Dorie Gutherie

Dorie Gutherie is a glass artist that uses the medium in a variety  of interesting and successful ways. From her standalone sculptures to intricate boxes to portrait "Nocturnal Veils", her work transfixes the viewer and creates a new world.

Born in 1982 in Moline, Illinois, Dorie was first exposed to the medium when she stumbled upon a small glass studio in her hometown. Since graduating from Illinois State University in 2008, Guthrie has continued her studies, being awarded scholarships, at Corning Museum of Glass, Penland School of Craft, and Pittsburgh Glass Center where she furthered her technique.

Over the last five years Dorie worked on staff at the Pilchuck Glass School, and also has been a teacher’s assistant at Corning Museum of Glass, Pilchuck, Haystack Mountain School of Craft and Pittsburgh Glass Center. Ms. Guthrie was selected to demonstrate flameworking at the 2013 Glass Art Society Conference in Toledo, Ohio.

Before uprooting to Brooklyn, Dorie taught kilncasting, flameworking, fusing, and imagery techniques at Brazee Street Studio, a Bullseye KGRC in Cincinnati, Ohio. Bullseye Glass Co. Resource Center has given her a solo show in NY, opening June 1, 2019. She is currently teaching, fabricating and working with visiting artists at UrbanGlass downtown Brooklyn.

Karen Lamonte

Since 1990, Karen LaMonte has created sublime and enigmatic works in glass, ceramic, bronze, iron, paper, and marble. Her works range from monotype prints to monumental stone sculptures, and explore themes of beauty, gender, identity, and the natural world.

LaMonte received her BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design and explored an early passion for glass sculpture at studios in New York and New Jersey. In 1999, she traveled to Prague on a Fulbright scholarship to work in the glass casting studios of Eastern Bohemia; while there, she created Vestige (2000), a glass sculpture depicting a life-sized dress with the wearer absent. This work garnered international acclaim, thanks in part to an essay about it by renowned art critic Arthur Danto.

In the early 2000s, LaMonte established a permanent studio in Prague, where she created her first major body of work: the series Absence Adorned. Like Vestige, these life-sized glass sculptures examine the interplay between public and private identities through garments that are opulently draped on invisible female figures; the works represent a re-invention of the traditional portrayal of the nude. Sculptures from Absence Adorned were first shown in a solo exhibition at the Czech Museum of Fine Arts in Prague, and have been widely exhibited since.

Drawing on the classical aesthetics of Absence Adorned, the Chrysler Museum of Art in Virginia displayed works from the series in their 2009 exhibition Contemporary Amongst the Classics. The exhibition combined classical sculpture with contemporary works to highlight continuity of style and creativity across generations.

To further explore the nexus of clothing, culture, and identity, LaMonte traveled to Kyoto in 2007; there, she studied the design, construction, symbolism, and significance of the traditional Japanese kimono. Back in Prague, she used biometric data of Japanese women to create dress sculptures in ceramic, cast glass, rusted iron, and bronze. Her selection of materials for the works was inspired by aspects of Buddhist philosophy. She titled the series Floating World, after scenes in Ukiyo-e woodblock prints. These sculptures have been featured in exhibitions at museums including the Chazen Museum of Art and the Hunter Museum of American Art. They are also included in permanent collections at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts; and elsewhere.

LaMonte next found inspiration in the music of John Field and Frederic Chopin, as well as the paintings of James Abbott McNeill Whistler. She channeled their atmospheric, night-themed compositions through her Nocturnes series of dress sculptures, for which she designed and sewed evening dresses to “wrap the female body in night” with white bronze, blue glass, and rusted iron. Some of these figures are modeled in reclining positions, a subtle subversion of the traditional odalisque through the removal of the nude body itself.

Within her Nocturnes series, LaMonte created Etudes, one-third-scale works that reference the historic Parisian project Théâtre de la Mode. During World War II, artists, dancers, and fashion designers created touring exhibits of small fashion mannequins installed in scaled theater sets, in hopes of helping the country move beyond the horrors of war. LaMonte’s Etudes–which echo that resilient wartime artistry–have been displayed with the larger-scale Nocturnes in exhibitions including Embodied Beauty at the Hunter Museum of American Art. In 2017 and 2019, LaMonte displayed her Nocturnes at Glasstress, an exhibition mounted concurrently with the Venice Biennale.

