Delicious Line Reviews posts on ‘Weapons for Spiritual Warfare’ KESHA BRUCE

02 Mar 2018

Kesha Bruce: Weapons for Spiritual Warfare

Morton Fine Art

Reviewed by Stephanie Lee Jackson

The patchwork symbols arrayed in Kesha Bruce’s luminous paintings feel like scraps of ancient garments, rescued from a flood. Squares of canvas, paint-logged, layered, and worn, are assembled in combinations that evoke a half-remembered ritual.

Bruce’s iconography derives from Hoodoo, a West African spiritual practice which evolved in the Mississippi Delta as a result of the slave trade. She absorbed the tradition as a child, watching her grandmother drawing spells in the kitchen. Recurring symbols, such as a crossroads, hold specific meanings – dispersal, banishment – which shift with context, like words in a poem. The act of painting becomes the working of a rediscovered spell.

Her paint handling mirrors the Hoodoo use of body fluids in spell casting. The rich textures appear to emerge from generations of handling, with few intermediary tools. The largest paintings exude the determined authority of a heritage shattered and painstakingly reconstructed.

Follow the hyperlink to view all available artwork by KESHA BRUCE on our website!  Please contact us here at the gallery for additional information and acquisition details.  ‘Weapons for Spiritual Warfare’ is up through March 7th, don’t miss out!

The Washington Post reviews KESHA BRUCE ‘Weapons for Spiritual Warfare’

Until I Break Skin, 2018, dyed/painted fabric on un-stretched canvas, 96″x 96″

The artworks in Kesha Bruce’s “Weapons for Spiritual Warfare” are a form of ancestor worship. Each one of the tradition-rooted pieces in her Morton Fine Art show is “an answered prayer,” writes the African American artist, who divides her time between the United States and France.

Most of these collage-paintings are small and consist of four rough-edged fabric squares daubed with simple geometric forms. The X, Y, + and # shapes are elemental, but rendered loosely to give evidence of the artist’s hand, as well as offer a sense of spontaneity. The largest and most complex are “The Sky Opened for Her,” which is cross-shaped and fringed with streamers, and “Between Starshine and Clay,” whose top third consists of overlapping black squares. The former resembles a ceremonial robe, while the latter evokes a sweeping view of a village under a nighttime sky — a universe conjured from tattered scraps and unstudied gestures.

Reviewed by Mark Jenkins, March 1, 2018.

Kesha Bruce: Weapons for Spiritual Warfare Through March 7 at Morton Fine Art, 1781 Florida Ave. NW. 202-628-2787. mortonfineart.com.

Please follow the hyperlink to visit our website  for all available artworks by KESHA BRUCE, and contact us here at the gallery for additional information or acquisition details.

 

WDC City Paper Spring Arts Guide mentions MAYA FREELON & AMBER ROBLES GORDON

Maya Freelon and Amber Robles Gordon

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.

American Lifestyle Magazine features artist MAYA FREELON ASANTE

‘Bleeding Art’ an interview with Maya Freelon Asante written by Shelley Rose featured in American Lifestyle Magazine Issue 87, 2018.

‘Visionary and artist Maya Freelon Asante discovered her preferred medium by happenstance.   While living with her grandmother during art school, she found water-damaged tissue paper in the basement and became fascinated by the bleeding of the color.  This fortuitous accident became her muse, and she has been using tissue paper to create her art ever since.’

“When I create the large tissue quilts, I always ask the community to help in the creation process.  [To me], community means, ‘I am because we are’ Ubuntu.”   ~Maya Freelon Asante

Please contact us here at the gallery by emailing mortonfineart@gmail.com for a PDF readable version of this article as well as additional information and images.  Available artwork by MAYA FREELON ASANTE can be viewed here on our website.

