New Publication: Tworkov, Towards Nirvana

$40.00

Published on the occasion of the following exhibitions

Tworkov: Towards Nirvana / Works from the 70s
January 14-March 20, 2021

VAN DOREN WAXTER
23 East 73rd Street, New York NY 10021
www.vandorenwaxter.com

Tworkov: Drawings from the 70s
February 6-May 1, 2021

MINUS SPACE
16 Main Street, Brooklyn NY 11201
www.minusspace.com

ISBN: 978-1-7325933-3-6

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Excerpt of essay written by curator Jason Andrew

While history has pinned Tworkov to a period of the 50s, he broke away from the Abstract Expressionist movement at the very height of his own success. Seen by many as radical,[i] the debut of his new monochromatic paintings at the Gertrude Kasle Gallery in Detroit in April 1969, was the arrival of an art less emotive, more stark, more Spartan. “I wanted to get away from the extremely subjective focus of Abstract-Expressionist painting.” Tworkov said, “I am tired of the artist’s agonies […] I wanted something outside myself, something less subjective.”[ii]

Excerpt from Of the Stark and the Spartan: Tworkov in the 70s written by Jason Andrew:

This radical change, years in the making, was consistent with Tworkov’s thoughtfulness and courage and found connections with the generation of artists nearly forty years his younger, which engaged Tworkov at Yale. He recognized their interest in seriality, and shared in their methods to skirt expressiveness and emotion. This generation included Chuck Close, Jennifer Bartlett, Judith Bernstein, Nancy Graves, Brice Marden, Howardena Pindell, Richard Serra and William T. Williams to name a few.

His tenure at Yale coincided this stylistic shift toward diagrammatic configurations spurred by a renewed interest in geometry and mathematics. Using the rectangle as a measurement tool and foundation of his compositions, Tworkov moved away from any reliance on automatism and turned to a methodical creative process. In his words: “I soon arrived at an elementary system of measurements implicit in the geometry of the rectangle which became the basis for simple images that I had deliberately given a somewhat illusionistic cast.”[iii] While this system did not exclude spontaneity and fresh invention, it did impose an element of the mechanical and calculated. And it was this decisively imposed predictability that would undo decades of painting that for Tworkov, history still most remembers.

When these new structured paintings debuted in a solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1971, curator Marcia Tucker championed the work:

These pictures—sensuous, personal, endowed with extraordinary clarity and formal intelligence—testify to the energy and timeliness of an artist who has, for over forty years, chosen the path of most resistance in order to challenge his own vision and ours.[iv]

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[i] “Tworkov: Radical Pro,” was the title of an Art News article written by Louis Finkelstein and published in April 1964.

[ii] Tworkov, Jack. "On My Outlook as a Painter: A Memoir." Leonardo, International Journal of the Contemporary Artist 7: 2 (Spring 1974), 116.

[iii] Tworkov in Leonardo, 116.

[iv] Tucker, Marcia in Jack Tworkov: Recent Paintings, February 5–March 14, 1971, Whitney Museum of American Art, exhibition brochure.

New Publication: Biala: Intimacy & Exile

$20

Published on the occasion of Biala: Intimacy & Exile: paintings 1952-1962
Organized in collaboration with the Estate of Janice Biala at McCormick Gallery, Chicago, IL, November 7, 2020-January 9, 2021

Essay by Jason Andrew
Design by Thomas McCormick with Arno Pro typeface

Published by McCormick Gallery, LLC, and TMG Projects
Printed by Permanent Printing, Ltd.
32 pages, softcover, color
11 x 8.5 inches / 28 x 21.6 cm

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Excerpt:

Biala chose subject matter over brute expression. Her paintings derive the time-honored triumvirate of still-life, landscape, and portraiture, and yet she approached these themes through an uncommon significance defined through a painterliness of gesture and color in calculated rhythm. Critic Michael Brenson aptly described her as “a blend of intimacy and exile.”[i]

[i] Brenson, Michael. “Biala at Kouros Gallery,” The New York Times, Friday, April 6, 1990.

New Publication: Joan Witek: Paintings from the 1980s

Published on the occasion of Joan Witek’s solo exhibition Paintings from the 1980s,
organized in collaboration with Artist Estate Studio LLC, at MINUS SPACE, 2020.

Introduction by Matthew Deleget; Essay by Jason Andrew
Design by Peter Freeby for Artist Estate Studio
Printed by danny luk at arcoiris nyc, inc.
Published by Artist Estate Studio for MINUS SPACE, Brooklyn, NY, 2020
68 pages, softcover, color
11 x 8.5 inches / 28 x 21.6 cm
ISBN: 978-0-578-76802-1

Excerpt of essay written by curator Jason Andrew

I first met Joan Witek in the Fall of 2003 while coordinating an exhibition of her work at the Kouros Gallery. During a visit to the studio, out of the storage racks, Joan pulled Las Meninas (1980-81). When I inquired as to other paintings from the period, she pointed rather embarrassingly to a tall thick roll wrapped in plastic leaning in the far corner of her studio. Intrigued, it has been my desire to re-present this body of work since that time.

