Debra Disman

Artist

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ARTISTS

Keeping the Faith…Making Art Inspired by Great Artist Faith Ringgold

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I am thrilled to be teaching MAKING ART INSPIRED BY GREAT ARTISTS  at Franklin and Roosevelt Schools in the Santa Monica Public School System through the CREST Enrichment program.

After a span of two years, teaching live and in-person is exciting and energizing. The students are enthusiastic, helpful and creative and IMAGINATIVE and the parents and staff supportive and engaged.

Everyone is working together to make in-person teaching a safe and rewarding experience. Despite the challenges and great energy required, what fun to see these young artists exercise their imaginations, play, learn and create!

Students responded positively to our “Story Quilt” project, inspired by the Great Artist, Faith Ringgold.
Put cloth in their hands, and away they go!
Students draw an idea for their fabric “story, then begin working on felt with cloth pieces that are glued into place.


Imaginative use of the materials is the intuitive order of the day.


The stories begin to emerge.


Joyous play and exploration of fabrics, cloth scrap and tactile textiles!

 

The Center for Contemporary Art 2022 International Juried Show

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I am thrilled to participate in the Center for Contemporary Art’s 

International Juried Exhibition

showing “Maximum Security”
made of Book Board, Wood, Mulberry Paper, Paint, Canvas, Watercolor Paper, Hemp Cord

EXHIBITION DATES: January 14, 2022 – February 26, 2022
Opening: Friday, January 14, 2022 at 6:00 p.m. via Zoom

JUROR: Erin Jenoa Gilbert
Erin Jenoa Gilbert is a New York based curator and art advisor, specializing in Modern and Contemporary Art of the African Diaspora. Exploring the relationship between art, power and politics, her curatorial practice examines the physical and psychological connection to land, the trauma of displacement and the Black female body as contested terrain. Gilbert’s intersectional critical analysis exposes the fault lines in the aesthetic regimes that dominate visual culture, specifically by presenting artists whose contributions to the canon have been overlooked, particularly women artists from the “Deep South” and the “Global South”. Most recently the Curator of African American Manuscripts at the Smithsonian Archives of American Art, she has also held positions at The Art Institute of Chicago and The Studio Museum in Harlem.

Over the course of her career she has addressed audiences at The Studio Museum in Harlem, National Gallery of Art, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Howard University, Fashion Institute of Technology and Swann Auction House. Figure and Force, a conversation she moderated between Barbara Chase Riboud and Ilyasah Shabbaz for Solange’s Saint Heron, exemplifies her commitment to expanding the audience for modern and contemporary art.

In July 2021, Gilbert curated A Force For Change, an exhibition presenting 26 contemporary women artists of African descent in New York benefiting UN Women. She is the co-curator of Mary Lovelace O’Neal: Whales Fucking which will open at MoAD in San Francisco, California in November 2022. Since 2015 she has curated several museum and gallery exhibitions in the US and UK including Zohra Opoku: Draped Histories/Beyond Visage, Sienna Shields: Invisible Woman and In The Eye of the Beholder.

Gilbert holds a BA in Political Science and a BA in African and African American Studies from the University of Michigan, and a MA in Contemporary Art from the University of Manchester.  She has published catalog essays on several prominent artists, including Deborah Roberts (Spelman University, 2018); Alma Thomas (Mnuchin Gallery, 2019); Chakaia Booker (ICA Miami, 2021) and Mary Lovelace O’Neal (MoAD, 2022).

Click Here to Read Erin Jenoa Gilbert’s Juror Statement

I am honored to be in the company of wonderful EXHIBITING ARTISTS: Joan Appel, Claude Beller, Bill Brookover, Monica J. Brown, Lionel Carre, Arden Cone, Steven Daiber, Tracy DiTolla, Marvin Eans, Steven Epstein, Tracy Finn, Sandy Furst, Anita Gladstone, Gregory Hennen, Valerie Huhn, Pat Kelly, Karen L. Kirshner, Jack Knight, Shawn Marshall, Monica Mendes, Edward Mills, Myra Joyce Nowlin, David Z. Orban, Clare Parry, Sandi Pfeifer, Robert Reid, Lilly Saywitz, Alireza Vaziri Rahimi, Mark Vogel, Chrissy Wallace

Click Here for Exhibition Price List

ENJOY THE SHOW HERE!

