The Split Wall is an evolving, site specific installation at Pittsburgh’s Blackspace. This projects combines new and existing work alongside sculptural elements in order to explore the ways domestic idealism, intimacy, and social mobility have been shaped by consumer driven ideology.
The installation is viewable by appointment only through the month of February. A closing reception will be held at the end of the month.
Variation on Dwelling #8, 2018/2024
Archival pigment print on panel
10 x 10 inches
Bridgette Mayer Gallery Announces Converge: 9th Benefit Exhibition, Supporting HelpUsAdopt.org and the Dina Wind Art Foundation
Philadelphia, PA – April 23, 2024. Bridgette Mayer Gallery is proud to announce the return of its Benefit Exhibition this summer with Converge, on view from Tuesday, June 11 to Saturday, August 3 at Bridgette Mayer Gallery. There will be an opening reception on Thursday, June 13 from 4:30 – 7:30 PM. Gallery Owner Bridgette Mayer has been curating and hosting Benefit Exhibitions biannually since 2007 as an opportunity to showcase more artists and give back to nonprofits in the Philadelphia community through art. This 9th Benefit Exhibition will be in support of two local nonprofit organizations. HelpUsAdopt.org is a New York-based, national financial grant program that helps families with the cost of adoptions. The Dina Wind Art Foundation is a Philadelphia-based nonprofit that helps to create opportunities for women artists.
Converge will be the largest Benefit Exhibition yet, with almost 300 artists curated from around the world. The title evokes feelings of confluence, uniting people through art, and coming together for two special community causes. Selected artists work in a variety of different media – including painting, drawing, printmaking, sculpture, photography, and fiber art. Each artist will present their work as a 10 x 10-inch or a 24 x 24-inch panel piece, keeping with the tradition of previous Benefits. Panels will be available for $500 for a 10 x 10-inch panel and $1,000 for a 24 x 24-inch panel, and a portion of proceeds from the exhibition will go directly to HelpUsAdopt.org and the Dina Wind Art Foundation. The Benefit Exhibition provides a rare opportunity for collectors to purchase work by their favorite artist at a fixed price, discover and collect new artists, and give back to the community through our nonprofit partners.
This year, the Gallery is also thrilled to welcome Dr. Brittany Webb, the Evelyn and Will Kaplan Curator of Twentieth Century Art and the John Rhoden Collection at Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, as our esteemed juror. Dr. Webb will award five prizes to participating artists, including a Vault project exhibition at Bridgette Mayer Gallery as the first prize. Award-winners will be announced at the opening event on Thursday, June 13.
Would you like a First Preview of the Exhibition? Kindly email jcarita@bmayerart.com for additional information.
Exhibition information: Converge will be on view at the Bridgette Mayer Gallery from Tuesday, June 11 to Saturday, August 3, 2024. Gallery hours are Tuesdays – Saturdays, 10:00 AM – 5:00 PM. There will an opening reception on Thursday, June 13 from 4:30 to 7:30 PM.
Gallery information: Bridgette Mayer Gallery is free and open to the public. We are located at 709 Walnut Street, 1st Floor, Philadelphia, PA 19106. Gallery hours are Tuesday – Saturday, 10:00am – 5:00pm.
About HelpUsAdopt.org:
Helpusadopt.org is a national 501(c)(3) financial grant program that helps couples/individuals (regardless of ethnicity, gender, marital status, race, religion, or sexual orientation) with the cost of their adoptions by awarding grants up to $20,000. We support domestic, international and foster care adoptions and do not charge our applicants to apply. Since 2007, we have awarded 715 adoption grants totaling over $6.8 million.
About Dina Wind Art Foundation:
Dina Wind (1938-2014) was a trailblazing artist and arts advocate whose bold, abstract sculptures challenged stereotypes and embraced sustainability. Inspired by her legacy, the Dina Wind Art Foundation empowers women artists, builds community, and supports arts education.
About Bridgette Mayer Gallery:
Since its establishment in 2001, the Bridgette Mayer Gallery has represented and exhibited artists whose work displays the variety and genius of contemporary art now being created in the US. The gallery represents artists working in painting, sculpture and photography with an emphasis on innovative process and content-driven ideas that speak to beauty, technology, culture and the contemporary landscape. With a public gallery located at 709 Walnut Street in Philadelphia and an art advisory firm based in Philadelphia and Orlando, Bridgette Mayer is a leader in the Philadelphia arts community, actively partnering with local organizations to support fundraising initiatives and generating opportunities for artists to engage with the public.
Dwelling has been selected for Klompching’s annual Fresh exhibition and awards.
Dwelling is to be featured in Fotomen Magazine, also known as Photographers Companion. You can read the full article, tilted “Rhetoric of the Real” in their January 2023 issue.
“As the favorite photographic brand of millions of readers, Photographers' Companion magazine gathers thousands of international masters, hundreds of articles about practical shooting skills, and builds channels between profession and public for learning and communicating. It has a total circulation of 350,000, which ranks the first of all the photography magazines in mainland China.”
The most disappointing show for an artist to be in is a summer group show. You're slobbed together with a bunch of strangers who are totally unrelated to what you're about, the rich people are out of town, PLUS this gallery would probably never show you.
