A solo exhibition of new works by Patricia Fabricant, curated by Christopher Stout

Opening Reception: Wednesday, October 30th, 6—8pm at 245 Broome Street, NYC

Artist Talk and Catalog Signing: Saturday, November 16th, 3—5pm

Closing Tea and Gallery Tour: Saturday, November 23rd, 3—5pm

“Nature abhors a vacuum.” – Aristotle

Equity Gallery is pleased to announce “Horror Vacui,” a solo exhibition of new works by Patricia Fabricant. The exhibition title contains an acknowledgement of the Latin phrase meaning “a fear of empty spaces” and marks a continuum of Fabricant’s practice in gouache-based process-driven abstraction.

In the exhibition catalog, Paul D’Agostino, Ph.D., excogitates that, “Patricia Fabricant’s paintings have long been characterized by resplendent palettes, layered treatments, innovative abstractions, compositional precisions, and an optically sympathetic sense of linear finesse that can only be yielded by an artist working intuitively and with manual certainty at once, and with a profound awareness of the pictorial nuances and expressive ranges of the materials at hand. In such an aesthetic space, the artist has created dreamily non-objective color fields and abstract organics, polychrome wood grains and politically cogent figurations, and chromatically charged, deftly interwoven self-portraits. Insofar as visual artworks might exude multisensory stimulation, Fabricant’s paintings furnish a colorfully exuberant playlist of polyphonic deliciousness.” 

Here is a consideration of the paintings from Horror Vacui In the artist’s own words:

“I have a deep and abiding interest in process-driven work, from mandalas and yantras to Aboriginal song-line paintings, Islamic tiles, and the Pattern and Decoration movement. 

I also draw inspiration from spiritualists such as Emma Kunz, Hilma af Klint, Agnes Pelton, and early Kandinsky. My process involves losing myself in a meditative state while immersed in making the work, and a subsequent desire to create that experience for the viewer through the repetition 

of patterned lines, complex layering, and the optical vibrations created by color relationships. I am also interested in the tension between lyrical gesture and tightly controlled patterning. I’m not looking for hard edges or precise symmetry. I’m interested in movement, pattern, density, and perhaps above all the tension of color on color. I embrace visceral, unapologetic, decorative beauty and want to make the viewer’s eyeballs vibrate.”

Horror Vacui opens Wednesday, October 30 and is on view until Saturday, November 23. The weekly exhibition viewing hours are Wednesday to Saturday, Noon to 6:00pm. For more information on this exhibition or other NYAE events, kindly email the gallery at info@nyartistsequity.org.

ABOUT PATRICIA FABRICANT

Patricia Fabricant is a painter curator, and award-winning book designer, born in New York City. She received her BA from Wesleyan University and studied painting in Florence Italy. Her abstract and figurative paintings have been exhibited widely at such galleries as M David & Co, Front Room, SFA Projects, Equity Gallery, Morgan Lehman, the Painting Center, and 490 Atlantic. Her curatorial practice includes three editions of the benefit group show, Among Friends, Studio Mates at Front Room Gallery, and With the Grain, at Equity Gallery. She lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.

ABOUT NEW YORK ARTIST EQUITY ASSOCIATION AND EQUITY GALLERY

New York Artist Equity Association was founded in 1947 to promote opportunities for artists and address economic issues affecting American artists. More than 160 leading American artists of the 1940s founded the organization, including Will Barnet, Thomas Hart Benton, George Biddle, Paul Cadmus, Stuart Davis, Arthur Dove, Marsden Hartley, Edward Hopper, Leon Kroll, Jacob Lawrence, John Marin, Louise Nevelson, John Sloan and the first President Yasuo Kuniyoshi. 

NYAE opened Equity Gallery on the Lower East Side of New York City in October 2015. Equity Gallery simultaneously serves as a gallery for artists to exhibit their work and as a community hub for staging professional workshops and innovative programming exploring critical issues of interest to artists and curators. As such, NYAE acts to counterbalance today’s increased focus on the art market by preserving an experiential space that privileges process over product and intent over style whereby artists and allied professionals may come together as trusted stewards charged with advancing visual culture.

Additional information is available via the organization’s website, nyartistsequity.org. NYAE is led by Executive Director Michael Gormley.

PROJECT SPACE:

LONDON CALLING COLLECTIVE IN RADIAL SYMMETRY, HARMONICALLY
Wednesday, October 30, 2024 – Saturday, November 23, 2024

A group exhibition in Equity Gallery’s project space gallery

Opening Reception: Wednesday, October30th, 6—8pm at 245 Broome Street, NYC

London Calling Collective in Radial Symmetry, Harmonically is a group exhibition from the seven-member artist group, the London Calling Collective, which began as friends traveling to London together in 2019 to see art. The collective has since produced several group exhibitions and a body of collaborative work. This exhibition will include work from each artist related to the concept of radial symmetry, in which the composition of the work radiates out from the center (like a mandala). The members of London Calling are Alexi Brock, Patricia Fabricant, Ellen Hackl Fagan, Katherine Jackson, Patricia Miranda, Josette Urso, Jo Yarrington.

