Jan Sawka: The Voyage
73 Market Street
October 19, 7:30 PM
November 9, 5 PM
A 24-minute preview of Jan Sawka’s The Voyage, a critically acclaimed performance of projected artworks with the music of the Mickey Hart Band. The October 19th screening will be followed by a Q&A with producer and director Hanna Maria Sawka, who is also the late artist’s daughter. Currently in development, Jan Sawka’s The Voyage is a 90-minute performance by the late, internationally acclaimed artist Jan Sawka. This powerful visual journey, consisting of 1200 hand-made paintings symbolically represents an individual life as well as the greater story of humankind. Every image used in The Voyage is a fine-art piece by Jan Sawka, who created a narrative sequence. A pilot of Jan Sawka’s The Voyage with music and video editing by Czeslaw Niemen was awarded a Gold Medal in Multimedia at the 2003 International Florence Biennial of Contemporary Art. For more information visit voyageproduction.com
Come to Harm
73 Market Street
November 9, 6 PM
Directed by Börkur Sigthorsson. In Icelandic w. English subtitles. Winner: Best Short Film, Reykjavik International Film Festival 2011, Come to Harm was filmed on location in a section of project housing that had been abandoned due to financial crisis. The barren concrete landscape of contemporary Reykjavik contributes the setting for the short thriller (18 mins) to tell the story of a life is drifting into turmoil. When a man senses an intruder in his home, panic quickly turns to grim determination as he arms himself for the inevitable confrontation.
Equal parts filmmaker & photographer, Börkur lives in London where heʼs been based since 2004. He started his professional career in photography in Iceland at the tender age of 20 but quickly branched into directing. In 2004, Börkur was signed as a director to the renowned UK music video production company Oil Factory (later to become Factory Films), where he worked for the next 5 years. In 2008, Borkur directed, produced and co-wrote his first short film, Support. It went on to win a number of awards, including ʻbest directorʼ at Strasbourg International Film Festival 2009, ʻbest shortʼ at Reykjavik Shorts and Docs 2008, Azyl 2009 and Croatian One Minute Film Festival 2009. Additionally, Support has been screened at several festivals around the world, including Rushes Soho Shorts Festival 2009, Filminute 2008, Interfilm Berlin, Hamburg Short Film Festival and Festival des Tres Courts 2009. Support was acquired by Canal+ in France, and is being distributed by London based Futureshorts. In January 2010, Börkur had his first Los Angeles exhibition, Work In Progress, at the Blythe Projects gallery. Organized in collaboration with The Museum Of Contemporary Art Los Angeles (MOCA), the exhibition included the first installment in the ongoing photographic project Conditions, as well as selected footage from his film work. Come to Harm is Börkurʼs second short film and he is currently
developing his first feature.
Jan Sawka: The Artists’ Role in Changing The World Symposium
November 16th 12-5pm
Paul Robeson Galleries at Rutgers University
350 Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd, Newark, NJ
Gallery Aferro and the Paul Robeson Galleries of Rutgers University present a symposium examining the case of the late Polish American artist Jan Sawka and the meaning of his work in a sociopolitical context, with speakers Frank Boyer, Jeffrey Goldfarb and Cynthia Nadelman.Sawka’s career began with work that expressed artistic opposition to the totalitarian communist regime of his native Poland, leading to his being included in the Polish School of the Poster, but also to his exile by the age of 30. Upon reaching the United States, his creative collaborations merged into counter-cultural, activist, avant-garde and alternative movements within the country he would call home for the majority of his career. This included collaborations as diverse as off-Broadway set designs and working with Samuel Beckett, to creating a historic art installation set for the Grateful Dead.
He continued to create work that would ultimately help change the political system of his homeland and that would bring attention to issues as diverse as a non-nuclear future, human rights, apartheid and Mid-East peace. In the meantime, he created paintings and fine-art prints that confronted issues of freedom on societal, cultural and deeply personal levels that were shown in over 70 solo shows at galleries in New York, Los Angeles and other cities. His work is in over 60 museum collections around the world. The last award of his life was from the American Institute of Architects for his design for an inter-faith peace monument for Jerusalem. This symposium is an event of “Reflections on Everyman: The Work of Jan Sawka,” a large exhibition of the artist’s works that is on view at Gallery Aferro until December 14, 2013. This symposium is made possible by the support of the Polish & Slavic Federal Credit Union, the Polish American Business Club, the Polish Cultural Institute New York and the Kosciuszko Foundation.
The presenting speakers, their topics and biographies:
Cynthia Nadelman: The subversive power of writing, letters, and coded language as manifested in Jan Sawka’s visual art.
Ms. Nadelman is an art critic, curator and poet based in New York, a contributing editor of ARTnews for over 25 years. Her art writing has also appeared in Drawing, American Heritage, Arts, Elle, Manhattan, Inc., Sulfur, American Ceramics and numerous museum and gallery catalogues. Her poetry has been published in The Paris Review, Pequod, The Gettysburg Review, New American Writing, Denver Quarterly, and Partisan Review. She first became acquainted with Sawka’s work in the early 1980s. Ms. Nadelman, whose parents were with the U.S. State Department, was born in Italy and grew up in Poland, Germany, Liberia, and Washington, D.C. She graduated from Bryn Mawr College in 1975, majoring in German. She has received fellowships from the Ingram Merrill Foundation and the New York Foundation for the Arts. Ms. Nadelman is an authority on the work of her grandfather, the Polish-American sculptor Elie Nadelman.
Jeffrey Goldfarb: Living in Truth through Art: The Power of the not so Powerless.
