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THE CLARK HULINGS FUND NAMES FIRST TWO GRANT RECIPIENTS |
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New York: The Clark Hulings Fund For Burgeoning Visual Artists is pleased to announce that Lydia Musco and Lauren Frances Adams, two emerging artists, have been named the Fund’s first grant winners.
Says Elizabeth Hulings who, with her mother Mary, founded The Fund in honor of her father, Clark Hulings, “On behalf of the distinguished panel of judges, I am delighted thatLydia Musco and Lauren Frances Adams were selected as the Clark Hulings Fund’s first grant recipients. Because of the quality of their work, their innovation and nature of their projects for which they requested assistance, these two women offered the strongest excellent potential for The Fund to make a tangible difference in each of their careers.”
In conjunction with her gallery show at the Petersham Art Center, in Petersham, Massachusetts, Lydia Musco, from nearby Royalston, will use the grant money to create a new outdoor sculpture specifically for the Art Center’s lawn. “When the The Petersham Art Center invited me to mount an exhibition, I was keen to juxtapose my smaller pieces with a larger-scale work installed outside the building,” says 35-year old Ms. Musco. “Although my work is influenced by urban spaces and environments, it is equally fed by a connection to the rural, wooded landscapes I explored while growing up. Along with ideas of architecture and constructed space, certain fundamental elements of nature have remained within my visual and object-making vocabulary, such as sedimentary layers and the work of gravity and time. This grant now allows me to create a new outdoor sculpture, gaining valuable experience within the realm of public art and I thank the Clark Hulings Fund for their generosity and support.” Ms. Musco was awarded a $5,000 grant. Growing up in the rural American South, 34-year old Lauren Frances Adams, who now lives in Baltimore Maryland, sought support for an upcoming seventh-month site-specific installation next April 2014 at the historic Clermont Farm, a former plantation slave-holding site in Clarke County Virginia, managed by the state of Virginia. Says Ms. Adams, “At the center of my work is a concern with what defines American identity. As Bruce Nauman once said, ‘art is a means of acquiring an investigative attitude.’ Continuing this exploration, the upcoming project with the Rotating History Project at the Clermont Farm in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia has afforded me the opportunity to make a new site-specific body of work. Alongside seven other artists, I will make archival inquiries into the layered history of the former plantation farm: once a pre-Columbian Native American hunting ground, then famously surveyed by George Washington, then a successful slave-holding farm, and now a whisper of its past selves. I have been given the original 1755 sitting room of the house for an immersive installation, which I am still developing but will involve painting and image-making.” Ms. Adams received a $4,500 grant. The judging panel included Meredith Bergmann, Peter Falk, Thomas R. Kellaway, Philip Koch, Dan Ostermiller, Jennie Ottinger, and Bart Walter. Peter Falk, of Rediscovered Masters, based his decision on three criteria: “First, the images had to be innovative and compelling right off the bat. Next, they had to make me think deeper about what I was absorbing, and finally, they had to possess the power to make me return and explore the submission afresh.” Says Philip Koch, an expressionist painter with roots in realism, and a professor at the Maryland Institute College of Art, Lauren Frances Adams takes a contemporary look back at traditional Americana, borrowing elegant lace-like designs of traditional decoration like wallpaper and inserts it into unexpected images, such as the struggle for justice of the labor movement. Looking at her work gives you a surreal double-take, while Lydia Musco’s irregular hand-built organic towers are imposing, yet humble, and seem to gesture with their own personality.” About Clark Hulings Clark Hulings’ ascendency in the art realm began in 1945 with a one-man show in Santa Fe, NM, the first of two-dozen gallery presentations he would have over the course of a peripatetic 65-year career. The capstone show took place at New York City’s esteemed Forbes Gallery in 2011, just seven weeks after his death. Writing about this solo exhibition, “ClarkHulings: An American Master,” in a lengthy article about it in the March/April 2011 Fine Art Connoisseur, Peter Trippi called Hulings’ vividly realistic tableaux of village and farm life in Europe, Mexico and the United States “superb.”