COURTYARD:

THE MONOCOTS
Wednesday, October 30, 2024 – Saturday, November 23, 2024

A site-specific installation in Equity Gallery’s outdoor garden exhibition space

Opening Reception: Wednesday, October30th, 6—8pm at 245 Broome Street, NYC

Based on the idea and form of monocots — plants whose veins run parallel like wheat, grasses, lilies or palms — this new site-specific work created for the Equity Courtyard is constructed of poly non-woven fabric and macrame cord. These fiber sculptures play with spaces between — between gallery indoors and public outside; between object and installation; individual and group; stillness and motion; and between fine art and domestic craft. Ellie Murphy lives in Queens, grew up in Kansas, and studied sculpture at Washington University in St. Louis and Yale. 

Martin Dull’s oeuvre is a backstage pass to a staged production of Wagner’s Ring Cycle seconds before curtain time; poised yet ready to pounce in the cavernous half-light appears a riot of gears and pulleys, clubbing giants, circles of fire, mythological shape-shifters, and at least one flying dragon.   

Layering schizy interventions on found objects, for example alternating merciless swings of a homicidal sledgehammer with gingerly applied coats of jewel-toned paint gayed-up with pinches of glitter, Dull arrives at an alien ensemble of discrete works displaying all the logic, predictability and linear progression of a waking dream.  Pulled every which way by complicated gestures that defy stasis, his sleepwalk occasionally halts to coalesce into almost free -standing sculptures teetering between precipitously protruding wall reliefs and later joined by neat rows of  made-with-everything, letter-sized panels –the latter Cinderella-hour love notes competing for whatever and whomever is left.  

Dull notes, “My work exists somewhere between object and imagination. Built over time, through deep material engagement, I aim to evoke a sense of narrative through conflation of different tropes. By commanding the visual languages of painting and sculpture, I offer a poetic and visceral environment for the viewer to explore. My goal is to connect, through making, with the deeper, unquantifiable elements that guide our human nature.  ‘Flesh and Bone’ expands on this investigation. As the rudimentary building blocks of living things, our flesh and bone become the vehicles that contain who and what we are. Everything abstract about existence is supported and held by these visceral materials. This observation serves as metaphor and impetus for my engagement in, and creation of, the objects on display.” 

Martin Dull is a New York based mixed media artist who studied at Pratt Institute, Marywood University, and the New York Studio School of Drawing, Painting, and Sculpture. He has been a recipient of several grants and residencies, most notably the 2015 Peter Rippon/Royal Academy European Travel Grant and a 2016 artist in residence at the Sam and Adele Golden Foundation. In June 2021, Dull was selected by Fresh Air Montclair to create a public installation along Bloomfield Avenue in Montclair, NJ. Dull has been a guest speaker and critic at several institutions including Pratt Institute, Hunter College and Fordham University, is co-founder of the curatorial collaborative JMN Artists, and works as an adjunct instructor at both Caldwell University, NJ, and Marywood University, PA. Dull’s artwork has been included in group and solo exhibitions throughout the United States, most notably solo exhibitions with John Davis Gallery, Hudson, NY in 2018, and M David & Co, Brooklyn, NY in 2019. 

New York Artists Equity Association (aka Equity Gallery) is a donor-funded 501(c)3 founded in 1947 by a celebrated and radically diverse group of practitioners, among them Jacob Lawrence, his wife Gwendolyn Knight, Yasuo Kuniyoshi, Paul Cadmus, and Louise Nevelson, to advance the professional aspirations of emerging artists from underserved communities.

Equity Gallery presents “Rainbow Room by Melissa Staiger” at Wing Space

The broad arc of a rainbow represents a symbol of awe and good fortune around the world. The sun hits the water droplets, and a series of ordered colors appear laying side by side.

This natural phenomenon inspires my work. I embrace the hard edge and methodically assemble and arrange gestures, shapes, and lines. The layering textures and structures create collages and sculptural paintings with acrylic paint. Tape sets the parameters for the chromatic forms. I see an array of ways to create compositions.

Relationships, patterns, and shifts of movement shape my work. I stack thick layers of paint to produce marks that resemble a flexible spine and rib cage. These fresco-like layers hold sensitivity and harmony. The lines stretch across the surface represent the integration of both hemispheres of the human body in a spectral wave.

In my most recent series, the title “Organic Form” comes from the compositions having a defined core and use of a stencil brush to create texture. Each painting takes me a step further into unknown territories and new ideas. It's a process of exploring, which much like following a rainbow, doesn't offer an end, but a fruitful journey.