 

 

Teaching Artistry Live and In-Person!

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Even in these times, it is wonderful to get back to live, in-person teaching!

Teaching classes outside at Santa Monica Public Schools, through the CREST Enrichment program, after a span of two years, is exciting and energizing. The students are enthusiastic, helpful and creative, the parents and staff supportive and engaged.

Everyone is working together to make in-person teaching a safe and rewarding experience.

I am teaching MAKING ART INSPIRED BY GREAT Artists at Franklin and Roosevelt Schools in the afternoon, and MAKE YOUR OWN BOOKS! at ROOSEVELT SCHOOL first thing in the morning. Despite the challenges and great energy required, what fun to see these young artists exercise their imaginations, play, learn and create!


Students work outdoors to create personal frames for their  Frida Kahlo-inspired self-portrait projects.


How they design the frames may communicate as much about them as their self-portraits inside them will.


Even the backpacks are works of art!

In our MAKE YOUR OWN BOOKS! class students learn the accordion fold book structure,

and begin developing their books with visual art and writing right away!

It is fantastic, watching the masterpieces unfold!

NEW WORK in 2021: “Forest Through The Trees”

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I was happy to finally be able to have Elon Schoenholz Photography in to photograph works completed during 2021… fast away the old year passes…

Here I share “Forest through The Trees“, 15 x 42 x 12”, made of book board, canvas, hemp cord, ribbon, typewriter ribbon, acrylic paint, wood.
It is part of a monochrome series in black, through the colors of “black” are infinite, and change with light, material, juxtaposition, and how the viewer engages with the piece.

Comprised of two accordion-folded “spines”, the “book”, becomes a “box”, with a “door” that opens, expandable “walls”, and  painted canvas “pages” held up precariously with wooden dowels. The piece can be presented and contemplated in numerous ways, and begs a tactile connection, through all of us working in book, and perhaps sculptural forms in general grapple with how to do this.  How to have viewers engage with the work, participate in it, without having it worn away over time in the process…

We are seekers.
The Journey continues.

Happy New Year.

(exterior, closed)

(exterior, ajar)

(interior/exterior, open)

Unfolding Possibilities: Something to Ponder for the New Year

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What do we seek, yearn for, want, crave, need, are motivated to strive for, for this New Year coming up?

What is Possible?
And

How do we Achieve it?

What are the Possibilities, and how do we Realize them, in this day and age, in this present moment, under our current circumstances, confronted by challenges seemingly too numerous to count, much less take in?


Unfolding Possibilities, (front cover) 2021, 6+ x 78″ x 6+”, mixed media artists’ book

We have to somehow move forward in a positive way, keep on truckin’, keep on trying, keep at it, continue, keep on keeping on.
We have to try, each in our own way. Hopefully, something will line up.


Unfolding Possibilities, (closed) 2021, 6+ x 78″ x 6+”, mixed media artists’ book

An initiative of the Los Angeles Count Department of Mental Health, Why We Rise LA took place in May 2021, supporting hundreds of Community Arts & Culture Projects which took place across all Los Angeles County neighborhoods, in partnership with more than 100 community groups, artists, grassroots leaders, healers and other LA County Departments. These projects and collaborations included mural making, ancestral healing workshops, a Countywide public literary art project, a Countywide chalk art program and more to celebrate the remarkable resources and communities in LA County and used arts-based strategies for healing and wellbeing.

