Vestige: Artists Creating Through Grief

November 5, 2022 - January 1, 2023

Customs House Museum, Orgain & Burner Galleries | Clarksville, TN

Curated by Terri Jordan

This invitational exhibition features works by artists who process grief and loss through art, including award-winning artists like Alia El Bermani, Gaela Erwin, Cynthia Billingsley, David Iacovazzi-Pau, Kelly Hider, Mitzi Cross and Will Dargie.

Bowery Gallery 29th Annual Juried Show

July 28-September 15, 2020 

Bowery Gallery| New York, NY

Janice Nowinski, Juror

The Bowery Gallery in New York’s Chelsea district is pleased to present its 29th annual juried exhibition of work in two dimensions. The juror this year is New York painter Janice Nowinski. Bowery Gallery was founded in 1969 by a group of New York artists resisting the commercialization of the art world. Since then, the Gallery, with some 30-odd members, has shown painters and sculptors, abstract and figurative, who share a consciousness of tradition and a belief in the formal power of art. Bowery artists have shown in group and solo shows in galleries and museums nationwide; Bowery exhibitions have been praised in the pages of The New York Times, The New Yorker, Art in America, Modern Painters, The New Republic, The New Criterion, and on artcritical.com, among other publications.

Bowery’s Annual Juried Show gives Bowery artists and the art-loving public a first look—or a fresh look—at artists young and new to the scene, as well as mid-career artists. Many of them live and work in the Northeast, but the show includes artists from diverse parts of the country, including the South, Midwest, and the West Coast. Juried in previous years by prominent paint- ers including Rackstraw Downes, William Bailey, Joan Snyder, and well-known critics, among them Jed Perl, Martica Sawin, and Lance Esplund, the show chosen by this year’s juror introduces forty pictures by forty artists, working in a wide and eclectic range of media, including oil, acrylic, mixed media, and gouache.

This year’s juror was Janice Nowinski, a former Bowery artist, whose work has been included in shows at the American Academy of Arts & Letters, the American University Museum, the John Davis Gallery, and Steven Harvey Fine Arts Projects, among others. Critics for the Hudson Review, The New Criterion, on hyperallergic, and the Huffington Post have reviewed her exhibitions. She was the recipient of a purchase prize from the American Academy of Arts & Letters. She lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.

In the Hot Seat

April 26 - August 11, 2019

KMAC Museum (2nd-Floor Gallery) | Louisville, KY

Curated by Joey Yates

A chair is a customary offering within our shared codes of polite behavior. For designers, it is a primary object for interpreting the intersection of function and aesthetics. In contemporary artistic practice it has become an indelible focus of creative inquiry for artists, working in a variety of media, who employ the chair for its ability to embody space, status, personal identity, memory, family history, and other aspects of our humanity. With arms, legs, a seat and a back, the chair can become a surrogate for the human body, reflecting the essence of a person and the lived experience.

In 1888 Vincent Van Gogh created a pair of paintings that attempted to personify his own studio chair, along with the favorite chair of his friend, artist Paul Gauguin. In 1912 Pablo Picasso helped introduce the element of collage into modern painting with his Still-Life with Chair Caning. Throughout the southern U.S. African-American neighborhoods have long been the site of a creative act known as Yard Work, an ornate form of outdoor display for everyday objects such as discarded tires, tools, cooking utensils, pipes and fan blades. Chairs often appear as a commemoration to a lost loved one, preparing a seat for their wandering spirit. This form of assemblage likely inspired the Texas artist Robert Rauschenberg to incorporate a chair into his work Pilgrim from 1960, an early example of one of his pivotal collage paintings that combined personal objects from his home and studio. In several paintings from Alice Neel the chair proved it can communicate the intimate interior worlds of her subjects. More recently, it was used to signify the more stately concerns of Kehinde Wiley's 2018 presidential portrait of Barack Obama.

The personification of the chair reaches beyond contemporary art into the wider culture, with such moments as the man vs. chair wrestling scene in the 1997 Harmony Korine film Gummo, or the speech by Clint Eastwood when, during his endorsement of Mitt Romney at the 2012 Republican National Convention, he made a rambling, improvised speech to an empty chair that was intended to represent a critical exchange with President Obama.

In The Hot Seat offers insight into how the chair is being continually reimagined in contemporary artistic practice. The exhibition combines artist-made chairs with sculptures, installations, paintings, and mixed media works by: Tanya Aguiñiga, Hawkins Bolden, Sarah Braman, Scott Burton, Alex Chitty, Jeremy Dean, The Haas Brothers , René Herbst, Lonnie Holley, Mika Horibuchi, Jessica Jackson Hutchins, David Iacovazzi-Pau, Chris Johanson, Donald Judd, Glenn Kaino, Barbara Kasten, Norman Kelley, Krueck + Sexton, Mateo López, Jonathan Muecke, Tejo Remy, Gerrit Rietveld, Aaron Skolnick, Travis Somerville, Simon Starling, KCJ Szwedzinski, Ole Ukena, Franz West, Robert Wilson, and Tobias Wong.

This show is supported by Leslie and James Millar; Jody and PA Howard; George and Linda Kurz; RJE Interiors, Genscape, and the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts