The Arteur

Cristina Vergano

Cristina Vergano is known for her paintings that blend a classical style with fantastical, surrealistic content containing layers of meaning. Author Gail Leggio said of her work, "All of Vergano's subjects—human, animal or hybrid—project warmth and intelligence; a spark of soulfulness emanates from their eyes. While many traditional allegorical figures are essentially mannequins to be accessorized with attributes, Vergano’s figures are beings that elicit a response from the viewer."

Vergano has received critical acclaim in The New York Times, ARTnews, Art in America, and New York magazine, among other publications. She was also featured, alongside Georgia O'Keeffe, Louise Bourgeois, Agnes Martin, and Yayoi Kusama, in the September 2014 article, "Wise Buys: 50 Women Artists Worth Watching," published by Blouin Art+Auction.

Born in Milan in 1960, Vergano studied at the International School of Milan, Liceo Cassini, and Università di Genova before moving to New York where she currently resides. She is represented by Tourné Gallery, and her work has been featured in the Parrish Art Museum (Southampton, NY), Islip Art Museum (Islip, NY), Anthropology Museum of the People of New York (Queens, NY), Laguna Art Museum (Laguna Beach, CA), Madison Museum of Fine Art (Madison, GA), DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park (Lincoln, MA), and the Chicago Athenaeum (Chicago, IL). Vergano has also designed a line of objects for the Museum of Modern Art (New York, NY). She counts among her collectors Whoopi Goldberg, Robert and Cortney Novogratz, and Madonna.

For more information about Cristina Vergano, click here.

Arlene Gottfried

Arlene Harriet Gottfried (August 26, 1950 – August 8, 2017) was a New York City street photographer who was known for recording the candid scenes of ordinary daily life in some of the city's less well-to-do neighborhoods. Her work was not widely known until she was in her 50s.

Early life and education

Born in Coney Island, she was the daughter of Lillian (Zimmerman), a homemaker, and Max Gottfried, who ran a hardware store with his own father, above which the family lived. Gottfried was the older sister of comedian and actor Gilbert Gottfried (1955–2022) and Karen Gottfried. When she was 9, Arlene moved to Crown Heights, where she became heavily influenced by the nearby, fast-growing Puerto Rican community. Later in the 1970s, she moved with her Jewish immigrant family to the neighborhoods of Alphabet City and the Lower East Side.

When Gottfried was a teenager, her father gave her an old 35 mm camera, which she eventually took to Woodstock, even though she said, "I had no clue what I was doing". She credited her upbringing for giving her the ability to get intimate photographs of strangers: "We lived in Coney Island, and that was always an exposure to all kinds of people, so I never had trouble walking up to people and asking them to take their picture." Gottfried graduated from the Fashion Institute of Technology taking photography courses.

She worked as a photographer for an advertising agency before freelancing for publications such as The New York Times Magazine, Fortune, Life, the Village Voice, and The Independent (London).

In her later years, she published five books of her work: The Eternal Light (1999), Midnight (2003), Sometimes Overwhelming (2008), Bacalaitos and Fireworks (2011), and Mommie: Three Generations of Women (2015). The Eternal Light focused on a choir Gottfried first saw at a gospel fest, which also led to her discovery of her love for singing. Midnight is a series of photographs that followed a man named Midnight who struggled with schizophrenia. Sometimes Overwhelming is a compilation of her photographs in the 1970s and 1980s New York. Bacalitos and Fireworks focused on New York's Puerto Rican community in the 1970s and 1980s. Mommie: Three Generations of Women was a portrait of three generations of women in her family: her immigrant grandmother, her mother and her sister. Mommie: Three Generations of Women later received Time magazine's Best Photobook Award in 2016.

Her photographs and archives have been exhibited at the Leica Gallery in New York and Tokyo, the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., the European House of Photography (MEP), the Brooklyn Museum of Art, and the New York Public Library.^[1]^[7]

Photography

Stephan Mackey

Stephen Mackey is a contemporary British artist whose dreamlike images of surreal fairy tale encounters and twisted romanticism have earned him a growing international reputation. He work conjures a time of artist Richard Dadd, taking the viewer into a new, sometimes dystopian world.

