In a former lifetime in which the person inhabiting the Oval Office had an actual vision based on facts, the arts were recognized as an integral measure of our society. President John F. Kennedy, for instance, said this about the arts: “We must never forget that art is not a form of propaganda. It is a form of truth.”

Truth, of course, has taken a hit since 45 took office. That whole “alternative facts” bit. But numbers, or so the saying goes, don’t lie. So with that in mind, we took a quick look at the potential math implications of 45’s federal budget.

First the overview:

• Number of programs and agencies due for elimination: 62
• Number of programs within the Environmental Protection Agency alone: 50

Other programs due for funding cuts—or outright elimination—focus on everything from literacy to low-income home energy improvements to investigating chemical accidents. The enormous breadth and scope of impact on those least able to manage without these programs is breathtaking.

But since we’re an arts and culture magazine, we’re going to focus our hyperventilation on the potential impact of these devastating cuts to art and culture in New England. The proposed budget calls for eliminating all funding for the National Endowment for the Arts ($152 million) and the National Endowment for the Humanities ($155 million).

What NEA funding means to New England:

For fiscal year 2017, New England states received $2.591 million in NEA grants overall, according to the NEA website. Here’s who got what:

• Connecticut: 15 organizations, $310,000
• Massachusetts: 62 organizations, $1,672,000
• Maine: 11 organizations, $242,000
• New Hampshire: 6 organizations, $120,000
• Rhode Island: 9 organizations, $152,500
• Vermont: 4 organizations, $95,000

But the math adds up even less when you look beyond straight grants. Ann Wicks, communications manager for the New England Foundation on the Arts (NEFA)—one of six regional arts organizations funded by the NEA and private donations—explains. Arts organizations can potentially receive NEA dollars in three ways:

• an outright allocation of a grant the organization applies for itself
• an allocation from NEFA through NEA dollars provided to NEFA
• from NEA dollars given to state arts organizations, such as the Massachusetts Cultural Council

Wicks says about 15 percent of NEFA’s annual budget comes from NEA dollars. Beyond grants, NEFA uses those dollars to support artists in other, less direct ways, Wicks says. The Creative Ground Directory, for instance, is a free resource that lists artists and other creators around New England so that it’s easier to find appropriate collaborators for projects. In FY2016, NEFA made a total of 462 grants equaling $3.4 million. New England states received $829,947 of those NEFA grants.

In other words, the loss of funding to New England arts and humanities organizations could be even larger. “NEA support is very important to New England and the creative sector,” she says.

It’s a point that is echoed nationally. The National Assembly of State Arts Agencies (NASAA), a national nonprofit that assists state arts agencies, offers this math about how NEA dollars improve the economy at large:

• The arts return $22.3 billion in tax revenue to federal, state, county, and municipal governments.
• Rural areas, low-income communities, and schools would feel the effects of this funding loss disproportionately from reductions. State arts agencies (using state and federal funds) award more than 25% of their grants to rural areas, 54% to low-income communities, and 45% to arts education projects.
• Every NEA dollar leverages more than $9 in matching funds, meaning that the impact of the NEA loss is just the beginning of the potential financial loss for arts organizations.

Cutting the NEA and NEH seem especially confusing given this math offered by NASAA: The NEA receives 0.004% of the total Federal budget, which is less than ½ of one hundredth of a percent.

That math also doesn’t add up when you consider the numbers presented by The Guardian. The British paper reports the following expenses incurred by taxpayers less than 50 days into 45’s residency:

• $56.6 million (or a cool $500,000 a day) to protect Trump Tower. That was through March 1. Assuming that Mrs. 45 stays until June for Mini-45 to finish school, that dollar amount could add another $46 million, bringing the total to $102 million.
• $3+million estimated cost for EACH weekend jaunt to golf work at his Mar-a-Lago Resort (a place where he doubled entry fees from $100,000 to $200,000 the day after he was elected).
• $97,380 for hotels for Secret Service to protect Eric Trump (that would be his son on those business interests 45 still hasn’t divested himself of) while he visited a condominium development in Uruguay. This is just one trip.

And finally this statistic: 45’s proposed military spending increase in his federal budget? $54 billion.

Something definitely doesn’t add up.

Does this irritate you as much as it does us? Here are a few links if you want to #TakeAction. See you on the streets.

Pen.org
artsactionfund.org
Change.org
The Official White House Petition to Save Arts Funding
Contact Your Representative
Arts Advocacy Day – Washington, DC
#SaveTheNEA

Top image courtesy Royal Talens

The post #TakeAction: Doing the NEA Defunding Math appeared first on Take Magazine.

Created on the Bay of Fundy in the tiny town of Eastport, Maine, the Tides Institute and Museum of Art (TIMA) established a wet-foot dry-foot policy early in its inception. All artists would be welcome to show their work and do residencies whether they came from the U.S., from over the border in Canada, from across the mile-wide strait from New Brunswick, or from across the Atlantic Ocean.

That was 15 years ago. Today TIMA and the town of Eastport—population 1,200—are riding high on art and innovation due to the imperative of their locale.

“We developed a Maine and New Brunswick [Canada] task force in 2010 so cultural leaders on both sides of the border could talk and meet. It’s the reason we started the institute,” says Executive Director Hugh French, who is one of TIMA’s founders. “There is too much of a tendency of stopping at the border in the U.S. and Canada while artists are crossing the border. It’s silly not to follow them.”

