The Next Big Art Movement - Mosaics and the Artists Breaking the Mold

By George Tibbett, curator

Perhaps even more exciting than the opening of the anxiously anticipated extension of the Q subway line along 2nd Avenue in Manhattan was the mosaic art in each new station. Many NYC subway stations have some mosaics but these new stations bring it to a new artistic level with artwork by Sarah Sze, Chuck Close and Vik Muniz all translated into large mosaics.

So will this push the art of mosaics into greater acceptance in the established art world?  Mosaics as with ceramics, has long been relegated to crafts rather than fine art. But this may be changing. Established ceramicists, such as Betty Woodman, have had solo shows at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Emerging ceramicists like Lulu Yee have been the toast of Bushwick Open Studios. So as go ceramics, so go mosaics?

Mosaics should mean more than just a jigsaw puzzle of pieces that form an image. Great mosaic art should expand the range of the medium. Here is a list of the top five ground-breaking mosaic artists working today:

Jorge Campos aka Pixel

Pixel, is a Santiago street artist whose mosaic work pixelates cultural heroes such as Nicanor Parra, artists such as Van Gogh, and iconic artwork like from Roy Lichtenstein. Pixel brings his mosaics to the streets where his work blends with other forms of street art for people to enjoy on the streets of Santiago. According to MosaicArtNow, Pixel explains the relationship of his art with the public. He says, “At first, people think they are facing a painting. Approaching and touching, they realize they are in fact facing a mosaic. Then, they wonder if it was really hand made.  They also play with distance to appreciate the work in detail, take photos, and when the image is revealed perfect and detailed on the small screens of their smartphones, they fall for it!”

 

Sonia King

Using a range of different materials, King’s mosaics are complex compilations that, as her website states, stimulate the imagination. Some of her work is described as coded messages. She asserts, “These mosaics explore the dynamic tension created when familiar organic shapes can be seen as both macro and micro visions of our landscape. Shapes that are simultaneously at rest and moving, pulling the tesserae together into a complex composition while exploring the interaction of each element and the mystery of the spaces between.”

 

Charlene Weisler

Weisler describes herself as an urban artist with an interest in decaying and discarded objects. First starting in photography, Weisler was captivated by decaying, peeling and eroding street art. From there, she gravitated to collecting and assembling discarded and broken objects to not only capture their inherent beauty and mystery but also to create new mosaic images. She explains, “My mosaics are often unplanned and are created organically as the pieces come together to tell their story. A broken mug, a piece of shattered plate or a discarded misshapen object are all important elements in my work.”

 

 

 

 

 

Isaiah Zagar

Isaiah Zagar might be best known for one of his greatest achievements – The Magic Garden in Philadelphia, which is essentially a full house and side yard of compiled mosaic art.  As described by Lonely Planet, “Think of all the things you have thrown away this week – an old shoe, a broken mirror, a loose button, an empty bottle of wine. Then picture all of it broken apart, artfully cobbled together with quirky objects like antique tiles and hand-carved Mexican dolls, and applied to a wall with cement, clay, paint and glue to form a gloriously colorful mural. This is the work of septuagenarian Philadelphia-born Isaiah Zagar: mosaic artist, world traveler, visionary, dumpster diver.”

 

Domingo Zapata

Better known as a painter, Zapata had a chance encounter when he walked into Koko Mosaico in Ravenna, Italy.  It was there that he saw the potential of mosaics to translate his paintings into formative artwork. “With these pieces, I wanted to create great contrast and pay tribute to the history of art.  I find taking a painting done in graffiti and recreating it using these ancient techniques helps me to understand the contemporary moment. These works represent to me where we have been and where we are going – they derive their strength from this duality,” he states on MosaicArtNow.

Coille Hooven

For over fifty years, Coille Hooven has been working in porcelain and creating psychologically charged sculpture that explores domestic-centered narratives from the kitchen to the bedroom. One of the first ceramists to bring feminist content to clay, Hooven uses porcelain to honor the history of women’s work, confront gendered inequality, and depict the pleasures, fears, and failures of partnering and parenting.

