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.

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. 

 

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.

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.

Nancy Callahan

Nancy Callahan is a visual artist who works in a variety of mediums. She is known for her screen prints, drawings, and installations as well as her work in the field of artist’s books.

She has exhibited her work nationally and internationally and has taught well-over a hundred workshops on innovative book structures. Her work is housed in many permanent collections throughout the United States and Europe including Yale University, Vassar College, The Corcoran Gallery of Art, University of Indiana at Bloomington, University of Michigan University of Delaware, Library of Congress, Rochester Institute of Technology, Wesleyan University Virginia Commonwealth University, Women’s Studio Workshop Saint Stephen Museum, Hungary, Bucknell University, SUNY Albany, and Harvard University.

Jim Bachor

Jim Bachor is best known for his pothole mosaics. His artist statement says it all:

Trying to leave your mark in this world fascinates me. Ancient history fascinates me. 

Volunteering to work on an archaeological dig in Pompeii helped merge these two interests into my art. In the ancient world, mosaics were used to capture images of everyday life. These

Inquiries?
jim@bachor.com
312-498-5287

colorful pieces of stone or glass set in mortar were the photographs of empires long past. Marble and glass do not fade. Mortar is mortar. An ancient mosaic looks exactly as intended by the artist who produced it over two millennia ago. What else can claim that kind of staying power? I find this idea simply amazing.

Using the same materials, tools and methods of the archaic craftsmen, I create mosaics that speak of modern things in an ancient voice. My work locks into mortar unexpected concepts drawn from the present.

By harnessing and exploiting the limitations of this indestructible technique, my work surprises the viewer while challenging long-held notions of what a mosaic should be. Like low-tech pixels,hundreds if not thousands of tiny, hand-cut pieces of italian glass and marble comprise my work.

This work is my mark.

​[email protected]

Bisa Butler

Hyperallergic writes on artist Bisa Butler:

Bisa Butler has a great name; it has almost a rock star quality. But she wasn’t born with it. Mailissa Veronica Yamba grew up in New Jersey, the daughter of a Ghanian-born university president (at Essex County College in Newark) and a French teacher from New Orleans. She graduated from Columbia High School in 1991, married, earned undergraduate and graduate degrees in painting and art education, and taught high school art for a decade while raising her children.

The story will sound familiar to many women artists. However, Butler has recently emerged as a significant art-world presence, with her first solo museum exhibition, Bisa Butler: Portraits, currently on view at the Art Institute of Chicago. (The exhibition opened in 2020 at the Katonah Museum of Art in upstate New York.) Butler gained success, quite remarkably, through the often-marginalized medium of quilting. Yet, what might seem like an overnight success is not. Butler had been showing work for 20 years with other African American quilt artists under the auspices of the curator, writer, and artist Carolyn Mazloomi. Butler was known in these circles, but it was not until three years ago that she surmounted biases in the contemporary art world against both people of color and fiber arts.

Butler’s breakthrough happened in 2018 at an art fair, Expo Chicago. Her work, presented by Claire Oliver Gallery, sold out during the first hour of the preview. I remember running into friends at the fair who asked breathlessly, “Did you see those quilts?” When Erica Warren, the textile curator at the Art Institute of Chicago, first saw the work at Expo, she was “transfixed and astonished.” “When the works came into my view in the crowded exhibition hall,” she told me by email, “there were a few particulars that really grabbed my attention, including the vibrant colors and patterns, the discerning gazes of the portraits’ subjects, and the balance and dynamism of the figural arrangements.” The Art Institute of Chicago subsequently acquired a major work, “The Safety Patrol” (2018). 