The impact of seeing Las Meninas was resounding. Its surface was unlike anything I had experienced. A thin slightly visible blue chalk line laid out the horizontal composition. Thick black marks made with oil stick layered in regularity, and graphite applied to the surface to temper the level of light.

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Lee Krasner (1908-1984), Black and White Squares No. 1, 1948 Oil and enamel on linen 24 1/8 × 30 in. (61.3 × 76.2 cm). Private Collection. Photo: Diego Flores, courtesy Barbican Centre. © 2020 The Pollock-Krasner Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

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Known for reductive, even geometric abstractions, it was curious to learn that Witek’s compositions, all of them, originate from a single narrative source. “The painting expresses my Spanish flair,” she told me. Witek’s father was Spanish, and as she described in her studio notes, “the title first came to me and I didn’t know what it was—eventually discovered it was Velázquez’s title.” Her notes continue: “Associations with me: Spanish / the Spanish love of black / named after the women who cared for the princesses at court—my being a woman / Spanish.”

The repetitiveness and regularity of Witek’s works seemingly link her to Agnes Martin. However, Witek’s approach—the gathering, sorting, collating, associating, patterning and the initiation of actions and proceedings—categorically moves her past Minimalism and closer to that of Process Art. In this regard, Witek shares a sharp sensibility with her peer the sculptor Jackie Winsor who described the origins of her work, “These things of mine certainly aren’t minimal. They’re not reduced to the most elementary things. The focus is not the cleaning up of abstract expressionism.”8 The same can be said for Witek.

Memories of Underdevelopment (1981), acquired by The Museum of Modern Art in 1983, was the painting that followed Las Meninas. Titled after the Cuban film Memorias del Subdesarrollo (1968), Witek’s studio notes indicate that she first responded to the subject through “organic” drawings in 1968, predating the painting. Having seen the film again on television, she noted “how much of a portrait [the painting] was of me.”

“I’ve always wanted to make incongruous things go together: like squares being portraits,” she once said, “In the 1970s the square was so important. The square as a square was not enough for me. I loved its containment but I wanted the square to be filled.”

That Witek sees many of her works from this period as self-portraits is astonishing—the clarity of a mark and its interpretation as figure / personality.

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Joan Witek, Edward Teller’s Dream, 1982, Oil and graphite on canvas 68 1/2 × 119 3/4 in (174 × 304.2 cm)

Introductory Glyph (1982) references her passion for Pre-Columbian Mayan hieroglyphs. This towering painting features at its center a single emblem glyph. Tall and sculpted, the totemic offering mimics an ancient stela whose carved glyphs give the reader a sense of place, situation, or setting for the telling of an event or history. “This fits perfectly with my hieroglyphs and their decipherment,” Witek said describing this work, “There is a constant language throughout waiting for that decipherment.”

In her review of this painting exhibited at Rosa Esman in 1984, Lowery Stokes Sims deciphers the painting this way:

The different proportions of the glyphs became imbued with specific meanings that carry into other paintings […] in Introductory Glyph the expanse of the central glyph, surrounded as it is by twelve registers of regularly placed strokes (larger ones on the bottom two rows), creates a decidedly negative space (a compositional black hole) that literally pulls the space dramatically back into the center. To counterbalance this effect, and to achieve a visual electricity that is comparable to that of the diamond-shaped interstices between the bottoms and tops of the rows of glyphs, Witek places a jagged edge down the center of the large glyph.

Edward Teller’s Dream (1982) is a unique subject for Witek as it makes use of the traditional association of black with death. The genesis of the idea for the painting is fully described in her studio notes about having seen the Teller documentary called A is for Atom, B is for Bomb:

the subject… is the emptiness of the vast ‘field’ of vertical four-inch strokes. Here, hopefully, opposites operate and after the vastness is realized, the backup is the tenseness of all those uninterrupted strokes. The painting needed to be ten feet to create that emptiness.

Emptiness is experienced through the repetitive architecture of Witek’s strokes,—what the artist once referred to as “geometrically common destiny”—a bundle of which stack up like a tomb at the bottom center of this painting. And we are right to read the painting this way, as searching for the structure of the composition, Witek studied the architecture of Egyptian funerary tombs.

Jason Andrew reviews Joan Snyder at CANADA

Joan Snyder, installation view. Left: Ode to Summer (2019); Right: Weeping Cherry Tree & Thee (2020) / Courtesy CANADA

Contributed by Jason Andrew

In a 1976 Cincinnati Enquirer review of Joan Snyder’s paintings, the reviewer, Owen Findsen, surmised that she had “picked up a little of this, a little of that … and made it all uglier.” While he found her work offensive, even questioning it’s validity, for those like me who have come to love Snyder’s work, it couldn’t be a bigger compliment. Joan Snyder paints her world from the inside out.