There’s a world veiled in static on the periphery of our vision, where dreams and nightmares bleed into one another. Glimpsed in flickering candlelight and whispered shadows of tangled vines in fairytales, we sense it creeping, seeping into our reality. We’ve entered the unrestful realms of British artist Stephen Mackey, where his paintings serve as portals to lands of darksome lullabies, unsettling dreamscapes of perpetual twilight evanescence. With each brushstroke, Mackey weaves secret tales of the precious and the sinister, the twisted romance of unquiet beauty.

Beneath the whimsical surface of Mackey’s paintings lies a darkness that lurks, unseen but palpable. Ethereal maidens appear to frolic with fantastical creatures, beauties dream soundly in enchanted canopied beds, and primp before shimmering mirrors. Yet, closer inspection reveals scenes fraught with lurking tension – the subtle dance between predator and prey, the maze of perils and pathways dark and bewitched.

Are these glimpses into a world existing just beyond our perception, where fairytales take a darker turn? Or are they manifestations of Mackey’s own subconscious, a shadowy reflection of the human psyche?

Mackey's bio sums it up, “No information = mystique. That's definitely part of it, although it does sound a little contrived put like that. You can have any facts you want, but you're sworn to secrecy. Only kidding, I just hate those sites where they have a moody photo of the artist with some trenchant quote about their life and art underneath. I'm 45, married, lots of children, cats, rabbit. I'm also self-taught, so if you're going to give anything away, let it be that. People love it, it's democratic.”

Mackey currently resides in the U.K.

Aico Tsumori

Aico Tsumori began working with ceramics at Kyoto City University of Arts, where she discovered that the medium allowed her to explore both two-dimensional and three-dimensional art forms. After graduating in 2002, she joined the Shigaraki Ceramic Cultural Park residency and has continued creating in Shigaraki ever since.

Since 2015, Tsumori has expanded her international presence, exhibiting in solo and group shows across Tokyo, the United States, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Korea. This broader exposure has provided her with a sense of greater creative freedom, as she engages with diverse interpretations of her work. Tsumori has received several awards, including the Shiga Prefectural Art Award in 2018 and second prize at the Kikuchi Biennale in both 2015 and 2017.

“People feel special emotions toward objects that resemble human forms. As a child, I was scared of a doll that sat in the corner of my room, but I pretended not to be afraid because I didn’t want the doll to know I was scared. The strange and complex emotions that arise from such situations fascinate me, which is why I continue to create works with faces.

In the past, my works often referenced ancient sculptures, Buddhist statues, and fairy tales. However, since 2019, I’ve been influenced by my daughter’s drawings, which inspired my “Ceramics from Children’s Drawings” series. This has led me to reference new and different images in my work.

When I create my pieces, they are solely mine, but once they are completed, they are handed over to the viewer. The viewer’s experiences and interpretations add to the work, perhaps even filling in things that are not explicitly depicted, resulting in new stories. I want to create as if I am painting a picture.”

Visit Aico Tsumori’s Instagram page.

Lucas Bononi

Lucas Bononi (b. 1991. Los Angeles) is a contemporary painter living and working in New York, NY. Inspired by naturalism and expressionism, Bononi's style melds organic elements with abstract human forms. Pursuing technical mastery, he relocated to Manhattan, refining his skills at the Grand Central Atelier after receiving a BFA in Academy of Art University, San Francisco. Notably, Bononi was on the cover of American Art Collector Magazine and is in the permanent collection of MEAM Museum, Barcelona. Recent career highlights include his involvement in Art Basel Week with art dealer Kyle Hamilton, a featured interview on CNBC Make It both in 2023, and a solo exhibition titled "The Forest" at Sugarlift Gallery in Chelsea, New York in 2022. With a follow up solo show booth in Traditions & Modernity Art Fair in 2024. Through his art, Bononi continues to provoke thought and introspection, exploring the profound connections between human form and the natural world. His participation in leading museums, galleries and press continues to stretch worldwide.