Guess what. You thought you couldn't be in a more disrespectful group show and you were wrong. We literally took any piece of shit you brought in whether it was awesome or total trash and tried to make it an idea.
The Patriot is a truly democratic show where everyone is treated equally like shit.
The Festival presents the theme Future Known as Unpredicted and explores the infinite nature of future; the imagined and the prophetic; the orchestrated and serendipity; the planned and the unpredicted.
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In October of 2021 I sat down with photographer David Levinthal to discuss his life and work for the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art. Listen to our nearly 5 hour conversation here.
April 1 ~ April 29, 2022
Amelie A. Wallace Gallery, SUNY Old Westbury
Opening Reception: Thursday, April 7, 2022, 4 – 7 pm
Performance by Ed Malone at 5 pm
Artist Talks: Leeanna Chipana: Thursday, April 7, 5:45 pm – 6:30 pm
Matthew Cronin: Friday, April 15, 11:00 am – 12 noon
Ramon Gil: Wednesday, April 20, 11:30 am – 12:30 pm
Installation view of Dwelling #8, Amelie A. Wallace Gallery, Old Westbury, NY 2022
Over the next week, I will be sharing some writing about my Dwelling photographs on Der Greif. Read my first post and follow their blog for future posts.
For Volume 1, editor John Pilson focuses on a diverse and compelling group of portraits. With a nod to John Szarkowski’s Looking At Photographs, he writes specifically about each image chosen, striking a tone that is at once humorous, poignant and surprising. Pilson’s ability to weave together philosophical, art historical and pop cultural references into a series of cogent yet improvisational texts is deeply humanizing. As he states in his introduction, each pairing is “a writer in a duet with a photograph”, an attempt to find something that resonates as opposed to something “that merely explains or dissects.”
Photographs by Aaron Turner, Sara J. Winston, Patrick Gookin, Katie Kline, Jordan Weitzman, Nat Ward, Matthew Cronin, elin o’Hara slavick, Tealia Ellis Ritter, Matthew Leifheit, Eleonora Agostini, Thalassa Raasch, Joey Solomon, Lacey Lennon, Laura Hart Newlon, Ben Alper, Mark Steinmetz, Elizabeth Bick, Irina Rozovsky, Adam Bellefeuil, Jenia Fridlyand, Margo Ovcharenko, Joe Leavenworth, Dylan Hausthor, Roger Richardson, Deepanjan Mukhopadhyay, Jonathan Pivovar, Aline Smithson and Naima Green.
Click the link or reach me directly for more information.
Lydian Stater is excited to present TLPS, an exhibition featuring first-ever NFT works from eleven artists: Jeffrey Michael Austin, Marcos Castro, Matthew Cronin, Yi Hsuan Lai, Marta Rodriguez Maleck & Zac Manuel, Cedric Tai, Anika Todd, Catalina Tuca, Victor Yañez-Lazcano, and Alisa Yang.
In 1637, somewhere in the dimly lit backrooms of wine bars in the Netherlands, merchants took part in a risky game. One in which bets were placed on the future price of a recently introduced flower, the tulip. Contracts changed hands so frequently that prices were completely divorced from the tulip’s inherent value. Inevitably, traders began to refuse to pay the exorbitant prices, causing a cascade of defaulted agreements as the price of tulip contracts crashed in what became the first recorded financial bubble.
The recent rise in the speculative trading of NFT artworks mirrors many qualities of the tulip bubble from the Dutch Golden Age. Excess wealth, status, greed, and—some experts argue—a fatalistic risk-taking culture in the wake of the bubonic plague, were all factors in a wild rise in tulip speculation. Financial speculation permeates the art world, but what was once limited to auction houses, art fairs, and blue chip galleries, now extends into the NFT marketplace.
The artists participating in TLPS are speculating in a different way. Together, their work theorizes that there is room for thoughtful and self-reflexive work in the NFT marketplace, work that relies on nuance, narrative, complexities, and critique rather than social media statistics and prior sales figures. The artist-led speculation takes on the form of video, painting, photography, performance, and sculpture. The work collectively explores themes related to identity: cultural, technological, and emotional, and how identity is intertwined with ownership, labor, and representation.
There is an obvious worry that a blockchain-driven digital world will continue to perpetuate the inequalities already dominating the current art world and economic system. Because of this, artists need early opportunities to engage with this space, to experiment, and to take control of it, as it is possible that much of our economic and social activity will take place here in the future.
While the NFT space could easily be written off as just a new digital playground for the crypto-wealthy, the novelty of NFTs and the unregulated nature of blockchain ecosystems creates a radical prospect for artists: financial and artistic autonomy. TLPS hopes to offer an example of what that autonomous vision might look like.
TLPS will be viewable online at www.lydianstater.co from June 3 to July 9, 2021.
*This exhibition acknowledges the ecological impact on the environment and the economic barriers inherent in many popular blockchain technologies. Because of this concern, all artworks minted for this exhibition have been created on the Tezos blockchain, which consumes 99% less electricity than the most popular blockchain for NFTs, and offers one of the lowest costs of entry into the NFT marketplace.