EFA Studio Member, Rhona Bitner had her book Listen reviewed by Jeff Gordinier in the New York Times.
Read the review on the New York Times website.
Del Geist: Cracked Ice at Garment District, NYC
Photo by Sabrina Eberhard
EFA Studios and The Garment District Alliance unveiled Cracked Ice by renowned artist Del Geist – a series of three towering structures made of stone and stainless steel titled Laurentide, Muir and Champlain that represent erratic boulders being held by immense ice-age glaciers. Located on the Broadway plazas in the Garment District between 39th and 40th Streets, the free installation invites viewers to reflect on the dynamic forces of nature and profound impact of climate change and will be available to the public through March 2024.
For more information, visit garmentdistrict.nyc
Simonette Quamina: Artnews @ Frieze London
EFA Studios Member Simonette Quamina was recently featured in an Artnews story about Frieze London - read more here! Established Artists Champion Rising Stars In a Can’t-Miss Frieze Project
Tessa Solomon writes: “Artist-to-Artist” is a standout of Frieze’s 20th anniversary programming, as it smartly subverts self-reference, instead projecting its hopes into the future by means of these rising and under-sung voices.
“It’s a wonderful opportunity for Frieze to put artists—some who may not be new, but who aren’t mainstream—on this international platform,” Simonette Quamina told ARTnews. Quamina, who was nominated by Alvaro Barrington, made an especially topical contribution given the fair’s preoccupation with the passage of time.
A Praxis artist, she’s best known for her varied collage and printmaking techniques which incorporate autobiographical imagery. The newest works, shape-shifting graphite drawings which variously absorb and negate light, depending on the pressure she applied to the graphite, are a departure from her usual materials, though. Talking to ARTnews via phone from London, she was reluctant to concede the story unfolding here, though she said that like much of her work, they reflect the mutable nature of memory—in particular her memories of growing up across Canada, Guyana, Saint Vincent, and the United States.”
Artists' Fellowship, Inc. 2024 Medal Honoree
In May 2024, EFA will be honored with the 2024 Gari Melchers Memorial Medal by Artists' Fellowship, Inc. This honor recognizes EFA as a unique and laudable organization in supporting visual artists. The Gari Melchers Memorial Medal is awarded to a person or an organization that has materially furthered the interest of the profession of the fine arts. Thank you to Jessica Daryl Winer, her staff, and the Board of Trustees for their program's resolute support of the arts.
Melissa Joseph: Irish Exit at Margot Samel
Melissa Joseph | Irish Exit
October 19 - November 22, 2023
Opening Reception: October 27, 6 - 8 pm
Margot Samel Gallery
295 Church St | New York, NY 10013
The term “Irish Exit” suggests a colloquial threshold, a transition: bodies passing from one space into another. It also alludes to identity and belonging. The term transforms across cultures and borders, shapeshifting to fit different contexts; in some zones, “Irish exit” becomes “French leave”, “English goodbye”, the list goes on.
It’s an apt framing device for Joseph’s latest explorations in felt, ceramics, and paper pulp—a diverse practice that is powered by a deep engagement with identity and sense of place. It is also one that exists comfortably on edges and in spaces without clear definition. In lieu of a singular approach, her methods combine the languages of craft, painting, and sculpture, giving form to multifaceted concerns.
The exhibition expands on Joseph’s ritual of unearthing and reshaping images of her family and the spaces they’ve made their own. It also engages themes of gendered labor—textiles wielded as a rebuttal to dominant patriarchal traditions. She begins with archival and recent photos, then translates them through new materials; her primary medium is felt, which she layers and shapes by poking fibers into a wool base. The result is painterly, with thick passages of color resolving into recognizable, if fuzzy, forms. This process holds many meanings. Its blurring of details reflects the pliability of memory and identity, channeled through Joseph’s own multivalent experience as a biracial woman, artist, and teacher (her mother is American of Irish descent, her father was born in Kerala, India).
When Joseph renders figures in Irish Exit, the most prominent are women. On the right side of the diptych Wedding Ablutions, a white woman and girl stand near a bed; one helps the other clip garters to knee-high yellow socks. Split on the left side, a brown woman stands, observing the scene. Renee Green’s use of the term contact zone comes to mind, which the artist and theorist has described as “various moments when negotiations between different cultures have to be made . . . ranging from literal spatial instances to psychological ways of coping with what appears to be foreign.” Joseph tells me that the duo are her aunt and mother, on her mother’s wedding day. In a provocative fuzzing of chronology—one enhanced by her fibrous medium—the figure on the left is Joseph herself. The thin space separating the work’s two sides plays a third subject, the live edge is significant.
Joseph forges many live edges and contact zones across Irish Exit. Some works dispense with figures, instead zooming in on various facets of her family’s home—corners, cupboards, furniture. In a smaller piece called Margot, after Meret, she playfully connects themes of domesticity and materiality to a lineage of women artists. Shelves of cups and wine glasses stack on top of each other, a wink towards Meret Oppenheim whose multidimensional practice resists easy categorization. Joseph sees this piece as something of the nucleus for Irish Exit, an exhibition permeated by objects and thresholds that become proxies for identities and relationships, along with spaces they consume, bump against, or leave.
–Alexxa Gotthardt
Hyperallergic: Return to Sender
EFA Project Space’s new exhibition Return to Sender: Prison as Censorship was featured in Hyperallergic!
Maya Pantone writes: “The United States Constitution’s Bill of Rights ostensibly protects Americans’ freedom of speech and expression; however, for incarcerated people, this fundamental civil liberty is often compromised. A new art exhibition in New York City, curated by prison abolitionist Mariame Kaba and co-organized by nonprofit PEN America, puts a spotlight on the harsh realities of carceral censorship experienced by currently and recently imprisoned artists, authors, and readers.”