Artists
Judy Chicago
Judy Chicago is an artist, author, educator, and humanist whose work and life are models for an enlarged definition of art, an expanded role for the artist, and women’s rights to freedom of expression. In the early 1970s, after a decade of professional art practice, Chicago pioneered feminist art and art education through a unique program for women at California State University, Fresno. In 1974, Chicago turned her attention to the subject of women's history to create her most well-known work, The Dinner Party, which was executed between 1974 and 1979, a monumental multimedia symbolic history of women in Western Civilization. In 2007 The Dinner Party was permanently housed at the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum.
Over the subsequent decades, Chicago turned her attention to a variety of subjects in a wide array of media, including the Birth Project, PowerPlay; the Holocaust Project: From Darkness into Light and Resolutions: A Stitch in Time in addition to a number of projects incorporating various glass techniques. Her most recent body of work, The End: A Meditation on Death and Extinction, was completed in 2018. Renewed interest in her early fireworks performances titled, Atmospheres, (1969-1972) led to a number of more recent commissions for new works incorporating pyrotechnics including, A Butterfly for Brooklyn in 2014 and Purple Poem for Miami in 2019.
Chicago’s work has been exhibited widely in the United States and internationally and her influence continues to be acknowledged worldwide, most recently evidenced both by her inclusion in Time Magazine’s list of “100 Most Influential People” 2018 and as one of Artsy Magazine’s 2018 “Most Influential Artists.” In 2019, she received the Visionary Woman award from the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago and in the fall, she was honored at the annual Gala of the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles where she was introduced by Gloria Steinem.
For more than five decades, Judy Chicago has remained steadfast in her commitment to the power of art as a vehicle for intellectual transformation and social change and to women’s rights to engage in the highest levels of art production. As a result, she has become a symbol of change for people all over the world.
Judy Chicago is represented by Salon 94, New York, and Jessica Silverman Gallery, San Francisco.
photo by Donald Woodman, 2019
Michele Oka Doner
http://www.micheleokadoner.com
Michele Oka Doner is an internationally renowned artist whose career
spans five decades. Her work is fueled by a lifelong study and appreciation
of the natural world, from which she derives her formal vocabulary. The
breadth of her artistic production encompasses sculpture, drawing, public
art, functional objects, video, artist books, and costume and set design.
She is well known for creating numerous permanent art installations
throughout the United States, including Flight at Regan International
Airport, Arlington, VA, Radiant Site at the Herald Square MTA station, New
York and the mile and quarter long bronze and terrazzo concourse, A Walk
on the Beach at Miami International Airport. Oka Doner’s work is found in
the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, Metropolitan Museum, the
Whitney Museum of American Art, Art Institute of Chicago, Musée des Arts
Décoratifs (The Louvre), the Victoria & Albert, London, the University of
Michigan, Yale and Harvard University museums, and The Detroit Institute
of Arts, among others. She has received numerous awards, including those
given by United Nations Society of Writers and Artists, Pratt Institute, New
York State Council of the Arts and the Knight Foundation. She was recently
appointed Artist in Residence at the New York Botanical Garden (2019). In
2016 she received an honorary doctorate from The University of Michigan,
where she earned her undergraduate and MFA degrees. Oka Doner is the
author or subject of numerous books, including Everything Is Alive (2017)
from Regan Arts press. Born and raised in Miami, she maintains a studio
and residence in Soho, New York.
photo by Anders Overgaard
Michael Rich
The paintings, drawings and prints of Michael Rich reflect an approach to nature and landscape as a wellspring for spiritual investigation and meditation through the contemporary language of gestural abstraction. A lifelong, Summer resident of Nantucket Island, time spent around the ocean and a landscape of great beauty has helped to shape a love and interest in the natural rhythms of color that remain a focal point in his work today. With an awareness of the opposing elements of nature’s serenity and tenacity, Rich investigates the harmony and irascibility of the natural world through opacity and translucency of color. Light, space and weather become marks and shapes of color in poetic spaces of memory while close observations of the delicate forms in the landscape become drawn or incised marks meant to be both descriptive and expressive. Whether in large-scale paintings or smaller drawings and etchings, Michael Rich aims to discover meaning in a landscape of intimacy through a language that is visceral, physical and colorful.