Mr. Goldfarb is the Michael E. Gellert Professor of Sociology at the New School for Social Research and he teaches “Media and Micro-politics” and the “Advanced Seminar in Sociology of Culture.” His most recent publications include “The Politics of Small Things, Left and Right” (2006), The Politics of Small Things: The Power of the Powerless in Dark Times (2006) and Civility and Subversion: The Intellectual in Democratic Society (1998). He also studied the freedom movements of Central Europe and one of his books deals with the transitions of the political systems there: “After the Fall: The Pursuit of Democracy in Central Europe” (1992). (Title references the essay “The Power of the Powerless” by the Czech playwright, political activist and first president of a free Czechoslovakia, Vaclav Havel.)
Frank Boyer: Art in the political and public space, then and now.
Mr. Boyer’s presentation will provide an overview of how the place of artist expression, and thus that of the artist’s role in society, has undergone change since the 1980′s to today within the art scene of New York and its surrounding area.
Frank Boyer holds an MA in Humanities and DA (Doctor of Arts) from the Program in Art and Art Professions in The Steinhardt School of Education at NYU. He teaches art-related subjects at SUNY-New Paltz and SUNY-Ulster, and in addition to poetry, fiction, and drama, writes art theory and cultural criticism. Dr. Boyer participated in the performance art scene of the Lower East Side of Manhattan in the 1980′s. He has worked as an arts administrator and grant-writer, particularly in the realms of art in education.
Toile News Project: Margaret Murphy
November 16 – December 14
Opening Reception November 16 7-10pm
Gallery Aferro, Project Room
After a decade of working with figurines deconstructing gender and consumerism I am making new work that is based on current news images that I am confronted by on google and facebook. Using acrylic and silkscreen on fabric I am painting sections of a toile fabric design switching out the central figure with one of my own from a current event. In an attempt to de-stress my life I tried to not watch, read or hear the news. I realized quickly that this was impossible and unavoidable. Every time I turn on my computer I am bombarded with images that reflect current events, some horrific and some silly. Like my work of the past these paintings juxtapose historic sentimentalized views of life with current images and viewpoints. Women’s rights protests from around the world, the Boston Marathon bombing event and Sandy Hook Elementary all appear in my work as well as other current news events from popular culture and global actions. In this exhibition I will present a series of individual paintings as well as a site-specific wallpapered wall and a dress designed with custom made textiles.
Award winning artist, curator and educator Margaret Murphy received her BS degree from Towson University in Maryland and her MFA in Painting from Mason Gross School of the Arts, Rutgers University in New Jersey. Murphy is the recipient of a Pollock Krasner Individual Artist Fellowship, a New Jersey State Arts Council Fellowship in Painting, a Puffin Foundation Grant, a MacDowell Colony Artist Residency and many others. She was inaugurated into the Brooklyn Museum’s Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art: Feminist Art Base in 2011. She has exhibited in solo and group shows internationally. Recent exhibitions include solo shows at the Visual Art Center of New Jersey, HPGRP Gallery in NY, Real Art Ways in CT., and Pentimenti Gallery in Philadelphia, as well as a traveling Ten-Year Survey Exhibition. Murphy is represented by Pentimenti Gallery in Philadelphia. Murphy is an accomplished curator mounting over a dozen contemporary art exhibitions in NY and NJ. She has taught at numerous colleges and universities for the past eighteen years.
Sowing Promise: Vikki Michalios
November 16 – December 14
Opening Reception November 16 7-10pm
Gallery Aferro, Liminal Space
The work and art of Vikki Michalios is about environmental systems inspired by ecological events, contemporary media coverage of them, or legends related to them. Since the 2009 Fukushima Daiichi catastrophe, fields of sunflowers have been planted to absorb radioactive contamination from Japan’s soil. The flowers lifted spirits while lightening the radiation damage. Sowing flowers of hope for a radioactive free future was the point of departure for the series of water based screen prints. Prints, as well as a 6 foot high by 20 foot long hanging water garden, can be seen together. The garden installation, “Beyond Organic,” is intended to ignite inquiry about modern use of natural resources and its impacts on ecology and health. Although the use of pesticides and genetically modified organisms are a common practice,“Beyond Organic” suggests natural alternatives. It blends together art, horticulture, and sustainable technologies. Using a simple hydroponic technique, 200 hanging vessels are filled with water, nutrients, and bricks of rock-wool. The garden adapts and changes to the indoor environment as it grows with no soil or natural light. Whimsical pink grow-lights shine on beans sprouting from this volcanic rock (rock-wool) that is melted and spun into a cotton candy-like consistency. This inviting and festive night-club atmosphere draws interest and inquiry. Like the prints, it lifts spirits while offering sustainable options. Water gardens can be grown on any scale, nearly carbon free, by anyone, and in unexpected places such as in basements or hanging from ceilings.
