Category Archives: New Jersey artists

Time

Thea Alvin:  The Nature of Time 

Rowan University Art Gallery 

The Nature of Time, gallery view 

GLASSBORO, NJ: Rowan University Art Gallery presents The Nature of Time, a new  installation by stone mason Thea Alvin. On view through July 24th at 301 West High Street,  Wednesday – Saturday 11 am – 5 pm, Artist reception July 9th, 2021, 4 – 7 pm. This project  complements the anticipated Time Sweeps, her permanent public art work coming soon to  the East Garden Courtyard of Discovery Hall at Rowan University.  

Made from nearly 14 tons of integrated stone pieces of Pennsylvania Field Stone, which  contains fossils, moss, and lichen, the installation consists of three distinctive formations: a  winding wall, a stone floor mosaic, and a cairn, which are joined by large format  photographs of Thea’s numerous public art projects, ambient projected light, video and a  melodic background soundscape.  

Time Sweeps is a stone sculpture currently under construction, in the East Garden  Courtyard of Discovery Hall at Rowan University. The approximately 264-ton sculpture will  be composed of three main features: a 100 ft. long winding wall with an arch, and two non connecting winding walls, and a small passageway between the two walls, often referred to  as a squeeze. The sculpture is comprised of primarily Pennsylvania Fieldstone (264 tons),  which contains fossils, moss, and lichen, and also includes seven boulders (2-3 tons each)  of the primary stone types (igneous, sedimentary, and metamorphic) including basalt,  conglomerate, gabbro, gneiss, granite, rhyolite, schist. Six of the boulders sit at the end of  walls and the seventh are columns of basalt that will mark the winter solstice. The wall will  be capped in buff sandstone from Colorado (12 tons) containing dendrites. 

Conceived as an “organic collaboration,” between the artist, the land, the stone, and the  visitor, Time Sweeps is a uniquely interactive public artwork that provides quiet space for  personal reflection and experiential learning.  

When describing her design process Thea explains, “Each sculpture is a composed  expression of the thoughts of the land itself. I’m in the moment with the chosen material,  capturing that angst, that patience, that essence, and setting it in stone. The lines are laid  and the rhythm is established on paper, but the melody becomes clear as the structure rises  from the ground in situ.” 

Using the natural world as her primary inspiration, Thea sees stone as an object in motion; as lines pushed by wind and driven by rain, casting shadows, capturing light. It is her  intention to create places of rest and reflection, while honoring the natural faces of the  stone by not adding too many marks that suggest that it was forced into position. The  beauty of the material is allowed to shine through, imperfectly perfect. Not asking too much  of the viewer, but acceptance and gratitude. 

Thea Alvin is an artist and stone mason, a designer and builder with determination and  creativity. She started her career in stone at age 16, working for her father as a tender, then  for years as a mason and then stone mason. She refined her stone style while traveling and  working all over the world, from China to Iceland, Canada to Italy, and all across North  America. She draws on the traditions in stone and expands those to create large site specific, unique, geologic installations. 

Time Sweeps, in progress

Contact: Mary Salvante, salvante@rowan.edu, 856-256-4521

www.rowan.edu/artgallery

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7 MILE

Jamea Richmond-Edwards Explores Detroit’s Fashion and Style in 7 Mile Girls

JAMEA RICHMOND-EDWARDS EXPLORES DETROIT’S FASHION AND STYLE IN 7 MILE GIRLS

Artist Talk & Opening Reception at Rowan University Art Gallery: Thursday, November 7, 5:00 PM – 7:00 PM

GLASSBORO, NJ – Rowan University Art Gallery presents 7 Mile Girls, an exhibition exploring the connection between Black female style of Detroit’s inner city, with designer fashion and self-empowerment. Featuring several new works by artist Jamea Richmond-Edwards alongside paintings loaned by the Rubell Family Collection, the exhibition will run November 7 – December 21, 2019, with an opening reception on Thursday, November 7 from 5:00 PM – 7:00 PM. 

Richmond-Edwards grew up observing the Black community’s fashion style in Detroit’s inner-city during the late 1980s and early ’90s. Popular and idolized were Coogi sweaters, red gators, and designer bags from Gucci and Louis Vuitton. She understood the correlation of the fashion industry around the Black female experience and their complex relationship with luxury clothing.  