The works in the Equity Gallery courtyard live together and share interest in counting, numbers as carriers, sequence and frontal display. Three inviting niches were our beginning point. “Three” has simultaneous stability and a registration of openness, as is the tendency of all odd numbers. Two of us attempt to manage three spaces, structures, objects, places, energies that assert as individuals with common concern. Two objects straddle a central number. The objects function as simple counting machines and reference tools that originated in 300 B.C.E.. The choice of 47 baseballs is specific and purposeful as is the selection of 47 wooden axe handles. Utility is changed in both cases. We can no longer hit or throw the baseballs, or chop with the axes.  The ax is now a gentle piece of formed wood. We can slide the handles and baseballs and use them for a different purpose. We can now count. We interact with these objects in clear, simple ways, driven by task or play. The wooden number 21 is central and asserts with quiet authority. It is not arbitrary and is a holder of energies and ideas. It is supported, though not explained, by its neighbors.

Concrete Shadows is an exhibition by Ayesha Kamal Khan that toys with the transience of a place and its portability. It pokes fun at the inadequate transference of a place whose depth and breadth are impossible to fold, transport and translate in another context. All the while recognizing the need to compress distance and carry along a sense of place as you know it. The work makes tangible the ever-changing shadows from her street back home in Islamabad and stretches the impossibility of grasping something that is perpetually changing. Her work inflates everyday objects by tracing their shadows to unpack how much of their specificity is grounded in its location.

Gritty Rituals is an exhibition that joins three artists: Lauren Comito, John O’Connor, and Peter Schenck. Each artist brings an almost religious reverence to their imagery, but their laser focus is aimed squarely at distinctively secular iconography: the human figure, post

consumer waste, advertisements, art history and text based narratives that reflect life’s absurdity. Rich color, compositional density, repetition of personal symbols, and mix of high and low culture can all be found in their work. Monk-like in their devotion to their craft and imagery, each artist toils not for the lofty goal of a heavenly afterlife, but to embody and redirect the gritty aspects of the modern world’s physical and visual assault on ourselves.

Each artist fuses the complexity of contemporary daily life with deep investigations into defining moments of art history. O’Conner’s works on paper manifest the color intensity and detail found in medieval illuminated manuscripts. He painstakingly renders his images in color pencil with the dedication of a 15th century old master, fusing them with high octane 21st century commercial logos, car advertisements, and intentionally nonsensical narratives. Comito and Schenck look to cubism and 20th century abstraction, but intertwine those daunting subjects with their own low brow aesthetics of cartoon figuration and 1980’s graphic design. While humor abounds in Comito and Schenck’s visual world, there is a dramatic tone in their work as well, as if their irreverent figures and structures are armoring themselves against the precarious world we all inhabit.

Lauren Comito's art transforms the overlooked into the profound. Drawing inspiration from everyday objects such as discarded packaging, she begins with abstract forms that evolve into complex, meaningful structures. In Comito's work, these ordinary items serve as potent symbols of impermanence and serve as a connection to our consumer society. Through symmetry and repetition, she constructs figures that emerge from abstraction, inviting viewers to engage in pareidolia—perceiving faces, watchful eyes, portals, and more within her compositions. Her colorful, totemic, Rorschach-like figures explode onto the canvas, confronting viewers while offering a playful counterpoint to their serious undertones. Comito creates celestial beings and intricate structures that are deliberately convoluted and challenging to decipher, prompting us to question the psychic impact of our contemporary landscape on our consciousness.

John O’Connor transforms disparate forms of information and data through idiosyncratic processes, creating abstract shapes, forms, patterns, and text. O’Connor utilizes text in myriad ways: from jotting down miniscule process notes to rendering visually complex cursive and block letters in his own invented fonts. His works give visual form to fraught moments when an individual's intentions and desires are affected, opposed, or concretely influenced by a more powerful natural, political, or psychological force.

Peter Schenck’s paintings abstract and stretch elements of the classical still life and portraiture, serving to illuminate the ephemeralness of life. Schenck also focuses on the inward life of the studio artist. Paint brushes, palettes, skulls, pedestals, paint tubes and the artist himself all jostle for attention in his world of gallows humor. He manifests the anxiety of art historical influence, but the ecstasy as well, implementing Picassoid figures, Gustonesque landscapes, and mid century abstraction in a frequent painterly loop. The understanding of painting in the wake of such powerful artists is palpable, but no less so is Schenck’s obvious delight in adapting their discoveries to his own purposes.

In "Gritty Rituals," Comito, O'Connor, and Schenck engage in a powerful act of psychological sublimation, transforming the mundane into the extraordinary. Their works serve as complex defensive mechanisms, deflecting, digesting, and reinterpreting the bombardment of modern life. Through meticulous craft and inventive composition, each artist creates a visual language that both confronts and transmutes our daily experiences. This exhibition invites viewers to witness how art can process the psychological weight of our contemporary landscape, offering new perspectives on the objects, information, and cultural icons that surround us. "Gritty Rituals" ultimately reveals the profound in the everyday, challenging us to reconsider our relationship with the world we inhabit and the inner landscapes we cultivate.

SUMMER SPOTLIGHT

July 25th  - Aug 10th

Opening Reception, Thurs. July 25th 6 - 8pm

In keeping with its artist-centric mission and to address numerous inquiries for solo exhibitions, NYAE will mount a peer-juried, 3 -person, members-only show as its finale for the season.  By situating a single artist in each of the gallery’s three zones, each selected artist will be able to exhibit a substantial number of works.