Vikki Michalios makes work about environmental systems, and is inspired by ecological events, contemporary media coverage of them, or legends related to them. Her drawings, prints, paintings, and installations have been exhibited nationally in group exhibitions in the U.S. and Europe. Past exhibition venues include the Hunterdon Museum (Hunterdon, NJ), Brooklyn Museum (Brooklyn, NY), Jersey City Museum (Jersey City, NJ), Teachers College Columbia University (New York City, NY), Walsh Gallery at Seton Hall University (South Orange, NJ), Portland Art Museum (Portland, OR), Blackburn 20/20 at The Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts (New York City, NY), Center for Contemporary Arts (Bedminster, NJ), Contemporary Artists Center, (Woodside, NY), Curious Matter (Jersey City, NJ), Denise Bibro Gallery (New York City, NY). Upcoming shows include her first solo show, “Sowing Promise,” at Gallery Aferro (Newark, NJ), and the 2014 Aljira Emerge 11 group exhibition curated by Edwin Ramaron. She has been published in The Star Ledger (NJ), New York Arts Magazine (NY), and Steven Zevitas, Studio Visit Magazine (MA). Michalios was awarded residencies at Millay Colony of Art (Austerlitz, NY), City Without Walls, ArtReach (Newark, NJ), Chautauqua Institution (Chautauqua, NY), and Gallery Aferro (Newark, NJ). She is a 2013 recipient of Aljira Emerge 11. Michalios earned a B.A. in Liberal Arts from The Evergreen State College with a focus in literature and an M.F.A. in Painting from the University of Oregon. She was born and raised in the Pacific Northwest and now lives and works in New York and New Jersey.
Sowing Promise: Artist Talks and Annual Holiday Party/Potluck/Open House
December 14, 2-7pm
The 5th annual holiday party, fast becoming a cherished local tradition. What will you bring to share? Presented in partnership with Aljira, A Center for Contemporary Art.
Reflections on Everyman: The Work of Jan Sawka
September 12 – December 14
Opening Reception September 12, 7-10pm
Gallery Aferro, Main Gallery & New Media Room
Curated by Evonne M. Davis & Hanna Sawka
This exhibition is presented in partnership with the Polish Cultural Institute New York, and with support by the Polish American Business Club and thePolish Slavic Federal Credit Union.
Gallery Aferro’s Main Gallery and New Media Room will feature a major retrospective celebrating the life and work of artist, expatriate, activist, architect and impossible-to-classify Jan Sawka (1946-2012). Sawka’s body of work includes paintings, book arts, sculptures, engravings, editorial illustrations, architectural installations, monuments, new media and a 10-story stage set designed for the Grateful Dead. Currently, a memorial exhibition of his work is on view at The National Museum in Krakow, Poland.
Born in 1946 in Zabrze, Poland, his childhood overshadowed by his father’s Stalin-era political imprisonment, by his 20’s Sawka had become the youngest member of the Polish Poster School. Sawka’s portrayal in his art of the impact of totalitarianism on the individual led to his expulsion from Poland in 1976. Having just won the “Oscar de la Peinture” in France, he was given a residency at the newly opened Pompidou Center in Paris. In 1977, he arrived in New York with his wife and baby, four suitcases and a portfolio of artworks. Within a year, he became a prolific editorial illustrator for The New York Times. While producing paintings at his home studio, he designed posters and sets for the Jean Cocteau Repertory Theater, Harold Clurman Theater, and Samuel Beckett Theater, where he collaborated closely with Beckett. By this time, he had built a gallery career in New York, Los Angeles and many other cities. In 1981, when Martial Law was imposed in Poland, the AFL-CIO sold Sawka’s Solidarity Poster in the millions to provide immediate support to the besieged Solidarity movement. In 1993, he created his first full multi-media spectacle in Japan. At the time of his death the artist was working on numerous projects. Sawka’s works are in over 60 museums around the world and he had over 70 solo exhibitions. The exhibition will focus on Jan Sawka’s concern with the human condition in today’s world, with examples of his paintings, prints and sculptures. As the late Professor James Beck of Columbia University wrote “He contemplates and dissects the social conditions of our moment – the absurdities of political states, the leadership, the courts, the universities – within the context of the individual caught in the labyrinth… such a condition is not differentiated from the absurdities of more human interaction, between lovers, husbands and wives. The isolation is there too, perhaps even more so: the absence of communication, the uniformity, the blandness, the emptiness… Here too is the softened, approachable world of physical beauty, of delicacy, refinement and sensitivity. These two struggle with one another… in Sawka’s irresistible art.”
Market Street Convergence presented by Gallery Aferro and the Newark Arts Council
Après Moi, Le Déluge: Solo Series
October 10 – November 16
Opening Reception October 10 7-10pm
85 Market Street
9 artists working in divergent media each present substantive miniretrospectives of projects they are currently deeply engaged with. The group, as a whole, includes many alumni of Gallery Aferro’s six-year old studio residency program, several current residents, and local artists whose process is unusually demanding in some way. Complimenting the October 13th Open Studios, this solo series is a serious look at process and output.
Artists: Dara Alter, Piotr Czerwinski, Patricia Dahlman, Phoenix Lindsey-Hall, Jo-el Lopez, Peter Owen
Jacob Mandel, Anne Q. McKeown, Irena Pejovic
Dreams Before Sleeping
October 10 – November 16
Curated by Evonne M. Davis & Jacob Mandel
Opening Reception October 10 6-10pm
85 Market Street, 2nd Floor
Twenty local, national, and international artists exploring the ways in which deeply personal themes and experiences transform and inspire acts of protest and awareness.
Artists: Aileen Bassis, Anonda Bell, Diana Candelejo, Patricia Cazorla and Nancy Saleme, Michael Dal Cerro, Lawrence Ciarallo, Dominique Duroseau, Chris Esposito, Julia Forrest, Zach Gabbard, Susan Evans Grove, Malik Hardway-Whitaker, Natasha Jozi, Aubrey Kauffman, Anna Kell, Abby Levine, Vaughn Tremayne Spann, Eli Vandenberg
With performance, Gathering the Gathering, by Natasha Jozi
Before I Die…..