Hooven’s sculptures range from teapots and vessels to figurative busts and dioramas, and they mine the domestic psyche to produce vignettes that resonate with familiarity despite an undisguised use of the fantastical. Developing her own vocabulary of archetypes, she regularly revisits certain creatures and forms: a domestic palette of aprons, pillows, shoes, and pies, as well as a cast of characters that includes mermaids, fish, snakes, and anthropomorphic beasts that appear part-dog, part-horse, and part-human. While these creatures may appear familiar and amiable at first, tension lurks underneath. Recalling fairy tales, fables, and myths, Hooven’s sculptures conjure a vision of the unconscious—both the joy and buoyancy of dreams, as well as the discomfort and despair of anxiety and doubt.

At a recent exhibition at NYC's Museum of Design, Coille Hooven: Tell It By Heart assembles more than thirty years of Hooven’s work. Hooven studied with David Shaner at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and later relocated to Berkeley, California, with her two children. Citing Peter Voulkos and Robert Arneson as influential in her decision to move west, Hooven became part of the Bay Area clay community, where she worked independently from academia and forged a career making both functional pottery and ceramic sculpture. In 1979 she became only the second woman to be in residence at the Kohler Co.’s plant in Kohler, Wisconsin, as part of their renowned Arts/Industry residency program. Coille Hooven: Tell It By Heart is curated by Shannon R. Stratton, William and Mildred Lasdon Chief Curator, with the support of Curatorial Assistant and Project Manager Angelik Vizcarrondo-Laboy.

 

Laura Lappi

Laura Lappi works in a wide range of media including installation, sculpture, photography and video. Her work crosses the boundaries between our perception of space and time and between reality and fiction. She is interested in creating bewilderment, uncertainty, unexpected situations and mystery by shifting the form of space and the viewer’s point of view. Emotions such as loneliness and yearning are important concepts within her work.

Lappi's work has been exhibited widely in solo and group shows in Europe, US and Asia including AC Institute in New York, Galleri Vest in Reykjavik, Galleri Uusi Kipinä in Lahti, Gallery Titanik in Turku, Kunstpodium T in Tilburg, Gramercy Gallery in New York, Fotogalerie in Rotterdam, Re:Rotterdam International Art Fair in Rotterdam, Twente Biennale 2013 in Enschede, Supermarket Art Fair in Stockholm, Access Art in New York and Green Papaya Art Projects in Manila. She has received grants from the Finnish Cultural Foundation, FRAME (Finnish Fund for Art Exchange) and the Arts Council of Finland.

Laura Lappi lives and works in Brooklyn, New York and Asikkala, Finland.

Brenda Goodman

 Brenda Goodman has been steadily doing her thing for decades, moving from early success within the Cass Corridor movement in her native Detroit, to a varied career in New York City, and finally to her current retreat in the relative sanctity of the Catskills. Her “thing” is a little bit difficult to sum up, perhaps, because over the course of this long and productive career, her creative output has vacillated between painting and drawing (with forays into three-dimensional constructions); smooth surfaces and chaotic buildup on canvas; and intimate small-scale works and jaw-dropping large paintings that grab your eye from across the room. But all these works come from a place of deep personal perspective and wildly messy emotion, and, as a newcomer to Goodman’s works, this strikes me as relevant to a contemporary conversation about women artists and female identity writ large.

Goodman’s oeuvre includes two intense self-portrait series that were a means for her to deal with personal struggles around her weight and physical appearance. Anyone who has battled with weight or issues of self-image will instantly recognize the selected self-portraits included in the second, painting-focused career retrospective, Brenda Goodman: Selected Works 1961–2015 at CCS’s Center Galleries, as mirrors of despair and self-loathing. “Self Portrait 4,” from Goodman’s first paintings about body dysmorphia, depicts a bald and chalky-white figure, vaguely female inasmuch as her nude form indicates labial folds and the suggestion of breasts, but more ghoul than girl. Eyes stare vacantly at the viewer, as she crams substances into her mouth with both hands. The image is appropriately manifested by the intense building up of material on the surface of the canvas; viewed at very close range, the figure’s hands and the food seem little more than piles of oil paint. Despite the density and chaos of this creation, and the desperation of the figure, Goodman’s skill as a painter salvages beauty from this horror.