Interior of TIMA’s 1819 Free Will North Church Project Space with large-scale installation, “Undertow,” by artist, Anna Hepler. Project space has 23-foot high vaulted ceiling and exceptional acoustics. | Photo by Allison Osberg.

Eastport is located on Moose Island and connected to the mainland by a causeway. It sits at the entrance of Passamaquoddy Bay on the border of Canada and is at the most eastern part of the US. It’s a place you might expect to be a little sleepy, at least when it comes to the arts and innovation. But you’d be wrong.

TIMA, whose studio, museum and housing for artist residencies overlook the U.S./Canada boundary, is a beehive of artistic activity. Community renewal, an active residency program, and an aggressively diverse permanent collection are just a few of the parts that make up the institute’s game plan. That diversity is also one reason funding and artists are drawn to the space, French says.

“Early on we felt we had to operate on different interests. Architecture and history, for example,” says French. “Our collection includes painting, photography, architectural elements, a historical collection and a strong interest in contemporary work. We foster new work. That is the reason for our residency program—so contemporary work can be created here.”

Tides Institute and Museum of Art| Image courtesy TIMA

Last year’s TIMA’s residency program had nine artists—six from the U.S. and three from abroad. This year the program will host 10-12 artists. This summer a two-year collaboration between Portland, Maine photographer Shoshannah White and Halifax interdisciplinary artist Charley Young will have its premiere in an exhibition in the 1819 church now known as the Free Will North Church Project Space.

TIMA’s main building was the organization’s first regional revitalization effort, a strategy of cross disciplines that began 15 years ago when the organization began. “The long-term effort started with tackling a threatened crippled building in the center of downtown,” says French. “We put $1.2 million to bring the building back. Now we have six buildings.”

Tides Institute and Museum of Art New Year’s Eve sardine drop | Image courtesy TIMA

Although Eastport is physically isolated, TIMA and the community are not. The populace comes together every year for “Artsipelago,” an event that includes galleries, chefs, and ferries. To celebrate yet another year of tides, TIMA annually organizes the New Year’s Eve Maple Leaf and Sardine Drop. During that popular event, a giant red maple leaf is lowered at midnight Atlantic time (11pm EST) to commemorate the Canadian new year while a brass band plays “O Canada.” An hour later, when the New Year reaches the States, an 8-foot sardine is lowered as the band plays “Auld Lang Syne.”

Tides Institute and Museum of Art – museum
Eastport, Maine
Website
Facebook

Top image: View from the top of TIMA’s main building with a view of Eastport’s downtown and waterfront – all of the islands in the distance are in Canada. | Image courtesy TIMA

The post Building Bridges, Crossing Borders Through Art appeared first on Take Magazine.

Sarah Mikolowsky is an arranger of things. It’s hard to be any less broad in describing what she does, because that’s also the most specific, all-encompassing way to talk about her process. She collects and she assembles. Whether the outcome is an illustration, a botanical wig, a grimacing puppet, monster lingerie, or a floral arrangement, assemblage is her means to a varying end.

Photograph courtesy of Sarah Mikolowsky

Mikolowsky earned her BFA in Illustration from the University of Connecticut in 2007. Soon after, the enthusiastic New England student with an appetite for wanderlust fled west. After spending a couple years in the microbrew capital of Bend, Oregon, she migrated to western Washington. In 2012 Mikolowsky established herself as a farmer florist on Orca Island off the Washington coast, cultivating a dedication to arranging the local flora in a way to highlight it’s native beauty. A short chat with Sarah will reveal that the very core of her inspiration as an artist is rooted in the nature of a flower. “A seed has so much potential—it knows how to organize itself into this absolutely beautiful thing that I have no way of recreating.” While that may be true, this concept of careful organization to create something beautiful—or striking and pleasantly weird looking—is a common thread throughout her work. Mikolowsky relies on intuition in her creative process, “I put things together based on how they feel together,” she says, “pulling strands out of what seems like chaos and creating a new order to it that makes it something palatable for me.”

Photograph courtesy of Sarah Mikolowsky

About a year ago, Mikolowsky returned to her home state of Connecticut, secured a silk-screening studio in Hartford, and has been roaming the region making arrangements of all sorts ever since. While she no longer grows her own plants, this self-proclaimed “roving floral designer” stays New England-local in her freelancing—spending this past summer, for example, farming and designing at Tea Lane Farm on Martha’s Vineyard.

Mikolowsky’s most recent exhibit, Buy Me Brunch, with assemblage accomplice Jonah Emerson-Bell appeared at Hygienic in New London last fall. The show, which featured mixed-media installations and wearable, functional pieces, investigates the experience of “the human meat suit” (aka the body) as a “self-sustaining machine that functions as an interface between the physical world and some obscured metaphysical reality.” Mikolowsky is all about dismantling symbols of culture—details of reality that perhaps go unnoticed—and reassembling them with other things or symbols to create something different, something imaginary and eye catching that disarms the viewer, perhaps suggesting that the body is the sole messenger between a real, physical world and the nebulous concept of the human mind. Not to mention that the Renaissance-era-inspired botanical wig she created for the show deems Kylie Jenner’s self-appointed creative ownership of “wigs” null and void.