October 10 – 19
Candy Chang’s interactive public art initiative has traveled to over 20 different countries and now makes its way to Newark, NJ. Presented in partnership with the Dodge Poetry Festival. Market Street Convergence visitors and passersby will be able to participate in the project. Chalkboards will be set up in front of activated spaces along Market Street where the public will be free to write in their ideas. The project culminates with a public reading of submissions led by Dodge Poets Vincent Toro and Gretna Wilkinson on Saturday, October 19th. See below for more details.
Activate: Market Street (2)
October 10 – January 15
Curated by Emma Wilcox
75 Market Street, 77 Market Street, 85 Market Street, 93 Market Street. On View 24/7. Artists: Patricia Dahlman, Marc D’Agusto and Eric Valosin, Zach Gabbard, Raylene Gorum, Kayt Hester and Adrienne Wheeler
The New World is Going to Need Houses: Oculus Art Collaborative
October 11 – November 16
Opening Reception October 11, 7-10 PM
93 Market Street, 2nd Floor
Presented by Oculus Art Collaborative. Artists: Linda Chen, Alex Scott Cumming, Kevin Durkin, Dawn Foster, Heidi Hussa, Esha Kallianpur, and Elizabeth Storm.
This young collective aggressively transforms a previously vacant space, exploring the limits and pleasures of collaborative practice and raising questions about utopia. With rumors of additional musical performance.
Areas Known and Unknown:
Arturo Meade, Mustafa Muhammad, and Nyugen E. Smith
October 11 – November 16
Curated by Evonne M. Davis
Opening Reception October 11, 7-10 PM
93 Market Street, 1st Floor
Three artists currently based on the tri-state region each present entire bodies of work to address issues connected with post-Colonial history, geopolitical realities, tropes about facial recognition. Each man uses the genres of either portraiture or maps, or both, to make pointed commentary. Featuring performances by Nyugen E. Smith.
The Edge of Pause, Marcy Chevali
September 12 – October 26
Opening Reception September 12, 7-10pm
Gallery Aferro, Project Room
In Marcy Chevali’s installation in the Project Room, The Edge of Pause, time is stretched, warped, and on occasion moves backwards. Things disappear, leaving behind imprints, holes, or trace-like suggestions of their existence. In the center of the installation stands a large worktable and one chair. Bulbous pink shapes drip heavy and swollen from underneath the table and seat of the chair, implying a displacement of the corporeal figure, and the presence of things less tangible. On the table and walls, drawings and small objects rest in varying degrees of completion. The works are made of mundane materials—string, found vinyl letters, shapes cut out of newsprint and waxed paper, bits of glue picked off the bottle, pins, empty glass jars and various scraps. Through the subtle transformation of these items, the exhibition elicits a sense of endless patience, a stillness, but with, perhaps, an edge of muted anticipation.
Marcy Chevali is a visual artist with an MFA from the Maine College of Art; she has been based in New York City since 2008. The recipient of a 2011 Gallery Aferro Studio Residency, Chevali has shown work in galleries and artists’ spaces in the city, including Queens Museum of Art, Lexington Art League, Aicon Gallery, AC Institute, The Gallery of Contemporary Art at Sacred Heart University and with organizations such as Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Art, Peculiar Works Projects, and 4heads. Chevali works in multiple media (thread, tea, paper, sugar, turmeric) and stages performance pieces that engage problems of gender, adornment, and narrative. She has served on the board of directors for the South Asian Women’s Creative Collective since 2011.
Skinning The Image, Katrina Bello
September 12 – October 26
Opening Reception September 12, 7-10pm
Gallery Aferro, Liminal Space
The point of departure for Katrina Bello’s new series of work on view in the Liminal Space is a quote by British painter Cecily Brown, who said about her work in the February 2013 American Vogue magazine article on her: “I need a source, especially at the beginning, when I’m trying to get under the skin of an image.” Thinking of painting as similar to skin is not a new concept, but the idea of the image as having a skin is something that Bello is trying to understand through this body of work. The work consists of paintings, photographs and video work, and the questions that set the direction of the series are: What are the conceptual and philosophical implications of the image having a skin? How does one formalize this idea? What are the artist’s motivations for doing so?
Katrina Bello is a visual artist whose focus is painting and drawing. She received her MFA in Studio Art at the Maryland Institute College of Art, and has exhibited in the United States and the Philippines. She currently lives in New Jersey. She is an alumna of the Gallery Aferro Studio Residency Program.
Bello writes: ” What is exciting about Brown’s quote is the violation of image and skin’s established conditions. It is with this quote in mind that I am rethinking my series of photographs taken in certain natural environments in the Southwest and Northeast. In it I photographed my hands gouging through sand, grasping boughs, stroking the furrows of petroglyphs. I am reminded of Thomas the Doubter who needed to touch the wound of the resurrected Christ in order to eradicate his doubt and establish belief in the resurrection.”
Time Stop in Space
October 12, 1-10 PM
Curated by Rebecca Jampol of Solo)s) Project House and Jeremy Slater
A 10 hour performance festival that will feature overlapping, durational performances. This block of “space” will reference time continuum with no restriction of media, or thought- bringing into question neighboring components and the energy fused between them.
October 19
85 Market Street
5 PM to 7 PM
Before I Die…Newark: A Gathering of Voices Culminating live performances and poetry reading drawn from the week-long public art project with poets Vincent Toro and Gretna Wilkinson along with Newark residents. Presented by Dodge Poetry Program, Gallery Aferro, and Newark Arts Council.
GhostFood Truck, Miriam Simun & Miriam Songster
October 11 – 13
Market Street, between Washington and University
Presented in collaboration with Marfa Dialogues/NY: Climate Change and Robert Rauschenburg Foundation. GhostFood will be open October 11, 6-10PM, October 12, 12-6PM, and October 13, 11-4PM.
GhostFood is a participatory performance by Miriam Simun and Miriam Songster that explores eating in a future of food scarcity and biodiversity loss caused by climate change. The GhostFood truck will serve simulated taste experiences to the public, employing a headpiece and custom scents to deliver the illusion of flavors that may soon be unavailable. Ghostfood is commissioned by the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation for Marfa Dialogues/ NY and is supported by Takasago and the Monell Center.
Miriam Simun is a research-based artist investigating the implications of socio-technical and environmental change. She has exhibited and lectured widely, and is a 2013 Creative Capital Grantee in the Emerging Fields for her project EAT YOUR FUTURE. Miriam Songster applies her background in sculpture, video and installation to the creation of scent-based immersive works that engage with the themes of minimalism, site-specificity, and the multi-faceted nature of sensory perception.
October 11
Gallery Aferro will be open until 10pm for the Open Doors Gallery Crawl.
October 13
Gallery Aferro will be open for the Newark Open Doors/Open Studios Tour. Visit studio residents in their spaces including: Jermaine D. Clark, Dahlia Elsayed, Phoenix Lindsey-Hall, Tasha Lewis, Jacob Mandel, Anne Q. McKeown, Planta, Ambika Trasi, and Ken Weathersby
Identity Blueprint Workshops
October 19 and 20, 11-5PM
Cyanotype workshops led by Gallery Aferro studio residency artist Tasha Lewis.
5th Annual Benefit Art Auction and Party
June 15, 2013, 7-10 PM (VIP Preview 5:30-7)
Regular Advance Tickets $25 / Regular Tickets at Door $30
Advance VIP Tickets $100 / VIP Tickets at Door $150
On Sale Now Here: www.aferro.org and by mail to PO Box 5668 Newark NJ 07105
Gallery Aferro is thrilled to announce the 5th Annual Benefit Art Auction and Party on June 15th. This festive event features hundreds of artworks and experiences by emerging and established artists, live jazz by the William Spaulding Quartet, seasonal foodstuffs, strong signature cocktails as well as icy beer from Hunterdon Brewery, and many, many wonderful door prizes including but not limited to fine dining experiences, theatre tickets, and gifts from McCarter Theatre, Stencil1, Shy Brothers Farm and others.
All proceeds from tickets and purchases make possible Gallery Aferro’s year-round exhibitions, award-winning artist residencies, publications and expanding education program. Gallery Aferro is a nonprofit alternative arts space founded by artists Evonne M. Davis and Emma Wilcox in 2003, offering engaging exhibitions that connect new audiences in a welcoming environment that builds community and reflects a positive image of Newark. The gallery has received two back-to-back Citations of Excellence from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts and has been described by Inside New Jersey magazine as offering “a dizzying array of contemporary art.” The Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation has praised our “expansive vision, impact in Newark as well as regionally and even internationally”, and our “exemplary mentoring opportunities for young artists.”
For one night only unique artworks by emerging and established artists will be available for sale at prices that will enlarge or establish your collection. Delight a friend, colleague or loved one with the gift of artwork. Bring someone who’s never been to the gallery, or to Newark, or someone you come with every year. Bask in the knowledge that you’ve supported downtown vibrancy, the free exchange of ideas, and arts access for the next generation. Dance and have fun.
Gallery Aferro has exhibited over 500 local, national and international artists, granted workspace to more than 60 artists, created 21 publications including a sound art CD and feminist art history handouts, collaborated with dozens of other community-based organizations, galleries and museums, hosted and created talks, screenings and demonstrations for high schools, colleges, universities, professional and senior groups, created off-site exhibition opportunities for NJ artists and expanded our educational offerings, starting with our program connecting Newark’s young women with creative experiences and computer literacy.
Sponsors: AMC, Cabot, Canvas on Demand, Canvas4Life, Clearview Cinemas, Field Station Dinosaurs, Fresh Direct, Hunterdon Brewery,Larry Litt, McCarter Theatre, Minted, NJ State Theatre, Old Sturbridge Village, Panera Bread, Portrait Innovations, Redbox, Remco Press, Shy Brothers Farm, Spanish Tavern, Stash Tea, Stencil1, Tom Binh, Two River Theatre
Dusica Drazic
S’Long As It’s Yours
February 23 – May 31, 2013
Opening Reception February 23, 7-10 PM
Main Gallery
Performance on opening night by Kelly Ann Pinho
Ongoing activities by Lorna Barrowclough, Moira Williams and Michelle Wilson
S’Long As It’s Yours marks the return of the semi-annual exhibitions at Gallery Aferro, each of which is a thematic exploration of an aspect of local and global urbanism. S’Long As It’s Yours was inspired by a brief exchange by two strangers about a fur coat, as they rode a train leaving Newark, NJ. It is a consideration of Shiftwork, Habitus, Intrasubcultural Politics, Mistranslations, especially those that are reproduced over time, “Biting,” Stance, and Coding, and Commodity Fetishism, especially of handmade, functional items.
Previous exhibitions in the series (In The Country of Last Things 2004, In The Country of Last Things 4-ever, 2006, In the Country of Last Refuge, 2007, Outside Over There, 2008) have been inspired by, among other things: apocalyptic imagery about cities,doppelganger cities, urban renovations, whether official or unofficial, the impact of global and local violence on local community,communication and the end of analog TV.
