transferred to finish high school after two years at the Durham School of the Arts. There, she mostly painted portraits, but “she was always a colorist, very good with color,” says Marcia Reed, her painting instructor at the school, who says that even then, she possessed an impressive “energy and driving force.” By 2006, she was a graduate student at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, living with her grandmother Pierce.
It was there that she came upon a stack of multicolored tissue paper in the basement of the house. The paper had most likely been in the same spot for fifty years. Drips from a leaky pipe had mottled the stack over time, moving the color from piece to piece, turning the sheets into gossamer rainbows. Freelon was transfixed, and soon consumed with turning the water-stained tissue paper into art, and using water herself to mark and alter tissue paper, intent on “making something out of nothing.” That discovery, borne out of her connection to her family, became her signature medium.
“Often, artists think they need to work with precious materials,” says Allan Edmunds, founder and director of the Brandywine Workshop and Archives in Philadelphia, where Freelon completed a residency years ago. Her use of tissue paper to make art both sets her apart and connects her to ingenious forebears, says Edmunds. “It’s in the tradition of working with what is available to you and being even more creative because you’ve created a challenge for yourself. I put her in league with El Anatsui.” Coincidentally, it is work by this Ghanaian artist—glittering, undulating woven fabric of found bottle caps—that’s a centerpiece of the NCMA’s permanent collection in the newly-renovated African art gallery that Freelon helped celebrate with her collaborative tissue quilts.
Making something out of nothing is part of the inspiration for the title of Freelon’s exhibit at CAM: Greater Than or Equal To. Freelon also sees the title as an inquiry: “As an artist, as a Black person, as a female, I am constantly raising this question to myself,” she says. How is value—of a person, a life, a work of art—determined, and who determines it? “If we don’t value lives, if we don’t value making this world equal, then we end up having a situation where certain people’s lives mean more than others.” Her use of the symbol ≥ “is to remind folks that it’s a constant question…an opportunity for you to be aware of your judgement and where you’re placing your value.”
She knows where her revered grandmother Pierce would have placed that value. “I think of a quote from my grandmother, which is that we come from a family of sharecroppers who never got their fair share,” she says. Grandmother Pierce’s grandchildren and “every Black person making the world a better place” were “our ancestors’ wildest dreams,” she also said. Freelon considers: “To have survived what it took to get here, and then slavery, and then segregation and racism—we’re living within it, and we’re still existing, and now we have a chance to thrive.”
Personally, Freelon says she’s more than thriving. “I’ve never felt prouder, or better or more grateful that I took the leap, that all of my focus goes to making art and sharing it with the world… I feel like I’m just getting started.”
USING HER VOICE
As Freelon grows in her art, she’s aware of her growing platform, as well. In a video posted on social media on Juneteenth, she says: “My artwork is about using accessible materials to challenge racist paradigms that have been set forth and perpetuated by the white art world.” The video shows her setting fire to her art; an effort to seize attention in support of the Black Lives Matter movement, and to make her message heard. “It’s about creating my own currency and value, and it’s about making space for and inspiring the next generation of Black artists.” In social media and in conversation, Freelon encourages her fellow Black artists to stand up for themselves, to challenge structures that don’t work for them and to know the value of their work.
One day in late June, the day before her birthday and not long before the first anniversary of the death of her father, Freelon is reflective. She is at Vanhook Farm in Hillsborough, a bucolic place where she and her children spend a lot of time. The farm–Black-owned, Freelon points out—has long been in the family of her partner of two years, Jess Vanhook. The location is both a solace and a symbol for Freelon. “I’ve thought about our ancestors and how for them, possessing the land means that you are taking control of your own future,” she says. “You’re asking the earth to produce something for you that has value. I realized that I was doing that as an artist, cultivating something that’s made by my own hands, determining my own value and worth.”
Even as Freelon watches over her nine-year-old son Aion, her three-year old daughter Nova, and Vanhook’s five-year-old nephew Prince, she’s focused on her art and what’s pressing on her mind. That includes supporting and mentoring younger Black artists, telling them the things she wished she’d known earlier on, both practical and philosophical: “Make sure you have an emergency fund. Make sure you apply to at least five grants a year. Be prepared to apply for art residencies that offer free studio space. Reach out to artists you admire, look at their CVs.” In a July Instagram post, she asked followers for the names of Black women artists she can pass on to museums and curators. She wants them to believe in themselves, wants them to “know that their power is their work.”