SUMMER CITY

WAAM Artists Members Invitational

June 20th - July 20th

Opening Reception, Thurs. Jun. 20th 6 - 8pm

Peer Juried by NYAE Panel

Overview 

The New York Artists Equity Association (NYAE) and the Woodstock Artists Association and Museum (WAAM) have a shared history that dates to their respective foundings as artist associations. Many early NYAE members summered in Woodstock and nearby communities and were WAAM members.  Given this shared history, WAAM and NYAE are staging member exchange shows; during the above dates WAAM artists will show at NYAE.  NYAE artists are showing at WAAM’s Woodstock location from April 19th  to June 2nd , 2024.

The Mother - The Father 

Equity Gallery Lighting Fundraiser 

May 16th - June 15th, 2024

Opening Reception, Thurs. May 16th   6 - 8pm

Call For Donated Works

NYAE seeks to mount a fundraising exhibition exploring the greatest of all first impressions, the Mother and Father, the architects of the human experience.  The exhibition will comprise small works (either 6” x 8” or 8” x 10”) donated to NYAE for sale to fund lighting upgrades for Equity Gallery.  

With this exhibition we suggest an expansive approach to the definitions of Mother and Father beyond the literal associations of parenting to include universal and symbolic expressions of archetypal forms conceptualizing the preeminence of the collective in keeping with NYAE as an aspirant association whose energies and resources flow to the greater good. 

By extension (and paradoxically), we expect that the works produced for this exhibition, though reflective of ideations on the Mother and Father theme,  will ultimately be the highest expression of the true self; we ascertain that one can only know themselves through connections to community, bonds that commence with family and ultimately extend out to a global kinship, a primal tribe tethered not to time, place nor to any single ethnicity, heritage, religion, or nation. 

How to Participate 

1.    Donated works can be 8 x 10 or 6 x 8 in.  All media is accepted.  Works on panel, canvas or 

       paper (mounted or framed) and ready to hang are preferred.   

2.    Submissions are due by Mon. May 6th and should include a jpeg image captioned with 

        title, media, date of production and size (height first). Please include current contact 

        information: full name, cell phone number, and postal address.  

3.     Send submissions to info@nyartistsequity.org with subject line Mother/Father.   

4.       Participants are requested to adhere, without exception, to drop off and pick up dates noted below: 

          Drop Off:  Fri. May 10th, Sat. May 11th or Sun. May 12th : from 12 - 4pm  

          Pick Up:  Sun. June 16th and Mon. June 17th. : from 12 - 4pm  

5.      Donated works must remain on site for the duration of the exhibition and be available for 

         sale. Unsold works will be returned to participants at the close of the exhibition and     

         available for pick up on the dates noted above.  

For further clarification or questions email Michael Gormley, NYAE Executive Director, at michael@nyartistsequity.org

CLINTEL STEED: Mysteries from Past Moons

Clintel Steed’s students report that he urges them to “paint your truth.” It’s an approach that he himself follows, but Steed’s truth, as a visually sophisticated Black man in the United States, is complicated. He is a virtuoso painter whose work is at once responsive to the instability of the present moment, informed by the art of the past, and inflected by intense emotion. His truth is triggered by such diverse stimuli as the inequities and traumatic events of the present day, the long history of Black people, the relationship of men and women, parenthood, joy, tragedy, and more. Steed expresses his passionate feelings through potent metaphors, in purely painterly terms, through expressive paint handling and vibrant hues, commanding our attention with unignorable imagery, urgent facture, and ambiguous images that provoke multiple associations and interpretations. 

A seated couple, the man, in profile, a self-portrait, confronting a beautiful, richly dressed woman, seems, at first encounter, to be about a contemporary event, but soon suggests ancient Egypt and, by extension, Africa. Is it an alternative to slave narratives, testimony to a distinguished past and to survival? A dark-skinned male, crowned with laurel, and a rosy nude reach for each other; then we notice a sharp-eared creature embracing the woman. Is the dark hero rescuing her? The legacy of Picasso haunts a weird cluster of brown, black, and blond pink-fleshed personages against a background of pyramids. We think of Roman frescos, of Egyptian murals, of the history of Modernism, and of race relations, at the same time that we are deeply engaged by the lush, sensuous paint.

Steed explains his themes by saying “I feel like they allow me to talk about painting issues I find interesting. Time, space, and form. Weight and color and trying always to be in the now and aware of the world I am living in.” That “now” encompasses many things.

—

Karen Wilkin

New York, March 2024

Clintel Steed was born in 1977 in Salt Lake City, Utah. He received a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, an MFA from Indiana University, and Advanced Studies from the New York Studio School. Widely exhibited in solo and group exhibitions, Steed is the recipient of the John Koch Award of the National Academy of Arts and Letters. He has taught at Columbia University and teaches at the New York Studio School.