Photograph by Josh Ericson

Photograph courtesy of Sarah Mikolowsky

“It isn’t ugly, but it addresses how funny things look and how funny things are,” Mikolowsky says of her concept for Buy Me Brunch. “Both of us (Jonah Emerson-Bell, collaborator) have a tendency to pick things out of little vignettes of culture and restructure them, crack a joke, and create something new. For me that ends up being a lot of wearable things like the monster lingerie. It’s almost a bigger form of puppetry, like costuming. I tell a story by making a collaged sculpture that’s wearable.” Perhaps the most striking of Mikolowsky’s work is the “monster lingerie,” which normally comes in the form of some wearable top—bra or shirt—with lavishly adorned monster eyeballs prepensely placed over where one would imagine the nipples are. A juxtaposition between the funniness, almost awkwardness, of the design, and the connotations of sexuality with its placement, dismantles a culturally enforced shame surrounding the human body by rearranging it to create something head-cocking, something you might giggle at.

Photograph courtesy of Sarah Mikolowsky

Mikolowsky’s affection for her home region breathes through her work. While she appreciates the tastes of her interim western home, it seems she prefers the unique harmony of old and new she finds in New England. “The aesthetic of New England is really different from what I’ve seen on the west coast as far as what people are interested in,” she says. “I try finding a mixture of the potential here and the history here. I like putting those things together.” As much of the materials she uses in her puppetry and lingerie work are found in thrift stores, the old trends that have been cast away or forgotten are central to the construction and aesthetic of her work. 

In 2017, Mikolowsky plans to maintain her floral designing gypsy status, continue producing work out of her studio in Hartford, delve into a collaborative electronic music project, and pursue a possible printmaking residency. No doubt we’ll be back in touch with her.

Photograph by Tia Morton

Follow Sarah Mikolowsky on Instagram @auntie_beast

The post The Nipples Have Eyes appeared first on Take Magazine.

On a brisk and sunny winter morning in Turners Falls, MA, sculptor Fafnir Adamites is at the beloved local spot, the Five Eyed Fox. She is tucked away on a bench, holding her morning cup of coffee, enveloped in sunlight. “It feels like spring in here, I can’t get enough,” she remarks. Adamites has lived in Turners Falls with her partner, sound artist Neil Young, for over a decade, collaborating together on installations, and embedding themselves amongst local artists. Her place in the community is evident, as residents coming in and out of the coffee shop greet her by name, often remarking on her recent work or upcoming events in the community.

The Unwitting Reception of Someone Else’s Secret, 2016 | paper, handmade felt

Adamites has lived in New England her whole life, outside of a two-year stint in Chicago to complete her MFA in Fiber and Material Studies from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. “ I went to UMass for undergrad,” she says. “I think just the depth of different art and music communities that are specifically in Western Massachusetts is a lot of what kept me here after high school, and after college.” She notes that collectives like Flywheel Arts in Easthampton, and the plethora of galleries, artists, and weirdos in the region, have given her little to no reason to leave. In fact, they keep her alive and creative.

Since returning from SAIC in 2015, Adamites has unleashed a prolific amount of solo and group exhibition work. While traditionally engaged with felt making to create various shapes and environments, Adamites has recently turned to paper to construct her most recent installations. “One of the things that makes felt and paper so similar for me,” she explains, “is that both have kind of a physical appeal and a conceptual appeal, too. I call felt and paper chaos structures, because they are not made like a textile is made, in terms of weaving and having a rigid rib, a woven piece. Felt and paper are just chaotic masses of fibers. The paper pulp and the wool, and that idea of having a chaotic mass come together into something usable that can be a surface or a structure in some way on its own, is beautiful to me.”

“Impediment Series” “Impediment 2” Detail Image, 2016 | paper, steel, wood | one of a series of five | 17x7x7

For Adamites, the lure of creating felt and paper is the collaborative process of skill and surrender. Utilizing a “wet process,” she agitates wool and other fibrous material in hot soapy water. She utilizes wool with other wide-weave fibers such as muslin, silk, or burlap to create a unique struggle between the fibers during the felt process. “Wool shrinks and you get this really beautiful surface texture that is very wrinkled and kind of unruly. It takes the sort of rigidity out of the grid. That one material can overtake another material in that way feels empowering.”

The texture of Adamites’ pieces ebb between dark smooth lines of black, sooted paper, where the beauty lies in an up-close examination; and disordered tangles and crumpled masses forming shapes that are both alien and familiar. Her installation The Unwitting Reception of Someone Else’s Secrets feels ghost-like and haunting; her most recent installation, Cryptonyms, at Deerfield Academy, looks strangely post-apocalyptic and alive.

“Supporting Materials 3”, 2016 | paper 5x3x3 | one of a series of 20 small sculptures, detail

Woven deep within her material processes, Adamites meditates “on trauma, memory, and the legacy of emotional turmoil inherited from past generations” to conceptualize her own experiences and to create conversations amongst those who interact with her work. “I like the idea of creating physical spaces or physical pieces that can be sort of a placeholder for those invisible things,” she explains, “like depression, mental illness, and so forth. Whether it is the things we do not want to talk about, or the traumas that are invisible, I want to have a monument to those things now.”