I was honored to teach a workshop as part of Why We Rise LA 2021 in coordination with 18th Street Art Center’sArts Learning Lab @ Home: called: Bookmaking with Self-Compassion.
See the workshop HERE!
Nearly 70 online participants learned to create the “Flower Fold” book structure, then added embellishment, images, and words expressing their experience of the pandemic, where they are at now, what they learned, what they wanted to share, their hopes, wishes, dreams, cares , fears, realizations, trauma, expressing the full gamut of human emotions.

The range of words submitted was wide-ranging, thought-provoking and evocative….including opposite emotions and experiences and bits of truth-telling, realizations and wisdom participants seemed eager to pass on to others in other words, humanness in its multiplicity.

I took the words generated by this workshop, and requested from the community at large, and stitched them into an Artists’ Book I made as a community collaboration, entitled, “Unfolding Possibilities“.  (“Unfolding Possibilities – Possibilities Unfolding”).  Videographer Jeny Amaya created a video of the project which was screened during the 18th Street Art Center event, “Left/Right/Here“

Unfolding Possibilities, Possibilities Unfolding: the making of above.

Unfolding Possibilities, (interior) 2021, 6+ x 78″ x 6+”, mixed media artists’ book
Unfolding Possibilities, (interior detail) 2021, 6+ x 78″ x 6+”, mixed media artists’ book

When confronted with what seems like overwhelming odds, and not in your/our, favor, try making something, try creating. Here is a workshop to show you how to do it, just one of countless, infinite ways you can make something (out of almost nothing-), create something, experience working with your hands and heart and imagination, craft something, fashion something, and perhaps share this with others. Relax your heart and soul and play. Just see, if you do not emerge, like the butterfly, stronger for the effort. Enjoy. See what happens.

Wishing You the absolute best, healthiest, most creative, most supportive, safest, and imaginative, New Year, now and ever.

Here. We . Go.

“MOSTLY MONOCHROME” from WoArt!

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I have been thrilled to be included in the exhibition, Mostly Monochrome, presented online by the loved and respected  WoArt Blog, and curated by WoArtBlog founder,  Christina Massey, offering a strong platform for Women Artists.

November 1 – 30th, 2021

www.woartblog.com.

“Mostly Monochrome” is an online exhibition featuring artists using a mostly monochromatic approach to the creation of their work. Artworks with the reduced variant of color grab their viewers attention instead through their process, materials, composition and tonality.

As one scrolls through the exhibition, you’ll be visually transitioning through subtle shifts in the monochromatic palette and visually stimulated through the juxtaposition of works from minimal color field paintings to extremely detailed and laborious drawings and sculptures.

Viewers are invited to scroll through the wide range of artistic styles and explore the work in the virtual gallery slideshow. Click on the images to get further details and make any purchases of Artworks.

Support the work of Women Artists, shop the online store!

Featuring Artists:

Laura Ahola-Young, Lois Bender, Laurey Bennett-Levy, Angelica Bergamini, Carol Bouyoucos, Clare Burson, Ai Campbell, Jaynie Crimmins, Marianne DeAngelis, Debra Disman, Pauline Galiana, Veronika Golova, Carolynn Haydu, Erin Juliana, Rachel Kohn, Parvathi Kumar, Barbara Laube, Bonny Leibowitz, Seren Morey, Jane Nodine, Judith Ornstein, Dara Oshin, Barbara Owen, Lily Prince, Eve Provost Chartrand, Robin Roi, Andra Samelson, Amy Sands, Mary Shah, Barbara Sherman, Christina Smith, Lauren Smith, Judi Tavill, Jessica Tawczynski, Shira Toren, Ellen Weider, Odeta Xheka, Emna Zghal, Tamar Zinn

I am honored to have two works presented in the show, “Before the Fall”, and “Profusion”, pictured below.

Hear our discussion on Clubhouse!
Artists Who AND…, ”Artists…giving back to the creative community”:  Debra Disman/Lois Bender/Laurey Bender-Levy, Clubhouse, November 17, 2021