Unabashedly expressive, her paintings are born of sorrow and moods, loss and struggles, and yes, peace and love as well. The new paintings now on view at CANADA echo a familiar cantata – an unapologetic narrative. “They are a form of keeping time,” Helen Molesworth writes in her witty catalogue essay accompanying the exhibition, “of remaining present, of acting as both observer and recorder.” The catalogue also features commentary by Wallace Whitney and Sean Scully.

Consistent throughout her work since the 1960s is Snyder’s use of a “stroke” – a heavy gesture succinctly pulled horizontally. Conceived as an alternative to the Great God Grid, this mark can be interpreted as a cancellation, a kind of crossing out. At first, at least, it was distinctly her own. Each stroke works in tandem with saturated orbs, scribbles, and textured elements of collage. While overtly physical, her paintings, often multi-paneled, are not lost to the oblivion of expression.

Snyder has always been outspoken, and her paintings are a kind of glorious outrage. When asked by Ruth Iskin, Lucy Lippard, and Arlene Raven to describe her art and its relationship to Feminism in 1977, she responded with an associative fusillade:

layers, words, membranes, cotton, cloth, rope, repetition, bodies, wet, opening, closing repetition, lists, life stories, grids, destroying grids, houses, intimacy, doorways, breasts, vaginas, flow, strong, building, putting together many disparaging elements, repetition, red, pink, black, earth feel colors, the sun, the moon…

The exhibition features a return to a common theme for Snyder, that of her “Field Series.” These works, painted in her studios in Woodstock and Brooklyn, continue to be about the sacred, the serene, fields of moons, moons in mud, rippling ponds, landscapes stretched out, and daily diaries exposed. These lush visions tell powerful stories.

Ron Gorchov, Painter Who Challenged Viewers’ Perceptions, Dies at 90

Ron Gorchov at his studio in Brooklyn in 2012. Dissatisfied with painting on a flat rectilinear surface, he began creating pieces that were saddle-shaped. Credit: Brian Buckley

Ron Gorchov, an abstract painter known for vividly colored, saddle-shaped canvases that curved away from the wall and gently warped the viewer’s perception, died on Aug. 18 at his home in Red Hook, Brooklyn. He was 90.

His death was confirmed by his Manhattan gallery, Cheim & Read. His family said the cause was lung cancer.

A tall, solidly built man with a kindly face, Mr. Gorchov may have been the closest thing the New York art world had to a gentle giant in the late 20th century. He was soft-spoken and approachable, with a relaxed manner. In a 2006 interview with The Brooklyn Rail, an art newspaper, he said that his paintings came not from angst but from “reverie, and luck” and “out of leisure.” He attracted a wide following among younger painters, particularly in the last 15 years of his life, when his work enjoyed a new prominence.

Mr. Gorchov was one of many painters who, in the 1970s, ignored rumors of the medium’s death while rejecting the scale, slickness and purity of Minimalist abstraction. These artists personalized abstract painting in all sorts of ways, for instance by adding images, working small or using quirky geometry. Several, including Ralph Humphrey, Robert Mangold, Richard Tuttle, Elizabeth Murray, John Torreano, Lynda Benglis, Marilyn Lenkowsky and Guy Goodwin, put an idiosyncratic, intuitive spin on a Minimalist staple — the shaped canvas. Mr. Gorchov did, too. But he was older, and his art blended some of the grandeur of 1950s Abstract Expressionism with the more skeptical, humorous attitudes of the ’70s.

Maurice Ronald Gorchov was born on April 15, 1930, in Chicago to Herman Noah and Grace (Bloomfield) Gorchov. His father was an entrepreneur. His mother was an artist who had studied painting at the Art Institute of Chicago and who, “began to give me ideas about art pretty early” he said in an unpublished 2017 interview with Hans Ulrich Obrist, artistic director of the Serpentine Galleries in London.

When he was 14, Mr. Gorchov began taking Saturday art classes at the Art Institute. In 1946 and 1947 he took night classes there. When he was 15 he began working as a lifeguard, his 6-foot-4 frame enabling him to pass for 18, the required age. At 18, he decided to become a painter.

Ron Gorchov, Painter With Curved Canvases, Dies At Age 90

Ron Gorchov at his Brooklyn Studio. Photo by Brian Buckley, 2012.

Ron Gorchov, the artist famous for his curved, saddle-shaped canvases, died on Tuesday at the age of 90.

Gorchov’s death was announced by Cheim and Reid Gallery of New York, which had co-represented him. Ron Gorchov was most famous for his curved canvases that almost made them a sculpture in their own right. These saddle-type canvases were sometimes stacked across the wall. Gorchov used to staple linen to the frames and painted them white, followed by layers of several colours. The end result didn’t hide the staples and left underlying colours exposed – but Gorchov preferred this ‘clumsy’ style. He said in a 2013 interview that he didn’t seek perfection; he liked the illusion of perfection.