Adamites creates work with the hope of offering a space for individuals “to have conversations with each other about difficult subject matters…the psychic burden and triggers all around us. And that is one of the few things that I can offer to help people, or at least to open some kind of space for dialogue for people to grapple with things that are so hard.” The focus of recent and upcoming work has been in creating “isolation spaces,” where a single person can enter into one of her sculptures and infuse the depths of their own emotions and experiences into her work. “It is not just about me and my grandmothers,” she says, “or whomever from my past. I want it to be something that more people can find their own place in, to tell their own story if they want to.”

The relationship between the fragility and impermanence of textiles, and the invisibility of trauma in everyday life, coalesces in multiple spaces of meaning for Adamites. “The idea that your work may break down and completely disappear seems scary for many people who want to archive their work. I embrace the devalued nature of these materials and their ephemeral state. For me, to work with materials like this is a kind of lesson every day in impermanence, and needing to be flexible and roll with unpredictable changes. It expresses both my conceptual explorations of what may not be seen and the reality that my art can be both fragile and present.”

Fafnir Adamites is a sculptor living and working in Turners Falls, Massachusetts. Her work will be on exhibition at the A.P.E Gallery in Northampton, MA beginning in February 2016 and at the Boston Sculptors Gallery in Spring 2016. For a more intimate look at her work, check her website and news page.

All photographs courtesy the artist.

Top photo:“Dead Reckoning is Subject to Cumulative Errors”, 2016 | paper, MDF panels 16x2x1.5 | part of the “Groundless Wayfinding” exhibit at Greenfield Community College, February 2016

The post Finding the Meaning in Making appeared first on Take Magazine.

There are plenty of places throughout New England where art junkies and collectors can access work from important and popular artists, alive and dead. Abigail Ogilvy offers patrons of her Boston gallery and art collectors a different experience; the opportunity to show, see and purchase art by our region’s emerging artists. She’s our direct line to these soon-to-be-famous artists and provides space for developing artists first individual or group show – those crucial moments of initial exposure in an ever-changing art market.

Mini Panda Yeux Violets, 2015 | 10.2 x 10.6 x 3.1 in., 3,600 straws

After graduating from Dartmouth with a degree in art history, Abigail began her career in the art world working for two galleries in Florence, Italy where she learned the art and science of representing living artists. After spending some time working in other adjacent industries and startups, Abigail decided it was time to start her own thing – a contemporary art gallery that focused on emerging and mid-career artists.

Abigail started by doing at least two to three studio visits a week, building mutually beneficial relationships with local artists. Now, after just one year of operation, Abigail’s dedication is paying off, “In just one year, three artists made it into the museum of fine arts summer auction,” said Abigail, “our artists [have been] picked up by other galleries and have been featured in other shows around the city…another one of my artists received the Fay Chandler Award.”

Framed Blue, 2015 by Katie Wild | Oil and acrylic on Plexiglas with paper collage and mixed media, 72 x 36 inches

In addition to showing and representing emerging artists, Abigail seeks to make the downtown Boston arts scene more accessible to all kinds of people. She accomplishes this through her programming at the gallery, hosting over 40 events in the last year ranging from artists talks to flower arranging classes. According to Abigail, it’s all a part of her strategy to diversify and enliven the Boston arts scene, “having events that aren’t necessarily just about the art – a combination of some sort of programming and the art, it get’s people in the door.”

In addition to broadening her audience of arts patrons and makers, Abigail also strategically works to lend gravity and importance to her emerging artists in the wildly competitive, nebulous art market. When curating group shows, Abigail mixes in lesser-known artists’ work with the work of more popular artists as a way to prioritize and legitimate the work of her emerging and mid-career folks. This selective and strategic arrangement asks audiences to contextualize the work of the undiscovered with that of the well-respected, “…it’s strategic in that I want people to think very highly of our gallery and our artists because they truly deserve that recognition.”

Town + Country, 2015 by Holly Harrison | 14 x 11 in., Mixed Media on Wood Panel

Over the next year, Abigail plans to bring her work outside the walls of her gallery and into other parts of Boston’s South End. She wants to bring her signature programming and novel artists’ work to new spaces all over the city like the Millennium Tower. It is in these new spaces where Abigail will engage new audiences and continue her invaluable work – ensuring the success of our next generation of artists.

Abigail Ogilvy is the curator and owner at ABIGAIL OGILVY GALLERY in Boston Massachusetts. Be sure to keep up with her rigorous line up of events and numerous exhibitions via Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

All images courtesy Abigail Ogilvy

The post The Art of Emergence appeared first on Take Magazine.

Art that takes you in and out of linear time. Music, photography, film, and video that create “incandescent, synesthetic quality” content. This is what viewers can expect from What Time This Feels, a multimedia installation in Providence, RI. Suara Welitoff, a Cambridge-based artist who works with found footage, original pieces, and filters to create photographs and videos, curated the show in collaboration with independent curator Micah Salkind, and 186 Carpenter curator and gallerist, Jori Ketten.

Take had the chance to chat with Salkind, one of the collaborators of What Time This Feels, to learn more about his and Welitoff’s work. Salkind is a curator and scholar working and living in Providence, RI:

Tell me about where What Time This Feels started:

It makes the most sense to start with saying that Suara is my aunt – she’s my mother’s sister. I’ve been exposed to her work since I was a young kid and she was making still photographs and playing experimental music, and when I moved out to New England, we became much closer. I would take the train up to Cambridge and we’d hang out. I’ve just been fascinated by her process as a visual artist and the way she treats the objects on which she works and the way that she relates to the media she’s interpreting and messing with.

