Elizabeth Murray Art Wall

The mission of the Elizabeth Murray Art Wall, named in honor of Elizabeth Murray (1940-2007), an extraordinarily gifted American artist who helped found the Bowery Poetry Club in 2002 with Bob Holman and was the creator of its art wall, is to sponsor curated exhibitions of both established and emerging artists, with an emphasize on emerging. This focus is dedicated to the spirit of Elizabeth who was a lifelong advocate for artists, especially those who were underknown and undervalued. Located in the Bowery Poetry Club, which is not a conventional gallery space, the audiences for the exhibitions will include not only visual arts lovers but also the diverse audiences for the Club. Exhibitions for the EMAW will be cross-disciplinary and often collaborative, based for the most part on the interaction between image and language in ways that are site-specific, innovative, improvisational and stimulating. The Visual Arts Committee of BAS oversees the Elizabeth Murray Art Wall.

News Flash: Raphael Rubinstein names our Amy Sillman & Charles Bernstein to his Top Ten List of 2011!

Next Exhibit:

BLIND SPOT
EJ Hauser & Mónica de la Torre

May 2^nd, 2012
5:30-7pm

Please join us for an evening of text, image, music, and a chance to discover where your missing light receptors are.

For the Elizabeth Murray Art Wall project, EJ Hauser and Mónica de la Torre have collaborated to create BLIND SPOT. EJ Hauser constructed a simple optical exercise in neon that can reveal one’s blind spot. Other images may or may not appear. Mónica de la Torre provided the conceptual springboard for the project.

I introduced EJ Hauser and Mónica de la Torre by email. After one studio visit their collaboration continued online. Their conversation is integral to the work. In it, the word “blind spot keeps coming and eventually becomes their central image.

EJ Hauser is a Brooklyn based painter known for her abstract and text-based work. Recently, portraits of Walt Whitman and Paul Thek made an appearance into her oeuvre. This year her work has been seen in Special Blend at the Journal Gallery and at the VIP Art Fair 2.0 with James Fuentes Gallery. EJ blogs on art and artists and you can follow her @ superdigit.

Mónica de la Torre comfortably wears several hats: poet, translator, and senior editor of BOMB magazine. Her poetry books include two in English, Talk Shows and Public Domain, and two in Spanish. She has translated Latin American poets and edited multilingual anthologies. Four, her new poetry book, is just out from Switchback. She will be reading at Bowery Poetry Club on May 19 at 4 pm, part of the Segue Series.

Tamara Gonzales

Curator

Previous Exhibits:

This is 2-UP
Collaborative Posters by Artists and Writers
Elizabeth Murray Art Wall
Bowery Poetry Club
March 7, 2012
5:30-7:30 pm
The mission statement for the Elisabeth Murray Art Wall at Bowery Arts + Sciences demands its exhibitions to be cross-disciplinary and often collaborative, based for the most part on the interaction between image and language in ways that are site-specific, innovative, improvisational and stimulating. 2-UP, has a similar, if not identical mission. For this exhibition 2-UP will build a mosaic on the Elizabeth Murray Art Wall using its archive of poster collaborations from the last 2 years. The installation will take place during the reception in a performative and improvisational manner. Simultaneously, there will be a program of readings, performance, and music by 2-UP members past and present, as well as special guests.

2-UP is a collaborative that makes posters, funded entirely by modest contributions from its members. Composed of 14 artists and writers, each edition of 2-UP pairs two of its members together to produce a double-sided newsprint poster, packaged in twos. Posters are distributed for free at 2-UP events (poster launches, exhibitions, performances), and available as a mail-order subscription for a small donation. The financial independence of the project and distribution model for the posters are meant to ensure the creative freedom of the participants and the accessibility of the work to its audience. Central to the project is the idea that the value of art can exist independently of money and irrespective of rarity.

A record 2-UP’s activities can be found at www.twoup.org .

Curated by Sue Scott.

Past and current 2-UP members and collaborators include:

Nathan Lee + Monika Zarzeczna, Colleen Asper + Davina Semo, Zerek Kempf + Cathy Park Hong, Ben Dowell + Mores McWreath, Glen Fogel + Craig Kalpakjian, Barbara Ess + Maximillian Goldfarb, Benjamin Kress + Cate Marvin, Adam Shecter + Matthea Harvey, Joe Winter + Christian Hawkey, Doug Ashford + Chip Hughes, Jen Liu, + Paul Legault.

