Cecilia André Tours

Though It All (perspective, 2018, mixed media (patterned silk, vinyl,acrylic and oil on stretchers), 17 x 20"

Cecilia André transparency 

Cecilia André'’ art shown at the Queens Botanical Garden Gallery 2020-21. 

above;Complementary Tides, 2021, vinyl, polyester thread and suction cups,  54 x 34”

Past Tour of - LES - Lower East Side

Wed.May8 11:30-1:30pm

Shara Hughes, In Lieu of Flowers

In this show, Hughes takes a more pointed approach to the imaginative landscapes that define her practice. The artist, looking to reinvigorate and reimagine a more specific element of this painterly trope, has created a series of flower paintings. The resulting works are vibrant and visionary, informed by Hughes’ deep-seated knowledge of art history.

A wide range of brushstrokes and materials, including acrylic paint, oil paint, and dye, are utilized to create a sense of aggression and urgency within these works. The artist demonstrates confidence in her gesture, driven by intuition and abstract experimentation. 

Playfulness is key to the artist’s process, allowing the subject matter to become a metaphorical playground. The flowers echo sultry figures, becoming humanlike in their displayed traits and evolutionary actions. For example, Naked Lady is loosely based off the Amaryllis belladonna flower, known for its striking beauty and uniquely leafless stem. However, the Amaryllis is stealthily toxic, all of its parts poisonous if ingested. The seductive tendrils of Hughes’ Naked Lady draws the viewer in close, as the venomous, strap-like leaves seem to melt off the canvas. My Natural Nyctinastydepicts a flower in nyctinastic movement, a nightly rhythm of a plant closing its pedals in response to the onset of darkness. The bud takes shelter within itself, symbolically signaling that it is not to be disturbed.

Meet 11:30 Arsenal Contemporary Gallery 214 Bowery btw Prince & Spring sts. 

Cost of Tour 80/ person in groups of 3-8  *this tour already is a group tour.

New Tour of - LES - Lower East Side

Wed. May 8 11:30-1:30pm

Cameron Clayborn: Through the Wrong Tongue’ 

Roberta Smith NYT wrote The sculptures and wall pieces in Cameron Clayborn’s New York solo debut have both historical and contemporary references. His preferred materials are leather-like vinyl and glittered vinyl sewn into stuffing-filled shapes that evoke the soft forms of Post-Minimalist sculpture of the 1970s. But he often adds gleaming sharp-pointed hardware associated with late ’80s Neo-Geo art. He pushes this combination into the present with subtle and not-so- subtle suggestions of gender, drag, race and violence. The show’s first artwork puts you on alert: Roompiercer With Tool might be described as a phallus of two different skin tones hanging from a sharp, shiny spike. Toolholder is a drape of glitter vinyl, the color of white flesh, hanging from steel clamps. In the crux of the vinyl rests a solid steel lozenge about four inches long. It suggests a man in drag, distilled to abstraction. Not everything in this show is as effective or as promising as these works, but much of it is. Stay tuned. 

Meet 11:30 Arsenal Contemporary Gallery 214 Bowery btw Prince & Spring sts.

Firelei Báez 

Intricate drawings and  installations explore the ways in which personal and collective identities are shaped by inherited histories. Báez incorporates the visual languages of regionally-specific mythology and ritual alongside those of science fiction and fantasy, to envision identities as unfixed, and inherited stories as perpetually-evolving. By rendering spectacular bodies that exist on opposite sides of intersecting boundaries, Báez carries portraiture into an in-between space where subjectivity is rooted in historical narrative

—hand-perforated blue tarp—often used for temporary shelter, and thus a symbol of both disaster and refuge—casting light onto material patterned with black diasporic symbols of nurturing and resistance. Overhead is a geo-specific map of the stars as they appeared in the night sky at the onset of the Haitian Revolution (1791-1804). A successful uprising led by self-liberated enslaved people against the French colonial government in Saint-Domingue, the Haitian Revolution was an early precursor to abolition movements internationally and had an indelible—if often unacknowledged—impact on the ideological and geopolitical landscape of the 19th century world. The installation’s oceanic quality suggests the broader history of black diaspora and the Middle Passage, in relationship to Glissant’s theory of the ocean as a connector and a repository of physical memory.

New Tour of - LES - Lower East Side 

Wed.May8 11:30-1:30pm

FAIRFIELD PORTER 

This artist lived (1907–1975) and produced work that is vey soulful and intimate. 