The painter Ron Gorchov, known for his distinctively curved canvases, has died at 90.

Ron Gorchov at his Brooklyn Studio. Photo by Brian Buckley, 2012.

The painter Ron Gorchov, best known for his vividly-painted and distinctly-shaped canvases, died on Tuesday. News of his death was announced by Cheim & Read, which represents the artist in New York. He was 90 years old.

Gorchov was born in 1930 in Chicago, and began studying art at the age of 14, when he took Saturday classes at the Art Institute of Chicago. In 1953, he moved to New York, where he became acquainted with acolytes of the New York School, including Mark Rothko and John Graham, among others. Gorchov supported his wife and son by working as a lifeguard until his breakout in 1960, when he was featured in a group show at the Whitney Museum and had his first solo exhibition at Tibor de Nagy Gallery.

While his self-described “abstract surrealist” style was indebted to the Abstract Expressionist titans of the day, Gorchov is perhaps most famous for his experiments with canvas. In 1967, after a brief hiatus from painting, Gorchov created what would become his signature bowed-frame canvas for the first time in Rothko’s studio. The concave works, which resemble shields or saddles, were made by stapling linen or canvas to a bent wooden frame, which Gorchov would then paint with pared down forms rendered in thin, vivid pigments reminiscent of Henri Matisse. The works walk the line between sculpture and painting, and placed Gorchov among the ranks of artists experimenting with shaped canvases, including Ellsworth Kelly, Frank Stella, Richard Tuttle, and Blinky Palermo.

Gorchov largely stayed in this mode throughout his career, and in 1975 his dedication to abstract experimentation landed him a solo exhibition at Fischbach Gallery as well as a spot in that year’s Whitney Biennial. The following year, he participated in “Rooms,” the legendary first exhibition at P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center (now MoMA PS1).

Ron Gorchov Dead: Acclaimed Painter Dies at 90

Ron Gorchov.
©MICHAEL AVEDON

Ron Gorchov, an artist whose work often took the form of saddle-shaped canvases with minimalist forms painted onto them, died at 90 on August 18. His death was announced by New York’s Cheim & Read gallery, which co-represented him alongside Maurani Mercier gallery in Brussels, Modern Art in London, and Thomas Brambilla in Bergamo, Italy.

Since 1967, Gorchov created canvases that are curved in such a way that they arc away from the wall, jutting toward the viewer in a manner that lends them a sculptural quality. Sometimes, the paintings appeared in monumental stacks, running up tall walls. Works of the kind have accrued a cult following in New York, where Gorchov was long based, with curator Robert Storr among his most vocal proponents.

In 2005, on the occasion of a show at Vito Schnabel Gallery, Storr wrote, “Ron Gorchov could have been a contender—more times over than any other painter of his generation. If he gets the breaks and goes the distance this time, he will be one of the greatest comeback kids the New York School has ever seen. What are the odds on this happening?”

Many critics have praised Gorchov for retaining his commitment to abstract painting at a time when the medium was presumed dead. During the 1970s, after Minimalism’s rise, many artists in the city had moved on to different mediums, in the process prioritizing lofty ideas about how art existed in relation to its viewer. But Gorchov, along with a cohort of painters that included Bill Jensen, Lynda Benglis, and Robert Mangold, continued to work in painting anyway, and their work evidenced an engagement with form that was considered bygone.

Gorchov crafted his canvases by stapling linen to a frame, then adding a layer of white primer and several layers of pigment. No attempts were made to hide the staples, and Gorchov’s strokes were often loose, leaving multiple colors exposed. In a 1975 review of Gorchov’s show at Fischbach Gallery, Roberta Smith called the technique “clumsy”—which she invoked as an endearing quality.

In a 2013 interview with fellow artist Natalie Provosty, Gorchov said, “I don’t want to be the kind of artist that feels he has to make perfect work. Work doesn’t need to be perfect. I like the illusion of perfection.”

Jason Andrew reviews Rachael Gorchov at Owen James Gallery

Contributed by Jason Andrew

There is a long history of artists expanding the objectness – that is, the sculptural dimension – of painting. Picasso and Braque introduced this concept in their assemblage works; Vladimir Tatlin broadened it in his “counter-reliefs” alongside Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoventhe, the “Dada Baroness”. For the Dadaists, breaking the picture plane meant breaking tradition, embracing chaos, and rejecting logic.