Ten years later, following the loss and eventual regaining of nearly 70 pounds, Goodman launched a second self-portrait series, featuring a more naturalistic figure — still chalky-white with body parts hanging in folds like a plucked chicken. To combat the vulnerability of presenting a more literal image of herself, Goodman painted several of the figures in this series with their faces hooded. But the most aching iteration of these portraits is the one that depicts Goodman in her studio leaning against the wall in contemplation of the very portraits that she constructed out of her own self-loathing a decade hence. There could not be a more potent poster image for the demoralizing experience of body dysmorphia, and to put that kind of personal struggle on display in a world as aesthetic and unforgiving as that of contemporary art is an act of courage and self-revelation.

 

Matt Lipps

Matt Lipps’ work combines elements of collage, constructed still life, and appropriated imagery, into a wholly new and original form.

His recent work “Library” is based on images from Time-Life’s 1970s seventeen volume set of books called “Library of Photography”, Lipps cuts out and assembles selected images into groups that echo the themes of the different volumes – Photographing Children, The Camera, Travel Photography, Special Problems, etc.. Mounted and arranged on shelves in front of vivid color backgrounds, the figures become players in a story that is both a tribute to the heyday of analog photography and an accomplished vision of the possibilities that the digital age has opened up to artists.

The colorful backgrounds of the series come from 35mm photographs taken by Lipps when he was a student and their warm emotional color and abstract feeling contrasts dramatically with the coolly objective black and white figures and forms selected by Lipps from the “Library” books.

Combining authored and appropriated photographs Lipps sets up a tension between the subjective and objective uses of the medium offering both an intriguing and fresh perspective on the history of the medium and history itself.

Matt Lipps received his MFA from the University of California, Irvine. Most recently his work has been shown at the Saatchi Gallery, FOAM (Foto Museum of Amsterdam), and is currently on view at Pier 24 in San Francisco. His work is in the collection of Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, The Pilara Foundation/Pier 24. He is Assistant Professor of Art at San Francisco State University. Lipp's work can currently also be seen at Art in General and in the group show "Under Construction - New Positions in American Photography" at Pioneer Works in Brooklyn.

Donald Lokuta

Donald Lokuta is a photographer who captures the essence of human behavior.

 

In his latest series he explores the costumed sea creatures of Coney Island's Mermaid Parade. He says, "Coney Island is in the southern part of Brooklyn, New York. It is on the Atlantic Ocean and is known for its amusement park, wide sandy beach and its boardwalk. At an annual summer event, marchers dress as mermaids, fish, lobsters, pirates, sailors, jellyfish, and various other sea creatures- and in a variety of other costumes- sometimes unrelated to the theme of the sea. This series of photographs were made before the start of the procession that winds through the streets and down the boardwalk of Coney Island.

 

The event gives the participants an opportunity to design their own costumes, dress-up and show off their creations. The diversity of bright and colorful costumes adds to the Mardi Gras atmosphere and in many cases offers an opportunity to display a side of one’s self that is seldom seen. Some marchers are masked as they assume another identity.

 

One of the women that I photographed for this series wrote in an email, “I was a mermaid! Her name is Katrina, Queen of the Waves. It’s my inner mermaid persona.” What we portray in our everyday life is also not likely real and the masks and costumes we put on during parades and other rituals, are an attempt to escape from one unreality to another- if only for a short time.

 

Anthropologist Barbara Babcock calls these dressing up opportunities, “symbolic inversion.” During these rituals, we are more likely to dress up in costumes that are the polar opposite of the person everyone knows. Events like parades make it socially acceptable for a person to escape into another reality.

 

These inversion rituals give us an opportunity to make our hidden fantasies real, even if they go against long held social norms. We can overturn social conventions in a socially acceptably way, and we don't have to do it alone. Our fantasies are supported by other participants and cheering spectators. Participants can wear normally “unacceptable,” sensational or even sexy costumes. And participation in many events is very democratic; you don’t have to be a movie star, great athlete, a political figure, or anything like that. You can often be a participant simply if you want to be.

 

For me, this is another window into how we see ourselves as a society and as individuals."