Rashid Johnson

Rashid Johnson (b. 1977, Chicago) is recognized as one of the major voices of his generation, an artist who composes searing meditations on race and class while establishing an organic formal vocabulary that fuses a variety of sculptural and painterly traditions. Though he employs materials drawn from specific autobiographical contexts—including those related to African American intellectual and imaginative life—and though his practice had its beginnings in photography and conceptual art, Johnson is equally interested in testing the ability of abstract visual languages to communicate across cultural boundaries. The visceral experience of art, on formal terms, is therefore considered inseparable from the social matrix that gives rise to it. Johnson’s work is predicated upon moving freely between these two modes. The breadth and generosity of his vision has resulted in a wide range of two-dimensional and three-dimensional objects, installations, videos, and performances.

Milt Kobayashi

There is a quiet sophistication in Milt Kobayashi’s oil painted canvases, summoning a pensive, ethereal feeling in the viewer. Kobayashi’s subjects are people from another time and place and, yet, they are strangely familiar. They are urban dwellers lost in thought as they take a momentary respite from their routine. Kobayashi’s people are absorbed in the world of contemplation and meditation - making them attractively aloof.

A third generation Japanese-American, Kobayashi was born in New York City, soon after that his family moved to Oahu, Hawaii, and then ventured to Los Angeles when he was eight. After receiving his B.A. in 1970 from the University of California - Los Angeles, Kobayashi began working as an illustrator. However he found his work, which was quite editorial in its nature, did not fit the Los Angeles commercial art market. In 1977, Kobayashi returned to New York City. After returning to New York, a casual visit to the Metropolitan Museum of Art permanently altered Kobayashi’s artistic direction and prompted a career change. There he saw Velazquez’s portrait Juan de Paraja.

He began studying the works of Whistler, Chase and Sargent, who were also influenced by Velazquez. Strangely enough, it was through his study of Western masters, especially Whistler, that Kobayashi became aware of Japanese art and “the Japanese floating world of Edo”. He began studying the 16th and 17th century Japanese Ukiyo-e woodblock print masters Hokasai, Sharaku and Utamaro. Ukiyo-e is defined as “pictures of the floating world,” depicting characters in the constantly changing motions of life. The whole perspective of Japanese art allures him - the patterns, color harmonies, use of negative space, and primarily, composition and design.

Kobayashi has received two major awards: the National Academy of Design’s Ranger Purchased Award and the Allied Arts Silver Medal. His work has appeared in Forbes, Fortune, and Reader’s Digest magazines. In September of 1997, Kobayashi was a featured guest artist at the Artist of America show in Denver, CO.

Judith Ornstein

Judith Ornstein describes her work as such:

In the making of art I discover my humanity, which often becomes obscured amid a life that is moving too fast and filled with too much. Making art is a working process, every day, that engulfs my whole being. My work is very much about the process. It itself takes me places, suddenly and without reason and I delight in the things I do not plan.

I’m an abstract artist whose imagery melds poetic impulse with networks of shapes and forms. My current work recycles the detritus materials from the ‘Amazon Generation’. Various kinds of honeycomb, fluted and flat corrugate are the familiar by-products of our throw-away society and my raw materials. For me mundane, everyday objects are tools, shape-shifters for my creative use.

Cardboard imbues my sculptures with the conflict of permanence and impermanence. Humble materials, like corrugate, brings up the issue of ‘what gives art value’. The material lives as a sign of cultural excess and has a strong sustainability message. Viewers may see me as just a rescuer of recyclables but I also have a real love of these materials. They have a raw elegance that keeps these pieces timeless looking.