Jene Highstein & Lawrence Weiner: Catch As Catch Can

January 11, 2012 – February 29, 2012
Opening reception, January 11, 5:30 – 7:00 PM

Like any collaboration, the outcome was unknown but Jene Highstein and Lawrence Weiner, friends of long standing, found it easy enough to work together despite their different aesthetic perspectives. Weiner is more formal, an artist who is also a performer whose language-based work is as much about poetry as anything else while Highstein is informal, hands-on, emphasizing materials and improvised gestures. But they melded in a smooth give and take. The given was the typeface Weiner chose—everything proceeded from there. Highstein riffed on Weiner’s lasso of a line to arrive at what he calls tornado forms spinning against the mustard yellow field he picked in response to Weiner’s suggestion to add color.

While Weiner frequently works with throwaways, the ephemeral, Highstein does not but liked Weiner’s idea of having no object for this project. After reviewing several options, they decided to just paste up an enormous print that would be ripped off when the show ended, gone. Take that, commerce, consumables and market values!

The opening will be followed by a party featuring music by bands Les Bicyclettes Blanches, Grog, and Dirty Mirrors.

Lawrence Weiner is internationally recognized as one of the most important artists working today. Since the early 1960s, he has created conceptual, language-based works that radically redefine the presentation and reception of the art “object.” His structures have appeared throughout the world in extraordinarily varied manifestations ranging from public architecture to manhole covers. Weiner also produces books, prints, posters, drawings, performance, and audio pieces, and since the early 1970s, has created a significant body of works in film and video.

Jene Highstein studied philosophy at the University of Maryland and the University of Chicago before dedicating himself to a career as an artist in 1966. He studied art at the New York Studio School and the Royal Academy Schools in London. He has an important parallel practice in the theater, dance and architecture, collaborating with companies like Mabou Mines Theater Co, Nina Winthrop Dancers, Molissa Fenley Dance Co. in New York, and ELD Dance of Stockholm. He produced a theater production of “Flatland” for the Brooklyn Academy of Music and collaborated with the architect Steven Holl on an ice structure for “The Snow Show” in Finnish Lapland. His works are in the collection of many museums in the United States including The Guggenheim in New York, The Los Angeles County Museum, The Contemporary Art Museum of Chicago and The National Gallery in Washington DC. His public works include sculptures at the Walker Arts Center, Minneapolis, the Panza di Biumo collection at Villa Litta, Varese, Italy, The Carnegie Bank collection in Stockholm, and a public park “Oasis” in Houston, Texas.

Past Exhibits:

Amy Sillman & Charles Bernstein: Duplexities
Curator: Bruce Pearson
October 28, 2011- January 3, 2012

For the Art Wall project, Amy Sillman and Charles Bernstein have made a series of image/poem collaborations, “Duplexities,” and an animated movie, Pinky’s Rule.

Pinky’s Rule, a seven-minute animated drawing, will be premiered at the opening. The sound track features Sillman reading Bernstein’s poem. In making the work, the collaborators went back and forth, toggling from image to poem and poem to image, so that it is impossible to say which came first. All the images bounce off the poem and the poem is constantly grappling with and extending the graphics. Sillman made more than 2000 images for the film.

Duplexities is a series of over 100 works. For this exhibit, about one-quarter of the collaboration will be shown: 50 17″ x 25″ inkjet prints (half images and half poems). The images for the film and prints were originally created on an I-phone. They were printed by Nathan Baker for this project as inkjet on archival newsprint. While many of Bernstein’s poems were written as commentaries on Sillman’s pictures, many of Sillman’s pictures were made in response to Bernstein’s poems.

Pinky’s Rule and Duplexities offer a Moebius twist on illustration and ekphrasis: the poems do speak out of the images, but the images reply in turn, and vice versa. Bernstein and Sillman have created a large-scale serial work that is overlaid and interwoven: the words offer versions of the pictures and the pictures are transfigurations of the words. They call their process iconophrastic (both speaking picture and pictures speaking). In animated film, “Pinky’s Rule” and in “Duplexities,” the associated image/poem collaboration, motifs and icons are constantly permuted, turned over and upside down, and oscillated for good measure. Figuration dissolves into abstraction and abstraction bursts into song.

See “Pinky’s Rule”

Photos: Elizabeth Murray Art Wall Exhibition
Catch as Catch Can/ Jene Highstein and Lawrence Weiner January 1 – February 29, 2012