Jamea Richmond-Edwards Explores Detroit's Fashion and Style in 7 Mile Girls
Jamea Richmond-Edwards 2018, Shirt with Lace Heart, 72 x 128″, Image Courtesy Kravets Wehby Gallery

The artifice of dressing became the driving narrative of her work and her form of Black aesthetic and expression. She was particularly interested in how her work confronted social disparities and the inequitable practices and tone-deaf decisions continually made by the fashion house of H&M, Adidas, Gucci, and Prada. In opposition to the market focus of these brands her imagery is inspired by the styles of Black designers who have made a positive impact on the fashion perspective, particularly Dapper Dan for Gucci, and the work of Duro Olowu, alongside influences of artists coming out of AfriCOBRA and the Black Arts Movement.

The title 7 Mile Girlsrefers to the street in Detroit where Richmond-Edwards grew up and where she encountered many of the female subjects in her paintings. Inspired by women in her life, the central female figures in her paintings confront the viewer with an air of confidence and agency as guardians of Black culture.  Across her multi-layered collages, the artist conveys the complex intersection of Black style, capitalism, fashion, and personal identity through the lens of these resilient Black women.

Jamea Richmond-Edwards 2019, Two Sisters and the Horned Serpent, 8 x 6 feet, Image Courtesy of Kravets Wehby Gallery

ABOUT THE ARTIST  
Jamea Richmond-Edwards
graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree from Jackson State University in 2004 where she studied painting and drawing. She went on to earn an MFA from Howard University in 2012. She offers a repertoire of portraits of women drawn using ink, graphite and mixed media collage. Richmond-Edward’s work has garnered the attention of various art critics including in the Washington Post and the Huffington Post’s “Black Artists: 30 Contemporary Art Makers Under 40 You Should Know”. Richmond-Edwards has exhibited her artwork nationally and internationally including the Delaware Art Museum, California African American Museum, Charles Wright Museum in Detroit, MI, and Galerie Myrtis in Baltimore, Maryland. Her works are in the permanent collection of private collectors across the country including the Embassy of the United States in Dakar, Senegal. She currently resides in Maryland with her Husband and three sons. 


ABOUT ROWAN UNIVERSITY ART GALLERY 
Rowan University Art Gallery
serves as a premier cultural destination for South Jersey, the Rowan community, and surrounding region. Our mission is to provide a platform for discourse on best practices in contemporary art by professional artists, curators, and scholars through the presentation of interdisciplinary art exhibitions, panel discussions, guest curatorial projects, and other public programming. 

The Gallery has a history of programming that recognizes the achievements of women in the visual arts with group and one person exhibitions that included: Beverly Semmes (2011), Joyce Kozloff (2014), Jeanie Jaffe (2015), Diane Burko (2018), Heather Ujiie (2018), Ebony G. Patterson (2019), and Julie Heffernan (2019). Its permanent collection includes the groundbreaking and historic installation The Sister Chapel.

This exhibition is presented with the generous support of the Joseph Robert Foundation. Support for programming at Rowan University Art Galleries is also made possible by funds from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, a partner agency of the National Endowment for the Arts. For more information please visit: rowan.edu/artgallery.

GALLERY LOCATION

301 High St W, Glassboro, NJ 08028, 856-256-4521

Visit us online at rowan.edu/artgallery and follow us on Facebook @RowanGallery.  #RowanGallery #7MileGirls

GALLERY HOURS

Monday – Friday, 10 am – 5 pm 

Saturday, 12 pm – 5 pm

Public parking is available in the Mick Drive Parking Garage across the street from the gallery. Admission to the gallery, lecture, and reception is free and open to the public.

Thank you to Chelsea Markowitz for the content of this post.

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Armor

Enamored Armor, Rowan University Art Gallery

ENAMORED ARMOR
The Potency of the Female Figure

GLASSBORO, NJ – Rowan University Art Gallery welcomes guest curator Amie Potsic with this exhibition. Three women artists reframe the cultural construct of feminine as empowering in Enamored Armor. The opening reception and artist talk is on Thursday, November 29 from 6:00 – 8:00 p.m. The exhibit is on display from November 29, 2018 – January 12, 2019.