Decades later, as hardcore ideologies dissipated, Robert Rauschenberg, Bruce Conner, Elizabeth Murray, and many others explored the plasticity of painting in more playful and less doctrinaire ways. In her recent work, Rachael Gorchov revisits old ideologies but with an eye to establishing a new framework for painting. Gorchov is clearly interested in the traditional concerns of color, gesture, and pictorial space. And much like her cousin twice removed, the painter Ron Gorchov – whom she only met in adulthood – Rachael has developed a distinct structure for her work.

Although she was already working in ceramic around 2010, I first encountered her concave paintings (made through a combination of mixed-media including papier-mâché and clay) in a solo show she called “Convex Chromascope” at Hunter College in 2015. Her 2017 solo at Owen James (then in Greenpoint) represented a turning point in her work, as brushstroke and shape coalesced into a uniquely warped mise en scène.

Gorchov has incorporated vinyl printing (high-quality scans of paintings on paper) into her compositions. Mimicking a drop shadow as it cascades from a physical sculpture, the vinyl extends the work’s visual space and drama, confirming its strictly physical flatness while introducing the illusion of motion – just as the sun passing overhead designates time. Jennifer Bartlett’s paintings of the late 1980s incorporated sculptural elements that similarly extended their narrative. Although Gorchov’s work is much smaller in scale, her strategy is just as ambitious as Bartlett’s. And much like Bartlett’s sculptural features, Gorchov’s vinyl is a sardonic reminder of modern painting’s literalness.

Gorchov’s recent exhibition at Owen James Gallery (now located on Wooster Street in Soho), opened on the cusp of the COVID-19 outbreak, and I saw the show just days before it closed in early August. It featured nine wall-mounted works and two works installed on the floor. Gorchov now describes her work as “sculptural painting.”

Elizabeth Murray Estate Moves to Gladstone Gallery

Elizabeth Murray’s painting “Bean,” from 1982, exemplifies the artist’s tendency to imbue abstractions with a cartoon-based, expressive style. It also demonstrates her facility with irregularly shaped and multipanel canvases.Credit...The Murray-Holman Family Trust/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; via Gladstone Gallery

Elizabeth Murray was represented by Pace Gallery for more than two decades. But now, almost 13 years after her death, her estate has chosen Gladstone Gallery to show and sell the pioneering Neo-Expressionist painter’s work. For Barbara Gladstone, the gallery’s owner, including Murray’s work in group shows with more contemporary artists to expand her audience is one of her top priorities. Bolstering Murrays’ international profile is another.

“I’ve been thinking about this and dreaming about this for a long time,” Ms. Gladstone said in an interview on Monday. “I have always admired Elizabeth’s work and thought it was time for it to be seen in a new context.”

The decision was announced on Tuesday.

Murray was among the most important artists to arise in New York during the 1970s, but she is less well-known than some of her counterparts. This is because of, in part, her preference for painting, which was relatively unpopular at the time, and her particular style, which imbued abstractions with a cartoon-based, expressive spirit. Sexism, too, likely played a role: When Neo-Expressionist painting became popular in the 1980s, it was often slightly younger male artists like Julian Schnabel and David Salle who were credited with its emergence.

Despite these challenges, Murray forged a successful and influential career that culminated with a celebrated retrospectiveat the Museum of Modern Art in 2005. Ms. Gladstone cited the effect that Murray has had on painters like Carroll Dunham and Amy Sillman, both of whom are represented by her gallery, as a part of the reason she was keen to add her to the roster. But it’s Murray’s resonance with artists from the most recent generations that Ms. Gladstone is particularly keen on highlighting and exploring further. “I think there’s a lot of what Elizabeth did that’s extremely relevant to lots of things being done today.”

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Tworkov Now Represented by Van Doren Waxter

Portrait of Jack Tworkov in front of his painting P73 #3 (in progress), Provincetown, 1973.
Photo: Arnold Newman / © 2020 Arnold Newman Properties / Getty Images

New York, NY — Van Doren Waxter is pleased to announce exclusive representation of the Estate of Jack Tworkov. An artist at the forefront of American painting for seven decades, Jack Tworkov (1900-1982) forged a disciplined aesthetic through techniques, transitions, and variations on compositions that score an artistic career which continues today to be avidly discussed and celebrated—the one constant being Tworkov’s gestural “mark.”

Van Doren Waxter will debut the gallery’s new online viewing space with a signature painting in Tworkov’s oeuvre, Ending (1967-72). This painting has not been exhibited or offered publicly since 1991. The gallery aims to cultivate broader national and international audiences for Tworkov’s art and ideas, while advancing scholarship focused on the artist’s life and work. The announcement follows the artist’s inclusion in Epic Abstraction (2019-2020) at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Artistic License (2019) at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and Pollock e la Scuola di New York (2018) at the Complesso del Vittoriano, Rome, Italy.

