Soft Sculpture installed on Flagler College Campus.
Sunday, 12 February 2023
Saturday, 11 February 2023
Abdoulaye Konaté, Artist, West Africa, b. 1953
Source link:
Adopting a unique process of assemblage, Konaté cuts-up, dyes, sews, and reassembles pieces of fabric (mostly cotton), then reconfigures them into large-scale, boldly coloured tapestries with incredibly detailed surfaces, creating arresting optical effects.
Working mostly with textile materials, dyes, and dyeing techniques indigenous to his native Mali, Konaté's installations form abstract visual tableaus which are at once explorations in colour and weaving cloth yet speak to more complicated global socio-political themes that resonate far beyond his local context.
In early works on paper rendered in acrylic, colourful motifs refer to graphic signs and cosmological symbols used by Malian societies, the most prominent of these being ciwara (or amulets)—a ritual object representing an antelope head, used by the Bambara ethnic group in Mali. The head of the beast, which typically forms part of a zoomorphic crest with elegant lines, evokes the graceful ripple of an antelopes form and is an important symbol used in masks worn to perform traditional dance and rituals of initiation.
Colour in Konaté's work isn't merely aesthetic and serves as a metaphor for themes as diverse as war, power struggles, religion, globalisation, ecological shifts, and the AIDS epidemic which he poignantly visualised in his 1995 work Lutte contre de HIV. This large textile work depicts a figure with an imposing red target at its centre, suggestive of being marked by illness, accompanied by a suitcase placed in front, containing three screenprints and a blanket referencing personal artefacts and ephemera related to the suffering brought on by the disease.
As the artist has previously said of his influences, 'I can say that in my art there are two well-defined lines of thought. On the one hand, there is the purely aesthetic side, influenced by the nature and cultural traditions of Mali, my country, and that determines the colours and the materials of my work. On the other hand, there is a more spiritual side, which stems from the desire to investigate and describe through my work the human suffering, which reflects itself on the relations between states, politics, the environment, society and the family. Addressing very urgent issues such as AIDS, fanatism and environmental threats, my works draw attention to the problems that plague the modern man and that are caused by a fundamental lack of tolerance in Africa as elsewhere in the world.'
Text Source: https://ocula.com/artists/abdoulaye-konate/
Bisa Butler, Artist, American, b. 1973
Asantewa, 2020. Cotton, silk, wool, and velvet quilted and appliquéd, dimensions 52 × 88 inches.
[ID: An African American woman sits back in a sleeved Victorian dress with black flowers in her hair, backdropped by a red geometric pattern. She gazes concernedly, her skin depicted with magenta, purple, teal, and yellow and her attire with vibrant, clashing patterns.]
Source link:
https://www.unitedstatesartists.org/fellow/bisa-butler/
More to see.
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Bisa Butler was born to educators in Orange, NJ, the youngest of four children. Butler earned a BFA from Howard University, where she refined her natural talents under the tutelage of lecturers such as Elizabeth Catlett, Jeff Donaldson, and Ernie Barnes. She later began to experiment with fabric as a medium and collage technique. During graduate studies at Montclair State University, where she earned her MA in 2005, she took a Fiber Arts class and had an artistic epiphany, finally realizing how to express her art by combining painting and drawing skills with sewing.
Butler worked as a high school art teacher for ten years in Newark Public Schools and for three years at Columbia High School in Maplewood, NJ. Her work has been acquired by the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, MO, the Orlando Museum of Art in Florida, the Minneapolis Institute of Art, and many other public and private collectors. In the fall of 2020, a solo exhibition of her work opened at the Art Institute of Chicago, the second stop of a traveling exhibit that began at the Katonah Museum of Art in Katonah, NY; her work was concurrently featured as part of a group show at the Toledo Museum of Art in Ohio. Butler is represented by Claire Oliver Gallery in New York.
Artist Website:
Beverly Semmes, Artist, American, b. 1958
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More to see on gallery website:
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Carmen Argote, Aritst, Los Angeles-based artist. She hails from Guadalajara. b. 1981
In-Line (magnet drawing)
2011
About the Piece
This work composed of chicken wire hexagons and copper mesh is held together by hundreds of small magnets. Each magnet holds a component to the canvas surface. This works looks at systems of organization such as strands and lines to create an image created by lining up these small hexagonal mechanically woven wires. With these works, I explore the idea of where a drawing can happen. I envision the space between the magnet and the chicken-wire piece to be the place where the drawing happens.
I envision these as freestanding, allowing the viewer to walk around the work and see the magnetic elements inherent in the work.
Material: chicken wire, magnets, canvas
Dimensions: 6' x 7' x 2"
Above image: A series of sculptures inspired by a simple laundry folding tool, co-opted as a sculptural form. These sculptures are reminiscent of both architectural structure and the physical movement which translates loose fabric into folded structure. They embody the ritual of folding, a process of layering over onto itself, so that one part covers another. The folded structures, like the installation, are of a human scale, yet transform into architectural models through repetition and play.
Material: Paper mache, paint, cardboard, tape, muslin
Dimensions: Variable
Artist Statement
As a multidisciplinary artist working in installation, I explore notions of home and place, interacting with architecture to reflect on personal histories and my own immigrant experience. I work with places and materials that surround me, utilizing local resources as points to expand from. My practice uses the act of inhabiting as a starting point, allowing the work to take form as I respond to a space, materials and ideas developing from my own experiences and relationships to a site.