Freelon says she had to learn all of that “on the fly.” If somebody had told her earlier, she says, “I could have made better choices, more informed choices. We need more community and connection between artists.”
If Freelon sounds older than her 38 years, it could be because she experienced a lot early on. She has been married and wrenchingly divorced, and experienced tragedy with the death of a newborn baby, a three-day-old son named Wonderful. She connects her work directly with that experience. “There are just so many complexities to life, the fragility of it. And back to the artwork: it’s tissue paper. If it gets wet, it will break into a million pieces, but when it is dry, it has power and strength. When you unify those elements, it becomes a force to be reckoned with.”
Art has taught her, despite the challenges she has faced, that everything she needs is within her. “Nobody can determine your future,” she says. As a younger woman, “I think I felt like I needed my parents, or I needed my husband, or I needed things or people to help push me to where I need to be, where in actuality, when everything was stripped away from me, and it was just me left, that’s all I had. That’s when I realized the drive and the energy and the purpose that’s inside.”
And that’s what her art brings her. In her work, Freelon says, “I find peace. I find sanity. I find my purpose. I find—in working with my hands—I find community.
“I find love.”
JOIN WALTER FOR AN IMMERSIVE EXPERIENCE CELEBRATING DIVERSITY, COMMUNITY AND ART. NORTH CAROLINA NATIVE AND NATIONALLY RECOGNIZED ARTIST MAYA FREELON WILL DISCUSS HER NEW EXHIBIT, GREATER THAN OR EQUAL TO, AND OFFER GUESTS A LOOK INTO HER CREATIVE PROCESS. CLICK HERE TO JOIN!
Don’t miss ROSEMARY FEIT COVEY’s artwork in Virtual MPAartfest 2020, a two week online juried fine art and craftshow/sale featuring the work of local and regional visual artists. This online event features contemporary art, special musical performances from some of the DC-area’s best musical talents*, a virtual version of the much-loved New Dominion Women’s Club Children’s Art Walk, the participation of many McLean Community organizations, and daily artist studio talks with our participating artists. WHEN: Sunday, October 4 through Sunday, October 18, 2020 WHERE: www.MPAartfest.org HOW: Admission is FREE for online events.
MERON ENGIDA, Solidarity 3, 2020, 33″x35.5″, acrylic on canvas
About Solidarity
My art has been my language to express myself and my voice. My work explores personal experiences and my Ethiopian cultural heritage. Oftentimes my subject matter reflects my life as a mother in a multiracial family. My figures are diverse and often huddled together, with wide eyes. Children and lambs are the visual vocabulary I use to express innocence and forgiveness. I intend to create dialogue about diversity and women – for example, a face with open mouth represents women freely exploring and expressing themselves. Women also hold in more pain than they let out and hold each other demonstrating resilience. My most recent series addresses challenges of race and identity. One painting depicts figures from all of the Ethiopian tribes together, celebrating each other’s uniqueness. My inner feelings and values call for the love, embrace and celebration of humanity, transcending past and present, despite our differences. – MERON ENGIDA, 2020
MERON ENGIDA, See the Love, 2020 36″x36″, acrylic on canvas
MERON ENGIDA, Solidarity 11, 2020, 36″x36″, acrylic on canvas
About MERON ENGIDA
Born in Ethiopia, MERON ENGIDA received her degree from Addis Ababa University School of Fine Arts and Design in 2007.
She has exhibited her paintings extensively in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia including at the National Art Gallery. Solidarity marks her inaugural U.S. solo exhibition at Morton Fine Art in Washington, DC. She notes, “When I start a painting, there are no rules. Sometimes I work from pictures but most of the time I create from imagination. Sometimes I start with a drawing and other times with acrylic paint on canvas which I layer with tones, symbols, and a motif. The figures emerge with expressive features, emotions, and texture. I work on the paintings with trusting mark-making, not knowing where I’m going. My creative process continues until I am surprised and content and then I revisit later to see if it is indeed finished.”