The Washington Post features JULIA MAE BANCROFT a review of ‘Mending Moments’

In the galleries: Julia Mae Bancroft stitches the past to the present

By Mark Jenkins December 28 at 4:00 PM

“Mamie’s House,” on view through Jan. 4 at Morton Fine Art. (Julia Mae Bancroft/Morton Fine Art)

 

It’s not only the predominantly gray palette that gives Julia Mae Bancroft’s artwork a ghostly feel. The mixed-media pictures in her Morton Fine Art show, “Mending Moments,” feature old-timey houses and interiors. Arrayed inside are women in long dresses, sometimes with faces transferred from vintage photos. The Virginia-bred D.C. artist graduated from the Corcoran College of Art and Design only a few years ago, yet seems fixed in an earlier era.

The “mending” in the show’s title refers in part to Bancroft’s use of embroidery. She stitches as well as draws and paints, working thin, white strands into compositions that sometimes also incorporate layers of paper pulp. The threads can be abstract elements or represent literal things, such as human hair. The vertical strings that cloak “Moonlit Overcast” suggest both hanging moss and the mists of time.

The effect can be spooky. The subject of “Sitting in Her Empty Chair” has a indistinct face and a clawlike hand. “Reverie,” the most 3-D piece, is built upon an iron grate with a tombstonelike shape. Bancroft, it appears, doesn’t merely ponder the past. She actively disinters it.

Julia Mae Bancroft: Mending Moments Through Jan. 4 at Morton Fine Art, 1781 Florida Ave. NW. 202-628-2787. mortonfineart.com.

 

Available artwork by JULIA MAE BANCROFT as well as her artist bio with statement can be found by following the highlighted link to Morton Fine Art’s website. Please contact the gallery for additional details.

MFA Welcomes Artist KATHERINE TZU-LAN MANN

Morton Fine Art is thrilled to introduce artist KATHERINE TZU-LAN MANN to our roster.

“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.

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.

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, 2017

Beard, acrylic, sumi ink, wood cut and silkscreen on paper, 60″x 61″

Shade, acrylic and sumi ink on stretched paper, 60″x 40″

Untitled, acrylic, sumi ink, wood cut and silkscreen on paper, 59″x 55″

​Window, acrylic and ink on paper, 72″ x 72″

If you would like to learn more about Katherine Mann or would like to see her work, please contact the gallery to set up an appointment. We look forward to your visit.

MAYA FREELON ASANTE in Artforum

“Material Girls: Contemporary Black Women Artists”

SPELMAN COLLEGE MUSEUM OF FINE ART
350 Spelman Lane SW,
September 6–December 1

Sonya Clark, Seven Layer Tangle, 2005,plastic combs, glue, 7 x 30 x 30”.

Maren Hassinger’s Love, 2005–12, in the far corner of the gallery, displays inflated hot pink plastic shopping bags gathered in the shape of an obtuse triangle rising up to the ceiling. It is impossible to see Love and not think of the collective progress made by the gay rights movement that has used this symbol of a pink triangle since the 1970s, as well the individual acts that went into shaping the movement. The allegorical use of materials continues in Sonya Clark’sPlain Weave, 2008—a simple, elegant grid of gold-colored thread and black plastic combs held together in the royal kente cloth pattern––elevating throwaway objects by using them to represent this coveted textile.

Such are two instances of the ways in which Chakaia Booker, Maya Freelon Asante, Martha Jackson Jarvis, Joyce J. Scott, and Renée Stout, in addition to Hassinger and Clark—challenge the social and cultural identities of objects, blurring the boundary between natural and industrial materials. Take, for instance, Booker’s contribution: masses of recycled rubber tires––some sliced into strandlike lengths, others cut to sharp, pointed, staccato shapes––elegantly manipulated into long sculptural tableaux or smaller, compact works that allude to organic material and figuration. Whereas irrefutable power, speed, and performance dominate the commercially driven affect of automobile tires, Booker’s use of these discarded, visibly worn wheels––in tandem with her subsequent manipulation in composing her sculptures––speaks to a range of experience by showing the tangible effects of the environment on the objects. It is in this way that “Material Girls” spurs a consideration of the desire for newness in commodity objects and stakes a claim for finding value in the materiality that marks our experience, in spite of its monetary equivalent.

— Amanda Parmer