Recent works by LaMonte focus on clouds and climate change, reflecting her long standing fascination with themes of common and interlaced humanity. Her monumental 2017 marble sculpture Cumulus, also shown at Glasstress in Venice, was modeled from real-life weather data in collaboration with climatologists from the California Institute of Technology.

LaMonte’s newest body of work uses biomimetic materials to reinvent historic Venus figurines for the 21st century.

Mitchell Johnson

In a 2004 review published in Artnews Magazine, the writer Susan Emerling, describes Mitchell Johnson as "a devoted colorist able to extract visual tension from the world around him". Mitchell Johnson (b.1964) moved to California from New York City in 1990 to work for the artist, Sam Francis. In New York, Johnson studied at Parsons School of Design with many former students of Hans Hofmann: Jane Freilicher, Leland Bell, Nell Blaine, Paul Resika, Larry Rivers and Robert De Niro, Sr. Johnson adopted their reverence for art history and their emphasis on drawing and painting from life as the source of a personal direction.

Johnson’s work draws on a vastness of experience and a persistent desire to make paintings that explain the world through color and shape. He has always moved seamlessly between abstraction and representation and the art historian Peter Selz described Johnson as an artist who makes “realist paintings that are basically abstract paintings and abstract paintings that are figurative.”

Beginning in the 1990s Johnson embarked on long painting expeditions to Italy, France and New Mexico with rolls of canvas packed in a golf bag like a modern day Corot. Wading through unfamiliar landscapes, often on foot, he worked to understand the ever complex geometry of land and sky. He prevailed not to capture some ideal sense of place, but to see better and to go deeper into painting.

Moments of revelation accumulated. A more personal direction became apparent in Johnson’s work in the 2000s as there was less reporting on what he was encountering and more emphasis on the mysteries of appearances. A watershed moment occurred in 2005 when Johnson stumbled on an Albers/Morandi exhibit. As Brenda Danilowitz from the Albers Foundation has commented:

“About halfway into Mitchell Johnson’s 2014 monograph, Color as Content, there’s a portfolio of Josef Albers and Giorgio Morandi paintings juxtaposed one to a page – looking at each other, so to speak. The images are not accompanied by words, but they speak eloquently of Johnson’s admiration of and debt to these two quiet yet lofty twentieth century masters. Albers shows his mastery of color, space, and form. Morandi answers with form, space and color. No words needed. In 2005 Johnson had come across an Albers exhibition in Morandi’s eponymous museum in Bologna and recognized that something remarkable occurred when these two unlikely comrades in art faced one another. The upshot resonates in Mitchell Johnson’s work of the past two decades: precisely and meticulously arranged color and form play off each other in

startling and lambent ways.”

In the 2000s Johnson began making regular trips to New England and Asia, in particular painting trips to Truro, Massachusetts. His paintings have been exhibited at various galleries in New York (Tatistcheff Gallery), Los Angeles (Terrence Rogers Fine Art), San Diego (Thomas Babeor Gallery), Santa Fe (Munson Gallery & Mitchell-Brown Fine Art)Richmond (Reynolds Gallery), Denver (Robischon Gallery), San Francisco (Hackett-Freedman and Campbell-Thiebaud), Chatham, Scottsdale (Cline Fine Art), Portland (Augen Gallery), Provincetown (Schoolhouse Gallery and DNA) and St. Helena (I Wolk Gallery) as well as numerous museums as referenced in his CV.

Johnson has been a visiting artist at The American Academy in Rome, Borgo Finocchieto, The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation and Castle Hill in Truro, MA. In addition to attending Parsons, Johnson studied painting and drawing at Staten Island Academy, Randolph-Macon College, The Washington Studio School, The Santa Fe Institute of Fine Arts and The New York Studio School. His paintings are in the permanent collections of 29 museums and over 700 private collections. Johnson is the subject of three monographs: Mitchell Johnson (2004, Terrence Rogers Fine art), Doppio Binario (2007, Musei Senesi) and Color as Content (2014 Bakersfield Museum of Art). A catalog for the 2021 Castle Hill exhibit is available at Amazon.com.

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Johnson's paintings have appeared in numerous feature films, mostly Nancy Meyers projects, including The Holiday (2006), Crazy Stupid Love (2011), and It's Complicated (2009).