An émigré to America from Russian occupied Poland in 1913, Jack Tworkov found refuge in Greenwich Village. His intellect and commitment to abstraction established him as a member of the post-war avant-garde and charter member of the intellectual Eighth Street Club. His was a long search for an abstract, painterly “mark’’ motived by his own conflict with self-portrayal in painting. This reflection fueled a full vigorous embrace and thrust that began in the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s, and grew into a more reductive, meditative, analytic mark by the 1970s and 1980s.

As a painter, Tworkov not only respected traditions of the art historical past, but he knew and was influenced by contemporary music, dance, and poetry. He made lasting friendships with composers John Cage, Morton Feldman, and Stefan Wolpe. Tworkov was close to choreographer Merce Cunningham, poets Robert Creeley, Charles Olson, and Stanley Kunitz. Painters Willem de Kooning and Franz Kline were well known to him among others from the Eighth Street Club. As a respected teacher, he accepted invitations at institutions across America including American University (1948-51), the legendary Black Mountain College (1952), and most notably the position of Chair at the Yale School of Art and Architecture (1963-69) where his students included painters Jennifer Bartlett, Chuck Close, Rackstraw Downes, Brice Marden, William T. Williams, and the sculptor Richard Serra.

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Jason Andrew Curates: Woodstock Artists Association & Museum

Fern Apfel, Herb Silander, and Jenny Nelson

Originally published by Art Valley NY

Woodstock Artists Association & Museum | March 7 – TBA, 2020

The Woodstock Artists Association & Museum opened a new exhibition on March 7 titled FOCUS: Fish and Dish—A Fresh Take on Still Life, juried by Jason Andrew. I was fortunate to see this show at WAAM the week after it opened. Unfortunately the opening reception scheduled for Saturday, March 14 was cancelled due to the closure of the museum to prevent the spread of COVID-19. I was particularly interested in this exhibition because the juror Jason Andrew, an independent scholar, curator, and producer, is a legend of the Brooklyn art scene. He’s the co-founder and director of Norte Maar, a non-profit dedicated to encouraging, promoting, and presenting collaborative projects in the arts. Andrew is also a Founding Partner at Artist Estate Studio, LLC, an entity that advocates for the legacy of artists like Jack Tworkov and Elizabeth Murray.

Andrew has a great eye and I was curious to see what he selected for the show. I was happy to see work by Beacon artists Sascha Mallon and Rob Penner, as well as other familiar names. The show includes Fern Apfel, Joan Barker, Sascha Mallon, Jenny Nelson, Rob Penner, Herb Silander, Jeff Starr, Linda Stillman, Wendy Williams, and Mimi Young.

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Jason Andrew Interviewed: Many Ask Artists To Supply Creative Work For Exposure. So Did The Asheville Art Museum

The Asheville Art Museum reopened this past November with "Appalachia Now!" as its marquee exhibition.

Originally published by Blue Ridge Public Radio

Ask any of the 50 artists invited into Asheville Art Museum’s “Appalachia Now!” exhibition and, to a person, they’ll tell you they were honored and elated. Many were motivated to stretch themselves artistically to create what they regard as their most ambitious works.

For good reason. “Appalachia Now!” is the flagship exhibition that reopened the Asheville Art Museum last November and few of the artists had ever experienced exposure on this level. The exhibition closes Feb. 3.

The Asheville Art Museum reopened this past November with "Appalachia Now!" as its marquee exhibition.

But here’s another truth: Even the museum director acknowledges the artists were largely paid with exposure. The museum raised $24 million for its renovation and only distributed stipends of $100 each to the “Appalachia Now!” artists, regardless of whether they simply loaned pieces out of their studios or created major new works at the request of the exhibition’s curator.

The stipend was a thank-you for participating with us on this project. It wasn’t a compensation,” said Pam Myers, who is in her 24th year as the museum’s director. “The intention from the beginning was to open with an exhibition of contemporary artists from the region to support the artists and bring national attention to their work, and I think that’s what we’ve done.”

Artists looking to establish themselves often get requests to perform or otherwise lend their creative skills to conferences, private parties, businesses and assorted projects for the promised payment of exposure. But what does it say about the value of an artist’s work when a city’s leading arts institution does the same?

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AES in the Wall Street Journal: You Inherited a Bunch of Papers. Now What?

Archives may hold historical and other value even if the deceased wasn’t famous

Originally published by the Wall Street Journal

At the end of our lives, we leave behind memories—and lots of paper.

Not just diaries, letters and photographs, but rough drafts, notes, sketchbooks, date books, check books and receipts.

Clearly, the doodles, random jottings and other ephemera that most people leave behind are of no interest to anybody. But that isn’t always the case.

The archives of singer-songwriter Woody Guthrie, for one, were purchased in 2011 for $6 million by the George Kaiser Family Foundation. The archive features rare recordings, journals and handwritten lyrics, but also includes contracts, royalty statements, employment and military records, and rent receipts.

That was an exceptional case, of course. But more common are archives of people who, though relatively unknown, made important contributions in a particular field, were important to an institution, or had connections with famous people.

