Art

Reuben Sinha

Traversing boundaries, cultures gained and cultures lost, and sensations across time and space are continual themes in my work. I left India at age eight and, ever since, have worked to reconcile what has been lost and found. My work is a continual meditation on memory and the body using line, color and form. Each work begins with raw materials: wood panels cut from prefabricated doors, beeswax from local farms, damar crystals and basic color pigments. In natural light, these paintings carry a translucency created by pigments suspended in beeswax, evoking sensuousness, depth, and personal reflection. In 2018, I began a series of brown encaustic color studies to explore the limits of a single color’s expression. The series is a response to mass disenfranchisement under Trump and growing xenophobia against brown skin. To some, brown is beautiful. To others, it is dirty; the outsider, the enemy. These color studies mirror the skin of the NYC public school students I teach. By layering and blending loving and hateful associations to “Brown,” I have developed a personal meditation on Otherness. These meditations on “Brown” have naturally incorporated expressions of isolation, anxiety, and calm emerging from the COVID-19 pandemic.

Read more
Art

Mia Muratori

For me, artmaking is the documentation of what I see and seek to understand. Watching, synthesizing, recording, I lay it all down with paint, no words, just light, color, shape and space.

Read more
Art

Francesca Schwartz

I am interested in the word, the image, the symbol. I am in love with bone. I am fascinated with the body and the end. The body is an impermanent landscape which we cannot truly know until we have also contemplated its disappearance. Part of this encounter rests on inhabiting my body as a woman. The blood flows mysteriously and then departs, marking seasonality. I meditate on corporeality and femaleness. Always the questions: What does the body retain? What is encrypted? What is memorialized? I am drawn to elements of bone, dye, chiffon, paper, wood, and found objects. I like some materials for their precision, others because of their elusiveness. Once in hand, alchemy takes over, and what happens is unexpected. So it goes, as the unconscious emerges. I tear apart, unravel, and desecrate in an effort to get to the center. I collage to bring cohesion to what feels fragmented. I assemble what is fragmented within myself and those I have lost. I devour. I cannibalize. I resurrect. By altering and reassembling the image, I encounter the space between longing and loss, memory and erasure, permanence and dissipation. I inscribe experience, even as it recedes. The body is inscribed; the word is written. We linger in some ways, yet we are destined to vanish. I bear witness while I am here.

Read more
Art

Grace Bakst Wapner

Grace Bakst Wapner’s work with urethane or satin, clay or bronze, chiffon or pipe cleaners in an interactive dialogue between material and object has been determinative in her process. In the early 1970s she erected walls and barriers constructed from satin and velvet, alluding to the dual nature of our social interactions, and now, in the 2000s, after working for years with clay and bronze, on paper and on canvas, she has returned to working with fabric, sometimes conjoining the fabric with clay. Throughout, there has been a continuing belief that the implementation of color, line, texture, and form
can evoke abstract truth. She studied painting and sculpture at Bennington College and at Bard, where she participated in the MFA summer program. But it has been her intensive day-to-day studio practice and the looking at the work of other artists that have most significantly informed her work. She has had twenty-nine one-person shows, participated in over one hundred group shows, lectured and taught, and been the recipient of honors, grants, and awards. She believes that the singular and complex practice of making art both asserts and affirms our humanity.

Read more