 

LA2

Born and raised in the Lower East Side, Angel Ortiz (also known as LA2), like so many other kids would write on his desks and chairs in school. When his mother put him in the NYC Boys Club, which he loved because of the access to a swimming pool. His friends at the Boys Club were already tagging up in the streets, buses and sanitation trucks when asked him to join them in using the streets as their canvas. After that, Ortiz was tagging non-stop. He became the King of the buses and sanitation trucks. His tags were everywhere, At the age of 14, Ortiz met Keith Haring, an artist from Reading ,PA. Haring was attending The School of Visual Arts and had a studio in the Lower East Side (The Rat Studio). Of all the tags he saw around the city, the "The LA2 tag" stood out to him. He asked around to see if anyone knew whose tag it was and looked for Angel for months before they were finally introduced at Junior High School 22. Here, Haring and other graffiti artists were creating a mural. He asked if anyone knew LA2, to which SOE, Angel's friend responded and said, "I can get him for you." He went to Angel 's house, told him there is a guy with funny shorts and glasses asking for him. When he skeptically went over to the school, Haring could not believe Angel was a kid! They got along right away and loved learning from each other. Ortiz showed Haring some markers tricks- Keith did not know too much about markers, but he was the King with the brushes. It was as if they had always known each other.

Their first collaboration was that first day on a taxi hood in The Rat Studio. LA2 added his tags and crew names and asked Keith if he could add squiggly lines to add energy.  Two weeks later, Haring called Ortiz and told him he had sold the piece and he wanted to collaborate with him.  Tony Shafrazi gave him his first show with their collaborations in the Fluorescent Room.  Keith Haring then asked his mother's permission to take Angel traveling. He wrote a letter to his teacher and at the age of 15 he was exhibiting in Europe. Through Haring, Ortiz met art icons like Andy Warhol, Jean-Michel Basquiat and Richard Hambleton. They exhibited for almost seven years, but continued collaborating till Keith's passing in 1991. 

 

Angel Ortiz lives in NYC and is still creating and exhibiting world wide.  LA2 HAS done work for various museums and programs, such as the Children's Museum of Arts, the Children's Museum of East End, Apple Village Arts and the Renaissance Charter School.  

 

He believes meeting Keith Haring was a blessing for both.  Humbled to this day that it was his tag that caught Keith's eye.

Philip Guston

Philip Guston ('ust' pronounced like "rust"), born Phillip Goldstein (June 27, 1913 – June 7, 1980), was a Canadian American painter, printmaker, muralist and draughtsman. Early in his five decade career, muralist David Siquieros described him as one of "the most promising painters in either the US or Mexico,"^[1] in reference to his antifascist fresco The Struggle Against Terror, which "includes the hooded figures that became a lifelong symbol of bigotry for the artist."^[2] "Guston worked in a number of artistic modes, from Renaissance-inspired figuration to formally accomplished abstraction,"^[3] and is now regarded one of the "most important, powerful, and influential American painters of the last 100 years."^[4] He also frequently depicted racism, antisemitism, fascism and American identity, as well as, especially in his later most cartoonish and mocking work, the banality of evil. In 2013, Guston's painting To Fellini set an auction record at Christie's when it sold for $25.8 million.^[5]

Judith Gale

Judith Gale’s artistic drive is inspired by nature, particularly marine life. Her fascination with the complex intricacies and the plethora of shapes and colors found in living things generate her paintings. By enlarging these unique elements of nature on canvas, she aspires to capture peoples’ awareness and appreciation of these spectacular wonders. She hopes her artwork helps to draw the tranquility of the ocean to the world above.

Judith has been actively working with the Molluscan Science Foundation, a nonprofit organization in Maryland focused on the study of mollusks and the preservation of coral reefs. She has been involved in distributing educational material to school aged children all over the world. She hopes that by introducing seashells to children, they will grow to love and value our oceans and help protect them.

This work with seashells shaped her art and influenced the themes of her paintings and photography. A portion of her proceeds are donated to this foundation. Judith Gale grew up in Maryland and is a graduate of the School of Visual Arts in NYC.

Robert Guillot

Robert Guillot is a sculptor with a surrealist edge. His enchantingly odd shapes and forms are enigmatic, enveloping a figurative, bodily essence while drifting into curious abstraction. The collective placement and presentation of these objects creates a specific terrain, a nimbly morphing landscape of accumulated parts. In speaking of his process, Guillot states: “Things arranged, again and again, over and under and in between. Together they create a visual rhythm, and this rhythm is EVERYTHING.”