My work reside in a space between solidity and fragility. Hovering between 2 and 3 dimensions. The throw away quality of cardboard reflects an almost organic life span from development thru deterioration. Sculpture reveals itself in time and its deterioration adds to the process and mimics biological life. However Picasso’s cardboard guitars are over 120 years old and still looking great. So the material is more durable than we think.

My sculptures are put together in a tangled space as a kind of improvisational universe. The process is a living experiment forming a bridge between thinking and doing. It is a process that overwhelms my conscious thoughts and instinctive reasoning. Without a color pallet the simple abstract, irregular shapes in various textures are combined to morph into a language dependent on position, shape and surface. I am always looking for a structure while moving parts around.

I want the work to be fun and humorous as well. So my shapes are often childish, poking fun at themselves. Shapes without a beginning or an end intrigue me most. The circles and ovals that have overwhelmed my work for years have extensive meaning, representing notions of wholeness, self and infinity. They are cyclic movements relating to women, celestial positioning and emotions. These organic shapes (out of stiff material) refer to our humanity and sensuality.

Lucienne O'Mara

Lucienne O’Mara’s paintings unlock the linear structure of the grid. The freehand geometry attempts to discipline and battle against the emotion and movement brought by the use of colour, and the physicality of the brushwork. The limitless potential of this single compositional method allows Lucienne to explore the boundaries of colour, rhythm, and space. Lucienne’s engagement with the repetition of squares within squares is seeking to break down visual order and imbue it with a kind of chaos and poetry more akin to our experience of life.

Lucienne was born in South London in 1989 where she still lives and works. She received a BA and MA from City & Guilds of London Art School and is currently in the final year of the Turps Banana Studio Programme.

Her work is featured in collections such as Simmons and Simmons, John Jones, and the Currell Collection. She has been the recipient of the Painter Stainer’s Prize, the Tony Carter Award, and a finalist of the Ingram Prize.

Margarita Cabrera

A self-defined social practices artist, Margarita Cabrera’s work is often fueled by collaboration from community engagement in order to get a holistic view of social issues. Materials such as US Border Patrol uniform and cochineal-dye, are used, and transformed, to deliver a multi-tiered conversation on topics such as globalism, populism, and the migrant experience. Often in playful representation, such as a landscape of soft-sculpture potted desert plants with colorful embroidery, or mimicking parrots made from found border patrol uniforms, to collaged works on paper made with cochineal dye, Cabrera implores viewers to confront contentious topics by utilizing materials tied inextricably to the issue.

Margarita Cabrera was born in Monterrey, Mexico, and moved to El Paso, TX at the age of 10. She received her BFA in Sculpture (1997) and her MFA in Combined Media (2007) from Hunter College in New York, NY. Cabrera is an associate professor at the Arizona State University Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts. Recent solo exhibitions have been held at the Longmont Museum of Art, Longmont, CO; McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, TX; Dallas Contemporary, Dallas, TX; and the Wellin Museum of Art, Clinton, NY. Her work has been included exhibitions at the Barbican Centre, London, UK; Denver Museum of Art, Denver, CO; the Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland, Cleveland, OH; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, PA; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA; the Smithsonian Museum of American Art, Washington, D.C.; the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, Houston, TX; the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, Houston, TX; the Ford Foundation Gallery, New York, NY; Seattle Art Museum, Seattle, WA; the Sweeney Art Center for Contemporary Art at the University of California, Riverside, Riverside, CA; the Sun Valley Center for the Arts, Location; El Museo del Barrio, New York, NY; and El Museo Rufino Tamayo, Mexico City, Mexico.

In 2012 she was a Knight Artist in Residence at the McColl Center for Visual Art in Charlotte, NC. Cabrera was also a recipient of the Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant, presenting a community public art sculpture commissioned by Lego at Discovery Green in Houston, Puentes Culturales. In May 2019, Cabrera unveiled her monumental, participatory public sculpture Árbol de la Vida: Memorias y Voces de la Tierra in San Antonio, Texas, and was named Texas Artist of the Year. Cabrera has also been selected as a recipient of the 2023-24 Latinx Artist Fellowship.