Jason Andrew, founding partner of Artist Estate Studio in New York City, a service offering archive management to artists and estates of artists, poses the example of a painter who never sold any works but who was friends with well-known artists. In such a case, Mr. Andrew says, an archivist or collector focused on those other artists may wish to acquire that person’s papers.

So for people who inherit those kinds of archives, it is worth doing a little investigation to see if they have any commercial value.

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DIY art spaces pop up in unexpected spots across the country

Cutting edge art isn’t limited to big cities and large cultural institutions. Creative work can be found across the country in small towns and artist-run spaces, says Jason Andrew, who curated an exhibit on contemporary Appalachian art that just opened at the new Asheville Art Museum in North Carolina, ashevilleart.org. “These are really DIY, do-it-yourself type spaces. You’re right there where all the creative juices are working and flowing.” He shares some favorite spots with Larry Bleiberg for USA TODAY.

Granary Arts, Ephraim, Utah

Art flourishes in remote central Utah thanks to artists based in a historic granary building on the high plains. “It’s in a very exciting space. It’s really in the desert. There’s nothing there,” says Andrew, a Utah native. Founded by two friends, it enriches the community with workshops, musical performances and art installations.

More info

Popps Packing, Hamtramck, Michigan

This group founded by a husband and wife, has brought international artists and quirky shows and events to a neighborhood just north of Detroit. Housed in a former meat-packing plant, it serves a community with immigrants from places like Yemen, Armenia, Turkey and Ukraine, offering a tool-lending library and meeting spaces, along with gallery openings and shows.

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Fiendish Plots, Lincoln, Nebraska

From Buddhist paintings made from rose petals to art inspired by workplace immigration raids, this gallery and exhibition space embraces the ephemeral and the contemporary. Run by an artist couple, it also offers workshops, performances, screenings, readings and artist talks.

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Collar Works, Troy, New York

Artists have brought new life to a former industrial building in upstate New York. The collective, named for the city’s once-prominent shirt collar factories, got its start mounting pop-ups and shows in empty industrial spaces. It has helped lead the revival of the area, Andrew says, hosting often edgy art installations and theater productions.

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Marmot Art Space, Spokane, Washington

Located in the hip Kendall Yards neighborhood, this “white cube” gallery focuses on emerging local artists, but has a polished vibe, Andrew says. It attracts crowds on the first Friday of every month when it opens new exhibits. “The walls are well painted, the lighting will be perfect. It’s a little more sophisticated.”

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Shop Talk with Artists’ Legacy Foundation

Artist Estate Studio and Artists’ Legacy Foundation partnered for an evening of discussion focused on presenting strategies for artist studio managers and their archivists. The conversation was among some of the most experienced peers in legacy planning and art management and involved key talking points about institutional representation, archive organization methods, and a walkthrough from Jason Andrew and Julia Schwartz on the most important steps to take to ensure the long term stability of an artist’s legacy. Artist Estate Studio’s design director, Peter Freeby also spoke on the top ten most important parts of digital strategy for an artist, which has been preserved below:

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Photo credit: Julia Schwartz, courtesy Artists’ Legacy Foundation

1. How to design

If you design anything, you are making a physical thing, not an idea. Think through the reality of what problem you’re trying to solve, who it’s for, and why it should exist. Map out how all these relationships connect. Build the absolute simplest solution to the problem. Finally, fine tune it and ask for feedback until it does everything you want it to do and people understand the core concept in the first 5 seconds of seeing it.

2. Use existing systems

Developing a website from scratch is costly, and expensive long term, not just for the time it takes to hire a freelancer. Building digital products in the ecosystem of other digital products allows you to quickly adapt and be compatible with new trends.

3. Pay attention to pixels

Images should be Jpegs that are 1500 pixels across at their smallest dimension (1500 px wide for portrait photos and 1500 px tall for landscape photos) and should ideally be between 200 and 700 kb. Tip: don’t size up images. It just makes them blurry.

Here are 2 ways to make sure your pixels are perfect:

• In Photoshop: use the "Export As" tool in the file menu and tweak the Image Size and Quality Settings to export a Jpeg that fits the dimensions you need.

• In Preview: "Export..." tool and tweak the Quality slider until it fits the file size you need.

4. Make sure you’re ADA compliant

There is a current trend of lawsuits against arts organizations across the country for not being ADA compliant on their websites. Here is a quick checklist to make sure you’re safe:

• all images should have captions that literally describe the image (these captions are also called Alt Text, or more broadly referred to as metadata)

• make sure that any video/audio content has text alternatives with equivalent information

• clearly label all text alternatives for video and audio as an alternative for said video and audio

5. Use Alt Text for Social Engine Optimization

Use alt text to describe images on your website involving artwork, events and news items. This is good for above ADA reasons, but also will assist your Google search ranking. In Squarespace you can write the Alt text for an image by writing it as the title of the image file before you drop it in your site. Describe the image, the location, and any other related keywords.