Butler’s work draws on the rich history of African American art: Her legacy lies with enslaved women creating embroidered quilts from scraps, her grandmother’s and mother’s needlework, Romare Bearden’s pioneering collages, AfriCOBRA’s self-fashioned aesthetics of the African Diaspora, James Van Der Zee’s studio photographs of elegant Black New Yorkers during the Harlem Renaissance, and activist artists — for instance, Faith Ringgold, whose monumental, Guernica-inspired vision of a race riot, “American People Series #20: Die,” (1967), was set in conversation with Picasso’s “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon” (1907) when the renovated Museum of Modern Art opened in 2019. It was the Gee’s Bend quilts, however, in an exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 2002, that inspired Butler, then a graduate student, to work with fabric.

Betye Saar

Assemblage artist Betye Saar creates a new, mystical world in her work.

"There has been an apparent thread in my art that weaves from early prints of the 1960's through later collages and assemblages and ties into the current installations. That thread is a curiosity about the mystical. I am intrigued with combining the remnant of memories, fragments of relics and ordinary objects, with the components of technology. It's a way of delving into the past and reaching into the future simultaneously. The art itself becomes the bridge. Curiosity about the unknown has no boundaries. Symbols, images, place and cultures merge. time slips away. The stars, the cards, the mystic vigil may hold the answers. By shifting the point of view an inner spirit is released. Free to create," noted Betye Saar in 1998.

In Betye Saar’s work, time is cyclical. History and experiences, emotion and knowledge travel across time and back again, linking the artist and viewers of her work with generations of people who came before them. This is made explicit in her commitment to certain themes, imagery, and objects, and her continual reinvention of them over decades. “I can no longer separate the work by saying this deals with the occult and this deals with shamanism or this deals with so and so…. It’s all together and it’s just my work,” she said in 1989.¹

Saar grew up in Los Angeles and Pasadena, California, and studied design at the University of California, Los Angeles—a career path frequently foisted upon women of color who were interested in the arts, due to the racism and sexism prevalent in universities at the time. Saar eventually studied printmaking, and her earliest works are on paper. Using the soft-ground etching technique, she pressed stamps, stencils, and found materials into her plates to capture their images and textures. Her prints are notably concerned with spirituality, cosmology, and family, as in Anticipation (1961) and Lo, The Mystique City (1965).

Valerie Meotti

Working in a range of disciplines, Valerie Meotti strives to give her art immediacy and understandability.

She explained, "Painting and creating visual art has been my passion for most of my life. My motives are not to send a message but to be felt. What one takes from my imagery is yours alone. I have a difficult time explaining why I create but I can tell you how. I have never felt I was a catalyst trying to reveal a profound message. 

I am not a singular artist in that I can not settle on one technique of expression. I enjoy having the versatility and knowledge to explore and experiment.  Watercolors are my base of operations, the one thing I rely on most. My unique digital transfer technique utilizes my graphic capability but lets me develop it freely like a painting, using both my major influences.  With this I cross over into collage components developing most of my mixed media works. Oil painting, I am new to but I love the color and luminescence that can be achieved.  I will continue my learning. Ceramics are mainly for the quirky characters I developed called Pistachio People and I still illustrate the little guys. I believe they can be in a successful mass market someday.  Someday I will achieve the independence to sustain my art. Just looking for some glimpse of encouragement."

 

Claudio Parentela

Claudio Parentela is an illustrator, painter, photographer, mail artist, cartoonist, collagist, journalist free lancer. He has been active for many years in the international underground scene and has collaborated with many zines,magazines of contemporary art,literary and of comics in Italy and in the world. His work can be categorized as street art but with a variety of mediums. He describes his illustration style as,"anarchic, cool, conceptual, twisted, schizophrenic, obsessive, and chaotic."

"I feel completely absolutely free only when I’m amongst my 'artistic things' and in my studio, with my photos, my papers, my colours, my glue, my scissors, my ropes, tapes, plastics, all my 1000 things I found around in the city. It’s been difficult to arrive here where I’m now but it’s a wonderful continuous magical journey, every moment and every day," he says.

What advice would you give to other artists?
To be and to continue to be, and try to be themselves. It’s so important, and then to have fun to have fun to have fun.