Fairfield Porter was born in Winnetka, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago, in 1907. In 1924, at age 17, he entered Harvard University, where he studied art and graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in 1928. Porter continued his studies for the next two years at the Arts Students League in New York, where he studied with Thomas Hart Benton. Porter himself was a mainly figurative painter, influenced by French post-impressionist painters, Edouard Vuillard and Pierre Bonnard. Porter’s works of art shared many of the qualities of their works, primarily their emphasis on intimate subject matter and on color relationships and subtle effects of light. Porter’s style is abstract yet recognizable, keeping with the realist tradition of representation, yet simplifying images so that the viewer is aware of the abstract design of the surface. He forged a distinct vision out of two disparate styles: one, intimate and representational; and the other, colorful and abstract. Porter’s subjects are often personal: appealing and intimate images of family and home, familiar roads and landscapes. Though he favored the watercolor medium early and late in his career, throughout his life he made pencil and ink drawings and painted in oils.

past CHELSEA ART TOUR    Saturday Feb 2nd 3-5pm

Dana Schutz: Imagine Me and You. This tour starts with a breath-taking show with large pasty paintings and five sculptures. In this show, Schutz largely keeps to very personal ground—and throws in references to the act of painting as a kind of emotional survival. In many paintings we see  individuals struggling not only with themselves and one another, but also with an environment that is increasingly hostile to human life. See article.

Cost of tour $80 . Meeting place Petzel Gallery 456 W 18 st 3 pm Sat Feb 2nd  paypal here

NEW CHELSEA ART TOUR    Saturday Feb 2nd 3-5pm

Tatsuo Miyajima: Innumerable Life/Buddha.  Numbers are at the heart of Miyajima’s practice. The artist explains that he uses numbers in art because they are an international language; digits transcend cultures. His numbers have danced on walls, in water, on the façades of buildings, in forests and in ponds, on skyscrapers, in gardens and courtyards, and on the faces and bodies of men and women. To Miyajima, technology is an instrument, and perhaps even an organism, that allows the expression of poetry and spirituality through light and movement. 

We will see LED displays, with thousands of numbers counting down from nine to one at differing speeds, before going dark momentarily. These digits embody the human cycle and the eastern philosophy of change and renewal; each solitary, blinking diode signifying the individual body and soul. The counting sequence continues, as if everlasting, and yet ‘0’, implying death, is expressed solely by darkness. Through this allusion, the numbers – or ‘Life’ – are destined to an everlasting cycle of regeneration. 

The colour of the new works: the radiant red of the installations denotes the blood of life, love, fire, passion, strength and joy, it is inspired by a legend told in the Lotus Sutra, recalling the teachings of Gautama Siddhartha, the spiritual teacher who founded Buddhism. Video of his work.

Art in the Boros group show in a building of many galleries - A vertical way of seeing art in Chelsea. This is a show of mid-career artists - my own, Cecilia André , artwork is included.I will highlight a few other pieces in the show.

Cost of tour $80 . Meeting place Petzel Gallery 456 W 18 st 3 pm Sat Feb 2nd  paypal here

NEW CHELSEA ART TOUR    Saturday Feb 2nd 3-5pm

Charles White- Monumental Practice: Preparations for a Mural. On view for the first time since the 1970s will be four monumentally scaled ink and charcoal drawings made by the artist as studies for the figures in his mural Mary McLeod Bethune, completed in 1978 for the Dr. Mary McLeod Bethune Regional Library in Exposition Park, Los Angeles, as well as related preparatory works and ephemera documenting the project—White’s last major artistic endeavor during his lifetime.

Josef Albers: Sonic  - Albers is recognized for his rigorously experimental investigations of color, spatial form, and visual experience. He often found analogies to and inspiration for his work in the compositional and structural qualities of music.  In his seminal 1963 art text, Interaction of Color, Albers associated the relationship of colors in a work of art to that of music, writing: “Hearing music depends on the recognition of the in-between of the tones, of their placing and of their spacing,“ to which he similarly notes that "colors present themselves in continuous flux, constantly related to changing neighbors and changing conditions.”1 These overlapping qualities of music and color are evident in Albers’s signature Homage to the Square paintings (1950–1976) and also his earlier Variant/Adobe series (1946–1966).

Rodney Graham The conceptual photographer (part of the so-called Vancouver School, alongside the likes of Jeff Wall and Stan Douglas has made a career assuming offbeat personalities that star in intricately assembled tableaux. For inspiration, he pilfers art history, film, pop culture, and scenes from everyday life. In every case, he’s recognizably himself—there are no masks or prosthetic noses involved—and yet perversely othered   Each photograph is the result of countless hours spent sourcing props, building sets, and snapping hundreds—if not thousands—of digital images, which are then seamlessly assembled in post-production.

Cost of tour $80 . Meeting place Petzel Gallery 456 W 18 st 3 pm Sat Feb 2nd  paypal here