"The Hero's Journey Polyptych"

"The Hero's Journey Polyptych" is an expansive exploration of the universal hero's journey, enriched with the nuances of West African imagery and the profound symbolism of Jungian archetypes in a comic style visual narrative. Drawing inspiration from Joseph Campbell's seminal work on the hero's quest and Jung's theories of archetypes, this polyptych delves into the transformative odyssey of the hero, accompanied by the enigmatic figures of the Trickster and the Magician.

At the heart of the composition lies the hero, whose journey is catalyzed by a moment of epiphany or unexpected circumstance. This pivotal moment propels the hero beyond the confines of familiarity and comfort, urging the hero to venture forth into the unknown realms of destiny. Embarking on a divine quest fraught with trials and peril, the hero's path is illuminated by the guiding presence of the Trickster and the Magician.

The Trickster, embodying the spirit of mischief and cunning, assumes various guises drawn from West African mythology, including the elusive Eshu and the cunning Anansi. Throughout the hero's odyssey, the Trickster serves as both adversary and ally, teasing the hero with tantalizing riddles and playful taunts that challenge their resolve and wit.

Conversely, the Magician emerges as the village shaman and alchemist, steeped in the ancient wisdom of West African traditions. As the hero traverses the dark night of the soul, encountering existential crises and inner turmoil, it is the Magician who offers esoteric guidance. Through mystical rituals and profound insights, the Magician facilitates the hero's ascent to a higher plane of consciousness, unlocking hidden potentials and revealing the interconnectedness of all things.

Through a visual language resonant with the vibrant hues and dynamic forms of West African artistry and illustrative figure painting, "The Hero's Journey Polyptych" invites viewers on a transcendent voyage of self-discovery and transformation. With each panel of the polyptych connected through an unfolding narrative marking chapters in the hero's epic saga, the timeless wisdom of myth and archetype intertwines with the rich cultural tapestry of West Africa, illuminating the universal truths that bind us all on our journey through life.

The paintings in my show ‘Twelve Petals’ are a group of recent paintings, mostly figurative with

a storytelling quality. The images are usually found during the process and not necessarily

referring to a specific myth or story. I use brushes, stamps, stencils and paper towels to find

beautiful and inventive surfaces and illusions. The flow of the paint uncovers the story that

needs to be told. In this way the image is intuitively discovered. I use this process to deepen into

the image and find something with ‘image-magic’ and fantasy. Some of the images have gold

leaf and sparkles which are inspired from my trips to southeast Asia and India. The paintings are

not meant to be ironic or smart, but earnest in my appreciation of the painters of the past and an

honoring of my own imagination.

• Mary Flinn

Curator’s Statement

Ghost Town is a meditation on abandoned commercial enterprises, the result of an economic or natural disaster, in towns and cities everywhere. The emptiness and decay in the iconic signs and forlorn window shops are faithfully gathered and recorded by Patrick Sansone and Richard Klein in their photographs taken during road trips and in their on-going research. The poetics that these left-behind artifacts embody are rendered in photography and assemblage as each artist navigates their own feelings about this subject. 

Part homage, part cautionary tale, these works evoke memories of similar signs and locations that many of us have encountered in our own travels and daily life. The messages their images telegraph to me become an endless scroll of possible narratives. Who were the people that occupied these businesses? Why did the business, and often the entire town fold? 

The attraction I personally have to these works is about wistfulness for the remnants of the ghosts of the past in the cruddy, faded colors, peeling paint, and broken glass. I have a long-standing interest in the Moderne Design of the 1930s-60s used both in the architecture and the lettering on these storefronts and signs, which signaled velocity, ambition, and style. 

There is a frailty implied in these works, often tinged with a dry sense of humor. 

Ellen Hackl Fagan

Artist and Founder/Director of ODETTA Gallery

See the Storefronts below!

Click here for Patrick Sansone’s Storefront

Click here for Richard Klein’s Storefront!

If one could point to one color emblematic of the profound ambivalence and exasperating contradictions of our times, green would clinch the role.  Whilst cast as a symbol of life, luck, and hope, it also signals disorder, greed, and poison.  Juried by fellow NYAE members Alexandra Brock, Patricia Fabricant, and Christina Massey, “Green” comprises a group show of 30 + artists and allied whose works explore the dichotomies, mythologies, and suspicious underpinnings of chroma’s most fugitive player. 

Featuring work from:

Abisay Puentes | Alaiyo Bradshaw | Arlene Rush | Basia Tov | Carri Szoczek | Denise Sfraga | Eileen Ferera| Elizabeth Henneberry | Ellen Weider | Fran Beallor | Fukuko Harris | Gwyneth Leech | Jodie Fink | Katharina Bosse | Kristin Reed | Linda Vigdor | Marcy Rosewater | Margaret Roleke | Mark Rosenthal | Maxine Davidowitz | Melanie Brock | Morgan Petitpas | Nancy Gesimondo | Patricia Watwood | Petey Brown | Sarah Canfield | Shae Nadine | Suzanne Parker | Theophilus Gaffney | Victoria G Smith

The Valence Series of works are haptically curative. They are remnants of material investigations and they, like my current physical circumstances, are fragmentary alterations, transitory, and samplers for transformation.