I don’t know when we started having this serious conversation about what it would be like to put a show together, but I said to Suara that I had a relationship with Jori Ketten who is the curator (and gallerist) at 186 Carpenter – 186 is a really amazing low-profit, kind of community space, that Jori runs and curates. Jori was like, ‘yeah your aunt’s work is really right up my alley, I’d really love to see what you guys put together.’ Suara has never shown in Rhode Island – and she hasn’t really done this kind of show at a space like 186 Carpenter. So it was a really exciting opportunity for me to say, okay – let’s look at all the stuff that you’re currently in process with, and we’ll pull things together that tell a coherent story.

One of the things that I told her that I was always interested in was the way that she deals with time in her practice. Suara will work on something for months, leave it for years, and then come back to it suddenly out of nowhere and it’ll make total sense. So yeah! We’ve put together a show of about 10 different pieces. There’ll be several video pieces and several still images, some of which are pulled from video work and some of which are their own objects.

What’s been one of the best parts about working on the show together?

I think it’s deepened my understanding of where Suara is coming from as a maker. It’s been really fabulous to find this deeper connection through not only her work, but through this sense of empathy that she brings through her practice as an artist, which is something that really resonates with me as a curator.

What are your future projects? What can we expect to see from either of you?

I hope to continue working with Suara as she develops her practice as an installation artist, but I am also working on an academic monograph on Chicago house music. Suara continues to hone her process in collaboration with her Boston gallerists at Barbara Krakow and other non-profit galleries in Berlin and New York.

Suara Welitoff | Photo courtesy of Micah Salkind

What Time This Feels is a multi-media installation by Suara Welitoff. The exhibition opens October 30th through December 10th, with an opening reception on November 5th at 5:00pm.
186 Carpenter Street, Providence RI. 

The post What Time This Feels: Art that Challenges the Linear Progression of Time appeared first on Take Magazine.

Approaching Molly Hatch’s ceramic studio on the third floor of Florence, Massachusetts’ Arts and Industry building, every single footstep resounds through the hallways. That’s the way of former mill buildings. This one, solid and comfortable with its little bit of dustiness and roughness, leaves plenty of space for artists to remake its purpose.

For Hatch, the spot’s pitch-perfect, a leisurely walk from her house and design studio with her black dog, Hank. “When you’re a young person dreaming of the studio you’d one day work in, this is what you envision,” she explains. In Sunday mode, which is not unlike artist-at-work mode — jeans, a striped blue and white tee, and sneaks, auburn hair pulled into a high ponytail — Hatch is ready to lift plates from one of her kilns. The plates belong to an installation titled Illume for Todd Merrill Studio Contemporary in Manhattan. This “plate painting” depicts a blue and white vase, surrounded by a shiny, solid gold “frame.” Each plate that helps comprise the vase is painterly, simultaneously a swath of the overall pattern and a complete work of art in itself.

Hatch is known for her plate paintings, installations that rely upon individual painted plates organized to create a larger image. The first series, Covet, showed at Sculpture Objects Functional Art and Design (SOFA) in New York in 2012. For that, she drew upon the collections of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Probably the best known—and the largest to date—of the plate paintings is Physic Garden, a permanent installation at Atlanta’s High Museum that measures 22 feet high and 17 feet wide, and required 456 plates to complete. Two 1750s Chelsea Factory plates that depict realistic flora and fauna in the “Hans Sloane” style served as source material for the project. Hatch finds the setting of Physic Garden in the museum’s Margaretta Taylor Lobby inspired. “There’s a window, and beyond the window, a reflecting pool,” she explains. “At night the wall, window, and reflecting pool move you, your eyes, in and out of the space. The architect put in an exhibition wall at exactly the right spot so that the work and the space are phenomenal fits for one another.”

Physic Garden 2013/14| Photo courtesy of High Museum of Art in Atlanta, Georgia

Her latest big project, Passage, a solo show at the Dianich Gallery in Brattleboro, Vermont, co-presented with Todd Merrill Studio Contemporary, is a departure from the plate paintings. “The plate paintings rely upon the boundaries of the wall,” says Hatch. “I want to question the wall. I’m interested in making three-dimensional paintings that reveal different images from various angles.”

One way to sum up Hatch’s voraciousness as artist and designer is this — she’s a consummate conversationalist. Rather than rely on words, her conversations take place between past and present, commercial design and fine art, boundaries and space.

While she was creating Passage, which runs through July, her studio space was relatively empty. The sole full wall—no doors or windows or shelving—was blank. The floor was mostly bare, save for kilns sitting like urns and a number of large ceramic blocks—clean, white, and ready—in neat piles. The blocks were impressive, not exactly massive, and yet notably larger than most ceramic objects. Imagine ceramic versions of wooden blocks found in a preschool classroom—but large and somewhat wondrous, like an Alice in Wonderland teacup.

