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Deeply inspired by her spiritual practice and surroundings in the Arizona desert, Kesha Bruce creates reflective and rich artworks intended to be visual landscapes to dream into in her solo exhibition We Can Birth Worlds.
About We Can Birth Worlds
Kesha Bruce’s work explores the complex connections between history, personal mythology, and magical-spiritual belief in the African diaspora. Her latest work is concerned primarily with exploring the ways vibrant color and abstract symbols can not only trigger powerful emotion but begin to conjure narratives.
Inspired by the belief that hand-made objects can be imbued with the spiritual energy and the intention of the maker, Kesha Bruce employs a labor-intensive creative process of dying, ripping, knotting and the cutting away of fabric to create each painting. The resulting pieced, patched, and assembled surfaces use repetition and pattern to hint at dream languages or perhaps hidden sacred texts.
A direct outgrowth of her daily spiritual practice, these new works are an effort to translate the expansiveness of the artist’s inner joy and reclamation of freedom into a visual language.
With We Can Birth Worlds, Kesha Bruce aims to create visual landscapes to dream into. Landscapes for present and future Black joy, possibility, and liberation.
About KESHA BRUCE
Born and raised in Iowa, she completed a BFA from the University of Iowa before earning an MFA in painting from Hunter College in New York City.
Kesha Bruce has been awarded fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA), The Vermont Studio Center, The CAMAC Foundation, and the Puffin Foundation.
Her work is included in the collections of The Smithsonian Museum of African American History and Culture (14 pieces), 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.
Represented since 2011, We Can Birth Worlds is her seventh solo exhibition at Morton Fine Art.
Available Artwork by KESHA BRUCE
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
Wed – Sat 12pm-5pm
Sun-Tues by appointment
**Hours are currently suspended to prevent further community spread of COVID-19. Virtual tours and detail images and video available upon request. We are still conducting business in a different and safe way.**
On view:
Morton Fine Art
52 O St #302
Washington, DC 20001
(202) 628-2787
mortonfineart@gmail.com
Neo-Byzantine (Red Hot), 2019, 24″x20″, oil on panel
Betrayal Wall, 2019, 24″x24″, oil on panel
El Ingres-Frida (Appropriation of Culture), 2019, 24″x24″, oil on canvas
Balloon Dumpster (The Party’s Over), 2019, 16″x20″, oil on panel
About Only Painted Fire |
In the summer of 2018, I travelled to Italy to see many of my favorite paintings in person for the first time: the early Renaissance frescoes of Giotto, Masaccio, and Piero della
Francesca. Though I was very familiar with the work through reproduction, seeing it with my own eyes was a transformative experience. When I returned home to California, I began a nearly life-size copy of one of my favorite panels of the Giotto frescoes at the Scrovegni chapel in Padua (alternately referred to as The Betrayal of Christ or Judas’ Kiss). I wanted to inhabit the painting, rather than just look at it; I wanted to feel what it was like to make those paintings.
During the process of copying this painting, I became intrigued with Giotto’s stylized depiction of fire, which blazed at the end of several torches along the top of the painting. I realized I had never really painted fire, and for some reason this became an irresistible challenge. At the same time, I was following the news and trying to make sense of the polarized and turbulent political climate of our time. Perhaps due to my newfound fascination with painting fire, certain phrases that commentators and pundits would use grabbed my attention: “dumpster-fire” and “trash-fire” especially, used as hyperbolic expressions of frustration and outrage.
I began to think more deeply about the uses and depictions of fire, symbolically and literally, and the ways in which humans have used fire in rituals. Fire is dangerous and out of control, which also makes it beautiful and sexy and alive. Fire is violent and destructive, which leads to change, regeneration and rebirth. We speak of ‘trial by fire’ and ‘lost torches’; passionate people can be ‘on fire’’ and have ‘fire in their belly.’ In California we have “Fire Season” and “high fire danger” alerts. There are “fire eaters” to entertain us, and parties that “burn down the house” and light “the roof on fire,” etc… All of these phrases and notions have been on my mind this past year as I have painted fire and searched for personal and artistic renewal.
The resulting paintings are not meant as a definitive or conclusive statement, rather as evidence of one painter engaging with the world, following a gut instinct, and doing “research paintings” in order to see what happens. The work can be seen symbolically or literally, or both; and I invite the viewer to bring their own interpretations and resonances to the occasion. No matter how we look at our current cultural moment, regardless of ideology or affiliation, it seems we are living through a time of great change. These paintings are in some way a response to that condition.
– VONN SUMNER, 2019 |
Dumpster Fire III, 2019, 16″x16″, oil on panel
Dumpster Fire IV, 2019, 18″x18″, oil on panel
Dumpster Fire II, 2019, 18″x14″, oil on canvas
KOR, 2019, 16″x12″, oil on canvas
About VONN CUMMINGS SUMNER
Vonn Cummings Sumner grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area, the son of a picture framer and a school teacher. Seeing the art that his father was framing, as well as travel in Europe, Central America and India shaped Sumner’s visual aesthetic during his formative years.