She is represented by Morton Fine Art in Washington, DC.
MERON ENGIDA, Solidarity 5, 2020, 30.5″x76.5″, acrylic on canvas
MERON ENGIDA, Solidarity 9, 2020, 33.5″x32″, acrylic on canvas
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
52 O St NW #302
Washington, DC 20001
COVID-19 protocol: By appointment. Mask required. Contact the gallery for supplementary artwork documentation such as detail images and short videos. Safe, no contact door to door delivery available. Shipping nationally and internationally.
I never told you, but I loved to talk with you just after you talked with God. I laughed when I heard you roaring at your reflection and thought, for all your conviction, surely a lion might exit when the bathroom door opened. But it was you. It was always you. I had my doubts, but I found myself waiting to witness the stillness in your eyes after you asked the questions ailing you. You disappeared deep into your worries and drowned the fight out of me with your waves of silence, but when you had the answers you were seeking, that stillness was like coming up for fresh air.
You said to call you King. From the beginning, you were impossible to predict. I braced myself for reactions that did not come and surrendered to the responses that did. When I got accepted to Medgar Evers College, excited to move to New York but nervous to leave you in your state of mind, your first response was, “When are we leaving?” Our move meant freedom from the southern walls closing in on you and a chance to know the northern ones. But walls are walls.
We found a place on Flatbush and Ocean, a world away from Chesapeake, and started a life. I told you just after we’d bought that cane juice from Coconut Rob. If only I’d told you before, we’d still have that five dollars or at least a taste of the sweet relief that spilled onto the sweltering sidewalk at the news of you becoming a father. You made a thousand decisions for the three of us as we walked down Fulton Street. You decided for us to abstain from meat and dairy, despite my sudden cravings. You vowed to move us farther into Brooklyn where you found men to revere, the men who made sisters out of the women they refused to court. And you decided that I would drop out of school. This was when you started burning sage every morning and having your divine conversations at the altar of my belly. It’s when you started to redress supremacy, drape it in dashikis and ankhs rather than disrobing it completely. The possibility in my womb frightened you, broke you, and emboldened the part of you who felt the pressure to shape a world where you reigned supreme, because now you had to share it with your own creation.
Your best friends were absent for your transition to fatherhood; Calvin was locked up and Deonté had taken his own life. Black men are an endangered species, you told me. Without the black man there are no more black people. But I was there. I was always there for all your learning and unlearning, your unleashed hurt that latched onto the only other living thing in the room. You didn’t want to heal, you wanted to humiliate. You went to war in cerebral camouflage, armed with the very weaponry that had destabilized you. You went in alone, but then you found your tribe of brothers on the same quest to decolonize the mind. But didn’t you think to bring love with you?
We went to battle many times, and called many truces, but I don’t know who surrendered first. It was after we saw Lamine, who sold black soap and shea butter on the corner of Flatbush and Nevins, slap Aya. She had been mocking Lamine with a sermon or calling him monsieur or something in Wolof when his hand, which had just folded his prayer mat, knocked the words and two teeth out of her mouth. She was holding their baby.
What a disgrace, you said when we got to the subway platform.
I know, I can’t believe he did that. I raised my voice as the train approached the station. You looked at me from the corner of your eye, but I looked at the number 2 train because I realized he wasn’t the disgrace you were talking about.
You females is crazy. And you entered the train without me.
We fought that night until I went into labor. Malika broke my water a month early in an act of protest declaring that war wasn’t a necessary evil, giving birth was.
After she was born, I knew we were done. I found myself alone, numb, and breastfeeding, and you kept on building your kingdom. You collected women, like eggs in a carton you could carry, crack, and coax to your taste. Women who wouldn’t question you, who would lighten your load and whatever seeds you planted in them.
Love is acceptance and acceptance is a curious balm. At Malika’s first birthday we celebrated too loudly. Three officers arrived, their instruments primed to quiet our noise. The first bullet hit you, but I dropped the cake. The fifth and fatal bullet flooded my numbness with all of the lights, movement, cries, and reds and blues around us. I looked into your eyes and saw the stillness, and I knew I caught you just after God.