Robert Guillot was born in Birmingham, Alabama in 1953. He studied at the Memphis College of Art and received his MFA at Yale University. Guillot’s work has been featured in solo and group exhibitions at Sideshow Gallery (Brooklyn); Jack Shainman Gallery (New York); Magasin 3 (Stockholm, Sweden); and The Stedelijk Museum (Netherlands). Guillot is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Grant (1981) and a Milton and Sally Avery Fellowship (1992). Past residencies included Yaddo and the MacDowell Colony.  Guillot’s work has been reviewed in Hyperallergic, Artforum, The Yale Architecture Journal, The New York Times and The Village Voice.

Janice Jakielski

Janice Jakielski is an artist that transcends her medium of clay. Her porcelain work looks almost like paper using industrial casting methods to create paper-thin sheets of porcelain that she layers, folds and curls to re-imagine historic vessels.

"I create objects of curiosity; beautiful objects to provide focus, retreat and pause in an overwhelming world. Through the use of meticulous detail, familiar forms and uncertain function I coax my audience to draw near, closing the physical gap between viewer and object. In this way the details of my workmanship and the excessive fragility of the porcelain act as a whisper, flirtatiously demanding investigation.

This work began from a place of material exploration. I adapt and re-invent ceramic engineering processes and materials for application in the studio. This experimental approach to ceramics allows me to circumvent the constraints of a conventional clay body. By inventing a new way of casting and manipulating ultra-thin porcelain sheets I am able to create impossible objects. Cut, veneered, twirled and slotted my vessels have a material ambiguity that brings the viewer to a place of sensory uncertainty.

My pieces are inspired by iconic historic vessels. I do not replicate these objects but instead re-imagine them in ways not feasible using traditional ceramics. By removing the interior volume I am able to contemplate these forms divorced from function. They are vessels without voids, containers without containment. I use planes to playfully define, dissect and divide the spaces that they inhabit."

Janice Jakielski was born in a small farm town in the heart of Pennsylvania Dutch country. Jakielski received her Master of Fine Arts in Ceramics from the University of Colorado, Boulder and a Bachelor in Fine Arts from New York State College of Ceramic Art and Design at Alfred University. She has exhibited both nationally and internationally including the Houston Center for Contemporary Crafts, Houston, TX, The Society of Art and Craft, Boston, MA, Cross MacKenzie Gallery, Washington DC and Eutectic Gallery, Portland, OR. Jakielski has participated in numerous residencies such as the Archie Bray Foundation, Roswell Artist in Residency, Djerassi and Millay Colony for the Arts. She is a recent recipient of a 2019 Mass Cultural Council Artist Fellowship. Jakielski currently teaches at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design and has a studio, laboratory and apiary in Sutton, MA.

 

Richard Kurtz

Outsider artist Richard Kurtz, is a self-taught, contemporary artist who worked for many years in NYC and is now based in California.His scrappy street-art reminiscent work is painted on a range of materials from hard metal to books to soft canvas.

"Kurtz is a textural adventurer, exploring the surfaces of old bank bags, antique luggage, children’s books — all of it left in his wake stamped with his flat, painterly icons in reds, blacks, and whites: boxing colors, bold and physical. This feisty imagery stands in contrast to the artist’s soft-spoken, meditative personality, making it that much more intriguing,"according to John Martin Tilley

 

 

Celia Gerard

The shape of Celia Gerard’s studio is akin to an isosceles triangle whose apex has been leveled. It is a slightly irregular shape, but with a door on one end, a window at the other and a set of walls connecting base to foregone-tip, its geometric irregularity recedes beneath the structural logic of a building within which this little polygon fits neatly. When I imagine an image generated by changes in the layout of this building—small studios merging; larger ones being subdivided—I see fluctuating spatial relationships defined within a set of unchanging parameters. Older forms become ghosted beneath newly constructed arrangements that arise as they are needed. There is a natural order that underlies this apparent chaos; the question is how does one find that natural order? How does a person cultivate the ability to see the logical operations that give shade and shape to what may otherwise appear tangled and arbitrary?