Featuring work by Marjan Moghaddam, Mari Ogihara, and Tiantian Li, Enamored Armor includes references inspired by art history, cultural specificity, and contemporary society. The classical figure serves as a basis, as the artists investigate the multiplicity of ways in which women choose to present and redefine themselves in pursuit of potency and self-discovery. Through video, painting, sculpture, and Augmented Reality, their work spans a historical spectrum of millennia with a finger on the pulse of current artistic practice, the women’s empowerment movement, and emerging technologies.

Marjan Moghaddam is an award-winning and pioneering digital artist and animator who works primarily with 3d computer graphics, motion capture, and digital media for animation, post-internet art. Her work has been exhibited internationally, in addition to curated shows at the Armory Show in NYC and Art Basel Miami. In her digital female bodies, Marjan utilizes aesthetic styles as part of a figural vocabulary that explores the evolving nature of humanity. The figures represent the deconstruction of the organic, and its fracturing and fragmentation as it migrates from the physical to the digital.

Mari Ogihara’s work ranges from female figures to colorful biomorphic sculptures. She connects her understanding of how a samurai got ready for battle with the way women throughout history have prepared their physical appearance for sexual intimacy. Ogihara has held international residencies in France, Japan, Brazil, and Mexico in addition to multiple residencies in the United States.

Tiantian Li’s work has been shown in numerous Philadelphia galleries in addition to major art museums in China. In her watercolors she explores ideation of female intimacy and emotions expressed through portraits of her lingerie superposition with portraits of historical characters from the renaissance period, which represents a time of enlightenment and romantic expression. She is encouraging women to take a positive perspective on their bodies and female representation while giving themselves the attention, humor, and respect they deserve.

The Rowan University Art Gallery is located at 301 High Street West. Free 2-hour public parking is available in the Mick Drive Parking Garage across the street from the gallery. Admission to the gallery, lecture, and reception is free and open to the public. Regular gallery hours are Monday – Wednesday, 10:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. and Thursday – Saturday, 10:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m. Directions can be found on the gallery website. For more information, call 856-256-4521 or visit www.rowan.edu/artgallery.

Support for programming at Rowan University Art Galleries is also made possible by funds from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, a partner agency of the National Endowment for the Arts.

Baisser in Mary Boone, in Glassish & Waxish Glitch from marjan moghaddam on Vimeo.

Thank you to Mary Salvante for the content of this post.

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Prime

Prime Time, Maureen, Maureen Gass-Brown, New Watercolors

Prime Time, Maureen Gass-Brown, New Watercolors,

Church St. Art & Craft

Join us for the month of April as we welcome spring with “Prime Time” a delightful floral watercolor exhibit by member artist, Maureen Gass-Brown.

An opening reception will be held on April 8th from 4:00 – 7:00pm. There will be a special discount on all unframed originals that will only be offered during the reception!

As always, artful refreshments will be served and everyone is welcome.

Church St. Art & Craft, 2 Church St., Mt. Holly, NJ in the Historic Mill Race Village of Shops,

609-261-8634

Prime Time, Maureen Gass-Brown, New Watercolors, Church St. Art & Craft

Church St. Art & Craft is an eclectic art space. We are a cooperative art gallery in the historic Mill Race Village in Mt. Holly, NJ. We are a custom frame shop, a place to gather and create art and a shop to purchase charming hand made gifts. In short, a wonderfully creative place to visit!

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Food

How Food Moves: Edible LogisticsImage: Amber Art and Design, Corner Store Project

How Food Moves: Edible Logistics

Amber Art & Design / Ryan Griffis & Sarah Ross
Brian Holmes / Otabenga Jones & Associates / Cynthia Main
Claire PentecostPhilly Stake / Stephanie Rothenberg
Candice Smith with Freedom Arts / Kristen Neville Taylor

Daniel Tucker, Guest Curator, Graduate Program Director in Social and Studio Practices at Moore College of Art and Design
March 27 – May 27, 2017
Public Program and Reception: Thursday, March 30, 2017, 6:00 – 8:30pm
Our public program begins at 6:00 pm followed by the reception
Rowan University Art Gallery, 301 High Street West, First Floor, Glassboro, NJ 08028
Admission to the gallery and reception is free and open to the public.
The public program begins at 6:00 pm, led by guest curator Daniel Tucker in dialogue on art, geography, and agricultural planning with Professor Megan Bucknum Ferrigno from Rowan University’s School of Geography and Environment, and with exhibiting artists.