As part of the exhibition, several interactive projects based at the gallery, online, outdoors and internationally are running from the present to the end of the exhibition. Lorna Barrowclough is mailing sculptural objects from the UK to the gallery in weekly batches to evoke commodity fetishes and the end of the once-thriving oyster trade in the tri-state area. Moira Williams is offering 10 free windowbox planters, with installation, to Newark residents on a first come first serve basis as part of her project Homegrown Security, details posted shortly. Michelle Wilson is selling the carbon-based credits to her body, as part of her project Carbon Corpus.
Artists: Fanny Allié, Louisa Armbrust, Lorna Barrowclough, Dana Bell, Sergio Bonilha + Luciana Ohira, Karlos Carcamo
Deric Carner, Anetta Mona Chisa + Lucia Tkacova, Dusica Drazic, Arielle Falk, Darren Fisher, So Yoon Lym, Kirsten Nash,
Charlie Penrose, Sondra Perry, Kelly Ann Pinho, Tyson Robertson, Jeff Slomba, Amanda Thackray, Moira Williams, Michelle Wilson,Lisa Young
Nell Painter
Four Eyes on Place
Nell Painter and Lucille Fornasieri-Gold
April 27 – May 31, 2013
Opening Reception April 27, 7-10 PM
Project Room
Four Eyes on Place juxtaposes two separate but related bodies of artwork—photographs of Brooklyn in the 1970s and 1980s and the paintings they inspired many decades later. Back in the day the photographer Lucille Fornasiere-Gold documented everyday life in her multi-racial, multi-ethnic Brooklyn neighborhood, with its working people, its sun worshippers and dog owners, even its dogs. The Brooklyn Historical Society acquired her photographic archive, where the painter Nell Painter found it. Over the course of two years Nell created new images by digitally manipulating fragments of Lucille’s photographs and painting them into visual fiction.
Nell Painter believes art should make visual sense but visual sense not only. Using archives of found images, she reconfigures the past and revisions it and, occasionally herself, in a process that is both digital and manual, sometimes much more digital, sometimes much more manual. For she believes in both the textured traces of the painter’s hand and the flat dissonances of digital imagery. Painter, (the painter formerly known as the Princeton University historian Nell Irvin Painter, author of The History of White People) lives and works in Newark, New Jersey. A graduate in painting of the Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University in 2009 and the Rhode Island School of Design in 2011, she has shown her work in Chelsea and northern New Jersey.
Lucille Fornasieri-Gold is a street photographer fascinated by America’s folk culture. “America does not have a classical background; it is a convergence of diverse cultures and customs from different times and places. When these cultures come together they mix to form a conglomerate, transnational taste. I document this ever-evolving ethos and the richness of its interactions. The common thread among these diverse groups is that they all seem to grab on to the idea of democracy, the freedom to do and say as they please. I’m 82 and have lived most of my life in New York. What I’ve seen from decade to decade is a massive opening of society.” Born in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, Lucille Fornasieri-Gold was first exposed to art through her father, a professor of architectural sculpture. She attended Hunter College and the Art Student League and later lived in Europe for three years. With the birth of her last child in 1969, she received her first camera and attended classes given by Ken Heyman in his studio, Garry Winogrand in his home and Lisette Modell at the New school. She took pictures intensely for a ten-year period. In 2002 she retired to work only on her photography, exhibiting regularly throughout New York. Her images were included in Women Photograph Men, and are in the collection of the Brooklyn Museum. She shoots frequently.
Stack and Rack
BroLab
April 27 – May 31, 2013
Opening Reception April 27, 7-10 PM
Panel and Book Signing May 18, 3PM
Liminal Space
BroLab Collective’s large scale public sculpture, Stack and Rack, consists of 16 brightly colored wooden cubes which can be assembled in numerous configurations. The interactive site-specific work inhabited downtown Newark’s Broad Street during the October 2012 Open Doors and Studio Tour. The exhibition at Gallery Aferro consists of all sixteen components from the outdoor work, now reconfigured and installed in Gallery Aferro’s Liminal Space alongside a series of photographs taken from last fall’s viewing. BroLab Collective’s members will host an artist talk and book signing event on May 18 to celebrate the release of their catalog highlighting Stack and Rack as well as previous projects. Copies of the catalog will be available for purchase.
The collective BroLab was established in 2009 by five artists with like ideas all seeking something bigger than their individual practices. Rahul Alexander, Jonathan Brand, Adam Brent, Ryan Roa and Travis LeRoy Southworth have built a practice bridging art and design principles exploring minimalist objects where people can interact with both the artists and the work. BroLab’s broad vision includes public sculpture, place making and site-specific interventions. In the canon of collective art, BroLab presents an alternative model by working intuitively, connecting art to a live activity of both making and engagement. BroLab has received critical attention from Architect Magazine, New York Press, L Magazine, NY Daily News, The Times Ledger and artcritical.com. BroLab has exhibited at notable venues and institutions such as the Venice Architecture Biennale, The Bronx River Arts Center, the Festival for New Ideas and The Center for Book Arts. BroLab has completed successful commissions for the NYC DOT Urban Art Program, the NY Public Library and the Newark Arts Council. Ongoing projects include a commission for the Bronx Museum, a transformative installation for the lobby, as well as a catalog marking recent work as granted by the Elizabeth Firestone Foundation.