Published September 27th, 2020
Dominique Taylor is a writer and video editor. She enjoys reading and talking about books on her YouTube channel, The Storyscape. She studied Political Science at Old Dominion University.
Kesha Bruce is an artist and curator from Iowa. After completing a BFA from the University of Iowa, Bruce received an MFA in painting from Hunter College in New York City. She has since been awarded fellowships at the New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA), The Vermont Studio Center, The CAMAC Foundation, and The Puffin Foundation. Regularly exhibited by Morton Fine Art in Washington D.C., and numerous galleries in France, Bruce’s work is part of the collections in the Smithsonian Museum of African American History and Culture, The Amistad Center for Art and Culture, The University of Iowa Women’s Center, The En Foco Photography Collection, and MOMA’s Franklin Furnace Artist Book Collection. Now based between the United States and France, Bruce’s most recent solo exhibition, We Can Birth Worlds at Morton Fine Art, can be viewed online.
This billboard designed by Nate Lewis is posted on Washington Boulevard, in Larimer.
IMAGE COURTESY OF REMEMBER WHAT THEY DID
Artist Nate Lewis spent nine years as an ICU nurse in the Washington, D.C. area. And the Beaver Falls native has been more than a little aggrieved by public discussions of the coronavirus, especially how Donald Trump has downplayed the pandemic. But a new billboard campaign is giving Lewis and other artists a chance to shape the debate themselves.
Artist Nate Lewis grew up in Beaver Falls.
CREDIT REMEMBER WHAT THEY DID
“There’s a lot of trust that has been lost because of the President, really — his disregard for science and his disregard for caring for people,” said Lewis.
Speaking of the virus on July 1 – and echoing a frequent talking point of his — Trump said, “that’s going to just sort of disappear, I hope.” The illness has now claimed nearly 190,000 lives in the U.S. Trump’s words are featured in Lewis’ contribution to Remember What They Did, a new, artist-driven billboard campaign meant to spark voter turnout in battleground cities.
Lewis’ design pairs Trump’s quote with the image of a CT scan of a COVID-19 patient. Lewis used the image because “it’s an eyewitness account… about how real this virus is.”
In late August, the billboard was pasted up high over Washington Boulevard, in Larimer, and on North Craig Street, near Bigelow, in the Upper Hill District. In all, there are four Remember What They Did billboards in Pittsburgh, and 10 others split between Detroit and Milwaukee. The campaign targets communities with high concentrations of voters who are young, Black, or Latino. A spokesperson for Artists United for Change, one of the nonprofit groups behind the initiative, said it will ultimately include “dozens of billboards … and hundreds of street art posters” in six cities total.
Artists United for Change is a political committee tied to progressive groups.
There are now seven billboard designs, each by a different artist. The artists include internationally known names like Shepard Fairey (known for his “Hope” poster of Barack Obama) and Swoon (a.k.a. Caledonia Curry, who coincidentally just opened a solo exhibit at Pittsburgh gallery Contemporary Craft).
Six of the seven billboards feature Trump quotes, including “fine people on both sides” (describing counter-protesters clashing with white nationalists in Charlotesville, Va., in 2017), and “When the looting starts the shooting starts,” regarding social-justice protests in May. A seventh billboard targets Sen. Lindsey Graham for saying “I don’t care” in regard to the lengthy detention of migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border.
The initiative’s partners in Pennsylvania include liberal group Keystone Progress. All the billboards feature the injunction “Vote Them Out.”
Lewis’ artwork has been exhibited in galleries around the U.S. He said he left Beaver Falls in 2003, after high school, to study nursing. He took up art while still a student. In 2017, he quit nursing and moved to New York to pursue art full-time. He now splits his time between New York and Washington.
Lewis’ work is often politically themed, and he said he hopes Remember What They Did inspires discussion.
“I hope that it reaches the young people … who aren’t pleased with the current administration, who aren’t pleased with the continual division that’s being sown,” he said. “I hope the people who want to vote the president out, that it sparks them to take action, really, to spread that action, to vote and use their right so that we can hopefully just move forward.”