Even though Hulings’ representational works stand in stark contradistinction to the Expressionistic, Pop and Minimalist creations of his peers, Trippi noted that he relished “enormous success among private collectors and commercial galleries, yet never became familiar to [the] mainstream,” a circumstance that produced no resentment on Hulings’ part. “I enjoyed what I was doing so much that there was no point in trying to be somebody else,” he said genially. “I decided to be the best I could be in painting conventional subjects in a traditional style.”
Hulings took a keen interest in colleagues who appreciated his self-assured approach, sharing his expertise with them at institutions like the New York City’s venerable Art Students League. Following Hulings’ death, at age 88, his wife Mary and daughter Elizabeth considered ways for them to carry on his collaborative spirit, leading them to establish TheClark Hulings Fund.
All contributions to the Clark Hulings Fund, a 501 C-3, are tax-deductible. For more information, visit www.clarkhulings.com. |
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Clermont Forum II: Interpreting Clermont’s History Through Art
April 12-May 31, 2014
Clermont Farm Historic Site, Berryville, VA 22611
The Clermont Foundation – Rotating History Project – Virginia Dept. of Historic Resources
THE NEIGHBORS
April 1 – June 1
Curated by Zoë Charlton and Tim Doud
Make Things (Happen) is a participatory project organized by Christine Wong Yap featuring 29 artist-created activity sheets to make things or make things happen.
Artists: Lauren F. Adams, Oliver Braid, Maurice Carlin, Kevin B. Chen, Torreya Cummings, Helen de Main, double zero, Bean Gilsdorf, Galeria Rusz, Sarrita Hunn, Maria Hupfield, Nick Lally, Justin Langlois, Justin Limoges, Jessica Longmore, Mail Order Brides/M.O.B., Meta Local Collaborative, Roy Meuwissen, Dionis Ortiz, Kristina Paabus, Piero Passacantando, Julie Perini, Risa Puno, Genevieve Quick, Pallavi Sen, Elisabeth Smolarz, Emilio Vavarella, David Gregory Wallace, Lexa Walsh.
See Make Things (Happen) at:
BiPolar
Curated by Andrea Pollan, Curator’s Office, DC
SCHOOL 33 in Baltimore, MD
January 17 to March 8, 2014
Opening Reception: January 17, 2014
6pm to 9pm
Participating artists:
Lauren Frances Adams
Katie Duffy
Mary Frank
Hedieh Ilchi
Dan Perkins
From Pollan’s curatorial statement:
Lauren Frances Adams dives into Elizabethan colonial history and transforms her findings into an installation that includes wallpaper, gourds, a painting, and pearls. Herfascination with how territories are colonized by historic powers begins with herresearches into fashion of the age. In her artist-designed wallpaper, Adams examined thefamous Hardwick Portrait of Queen Elizabeth I. Her gown includes embroideries of thenatural history discoveries of that era that the artist has given special focus to on herwallpaper. On this theatrical backdrop she hangs a fictive portrait of a Native Americanwearing a towering costume of ruffs and collars appropriated from portraits of Englishexplorers and politicians. Adding conceptual texture and oddity, Adams has scattered pearls, the kinds that so frequently encrust the gowns of the colonizing aristocracy, with the gourds deemed precious by the Native American tribes along the North Carolina coastline, Adams thereby compresses time and geography and prods our conscience onthe value of one society dominating another.]]> 
(above images, L-R: Stephanie Syjuco, Dazzle Camouflage Propositions, 2013 and David Mabb,
Daisy Print Wellington Boot, Detail from The Morris Kitsch Archive, Laminated digital print, 2009)
Ornament and Crime
Stephanie Syjuco, David Mabb, Susanne Slavick, and Stacy Lynn Waddell
Organized by Lauren Frances Adams
November 2 – December 8, 2013, 1717 Troutman #327, Queens, NY
Opening Reception: Saturday, November 2, 7 – 10 pm
“For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror. . .” Rainer Marie Rilke
Ortega y Gasset Projects is pleased to present Ornament and Crime, an exhibition organized by Lauren F. Adams comprised of artworks by Stephanie Syjuco, David Mabb, Stacy Lynn Waddell, and Susanne Slavick. The exhibition contends with the Adolf Loos essay from 1913 of the same name—a provocative and supremacist philosophy of how ornament and decoration impairs modern society, not only through wasted labor but also by embodying that which is degenerate or unsophisticated. Unlike Loos, the artists included in this exhibition engage ornament not as mere style or form, but as a platform to debate the political and social concerns of our time.