Touch
Natasha Iqbal Jozi
April 27 – May 31, 2013
Opening Reception April 27, 7-10 PM
New Media Room
Performance April 27, 8-9PM
Performers: Hannah Jennette Castoro, Megan Gecik, Malcolm McMichael, Jeremy G Bell
“Our daily lives are an amalgamation of personal and worldly struggles. In this struggle we often forget the fundamental happenings around us, engulfing our senses through out our day. We ignore them and brush them aside, which makes us oblivious. We are ill-informed towards what we touch, we smell, we see, we hear and taste. It is only the information that is aiding us in gaining the pre-set goals for ourselves that matter. We do not notice how the air touches our body, how our feet touch the ground, how our thoughts are touching our mind, sun brushing against our body. “Touch” is a performance that awakens and reminds us of all the touches that touch us. The touches we do not register, yet they are so essential and determine for us the way we want to spend our lives.”
Natasha Iqbal Jozi is an artist and poet, originally from Islamabad, Pakistan. Jozi secured a Gold Medal in her Bachelors in Fine Arts from Fatima Jinnah Women University, Pakistan. She was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship award and got accepted to Montclair State University, where she is pursuing her MFA.
Jozi is a performance and installation artist, and most of her work revolves around audience interactivity. She has a minimal approach and focuses on the human body and how it is a vessel to connect with the world around it. Acute acoustics, demarcated territories and paths, palatable items, memorable aromas, tantalizing tactual elements build up to invite the audience and draw them towards the installations and performances.
JC Lenochan
Uncolonized: the Clashroom
Project Room
With performance by students at opening reception
Project Room
February 23 – March 30, 2013
Opening Reception February 23, 7-10 PM
A critique of cultural bias at its academic front, Gallery Aferro Residency alumn and Newark high school educator JC Lenochan continues his series of installations as investigations of epistemological fatalism in pedagogical practice in un-colonized: the clashroom. Deconstructing objects and drawings, reconfiguring ideology and class stratification as a public challenge to the viewer’s sense of re-thinking visual language as a means of cultural transformation, establishes the core of these issues and concerns. Conflicts vs. resolutions, comfort vs. sacrifice, knowledge vs. ignorance, domestic vs. international and colonized vs. un-colonized will be confronted in a post-colonial dialogue/performance with Newark high school students, predicated on the social implications and repercussions of being mis-educated in our class room experience.
“To commit ourselves to the work transforming the academy so that it will be a place where cultural diversity informs every aspect of our learning, we must embrace struggle and sacrifice. We cannot be easily discouraged. We cannot despair when there is conflict. Our solidarity must be affirmed by our shared belief in a spirit of intellectual openness that celebrates diversity, welcomes dissent, and rejoices in collective dedication to truth.” -Bell Hooks
JoJoe Ciardiello
PCNJ EDITIONS: Print Matters!
Liminal Space
February 23 – March 30, 2013
Opening Reception February 23, 7-10 PM
Gallery Aferro is pleased to collaborate with The Printmaking Center of New Jersey to exhibit the Center’s Collaborative Editions Project (CEP). In the project, emerging and established New Jersey artists have the opportunity to work in residence with talented master printers to create limited editions of fine art prints. The purpose of the project is to successfully demonstrate that printmaking is a tool that will expand artists’ experience, enable them to broaden their fine art inventory and will help provide a source of revenue through the sale of new prints, regardless of their past printmaking experience. The exhibition showcases each of the four new prints created by resident artists, and contextualizes their practice with related works.
CEP artists Ibrahim Ahmed III, Joe Ciardiello, Diana Gonzalez Gandolfi and Joe Waks worked with master printers Jase Clark, Eileen Foti, Sheila Goloborotko and Randy Hemminghaus. Each master printer is an innovative and creative collaborator; a rare and valuable assets to the fine art community; and an exceptional artists in their own right. By connecting two artist service organizations, we celebrate the potential of all kinds of collaborations.
Ibrahim Ahmed III was born and raised in the Middle East. He was originally trained as a writer. Ahmed’s work is evocative of a stained glass tradition from the Middle East circa the late 16th and 17th centuries. This stylistic revivalism not only harkens the viewer back to a traditional form of art, but also recreates the sense of undeniable spirituality that was once seen in this form. Interestingly, the sensual and sophisticated beauty of Ahmed’s windows evolves from a place of darkness. Ahmed uses cross hatching-like patterns that reference childhood memories. While living on the island of Bahrain during the first Gulf War, the American embassy contacted all its citizens and gave them tips on how to better prepare homes in case a bombing were to happen. Taping windows in a cross hatching pattern, they were told, would prevent glass from shattering during a bomb blast. “There was something about this experience that made me gravitate to windows, along with the many mosques I prayed in while growing up in the Middle East.” He currently lives and works in Newark, NJ.
Joe Ciardiello has been drawing for as long as he can remember, probably since the age of four. He was born and raised on Staten Island, just a short ferry ride to Manhattan where he attended The High School of Art and Design and college at Parsons where he earned a BFA degree. Over his 35 plus year career he has worked for most major magazines and newspapers as well as for corporate and advertising clients, book publishers and record companies. Some clients include: American Express, Barnes & Noble.com, Capitol Records, The New Yorker, The Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, Rolling Stone, Smithsonian, Sports Illustrated and Time. Joe’s portraits of authors appear regularly in the New York Times Book Review. Among his awards are four medals from the Society of Illustrators. He has been profiled in Communication Arts Magazine as well as other graphic arts journals and he is included in Who’s Who in American Art. In 1999 Joe had a one-man exhibition of his work at the Society of Illustrators in New York. Some of his work appears in the companion book to the PBS series “The Blues” produced by Martin Scorsese, as well as in “Illustration Now!” published by Taschen in 2005. A musician as well, Joe plays the drums regularly with a blues trio and an all-illustrator jazz group. He lives along the Delaware River in Milford, New Jersey.