Celia Gerard’s artistic practice is grounded in this kind of search and her procedural basis—regimented and systematic—is engineered towards the experience of discovery. In Gerard’s drawings, the process of construction and erasure that ultimately leads to a highly nuanced geometric coordination is made visible. One sees the final composition, and at the same time, the choices by which Gerard arrived there: her destination and journey pressed into a single visual arrangement.

This kind of practice is built on the type of looking that comes naturally to seekers of all variety. It is active and mindful observation, full of intent and near to the experience of contemplation. This way of seeing draws heavily on one’s insight and, by extension, encourages intuitive association. When I give myself over to studying the details of Gerard’s work, to becoming a seeker myself, certain mental operations fire into action. Intuition leads directly to imagination. My sense of wonder is stimulated, but so too is my analytic mind, probing and cataloguing. To my eyes Gerard’s work accomplishes a rare double action. It is developed through steady, calibrated technical decisions that eventually accumulate into an image that speaks to the embrace of understanding arrived at without any need for reason or proof.

Gerard favors very strong paper for her drawings because it needs to withstand a great deal of her touch, which can be as aggressive as it is gentle. Consequentially, they are works of great tactility and sensuality. Her exploration of bronze and ceramics is rooted in the same hands-on curiosity that is the foundation of these drawings. The plate-sized ceramics are each a unique response to the same question: what happens when I try this? They are cast from the same mold but Gerard has used a variety of clay bodies—porcelain, earthenware, T1—and glazed each piece differently. They seem to float on the wall, almost rising against the pull of gravity.

Gerard’s bronze sculptures embody an opposing sensibility; some are dark and heavy, scarred, pockmarked and pitted like the weather-beaten anchor of an old ship. These pieces also bring to mind the slag that remains after a coal fire, or a growth of chaga upon a birch tree. But of course Gerard’s bronzes are not meant to represent any of these things. They are resolutely abstract—like her drawings and ceramics—and in that sense attend to a discourse that long ago departed from the merely representational. It is a discourse between a creator and her material that is concerned with essential formal ideals such as balance, harmony and rhythm. Kandinsky worked in this manner. So did Agnes Martin. These artists sought to express the intrinsic qualities of their art, to create visual structures that would resonate on a level beneath the system of words that comprise our languages. It is not easy. Martin destroyed much of what she made.

It is also easy to be misunderstood: for a long time critics identified Martin’s compositions with rows of crops and textiles—because one can point to a visual resemblance—despite the fact that Martin herself did not make that association. As I walked down the narrow hallway from Gerard’s studio to the elevator, I wondered if I was making a similar mistake, connecting her aesthetic configurations with architectural space. But I wasn’t wrong. Insofar as Gerard’s work achieves a state of equilibrium amidst its many parts, there will always be a congruence between her abstractions and the ideals of constructed space, be it a building, a borough or a city. The danger is thinking that such a relationship in anyway explains the work. It does not. It only proves that her abstractions are very deeply in tune with how we create the places we inhabit.

— Charles M. Schultz

 

Celia Gerard (born 1973) received her BA with Honors in Art and Art History from Colgate University, her MFA in Sculpture from the New York Studio School of Drawing, Painting And Sculpture and her EdM from Harvard University. In addition, she studied with Nicolas Carone and Bruce Gagnier at the International School of Art in Umbria, Italy.  One-person exhibitions include Sears-Peyton Gallery; Tayloe Piggott Gallery, Jackson, WY; Mark W. Potter Gallery, Watertown, CT; New York Studio School of Drawing, Painting and Sculpture. Group exhibitions include the National Academy Museum; Lori Bookstein Fine Art; Sideshow Gallery; Lohin-Geduld Gallery; I-20 Gallery; Gutman Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA; Coolidge Center for the Arts, Portsmouth, NH. Publications include ARTnews, CityArts, The Daily Beast, ArtSlant, Parabola and works&conversations. Awards and honors include the S.J. Wallace Truman Fund Award, National Academy Museum; Artist in Residence, New York Studio School of Drawing, Painting and Sculpture; Cathedral of St. John the Divine Sculpture Fellowship; Inaugural Artist in Residence at The Spruceton Inn. Teaching career positions include Bard College, Swarthmore College, Pratt Institute, the New York Studio School, Columbia University and the School of Visual Arts. Gerard lives and works in New York, NY.