Detail from Passage | Photo by John Polak courtesy of Molly Hatch Studios

Hatch painted the blocks in different patterns, from a Middle Eastern tile to a weaving. These patterns generally do not “go together.” In the gallery, the blocks are set upon wooden and ceramic plinths painted in patterns and faux wood grain. Passage evolves from a series of cube vases Hatch recently created, objects that aren’t functional vases, but cubes with cutouts in the shape of vases to play upon both the idea of functionality and, simultaneously, negative space. For Passage, she posed a related question: “Do I need that cutout?”

As for the big blocks: “I wanted a chance to pull my work into space. I wanted it to come off the walls,” Hatch explains. “The idea is the pieces could be played with and restacked. I want to explore pattern and form, but in a three-dimensional space.”

Patterns often seen on functional objects, from vases to wallpaper, cover these non-functional forms. As if that idea isn’t sufficiently intriguing, Hatch plays with other juxtapositions. Some patterns are from history and others are more contemporary ones that tend to show up in a design context rather than art. She wants to lure them from functionality to see how they fare.

The Dianich Gallery is much more intimate than other places Hatch has exhibited. “I was drawn to that—and the chance to reach a different audience,” Hatch says. “In this setting, I’m able to focus upon a small, pointed project—and to take some risks within the constraints of this venue—a small gallery in a small town close to home.“

Hatch’s childhood and family background have a great deal to do with her sense that perpetual conversations arise from juxtaposing things people don’t often put together. Her parents eschewed a world of refined society and instead moved to southern Vermont, where they farmed. Décor at the farmhouse was unusual: Art and antiques in her family’s home and extended family’s residences were, like pieces she plays off of in her own art and design work, beautiful and significant and fine and enduring.

Covet Project: 2012 | Photo by John Polak courtesy of Molly Hatch Studios

As an adult, Hatch contemplates the role of beauty and delicacy, but she does so in the milieu of simple, hard work. She is a powerhouse. She credits her work ethic to her upbringing on the farm and her aesthetics in large part to family influences and exposure. “To have grown up with old-money objects and the farm’s demands, lessons I drew upon were complex—about taste and lifestyle,” she says. “I love that I interact with these questions on a daily basis.”

Interior design is another of Hatch’s influences. “I read interior design magazines to see what interests designers,” she says. “For example, I love the idea of putting an old object on a mantel and a contemporary cutout vase and pretty much encouraging the objects to talk to one another.”

That sets the stage for a paradigm that makes sense to Hatch. “When I first began to do design work for Anthropologie, some ceramic artists thought I was selling out. I disagreed and I still disagree,” she says. “I need to focus on creation of both the consumable and the unique object, and, rather than see those as oppositional choices, I find them complementary.”

She constantly extends ideas developed in one realm into another—she might create a one-of-a-kind vase and then make a series of commercial vases that are decorated with her paintings of vases. “I love to operate in consort, and to see where designs land best.” She maintains enthusiasm for the large plate paintings or the new work in “Passage,” and she also enjoys her ongoing work with Anthropologie. The way Hatch works—process and breadth—represents her unique heritage.

Image at top: Molly Hatch | Photo by John Polak, illustration by Jan Šabach

The post Off the Walls appeared first on Take Magazine.

Providence’s Raina Belleau comes to us by way of Minnesota and one can see a mid-western influence in her work, especially in the treatment of the faux-taxidermy elements which figure prominently. While they may be positioned at odd angles or made up critters altogether, there’s a sense of Native American spirituality with the respect paid to them, and nature in general, represented in her work.

The Oracle, 2016 | 60 x 24 x 42 Acrylic paint, apoxie sculpt, bandage, chair, door mat, electrical components, extension cord, faux fur, jeans, LEDs, mirror, paper mache, plaster and spray paint

We watch miniature bugs crawling through a tiny campsite in her video Everlasting, there’s The Oracle sculpture, a human-polar bear hybrid with two left feet, and she’s also shown us a shaggy faux fur piece called Companion with fleshy bits that could be creating or consuming marshmallow-shaped objects – a most interesting pet indeed. All of these odd pieces carry a sense of fun, but her work seriously reckons with ideas to our relationship with our natural environment. There’s always something a bit decrepit that’s happened, mushrooms show up in a few of her installations.

Still from Everlasting, 2014 | Duration: 2:54 Video, color, sound

Ian Alden Russell, the self-described curator/strategist/educator, points out that Raina’s status as an emerging artist may be evolving towards the next step, “They’re someone who is already having shows, transitioning from self-started projects, to where opportunities are manifesting themselves…”

We’re looking forward to her collaboration with Caleb Churchill, entitled Fantasia Colorado, for Satellite Art Show, coming up at Miami Art Week with GRIN contemporary gallery and congratulate her on her recent Rhode Island State Council on the Arts (RISCA) fellowship grant for 2017.

Top image Companion, 2014 | 38 x 12 x 18 Faux fur, recycled insulation, polymer clay, foam, cast resin, dog collars, acrylic paint, music stand

All images by Caleb Churchill

The post Raina Belleau – A Modern Menagerie? appeared first on Take Magazine.