Diana Gonzalez Gandolfi has been exhibiting her work in one-person and group exhibitions in museums and galleries throughout the United States since 1978. A painter and printmaker, her work is in numerous private and public corporate collections, including the Hunterdon Museum of Art, The Noyes Museum, The Jersey City Museum, The Montclair Art Museum, Johnson & Johnson, Rutgers University, IBM, Fidelity Management Corporation, NJ Department of Treasury, the Bank of Boston, and the Newark Public Library. She has received awards, fellowships and residencies from various institutions, including two Boston Museum of Fine Arts Traveling Fellowships, a NJ State Council on the Arts Distinguished Artist Award and Fellowship for Printmaking, two NJ State Council on the Arts Painting Fellowships, a Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation Painting Fellowship, a Rutgers Center for Innovative Print and Paper Fellowship and a Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation Residency Grant to attend the Vermont Studio Center. A native of Argentina, she trained as an artist in the United States and holds a BFA degree from Tufts University, a Diploma and a Fifth Year Graduate Certificate in Fine Arts from the Boston Museum School and an M Ed in Art Therapy from the Institute for the Arts and Human Development at Lesley University. Diana resides in Highland Park, New Jersey.
Joe Waks is an emerging artist working in painting, photography and printmaking. He is also an attorney who has worked at the highest levels of local, state and federal government in his beloved Garden State. His mixed media creations underscore his passion for politics and popular culture. He was a 2008 New Jersey Print and Paper Fellow at the Brodsky Center for Innovative Editions at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. Waks has had numerous solo and group shows at galleries in New Jersey and New York, including two highly successful solo exhibitions in 2010. His works are in private collections in New York City, Los Angeles and many others in the United States and Canada. Waks is also in the permanent collection of the Jersey City Museum and Ogilvy CommonHealth Worldwide, part of one of the largest public relations agencies, recently acquired several of his paintings for its prestigious collection. Joe resides in Bayonne, New Jersey.
PCNJ’s Collaborative Editions Project was made possible in part by funds from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts/Department of State, a Partner Agency of the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation.
Eric Owen
CologneOFF 2013 USA
New Media Room
February 23 – March 30, 2013
Opening Reception February 23, 7-10 PM
CologneOFF, Cologne International Videoart Festival is a nomadic festival project travelling around the globe during 2013, making a stop on its tour in Newark to present 5 programs of single channel videos.The four programs are curated by the director of Cologne International Videoart Festival, Wilfried Agricola de Cologne. CologneOFF VII – Art & the City explores how artists experience the urban environment, while CologneOFF VIII -Memory & Identity tackles essential questions of human existence in relation with others. The third program, entitled “[self]~imaging” include artists portraying themselves via the medium of video.
The two final programs are “Visionary Insights” a selection from animateCOLOGNE – Cologne Art & Animation Festival, and “Look! That’s it!” presents selections curated from 12 international festivals. In its totality, the show presents the diversity of global video art creation by presenting a variety of artistic and curatorial approaches.
Artists: Matthias Härenstam (Sweden), Albert Merino (Spain), Francesca Fini (Italy), Sarah Mock (Germany), Yuriy Kruchak, Yulia Kostereva (UA), Oksana Chepelyk (Ukraine), Liu Wei (China), Eva Olsson (Sweden), Andres Jurado (Colombia), Alessandro Amaducci (Italy), Johanna Reich ( Germany), Susanne Wiegner (Germany), My Name is Scot (Canada), Ryota Hamasaki (Japan), Przemek Węgrzyn (Poland), Emanuela Iorga (Moldova), Mark Kadota (Japan), David King (Australia), Jonathan Minard and James George (USA), Beate Hecher/Markus Keim (Austria), Emilio Bassail (Mexico), Nicola Bergström Hansen (Sweden), Jean-Michel Rolland (France), Dario Bardic (Croatia), Mihai Grecu (Rumania), Shuai Cheng Pu (Taiwan), Arjan Brentjes (Netherlands), Wrik Mead (Canada), Kaspars Groshevs (Latvia), Karolien Soete (Belgium), Sergio Sotomayor (Spain), Caro Estrada (Austria), Pablo Fernandez-Pujol (España), Lee Welch (Ireland), Jen Ross (UK), Cyane Tornatzky (USA), Cynthia Whelan (UK), Barry Morse (USA) , Shiftwork (UK), Jonas Nilsson (Sweden), Luc Gut (CH), Sally & Mo (Iceland), Andre Rangel ( Brazil), Angela Washko (USA), Sibylle Trickes (Germany), Agricola de Cologne (Germany), Lara Salinas (Spain), Virginie Foloppe (France), Sonja Vuk (Croatia), Doug Williams (USA), Owen Eric Wood (Canada), Yiotis Vrantzas (Greece), Guli Silberstein (UK/Israel), Alexandra Mitlyanskaya (Russia), Jacob Tonsky (USA), Jean Paul Zelada (Peru), Tiberiu Fekete (Romania), Juan Pablo Zaramella (Argentina), Arab Media Lab Project, (Morocco/NL), Khanyisile Mbongwa, James Taylor (RSA), Shahar Marcus (Israel)
Cologne International Videoart Festival
http://coff.newmediafest.org
animateCOLOGNE – Cologne Art & Animation Festival
http://caaf.newmediafest.org
Global Art & Moving Images Awards
http://glamia.newmediafest.org/blog/