Kent Monkman

According to Hyperallergic, Kent Monkman’s art commingles art history with cultural mythology in a passion play about masculinity and belonging. His paintings and diorama use just enough camp to make the works feel self-aware, like the moment in a dream where you realize where you are, wake up, and reflect on the madness.

By his overt references to paintings of nearly every art historical period, from the caves of Lascaux to Veronese to Francis Bacon, Monkman asserts himself as both a traditionalist and an iconoclast.  He raises his voice for native populations transcending the devastation of colonialism, while depicting their struggles in the language of European painting.  In doing so he stakes new ground and claims a territory for himself as both an artist and a descendant of those originally displaced.

Kent Monkman is an artist of Cree ancestry who works in a variety of media including painting, film/video, performance and installation. Monkman has exhibited widely within Canada, and is well represented in numerous private and public collections including the National Gallery of Canada, the Art Gallery of Ontario, and the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. He is represented by Sargent's Daughters in New York, Trepanier Baer Gallery in Calgary, and Pierre-François Ouellette art contemporain in Montreal.

 

 

Steven Gorman

Steven Gorman creates biomorphic hybridized forms constructed from white earthenware ceramics, airbrushed acrylics and occasionally an added mixed media element. Having a strong interest in the Surrealist movement, particularly the works of Hans Arp and the contemporary ceramic work of Ken Price, Ron Nagle, and Kathy Butterly, he strives to continue making work within this tradition of the finish fetish object.

He says, 'Through the use of flowing organic bulbous forms, color and pattern choices, I hope to create works which are stunning, alluring, mysterious, sensuous and layered with deeper meanings. Ambiguity of form united with an interesting surface treatment has been the hallmark of my work since 1993. Often there is an underlying veiled contemporary issue reflected within the work. Viewers have used the words; otherworldly, animated, whimsical and cartoony to describe my work. The word illusion has also been mentioned, when they state, how can something so hard appear to look so soft?

Every object starts out as a drawing, is then slab built, smoothed, carved, refined through a three step laborious sanding process, fired, post fire sanded again, cleaned, airbrushed, signed and then sealed. One of my goals has been the merger of painting and sculpting as one united whole, at the same time expressing ideas and concepts pertaining to life in general. My goal is to play a part as contemporary ceramics continues to metamorphosis from the genre of Fine Craft to Fine Art."

 

 

 

Maria Lassnig

Maria Lassnig (Austrian, b. 1919) is one of the most important contemporary painters and can be seen as a pioneer in many areas of art today. Emphatically refusing to make “pictures,” she has long focused on ways of representing her internal world. Using the term “body awareness,” Lassnig has regularly tried to paint the way her body feels to her from the inside, rather than attempting to depict it from without.

Throughout a remarkable career that has spanned more than 70 years, she has continued to create work that vulnerably explores the way she comes into contact with the world, often placing particular emphasis upon the disjunctions between her own self-image and the way she is seen by others—as a woman, as a painter, and as a person living through the dramatic technological and cultural developments that have marked the century of her lifetime. Bravely exposing personal traumas, fantasies, and nightmares, Lassnig’s art offers instruction for courageous living in a time of increasingly spectacularized social interaction.

 

Lou Krueger

Lou Krueger's  goal is to create  magic with his artwork, be an engine of inspiration in the lives of his students, and find grace with his life.

 

"I’ve been making art for forty years, and teaching for thirty-four. I’m one of the fortunate ones, I love what I do  and I  believe that my best work is still in front of me." LK

 

Lou Krueger received both his undergraduate and graduate degrees from Northern Illinois University, with a BFA in Metals, 1970, and his MFA in Photography, 1976. During the past thirty years he has taught photography at NIU, Elgin Community College, Syracuse University, and currently Bowling Green State University. He was one of the co-founders of the Syracuse University art photography program, served as the Chair of Art Media Studies (SU), as an Assistant Dean of Visual and Performing Arts (SU), and most recently as the Director of the School of Art at Bowling Green State University.

 

Conceptually his creative work, narrative fantasy, masquerades as reality with an emphasis on the existentially absurd; technically his research agenda focuses on issues of photographic illusion, experimental color photography, and alternative/pinhole cameras. His photographs, drawings and paintings have been exhibited nationally.