Recent featured museum exhibitions include The Bristol Art Museum, RI; The Newport Art Museum, RI and the Walton Arts Center, Fayetteville Arkansas. Rich is the recipient of the Basil H. Alkazzi Award (USA) and was included in Sotheby’s auction series, International Young Art. His work is featured in private and public collections nationally including, The Bronx Museum of the Arts, NY; Museum of Southern Art, New Orleans, LA and the Springfield Museum of Art, Springfield, OH.
Michael Rich lives and works in Providence, RI and Nantucket MA and is a Professor and Chair of Visual Arts at Roger Williams University, Bristol, Rhode Island.
Gaspar Saldanha
Brazilian born, US based designer Gaspar Saldanha is renowned for his textiles. After studying Fine Arts and Industrial Design in Rio de Janeiro, he moved to New York City to specialize in textile design at the Fashion Institute of Technology. As a textile designer, he worked for leading fashion brands such as Anne Klein and Calvin Klein. In the early nineties, Saldanha established his eponymous fashion brand, producing a line of menswear sold at prestigious stores such as Barneys and Bergdorf Goodman. For the following twenty five years, he held design positions at various fashion brands such as Halston Mens and Kenneth Cole. In 2008 he joined his sister in reviving their grandfather, the great Brazilian muralist Paulo Werneck’s archives. Currently living in Miami, Saldanha works on re-editions and reinterpretations of Werneck’s mosaic oeuvre.
Saldanha designs and supervises products that are licensed to specialists: Mosaic murals with oficina de Mosaicos in São Paulo, mosaic furniture with ETEL in São Paulo, and rugs with KRAVET in New York.
Evan Robarts
Robarts was born in Miami Beach, FL, and is currently based in Miami, FL. He received his BFA from Pratt Institute in sculpture in 2008. His work explores urban development, transformations, and environmental changes. He has held solo exhibitions at Berthold Pott, Cologne, Germany, Bryce Wolkowitz Gallery, New York, USA; and Galerie Jeanroch Dard, Brussels, Belgium. Recent group exhibitions include “See The Moon?” at Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, NY; “Not Really Really”, curated by Frédéric de Goldschmidt and Agata Jastrząbek, Brussels, Belgium.“Daily Formalism”, curated by MAB Society, at Bank Gallery, Shanghai, China; “Today/Morrow” at Balice Hertling, New York, NY; “Wayfarers”, at the Berman Museum, Ursinus College, Collegeville, PA; and at the Martin Margulies Collection in Miami, FL.
AVAF
Assume Vivid Astro Focus
http://www.assumevividastrofocus.com
assume vivid astro focus is comprised of Eli Sudbrack and Christophe Hamaide-Pierson. Eli Sudbrack was born in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil and lives and works between São Paulo and New York. Christophe Hamaide-Pierson was born in Paris and lives and works in Paris.
Fred Simon
Simon creates large scale, detailed urban landscape drawings on paper, using colored pencil and just a tiny bit of oil pastel. These large scale, mural-like drawings are of a fictional city somewhere in the northeastern United States. They may evoke memories or remind people of places that they have lived or known, but the landscape drawn here is unique - a world unto itself that Simon has created.
There are a range of visual experiences offered by these drawings. Getting up close, one can observe countless small details - people on sidewalks, stoops, cars, the insides of shop windows, architectural details. Stepping back, the eye can take in a larger view of the entire image - the ways in which buildings, blocks of them, along with highways, rail yards, parks and other features, blend together to form patterns and layers for the observer to take in. There are buildings in these drawings that some may recognize. Some of these buildings have since been demolished, or been transformed beyond recognition, as have some of the neighborhoods where these buildings were found. As our cities continue to change, there is an element of documentation in this work.
This work has been shown everywhere from galleries to community spaces, to storefront windows, and has been sold to private collectors.