Editor’s Note: If you just heard about the artist ANNA SCHULEIT HABER, it’s probably because of what she did on her summer vacation. She spent a month in Fitchburg, Massachusetts, a former mill town not at all on the art literati’s radar, conducting a friendly takeover of the front page of the local newspaper with imaginative typography. The MacArthur Fellow collaborated with the Sentinel & Enterprise and the Fitchburg Art Museum on a project that involved turning 26 consecutive editions of the daily newspaper into a work of art centered on a letter of the alphabet. Typographers from all over the United States and the world created the letters, which dominated their respective front page and informed articles, essays, poems, and quotes that riffed off the A, G, Q, etc. The whole thing was stunning, subversive, and accessible—a profound celebration of ink and newsprint, journalistic experimentation, and bringing art to people’s everyday lives.

While Schuleit Haber worked on The Alphabet, fellow artist Nanette Vonnegut wrote this essay about Schuleit Haber’s body of work—from years-in-the-making installations at abandoned hospitals to paintings to musical compositions— and the connections between the two artists and Vonnegut’s late father, Kurt.

Orange Tulips, 3rd floor. Installation, titled Bloom, of 28,000 flowers in bloom and 5,600 square feet of live sod. Massachusetts Mental Health Center, Boston, 2003. Commissioned by Harvard Medical School and the Department of Mental Health of Massachusetts.

It is mid-November 2000. I am in the laundry room, trying to match socks and feeling hopeless. Just when I want to scream, I hear in the distance J. S. Bach’s Magnificat, like a musical thunderstorm close by. My husband reminds me that an artist named Anna Schuleit is doing a soundcheck for a sound installation called Habeas Corpus, to take place the next morning at the grounds of the Northampton State Hospital.* As the crow flies, this place is just a mile away, over houses, gentle hills, and a field or two. I am beguiled and want more of the magic that is rattling my doors.

Besides the socks, I have my hands full because my father is visiting from New York City. He is grumpy because Northampton is not New York City. Now I know I have something special to show him. “Dad, I’m taking you to something magical in the morning. Wear a hat.”

The next morning, I fetch my father and he is bundled up against the cold, gray day. He did not forget to wear his stocking hat, which is on crooked, making him look more curious than grumpy. There are hundreds of people gathering, milling around, gazing in anticipation at the massive vacant brick building, Old Main, that once housed adult men and women deemed insane. It was enough to be poor, or old, or a wife who had stopped being useful around the house to get a spot at the Northampton State Hospital.

I am thinking of these men and women when the condemned building and the air around it quicken to the sounding of trumpets and timpani. The perfectly engineered panoply of sound has entered the marrow of my bones and somehow not busted everything along the way. The crowd is a pulsing cloud of humanity, slowly drifting around Old Main. No one dares to peek in the doors and windows to look for the source. As if on cue, the sun parts the concrete-like clouds and pours straight into the heart of Old Main. It is over in 28 minutes. I am wondering if my father is thinking of the destruction of Dresden or of his mother’s sudden death right before he shipped off to war. I do know he is deeply affected. “I can’t believe what just happened,” is all he says.

At the root of a lot of art is some kind of injury that needs addressing. Sometimes the right strand of words or a line drawing of someone you miss will do. The decades of neglect and acres of broken human hearts that came to define hospitals like this one, however, called for 40,000 watts of electricity conducting carefully selected music through 15,000 feet of electrical cable and 102 speakers amid thousands of square feet of brick and mortar. Anna envisioned that “the sound [would] travel through past and present times in one breathtaking, effortless movement.”

I did not know it then, but it was my two dead grandmothers who were rattling my doors as I wrestled with those socks. Since then, I have been digging for information, coroner’s reports and medical records, to try and fill the vast blanks in their lives. No luck with Grandmother, whom I never knew, but medical records for Granny, whom I did know, arrive by mail. Granny was institutionalized twice in a state hospital much like Old Main—once in 1943 for 12 months and again in 1953 for 6 months. The order of commitment allowed for sexual sterilization, citing “the best interest of society.” Maintenance cost: $10 per week. The medical records note: “Manic Depressive Reaction, Manic Type . . . was high school Valedictorian, unusually able in literary matters, particularly writing . . . Lesbian tendencies.” I weep. She got out and went on to be the most boring, sweet-smelling Granny ever.

As for Grandmother, I found a brief obituary in the Indianapolis Star: “Suffers Fatal Heart Attack.” Of course that is code for “not exactly sure since barbiturates and alcohol were involved.” She died on Mother’s Day, that stingy, cruel day that reminds mothers of the other 364 days they will not get any flowers. A message to mothers everywhere: try not to die on Mother’s Day. It is a seriously bitchy thing to do to your children. But it is easy for me, a mother, to understand the extra swig, another pill, knowing my son is being sent off to war.

After Habeas Corpus, Anna went on to complete more site-specific installations in New England. Bloom took place in 2003 in a vacated psychiatric hospital in Boston: 28,000 blooming plants, 5,600 square feet of live sod, water, volunteers, and recorded sound for four days, for FREE, “to address the persistent absence of flowers in psychiatric hospital settings.”