Get to know the wall mounted sculpture creations of MFA’s newest artist partner, Seattle based LISA MYERS BULMASH, and her “Bought and Paid For” series.
“This triptych of altered books is mounted on antique washboards, exploring the American Dream as filtered through a Black and female lens. The series centers on the heart of that complicated dream: owning a home of one’s own.
A repeating image in the center niche unites the three books: a family photo of the artist’s brother, running into their childhood home. This image is layered over other buildings significant in the African American experience. The first shows a slave auction “house”; the second shows the childhood home of the artist’s mother; the third depicts the artist’s first home in the Northwest.”
Featured here “Bought and Paid For 1 (triptych)”, 24″x40″, altered books mounted on antique washboards. Scroll for details. Contact Morton Fine Art for additional information on Lisa Myers Bulmash and her powerful sculptural creations.
Lisa Myers Bulmash, Bought and Paid For #1 (triptych), 2020, 24″x40″, altered books mounted on antique washboards
(Detail)
Sculpture 1 of 3
Sculpture 2 of 3
Sculpture 3 of 3
Contact the gallery for additional information about LISA MYERS BULMASH.
Just off the easel – two new small drawings by DC based artist MICHAEL ANDREW BOOKER.
Michael Andrew Booker
Pocket Rockets (PPE 1), 2020
Fine liner pen and watercolor on paper
14 x 11 in
Michael Andrew Booker
Untitled (PPE 2), 2020
Fineliner pen and watercolor on paper
14 x 11 in
Influenced by quilts used during the Underground Railroad to send hidden messages to the traveling slaves, the drawings in Godspeed document a journey of escapism for travelers in search of a better life, for themselves and for generations to come. Quilts are used as sign markers, shields, portals, and gateways to help secure safe passage towards an “Afrotopia.” Hip Hop music, African wax fabrics, and the quilts of Gee’s Bend give form and guidance to the figures and patterns, encompassing African American history, culture, and mysticism.– MICHAEL A. BOOKER, 2020
Michael Booker 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
ANDREI PETROV, Moonlit Poem, 2020, 10″x20″, acrylic & watercolor on canvas
About Sanctuaries
Internationally recognized for his incredible nature based abstract paintings in oil, Andrei explores expansive and airy seascapes, a wonderful breath of fresh air during these times of confinement. The scale of these beautiful paintings reflects the adjustment from his large Brooklyn studio (where he oftentimes creates large works on canvas) to more intimate works created from his home studio in Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Each piece has distinct brushwork, depth and layering, and palette which is distinctly and unmistakably from Andrei’s hand.
ANDREI PETROV, For Years to Come, 2017, 30″x48″, oil on canvas
ANDREI PETROV, Splashdown, 2020, 14″x19″, acrylic & watercolor on canvas
ANDREI PETROV’s Obscured Source and Secure Location installed
About ANDREI PETROV
Based in New York City ANDREI PETROV explores memory in his organic abstract paintings. His paintings probe the distortion, incompleteness and rare moments of clarity in the shadows of memory. Each piece portrays the intrinsic struggle and selective inclusion or exclusion of details in the process of recollection. At times, sharpness occurs in the rear of the picture plane while the out of focus, obscured areas, exist in a larger scale toward the foreground and make reference to the inscrutable nature of long and short term memory.
PETROV’s paintings have been exhibited nationally and internationally in prestigious collections and can be viewed at The Four Seasons Hotel in both Washington, DC and Punta Mita, Mexico, The Fairmont Hotel in Chicago and The Conrad Hotel, Miami. His paintings have also had cameos in the following films, The Royal Tenenbaums, Autumn in New York, Kate and Leopold, The Business of Strangers and Words and Lyrics. He is the featured visual artist 2016 for Music@Menlo.
Sanctuaries marks ANDREI PETROV’s seventh solo exhibition at Morton Fine Art.
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
52 O St NW #302
Washington, DC 20001
COVID-19 protocol: Contact the gallery for supplementary artwork documentation such as detail images and short videos. Safe, no contact door to door delivery available. Shipping nationally and internationally. By appointment only. Mask required.