Together, the works in this exhibition are actively defying what Loos described as the greatness of the modern age, “freedom from ornament.” Instead, these works seek to illuminate the weight of history, resuscitating or borrowing archival patterns in an effort to elucidate contemporary notions about political order, social hierarchies, and constructed authenticity. Existing between homage and critique, the artworks in the exhibition utilize ornament as a sort of trojan horse — acting as subversive cover to reveal disruptive or terrible truths.
Installations by Stephanie Syjuco of various ‘ethnic’ and ‘tribal’ patterns question the very categories that we assign to regional patterns in the amnesiac globalized marketplace. Syjuco achieves this through appropriation, such as in the Dazzle Camouflage Propositions, which pictures Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye in France, covered with Vietnamese and Algerian patterns. The result is the contrasting of iconic modernist architecture with decorative languages that are native to countries colonized by France, and eventually emancipated through brutal wars. Syjuco’s interventions are simple juxtapositions that reveal contested histories — a visual contradiction resulting in an uneasy reconciliation.
The paintings of Susanne Slavick feature photographs found online (and altered) of the physical devastation of recent wars in the Middle East. She combines these with decorative painted embellishments derived from the art and architecture of the sites and cultures pictured. Layering contemporary imagery of rubble and ruin with ornamental details from historical sources, works such as Restore: Sarafiya Star over the Tigris are intended to reveal physical and cultural loss and to recuperate through aesthetic means. As Slavick notes, “The presence of this ornate detail insists that the targets of war are neither faceless enemies nor sites devoid of culture. They are not just anywhere but somewhere, not just anyone but someone.” In this regard, Slavick’s works counter Loos’ insistence that the forward progress of modernity requires selective eradication of the nuance of lived human experience, exhibited through the embellishment of everyday forms.”
Stacy Lynn Waddell burns, singes, stains and gilds the surfaces of walls and paper in an effort to recontextualize historical narratives and classical representation. Repetitive acts of destruction create new surfaces of subversive beauty and visual conflict. Concerned with African American cultural history, iconographic images such as the works of the Hudson River School, and the labor and trace of the artist’s hand, Waddell’s artworks utilize personal symbolism in search of the universal patterns which unite us.
David Mabb presents Highlights from the Morris Kitsch Archive, a selection from a collection that contains over 500 images, largely drawn from the Internet, of commercial objects decorated with 19th century William Morris patterns. Isolating aesthetic history as a commodity, Mabb’s archive clarifies the tension between Morris’ utopian ideals of fine craft and pre-industrial labor roles and capitalism’s post-industrial consumption endgame. In Mabb’s words, the trace of Morris in the 21st century “has acted as a form of iconoclasm, undermining the integrity of Morris’s design and production, obscuring their utopian and therefore critical potential; it leaves no evidence of Morris’s politics, whilst appearing to celebrate him.”