I learned to sew, quilt, knit, and spin from a family of women makers and I studied Textile Surface Design by painting on paper. My default materials are linen, any woven fiber, paper pulp, gouache, and acrylics. Through these materials and mediums I developed a belief in the material language of abstraction.

The Valence works verbalize a range of forms and edges, using burlap and the textural weave and grid of woven fiber, against itself, as subject and matter. Through mono, contact, and stencil printing, the studies and works build a textual surface of layering, letting the textile be itself and paint be paint. Casual draping, fraying, folds, saturations, dripping, and varying surface tensions, speeds, and pressures are all considerations. Instead of a formal conclusionary construct, these works are meant as a less distilled, yet formative affirmation amid cacophony. Expressing an emotive plethora through disrupted aesthetics, these works link displacement and alteration as their conditions, and they play and blur the lines and spaces between high and low; rarified and every day; perception and imagination; known and unknown; careful and messy; and a thread of gathered references making for what Roland Barthes in A Lover’s Discourse describes as an affirmation of an unthought logic.

Trained as a Textile Designer yet thinking and practicing as a painter, Linda King Ferguson maintains studios in Marquette, MI and Nashville, TN. She has a MA from Rhode Island School of Design, MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts, and she studied at Penland School of Crafts and Academia Di Belle Arti, Perugia, Italy.

Artists, studio mates and domestic partners, Linda Griggs and Allen Hansen at first blush seem worlds apart stylistically. Griggs privileges a hard-edged realism; Hansen a numinous abstraction.   Yet, one intuits that these polarities are but contrarian shenanigans, a surrealist ruse to distract from their paired abandon into reckless romanticism.  Griggs’ seemingly unforgiving realism betrays a formalist obsession with painted color and linear design at arm’s length from the real world.  Her world is a garishly lit stage set, imagined one test shot at a time, devoid yet suggesting the unavoidable trespasses and clumsy human affairs we mistake for real life.  Hansen shares Griggs’ fetish for waking dreams and similarly toys with mood and melancholy, dark pools, and murky undertows.  If Griggs is a formalist posing as a realist, Hansen is the extreme close-up of a closeted narrative painter switching on the overhead to spy on deliciously shadowy goings-on rivaling creationist conspiracies and Hitchcock noirs. Taken together they are the perfect polar dive into the in-between space of February’s winter emptiness and its blasted flashes of fire and freeze that signal introspective epiphanies.  

Sunny Chapman delves into the profound depths of darkness, both literal and metaphorical, through a series of evocative paintings. The work explores the shadows that linger on the periphery of our consciousness, inviting the viewers to confront the enigmatic beauty within the obscurity. Each piece is a dance between light and dark, revealing the hidden narratives that unfold in the twilight realm. The compositions, born from the interplay of nature and night, provoke introspection on the complexities of the human experience-navigating the mysterious recesses of emotion, memory, and the unexplored corners of the psyche.

The Pattern and Decoration movement was born to counter male-centric minimalistic trends. Emerging in the 1970s, it foregrounded elaborate patterns interwoven with global influences and boldly challenged Eurocentric paradigms through its distinct voice, especially when interpreted through a feminist perspective. The "Process and Delight: The New P&D" exhibit illustrates this movement's enduring impact on contemporary art and pays homage to the tradition of the 1970s P&D movement.

The contemporary artists showcased, informed by this tradition, are more than mere revivalists. Their layered surfaces carve out immersive worlds that reflect our zeitgeist—spaces that celebrate complexity in form and content through an unabashedly maximalist ethos—artworks abundant with detail, pattern, and repetition. Highlighting the P&D continuity, one cannot miss the inclusion of Arlene Slavin and Dee Shapiro, two pivotal figures from the original movement. Slavin and Shapiro enrich the exhibit with their signature use of luminous colors and intricate grids. 

Marcy Rosenblat and Oriane Stender also use bold colors and detailed motifs, specifically referencing textiles, evoking an engaging dialogue with what was traditionally perceived as "women's work." Patricia Fabricant, David Ambrose, Charles Clary, and Kit Warren masterfully intertwine natural motifs with patterned details. Simultaneously, Sui Park and Jaynie Crimmins offer critiques on materialism, Park with her repurposed industrial objects, and Crimmins through her use of post-consumer remnants. The materiality in Caroline Wayne’s and Theda Sandiford’s works taps into deeply personal stories while resonating universally. Seren Morey, Amy Cheng, and Chris Arabadjis further diversify the collection, drawing intriguing lines between art and physics, abstraction, and representation.

Collectively, the voices in "Process and Delight" vibrantly celebrate the fusion of artistry, craft, technique, and the intertwining of beauty with excess.

— Etty Yaniv

For most visual artists, the bulk of time they spend creating work is alone in the studio. A studio can be a sanctuary, a second home, a vessel of inspiration. But a studio practice can also be very isolating. How can an artist know if what they are creating is communicating what's intended? How does the work resonate with the viewer? Artists are charged with not only the difficult work of transforming inspiration into expression, but also providing context for that expression. It can be challenging for some artists to explain their practice.

transcender was created in 2017 in Bushwick to help artists fill this void. Feeling support from a community of like-minded creators have helped move a practice forward, inspire new thinking, and open doors to new methods of presentation. transcender presentations have assisted presenters polish their descriptive skills for the benefit of viewers/collectors/curators, and are inspirational for the audience as well. transcender sessions fostered a nurturing environment, sorely missed since the sessions went dark in 2020.