Artists explore the US food supply chain and its complex patterns of distribution in between the point of origin (the farm) and its point of consumption (the plate). The exhibition aims to highlight the work of contemporary artists grappling with the complexity of this movement through multi-media, research-based, and participatory practices that focus a lens on the social and industrial impacts of migrant workers, food justice movements, immigration, multiculturalism, and economic disparities. This project builds upon Tucker’s event series, Moving Units: Where Food & Economy Converge. A companion booklet, produced by Rowan University Art Gallery, serves to provide a general overview of US food supply chains. It includes descriptions of the artist contributions to the exhibition that relate to each step on the chain. Throughout this booklet you read about an approach to geographic education that values connecting with the world outside the classroom. The booklet was researched and written by Megan Bucknum Ferrigno, part-time faculty member of Rowan University’s Department of Geography, Planning and Sustainability. Additional contributions made by Dr. Chuck McGlynn, Dr. Jennifer Kitson and Makenzie Franco.

About the Artists and Projects

With Corner Store, Amber Art & Design – a team of Philadelphia-based artists that work on public art within marginalized communities that have little or no access to art – explores the contemporary sociological and psychological intersection between pan-ethnic Black and Asian communities in Philadelphia and how relationships are shaped based on which side of the counter we stand. (image top)

Illinois-based artists Ryan Griffis and Sarah Ross are represented by Between the Bottomlands and the World, a video (combining photographs, narrative writing, and moving images) exploring the rural Midwestern town of Beardstown, IL, a place of global exchange and international mobility, inscribed by post-NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement) realities.

Brian Holmes, an art and cultural critic with a Ph.D. in Romance Languages has a long-standing interest in neoliberal globalization and a taste for on-the-ground intervention. His online atlas, Living Rivers, is devoted to the Mississippi and Great Lakes watersheds and shows these fluid ecosystems as they are inhabited by a multitude of creatures and radically altered by human enterprise.

Otabenga Jones & Associates, a Houston-based educational art organization, documents a collaborative art project and public health program addressing the ongoing crisis of obesity and its related risks with “The People’s Plate.” Inspired by the Black Panther Free Breakfast for School Children Program, this art project includes a public mural in Houston and programs to kick off a year-long commitment to health education.

Cynthia Main, a multidisciplinary artist from Missouri focuses on relating to the land as part of an integral view of a more sustainable society. She shares her hand-made buckets and barrels created using traditional techniques to readdress storage as one of the current dilemmas of localizing production.

Chicago’s Claire Pentecost uses photography to show how industrial agriculture is only partly about supplying food and how it is structured to meet the problem of expense and excess capital accumulation when considering the cost of complex machinery, brand name chemical herbicides, pesticides, fungicides, fertilizers, and patented seeds.

How Food Moves: Edible Logistics

Philly Stake is a locally-sourced, recurring dinner that raises funds for creative and relevant community engaged projects that contributes to the well-being of Philadelphia’s neighborhoods through community arts, urban agriculture, social services, and activist work.

Stephanie Rothenberg’s Reversal of Fortune: The Garden of Virtual Kinship is a garden in the form of a global map that explores the question of what it means to be charitable through the click of a button and examines the cultural phenomena of online crowd-funded charity and how the flow of money impacts the project, positively and negatively.

How Food Moves: Edible LogisticsStephanie Rothenberg

Candice Smith runs Freedom Arts, an after school collaborative art program at Camden’s Freedom Prep Middle School, which is creating an installation responding to the idea that Camden is a “food desert” and examining the movement of food at their school and in their community.

Philadelphia-based Kristen Neville Taylor’s installation – a globe depicting routes of oranges and actual oranges outfitted with a QR code that links to music, articles, folk tales, and art – was inspired by a lyric from Leonard Cohen’s “Suzanne” (“and she feeds you tea and oranges that come all the way from China”) which she associated with the market place and the movement of food but also romance and exotic foreign cultures.

Admission to the gallery and reception is free and open to the public. 
Free parking is now available in the parking garage on Mick Drive directly across from the gallery. For visitor information go to our website: www.rowan.edu/artgallery.

Thank you to Mary Salvante, Rowan University Art Gallery for the content of this post.

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