BIOS
Stephanie Syjuco creates large-scale spectacles of collected cultural objects, cumulative archives, and temporary vending installations, often with an active public component that invites viewers to directly participate as producers or distributors. This has included starting a global collaborative project with crochet crafters to counterfeit high-end consumer goods; presenting a parasitic art counterfeiting event, “COPYSTAND: An Autonomous Manufacturing Zone” for Frieze Projects, London (2009); and “Shadowshop,” an alternative vending outlet embedded at SFMOMA (2010-11). Born in the Philippines, she received her MFA from Stanford University and BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute. Her work has been included in exhibitions at MoMA/P.S.1, the Whitney Museum of American Art, SFMOMA, ZKM Center for Art and Technology, Germany; Z33 Space for Contemporary Art, Belgium; UniversalStudios Gallery Beijing; and The Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, among others. She will be joining the faculty at the University of California at Berkeley in January 2014 as an Assistant Professor in Sculpture. She is the recipient of the Joan Mitchell Painters and Sculptors Award. http://www.stephaniesyjuco.com/
Susanne Slavick is the Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Art at Carnegie Mellon University and recent editor and curator of Out of Rubble (Charta, 2011), a book and traveling exhibit featuring international artists who respond to the aftermath of war. She has exhibited internationally, with recent solo shows at the Chicago Cultural Center, McDonough Museum in Youngstown, and Accola Griefen Gallery in NYC, where she is represented. Slavick studied at Yale University, Jagiellonian University in Krakow, Temple University Abroad in Rome and Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia. She has published visual essays and articles for: Cultural Heritage and Arts Review, Cultural Politics (Duke University Press) Frontiers: A Journal of Women’s Studies (University of Nebraska Press), Guernica: A Magazine of Art & Politics, and AlterNet. In January 2014, she will present a solo exhibition at Princeton University’s Bernstein Gallery. http://artscool.cfa.cmu.edu/~slavick/
Since earning her MFA from The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2007, Stacy Lynn Waddell’s work has been recognized and exhibited nationally. Waddell has participated in exhibitions at the Franklin Humanities Institute at Duke University in Durham, NC, the Weatherspoon Art Museum in Greensboro, NC, The North Carolina Museum of Art in Raleigh, NC, The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, PA, Project Row Houses in Houston, TX, The Studio Museum in Harlem in NY and On Stellar Rays in NY among other venues. Her work is included in several public and private collections that include The Nasher Museum of Art, Durham, NC, the Weatherspoon Art Museum, Greensboro, NC, The North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh, NC, The Gibbes Museum of Art, Charleston, SC and The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY. Waddell is a 2010 recipient of the Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters and Sculptors Grant. She currently resides in Chapel Hill, NC. http://www.stacylynnwaddell.com/
David Mabb is an artist who works with the textile and wallpaper designs of nineteenth century interior designer, writer and socialist William Morris. Mabb’s interest in Morris stems from the social and political implications of his work, the continued relevance of his politics and the continuing market for his designs. Mabb’s interpretations or reconfigurations of Morris’s designs have foregrounded the relationship between Morris’s own utopian thinking and other forms of modernist cultural production. David Mabb is a Reader in Art at Goldsmiths, University of London. His work has been exhibited in numerous international exhibitions including Leo Kamen Gallery (Toronto), William Morris Gallery (London), Tate Britain (London), and Nature Morte (Berlin), among others. http://www.gold.ac.uk/art/research/staff/dm/01/
Lauren Frances Adams (Snow Hill, North Carolina, b. 1979) lives and works in Baltimore, Maryland, where she is a full-time faculty member at the Maryland Institute College of Art. She has had recent solo exhibitions at Back Lane West, Cornwall, UK; Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis (Front Room and EXPO Chicago); and Conner Contemporary, Washington, D.C. Her work has been featured in group exhibitions including: Nymans House and Gardens, Sussex, UK; Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art, North Carolina; CUE Foundation, New York; Mattress Factory and the Andy Warhol Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, PA; among many others. She is a Joan Mitchell Foundation MFA Grant recipient (2007), and attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (2009). http://www.lfadams.com]]> 
I am a Trawick Prize finalist. The 2013 exhibition will be held September 4-28 at Gallery B,
located at 7700 Wisconsin Avenue, Suite E, Bethesda, MD 20814.
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Paradise Garden Project