Participating in transcender, presenting or attending, is free of charge. Every session will include roughly a half-dozen artists, each of whom will have 9 minutes to present (up to)10 images. The presenter can decide what kind of feedback they'd like to receive from attendees. Digital images will be projected for the audience. Sharilyn Neidhardt, a co-founder of transcender, will return to facilitate the first two sessions at Equity Gallery.

Wed. Oct. 18th and Wed. Nov. 15th, 7 :00 - 8:30 PM

Post-holiday sessions will be announced at a later date

How to apply:

Interested participants need to send an email with a single paragraph artist statement and five to seven images to info@nyartistsequity.org with the subject line “transcender application”. At this time we are not supporting video or musical accompaniment.

Oct. 18th Session applications are due EOD Mon. Oct 9th.

One application per artist. There are no fees and all are invited to participate, however Artist Equity Members will receive priority consideration.

Ecstatic Nature: Shiri Mordechay and Matt Rota

All art is seeded in some measure with dissatisfaction or anxiety with the world.  Hence the need to re-order an alternate or opposing view.  In some instances, particularly in times of cultural or economic stress, art acts to fracture reality to the very extent said realty is untenable or incomprehensible.  Novel forms, relationships and mythologies rear up in the pictorial space and augur a unique perspective that alters both inner being and world view.  This deconstruction and reordering is not without violence, a power struggle first witnessed by those unable to shield themselves from the marauding influxes unleased when cultural containers are compromised.  The rest of us, unseeing and insensitive, experience that battle as art.

In his newest series of drawings for Equity Gallery, Matt Rota dismisses his signature saturated dyes for the stark graphic of black and white, the latter an argot punctuated by an infinitesimal array of implying gestures and coded symbols.   A cue that he is threatening to abandon reality all together, and who can blame him, Rota retreats to the dream of history and casts its marauding gods, freaks, and half-crazed heretics in narrative intrigues lasting well past the sleeping hours.  The series, a frenzied scavenger hunt unearthing blasphemies, taboos and every god-forsaken mishap known to modern man, can only lead to the jumping off point---the cliff’s edge that separates the agnostics from the true believers.  The former, high-minded and vainglorious, are ever ready to fall on their swords in a last-ditch effort at redemption whilst the latter blunders on, occasionally committing random acts of revenge when reality threatens to close in. 

Double billed with Rota, Shiri Mordechay is similarly showing a new series of works on paper at Equity.   Like Rota, Mordechay’s new work evinces a masterful exploitation of the immediacy and spontaneity of drawing⎯in particular a compelling balance between narrative potential and the veiled coding proffered by water media.  And while Rota reaches for a dissonant ensemble of line expressions, from skittish jumps to adrenaline-pumped swipes, to alchemize his compositions, Modechay floods the picture plane leaving Rorschach bleeds, tide marks, and a  layered sediment of forms, simultaneously ethereal, dense, and teeming with the alien life. 

Strange birds both, save Mordechay, has largely dispelled with any seeming effort to temper her wild imaginings with the slightest reference to the outside world.   Her expedition is a DUI joyride to the phantasmagoric underbelly of the unconscious.  Technicolor lizards, ruffed changelings, assorted livestock, and poison fruit collide in a giddy idyll—a pagan forerunner to a Thanksgiving feast. 

The haunting question however is whether Mordechay is pulling our leg; are these works simply (as she states) traces of the wonderous wanderings of an unquestionably inventive mind or are we glimpsing the preternatural sentience of a world to come?

Mark LaRiviere first impulse is to make convincing people—to give them a solid, lasting form. He adds that, “always, the question remains; how can I bring forth these figures honestly, reflecting a sense of truth that feels in sync with our time.  That spark of truth becomes apparent as I work and search for the rhythms, forms, movements and a certain light that resides in all things”.

Fay Ku: Eye Teeth

Fay Ku creates worlds inhabited by women and children engaged in often troubling or even demonic behaviors which evince cultural, sexual, and political identities, power dynamics, social and familial conflicts—the full spectrum of human behavior. Ku adds that, “I suspect my narratives arise from my personal experience of displacement as an immigrant.  My parents and I carried our culture within ourselves, disconnected from our physical reality”.  In her artwork, this cultural isolation is seen as figures drawn against stark backgrounds.  “My characters have little need for a physical setting”, Ku notes, “because they exist in a psychological and not a concrete realm.”   

Apropos of its 77 - year legacy supporting emerging artists, NYAE opens the fall season with an exhibition featuring artists participating in the NYSCA-funded Paying Artist Program which awards stipends for new projects.