Anna Schuleit Haber’s studio

Even pixilated, the images of Bloom uncoil my tense little heart. Anna’s unstinting use of flowers to fill yet more vacant, grief-stricken spaces was exactly what was necessary, nothing less. I felt electrified in a familiar way as I studied photos of Bloom. The power of the visual matched the power of the sound that marked Habeas Corpus. Anna never puts herself at the center of her installations. Her large, beneficent visions have always depended on the generosity of others, making the installations a collaborative effort. Habeas Corpus gestated for four years and nearly died for lack of funds and support before finally coming to life. At first, Anna’s idea for Bloom was met with disappointment because she could not see repeating Habeas Corpus at the Massachusetts Mental Health Center in Boston. Visions need to spontaneously combust in others to see the light of day. Whether in a day or years, Anna’s ideas caught on and set off a chain reaction of generosity in others that finally made the concepts live and endure as works of art. No one is more humbled by this creative process than Anna Schuleit Haber.

The MacArthur Foundation, angelic and moneyed, looks for and funds exceptionally creative, pathbreaking individuals. On September 1, 2006, the director of the program called Anna, then 32, to let her know she met every single qualification to be a MacArthur Fellow and that she was already making the world a better place, citing her installation Bloom as “a work of conceptual clarity, compassion, and beauty.” The award comes with no strings attached. No person getting that call from the MacArthur Foundation sees it coming; he or she is usually on the way to work, taking a bath, or paying bills. This is a phone call the Fellows will never forget. The media calls the fellowship the MacArthur Genius Award, because it is easier to say genius than to list qualities like transcendent, brave, tenacious, and compassionate. I Google “genius,” and nothing about hard work or compassion shows up. Genius seems to be a word that is in love with itself and does not do anything.

Thanks to the MacArthur grant, Anna could afford to be in her studio full time for the first time in her life. She returned to her first love: painting. Her drawings and paintings show us where she has been, always saying, “Human being here.” She employs 200 brushes and no two are alike. One could say of Anna’s work that there is always just one of one, which can lead to 2 or 2,000. Her work looks as though her whole body is moving through it. I see long strides, stillness, and maybe some tap dancing. Her work stands in direct proportion to life, which, in her case, sometimes requires the side of a building or 25-foot panels of raw linen.

As I write this, I find myself feeling dizzy because I know I cannot cover the breadth of Anna Schuleit Haber’s work. Luckily, I have a fainting couch in my studio. I like to think I am being useful, fainting by proxy for artists like Anna so they do not have to. I am grateful for all the heavy lifting she does without complaint.

My father did not love to write. It was mostly torture, a lot of sitting and failing and foraying into the kitchen for fatty snacks, a cigarette always stuck to his bottom lip. When I write, I feel very close to him—I am wearing a bodysuit made of twigs and twitching more than actually writing. But if you are patient, there comes a magic pairing of will and muse: a beloved sister, a wretched boyfriend, a Granny. They make the waiting worthwhile. Then a word, a brushstroke, a song, a cure, the best joke ever. Both Anna and my father remind me about staying and not leaving.

The Voice Imitator, started in 2013, is a work in progress, a collaboration involving the written word, musical composition, and paint between two artists who happen to be husband and wife. My mouth waters as I read the proportions of the work: one short story to one composition for piano to one painting, 1:1:1, which is multiplied by 104, the number of short stories in Thomas Bernhard’s 1978 collection, Der Stimmenimitator. Bernhard’s words move through Anna’s voice; are transmuted into short musical compositions by her husband, composer Yotam Haber; and are then sent back into Anna’s brave and able hands. This much information passing through two human bodies, winding up as art, is explosive and seriously playful.

Effective is the most useful, unsexy word I can come up with to describe what I think art, at its best, can be. What I experienced years ago at Old Main effectively challenged and changed me. I was witness to others changing around me. I felt ghosts brushing by me, going home and not looking back. Anna’s Habeas Corpus really did move the Magnificat through me, and the past into my future. I stand in awe of the veracity of her visions and her conductive powers.

In response to my introductory e-mail, in which I explained that I had been at Habeas Corpus with my father, Anna wrote, “The short of the story is that people told me that your dad was there that day, but it was just a rumor. It means so much to me . . . I was (and still am) such a big fan of his work. Having the circle close by getting to know you fifteen years later is a true gift.”

On a perfect June day, I met Anna at last in Harrisville, New Hampshire, where she spends her summers. As I sat waiting on the front porch of the Harrisville General Store, I explained to a curious elderly gentleman that I was meeting a dear old friend whom I had never met. He must have noticed my flapping wings. Suddenly, I was looking up into Anna’s open, intensely lovely face. Our words looped around our heads and played a gentle game of tag while we ate our lunch on that porch. There was so much catching up to do; there were so many stories to finish. Anna explained how much my father’s writing had affected her life. Sitting with her, I was struck by her radiant kindness, the key ingredient that arcs through all her work— what makes it stand so tall. The circle was complete and round with love and respect for the art that had saved our lives in countless ways. Three hours later, it was time to go.

Finally, Anna Schuleit Haber, meet Kurt Vonnegut. Dad, meet Anna. I can easily imagine my father asking Anna to run away with him and Anna answering, “I have always loved you, but I am married.” Then my father: “Teach me how to paint.” Anna: “You have to do that on your own, but stay and watch how I stay.” My father: “Darling, I have never left!”

Habeas Corpus, a sound installation for Northampton State Hospital. | Photo by Hedwig Schussler

Anna Schuleit Haber – artist
Harrisville, New Hampshire
Website
Facebook
Twitter
Instagram

Top photo by photographer Ashley Green

The post Transcendent and Tenacious appeared first on Take Magazine.