He attended the University of California, at Davis, where he earned both a Bachelor’s degree and an M.F.A. in painting, with highest honors. While at Davis he worked closely with Wayne Thiebaud both as a student and as a teaching assistant. Sumner also took summer classes at the San Francisco Art Institute, and is influenced by the Bay Area Figurative movement that centered around that school in the postwar period.
Sumner has exhibited nationally and internationally since 1998. He has been featured or reviewed in many publications including New American Paintings, Elle Décor, The Washington Post, The Huffington Post, L.A. Weekly, Art Ltd., Riviera magazine, Hi Fructose, Cartwheel Art, The Painter’s Table, Boom magazine, and Quick Fiction. Sumner has shown regularly throughout the Los Angeles area since 2003, including in a solo museum show- Vonn Sumner: The Other Side of Here- at the Riverside Art Museum in the fall of 2008. A second solo museum exhibition, Vonn Sumner: Stages, followed in 2011 at the Phillips Museum of Art on the campus of Franklin & Marshall College in Pennsylvania. Sumner’s paintings have been shown internationally in Venice, Italy; Manchester, England, and Switzerland. He is represented by Morton Fine Art in Washigton, DC.
Only Painted Fire marks his forth solo exhibition at Morton Fine Art.
Standing Man (on fire), 2019, 16″x12″, oil on canvas
Trashfire IV, 2019, 18″x14″, oil on canvas
Trashfire III, 2019, 18″x14″, oil on canvas
Neo-Byzantine (Japonaiserie), 2019, 24″x20″, oil on paper mounted on panel
A Fire Without a Trashcan, 2019, 16″x12″, oil on canvas
Trashfire II, 2019, 14″x12″, oil on canvas
Trashfire I, 2019, 12″x9.5″, oil on canvas
Artist Laurel Hausler pictured with ‘Noir Rose’, 2018, oil and gouache on canvas, 36″x 48″
‘In my mind, there are three meanings of Dogtown.
There are the “Dogtowns” scattered throughout the US, usually desolate dusty places once frequented by rogues and unlucky outcasts.
There is a Dogtown-THE Dogtown- in Cape Ann, Massachusetts. This Dogtown is a historical abandoned settlement, once populated by outsiders, widows, witches and roaming packs of dogs. Today, it is still a wild place and one that should be preserved. Situated amidst Pleistocene boulders, the area continues to be a source of lore.
This exhibition is the third and imagined Dogtown- a mythical place that combines all of the latter aspects—and their metaphysical reflections. It’s a Blair Witch Project woods, a stony, inscrutable wilderness where women and witches live as they wish with dogs for companionship and protection—a place of ritual, noir and labyrinthian mystery, symbolizing persistence in the face of life’s craggy brutality.’
‘Violet’s Window’, 2018, ink, gouache, pencil and oil pastel on paper, 20″x 20″
There are fewer photo transfers in Julia Mae Bancroft’s “Through Glass Lace” than in her previous Morton Fine Art show, but the weight of old photographs remains heavy. The D.C. artist’s mixed-media pictures are almost all in black and shades of gray, with just occasional touches of pale pink or green. Bancroft conjures the past as drained of color but crowded with memories.
Texture is as crucial as image to Bancroft’s style. The pictures incorporate pulp, fiber, papier-mache and hand-stitched embroidery, and they are on sheets of paper mounted to stand slightly away from their backdrops. The layers represent what the artist’s statement terms “a glass lace screen” while “piecing together a fragmented narrative.”
That narrative doesn’t seem to be autobiographical. Some of the photo imagery is older than Bancroft, evoking the 1960s and much earlier times. The same is true of the artist’s technique, notably the needlework. The reminders of traditional women’s crafts ground Bancroft’s ghostly reveries in real-world labor.
~ Mark Jenkins, 2019
Julia Mae Bancroft: Through Glass Lace Through May 22 at Morton Fine Art, 52 O St. NW, No. 302.
‘Thinking of Falling’, 2019, ink, gouache and collage on paper, 22″x 11.5″
Remaining available artworks by JULIA MAE BANCROFT can be viewed here on our website and are also accessible for viewing in person at Morton Fine Art.
Morton Fine Art
52 O Street NW #302, Washington DC 20001
Hours: Wednesday – Saturday : Noon – 5pm
Sunday – Tuesday : by appointment
Toward the end of 2016, Maya Freelon began dealing with issues of rebirth and rebounding: the changes of various identities that happen in midlife. Recent tissue and ink mono prints reflect those transitions, with explorations of more subdued palettes, analogous and monochromatic color schemes. Identity is an issue present in Amber Robles Gordon’s work, as well. For the past year she has been constructing collages that deal with African and Puerto Rican heritage in a patriarchal American society, and pushing against the patriarchy with matrilineal mandalas. While the themes of identity will unify these two solo exhibitions at Morton Fine Art, their kaleidoscopic use of color will likely create the visual complimentary bridge. April 27 to May 15 at Morton Fine Art. Free. —John Anderson
Please follow the highlighted links for currently AVAILABLE ARTWORK by these two fantastic artists and stay tuned for the upcoming fusion of their exciting solo exhibitions here at Morton Fine Art opening April 27th, 2018.
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