I work from an intimate and personal place, using shared experiences to connect the spaces that house us to notions of home and self. Often working with family, I explore our common immigrant experience as a layered, multigenerational, transnational experience that is echoed though shared memories, traumas, and aspirations, extending outward from the intimate space of home.
Architecture for me exists apart from the physical structure, in familial myth, in class structures, in shapes, and as an imprint acting upon the body. My interest in the shape of spaces and in the layout as a visual language for expression developed in childhood from looking at my father’s architectural drawings of houses he wanted to build.
Robert Rauschenberg, Artist, American, b. 1925, d. 2008
Layers
Scrape (Hoarfrost Editions)
1974 76 x 36 inches
Offset lithograph transferred to
collage of paper bags and fabric
Edition of 32
Robert Rauschenberg worked in a wide range of mediums including painting, sculpture, prints, photography, and performance, over the span of six decades. He emerged on the American art scene at the time that Abstract Expressionism was dominant, and through the course of his practice he challenged the gestural abstract painting and the model of the heroic, self-expressive artist championed by that movement.
In his landmark series of Combines (1954–64) he mixed the materials of artmaking with ordinary things, writing, “I consider the text of a newspaper, the detail of photograph, the stitch in a baseball, and the filament in a light bulb as fundamental to the painting as brush stroke or enamel drip of paint.”1 In Bed (1955), for example, he covered a large wall-mounted board with a pillow and patchwork quilt which he then marked with graphite scrawls and exuberant lashings of paint, the latter perhaps an ironic nod to Abstract Expressionism.
Born in Port Arthur, Texas, Rauschenberg studied at a variety of art schools including the experimental Black Mountain College outside of Asheville, North Carolina, where the artist and former Bauhaus instructor Josef Albers was his teacher. There, his mentors and collaborators included the composer John Cage, the artist Cy Twombly, and the choreographer Merce Cunningham, with whom he would collaborate on more than twenty dance compositions. Rauschenberg’s engagement with performance was enduring and a defining influence in his work. As his career began to gather steam in New York in the mid-1950s, he also began a crucial dialogue with the artist Jasper Johns that shaped the work of both: together the two artists pushed each other away from defined models of practice towards new modes that integrated the signs, images, and materials of the everyday world.
Photography and printmaking were two of Rauschenberg’s abiding interests. In the 1958–60 seriesbased on the thirty-four Cantos of Dante’s Inferno(346.1963.1-34), he used a solvent to transfer photographs from contemporary magazines and newspapers onto drawing paper. The series is emblematic of a lifetime of experimentation with the ways the deluge of images in modern media culture could be transmitted and transformed.
Text source Museum of Modern Art
Catharine Ellis, Weaver and Dyer
Catharine Ellis has been a weaver and dyer for over 40 years. One of the leading textile educators in the United States, Ellis is founder of the Professional Crafts Fiber program at Haywood Community College in North Carolina. An internationally recognized textile artist for her invention of woven shibori, Catharine is the author of Woven Shibori and the much anticipated book The Art and Science of Natural Dyes: Principles, Experiments, and Results that will release in 2019. Ellis continues to share her extensive research and expertise in the craft of natural dyes with the worldwide dye community.
Link below to blog.
Scroll to view making black with indigo and madder.
Appalachian Traditions Discussion with Catharine Ellis
Catharine's presentation begins at 16:50.
Wednesday, 8 February 2023
Sojourner Truth, Abolitionist
Portrait of abolitionist Sojourner Truth, sitting with yarn and knitting needles
For scholars of Truth’s portraits, though, the symbolism is great. Truth’s handiwork conveyed an aspect of her social justice message, that knitting represented industry and advancement. She demonstrated the skill to people she met, many of them seeking refuge in the Freedmen’s Village in Washington, D.C., in the mid-1860s, and encouraged them to take up knitting. Her audience might produce items they sold or kept for themselves. Regardless, she believed that anyone would be “much happier” if usefully employed.
It is difficult to tell whether the shawls and caps Sojourner Truth wears in these portraits are knitted or crocheted, but in all four photos, she is knitting. The Library Company notes that “[Sojourner Truth’s] knitting probably alludes to her promotion of the handcraft as an industry for advancement of former slaves.” Curious about the significance of the knitting shown in the portraits, I further researched Sojourner Truth and her knitting. It was difficult to find anything specific, but most helpful, informative, and current was a blog post on the Brooklyn Tweed website written by Ra Malika Imhotep, entitled “Part II: Crafting for Freedom,” published on July 28, 2020. In her rich analysis of the intertwined histories of Black people and handwork, Imhotep, a Black feminist scholar, confirmed that Sojourner Truth was active in a community that supported racial and gender equity in Northampton, Massachusetts called the Northampton Association of Education and Industry where abolitionists operated a silk mill, teaching escaped and former slaves skills that would help them learn to support themselves. In addition to Imhotep’s article, I have shared other primary and secondary sources I encourage you to explore below.
Although the dominant representation of the relationship between enslaved Africans and cotton is the agricultural labor of the field, there was a subset of cotton work that took place in the cloth house. The Homespun Movement is largely attributed to Anglo-American women who performed their patriotism during the American Revolution (1775 -1783) by refusing imported British materials and clothing by returning to traditional methods of weaving and spinning their own textiles. What gets cut from this story and is subsequently hard to research, is the way the labor of the enslaved enabled this valorization of domestic goods. What I do know is that some enslaved Black people, often described as elderly, disabled and otherwise unfit for agricultural work, were conscripted to the industrial labors of spinning cotton, weaving cloth and making clothes.
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