Opening Reception: September 7, 6pm - 8pm

Srishti Dass recently earned a BFA at the School of Visual Arts, New York. Born and raised in New Delhi, Dass’ abstract drawings trace the flow of energy connecting the mind and the outside world as the former seeks peace through introspection. 

Ricki Dwyer is an artist and educator working between San Francisco and Brooklyn. His practice considers weaving and craft in both theory and practice and honors drapery as the negotiation that things will never fall the same way twice. 

Maryanne Pollock received a BFA from Tyler School of Art and continued studies at the Pennsylvania Academy, the Corcoran, and American University. Pollock’s project experiments with draping and hanging silkscreened fabric to create tents that transform outdoor spaces into a place of refuge, protection, and meditation. 

Colette Robbins is a hybrid digital-analog sculptor, educator, and curator. Her sculptures include motifs of abstracted and remixed ancient symbols, archaic smiles, augmented Greco-Roman heads, and detailed rocky textures. This eclectic imagery references occultism, antiquated medical practices, neuroscience, and psychology. 

Summertime Rolls is a classic seasonal survey show featuring artists addicted to materials and processes. The exhibition is organized by Brooklyn-based painter Benjamin Pritchard who exhibits in the New York and Detroit areas.

“The decision to follow ones own thinking leads to strange outcomes.

The Artists in this group all have taken on the direct and difficult work of pursuing a personal perspective into the world unmitigated by style or fashion or larger forces whether by strength of will or  incapability to do otherwise..

 This quality or disposition around thinking and making from a personal idiosyncratic place is the central thing I love about each of the artists in this show and also what got me curious about how the work would all interact together.

Artwork that starts from this simple place of the self and feelings and thinking sympathetically about ones ideas leads to interesting realms.

My plan is to see how these different streams of thinking and making come together Into a larger thing.

Ben Pritchard

Featured Artists:

Peter Bonner | Fiona Buchanan | Guy Corriero | Carol Diamond | Martin Dull | Charles Goldman David McDonough | Nikki Mehle | Ilse Murdock | Whitney Oldenburg | Shivani Patel | James Prez | Ben Pritchard | Kim Reinhardt | Jason Rohlf | Mark Sengbusch | Melissa Staiger | Christina Straight | Natasha Wright | Andrew Zarou

Organized by: Ben Pritchard

Beginning in ancient Greece and up through the modern era, poets and painters have portrayed seemingly guileless, chimeric creatures with enchanting voices that unfortunately forebode destruction.  First mentioned in Homer’s Odyssey, these hallucinatory beings were heard offstage, leaving their physical characteristics to be imagined by the reader.  Later they were described as part human and part bird –and capable of playing string instruments such as the lyre.  These initial descriptions envisioned sirens of both sexes but by the Middle Ages, sirens were depicted solely as female and their hybrid natures more complex to include human heads and torsos combined with wings, claws and fishtails.  

Increasingly, particularly in Christian iconography, sirens were seen as a symbol of irresistible temptation leading to man’s downfall and death.  In the 17th century, the age of exploration, sirens were situated on exotic islands steep with rocky cliffs and lashed by high seas.  Her appearance changed to that of a woman fish,  mermaid-like, an evolution that  her favored prey were unsuspecting mariners who Leonardo da Vinci wrote,  would be first lulled to sleep by the siren’s sweet song and then murdered by them.  

In modern times, sirens lost their fish tails and were depicted as fully human; their fabled songs, whilst still spellbinding, simply detained travelers and made them forget their native lands—rather than lure them to a certain death.  Divested of their murderous reputations, sirens were at worst talented courtesans with questionable morals.  The curators of Siren: Reinterpreting the Temptress Song propose to continue this rehabilitation and evolution of the siren and suggest that all along her song was indeed irresistible –but her enchantment did not cause misfortune rather it was meant to be an impossible-to-ignore warning sign of grounding shoals and capsizing squalls.  Her songs inviting respite and temporary forgetfulness can too be viewed as a salve—a psychological waystation to regroup before taking up one’s duties and travels with renewed vigor.   

One imagines that in our present time the siren’s song grows ever louder –like an incessant gale wind. She panics.  The siren’s exotic locales have all but disappeared, her beloved seas choked with the detritus of a wasteful and selfish culture that celebrates greed and injustice.   We push ourselves and others to exhaustion ---happiness a forever out of reach destination informed by a thousand self-righteous demands and entitlements while she serenades us to stay and quiet. Lastly, we fight about everything,  each party insisting the other is in the wrong.  “Hush” the siren sings. Rest your weary head and let things be.  

Curated by Carri Skoczek and Michael Gormley

NYAE proudly presents Linnea Paskow in the Project Room at Equity Gallery.

“Demons, killers, fairies, and angels come to me in night visions. Staring into the dark canvas,

scraping paint, mushing colors gives them faces and names. Sometimes they come with stories

and sometimes they are silent, their hands praying that they will wake up again. Let us meet in

the dark woods to follow their stories. Let them ignore me or be amused by my company.

Scratch at the door and meet the stranger who stands at the threshold.”

Linnea Paskow

See Linnea’s work online through our SIREN storefront below