6. Data matters (but not all data)

Pay attention to the analytics on your site, but specifically watch out for Geography, Visitor Count, Time on Site, Device Usage, and Traffic Sources. These numbers can tell you where your fans are, how they’re looking at your site, and where they found you.

Photo Credit, Peter Freeby

7. Understand your fans

After combing through the data, use it to come up with a profile of what kind of person they are. At big tech companies like Airbnb these "profiles" even have a name and personality. The more you can personify the data, the more personal you’ll seem to the people who find you.

8. Design for them

If you know who likes you and how they find you and what they use, you can figure out what changes you might want to put into the site. If everyone finds you on instagram and uses an iPhone, make sure that you put the most effort into making your website mobile friendly and has interesting images that people will want to share.

Some recent data about our sites that informs us about the kind of work we put in:

• Jack Tworkov visitors use desktop computers 43% of the time

• Elizabeth Murray visitors use desktop computers 66% of the time

9. How to Instagram

Because of the number of profiles that have spam followers now, success on instagram isn’t as much about the followers anymore. It’s much more about the engagement with comments and likes. (followers are still important, but not the #1 priority)

According to the data, here’s how to post the best photos on instagram:

• Close up shots

• Portrait photos/photos with faces

• Multi-photo posts

• Video posts

10. Marketing

Spending a small amount on social media marketing can get you a long way, and using apps like Adobe Spark Post, it’s way easier to make a successful ad than ever.

But, email marketing is still statistically far and away the most successful way to advertise. Make sure that you are consistent, sending out an email once a month, every other week, every day, it doesn’t matter. If you can get your newsletter into someone’s routine, they will keep up with you. Also, be intentional. Emails should have very short paragraphs and images, not be long essays. They should also be sent to multiple narrow audiences, (not 10,000 people who are in a sending mailbox called "art").

AES in WSJ: You Inherited Some Artwork. Now What Do You Do?

Artist Estate Studio Founder, Jason Andrew was quoted by Daniel Grant in the Wall Street Journal. Read about where to go to find out what the artwork you’ve inherited is worth, how to sell it, and how to get help managing an artist’s legacy.

AES in Forbes: Why Designers Should Collect Art

In the design work I do, I get stuck in a cycle of inspiration. It’s not unlike going to the fridge, opening it, staring for a minute, closing the fridge and going back to my room. I do this with Dribbble and Behance and Twitter TWTR +0% and sometimes Reddit. This cycle of getting inspiration from all the same places is a big problem for the design community. It’s easy to get lost, or make the same things over and over again. It's easy to be cynical about the things you make when the ideas you believe in are written in a note on your phone.

Designers are limited by the constraints of their projects with brand standards, style guides, practicality, and every other factor in a project. With these constraints, designers aren’t able to explore full freedom of creativity. In a number of ways, this is good. The best design is design that is working within practical constraints. But this restriction also limits designers so they might not come across solutions to design problems because they aren’t able to explore far outside the limits of their current projects.

This is why companies like Google have 20 percent rules, allowing people to explore outside the constraints of their own assignments and find solutions in side projects that can influence the company in serendipitous ways. While this approach is immeasurably helpful in creating opportunities for spontaneous innovation and developing a community that genuinely cares about the work they do, it doesn’t directly solve the problem to which it is directed.

If designers are making things within design constraints and don’t have significant contact with unconstrained aesthetic ideas, they don’t come in contact with new ideas that might better solve their design problems.

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originally published on Forbes.com

AES Talks Legacy with Hrag Vartanian of HYPERALLERGIC

What Should Artists Do With Their Work After They Die?

Guests Jason Andrew and Saul Ostro sit down with Hrag Vartanian in this episode of Hyperallergic’s podcast, Art Movements

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Highlight:

Vartanian: What is the biggest challenge when dealing with an artist’s legacy?

Andrew: You load as many archival boxes as you can in the back of your Honda Civic and you process that and you build the relationship. The biggest challenge is that people don’t want to talk about their legacy. They don’t want to talk about dating this painting from 1982. The more that you develop a rapport and confidence with an artist working in their studio you’re able to get around those situations.

Founding Partner Jason Andrew Interviewed by Catalogue Raisonné Scholars Association (via CRSA)

Jack Tworkov in his Provincetown studio, 1960. Photo: Arnold Newman, © Arnold Newman / Getty Images. Courtesy Tworkov Family Archives, New York.

New York - Founding Partner at Artist Estate Studio, Jason Andrew, talks to the Catalogue Raisonné Scholars Association about his work on the launch of the first online catalogue raisonné project for painter Jack Tworkov. Launched over ten years ago, Andrew discusses the ever-changing-landscape of catalogue raisonné research and it’s growing presence online.

READ FULL INTERVIEW HERE >