SANTA MONICA
Swept Away: “The Center Will Not Hold” I
My work, “The Center Will Not Hold” was PERFORMED ON SITE AT THE ANNENBERG COMMUNITY BEACH HOUSE as part of: Swept Way: Love Letters to a Surrogate, organized by
Warren Neidich, Christina Mossaides Strassfield, Anuradha Vikram and Rene Petropoulos 2022-23
“Swept Away: Love Letter to a Surrogate/s” is a community oriented artistic project that aims to create a transcontinental heartbeat across America. It is hoped that through its combined gestures and performances, a sense of solidarity, so desperately missing today, will emerge with which to confront the ecological catastrophe at our doorstep.”
65 Los Angeles County artists presented live performances over Earth Day Weekend: April 22 and 23, 2023 at the Santa Monica State Beach near the Annenberg Community Beach House on the Pacific Ocean. “The Center Will Not Hold” was one of them.
Stills from “The Center Will Not Hold”: gathering the water, stitching the sand.
Collaborators: Deborah Lynn Irmas and Frida Cano.
Image Credit: Mick Lorusso April 2023 Three Women Gather Water Working Silently Together
Image Credit: Mick Lorusso April 2023 Carrying Water to the Blanket of the Four Directions
Image Credit: Mick Lorusso April 2023 Making Their Way to the Blanket of the Fuur Directions Site
Image Credit: Mick Lorusso April 2023 Water is Used to Dampen The Sand To Create Mounds
Image Credit: Mick Lorusso April 2023 Needles Threaded With Hemp Cord Are Used To Stitch
Image Credit: Mick Lorusso April 2023 Through the Sand Mounds Creating Lines of Connection
Image Credit: Mick Lorusso April 2023 Hemp Cords Are Threaded Across the Open Circle
Image Credit: Mick Lorusso April 2023 The Center Is Stitched as is the Sand Around the Blanket
Image Credit: Mick Lorusso April 2023 The Work of Mending is Completed for the Moment
Image Credit: Mick Lorusso April 2023 The Work is Never Done on This Earth and in This Life
More to come.
EXHIBITIONISTA: “Swept Away: Love Letter to a Surrogate(s)”
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I am thrilled to participate in:
Swept Away: Love Letter to a Surrogate(s), Main Beach, East Hampton, NY / Santa Monica Beach, Santa Monica, CA
Curators: Warren Neidich, Christina Mossaides Strassfield, Anuradha Vikram and Rene Petropoulos 2022-23
The syncopated sound of the surf will provide the background acousmatic. This poetic project in some ways harkens back to the Happenings staged by Allan Kaprow in 1966 all through the South Fork: https://alastairgordonwalltowall.com/2018/02/07/gas-i-am-a-happener-1966-east-hampton/
Artist Warren Neidich co- curated the successful Drive by Art event in 2020.
The “SWEPT AWAY” project is co-curated and co-coordinated by Christina Strassfield, Museum Director/Chief Curator of Guild Hall, Anuradha Vikram, Los Angeles based independent curator, and Los Angeles based conceptual artist Renee Petropoulos, plus administrative coordination by Julie McKim.
65 artists living in on the East End and 65 west coast artists are participating in this community and family-based Art Happening. In the spring the reverse will occur; with East End artists writing love letters to LA artists to be executed at Will Rogers State Beach, Santa Monica in conjunction with the 18th Street Arts Center.
Artists will create ephemeral performative gestures of immateriality or time-based works on the beach. This could be making a sandcastle, singing a song, reciting poetry, dancing, make a sculpture that interacts with the tide, collecting shells, doing a light projection,, picking up garbage on the beach, etc. The works could be political and deal with global warming and its effects on the water level or could be apolitical and talk about the natural beauty of the real in opposition to the digital and virtual.
The importance of biodegradable, non-toxic materials will be essential as well as leaving the beach pristine after the work.
Each East Coast artist has been linked up to a West Coast artist who will email instructions – a love letter – for a work of art that the local artist will incorporate into their performative piece, acting as a surrogate. In the Spring will occur the reverse, with East Coast Artists sending Love Letters to their West Coast counterparts, who will use it as a springboard to create offerings to happewn at Santa Monica’s Will Rogers State Beach.
The list of East End and West Coast artist pairings is as follows:
EAST END ARTISTS > LOS ANGELES ARTISTS
Pamella Allen > Jade Gordon + Megan Whitmarsh
Suzanne Anker > Margarethe Drexel
Elena Bajo > Jasmine Orpilla
Lillian Ball > Dana Duff
Monica Banks > Jamie Ross
Dianne Blell > Lisa Anne Auerbach
Scott Bluedorn > Robby Herbst
Sanford Biggers > Sterling Wells
Megan Chaskey > Lionel Popkin
Scott Chaskey > Kathryn Andrews
Philippe Cheng > David Horvitz
Andrea Cote > Nina Waisman
Ivana Dama > Rodrigo Arruda
Peter Dayton > Anita Pace
Katrina Del Mar > Taisha Paggett + Meital Yaniv
Jeremy Dennis > Debra Disman
Sabra Moon Elliot > Rochelle Fabb
Carol Edwards > Pamela Hudson
Eva Faye > Patty Chang + David Kelly
Saskia Friedrich > Fran Siegel
Margaret Garrett > Susan Kleinberg
Veronica Gonzales > Cassandra Marketo
Kimberly Goff > Cheri Gaulke + Xochi Maberry-Gaulke
Jeremy Grosvenor > Vincent Johnson
Jerelyn Hanrahan > Andrew Berardini
Candace Hill Montgomery > Anna Joy Springer
Virva Hinnemo > Sam Shoemaker
Alice Hope > Krysten Cunningham
Erica-Lynn Huberty > Sandeep Mukherjee
Terri Hyland > Joseph Mosconi
Ruby Jackson > Alice Könitz
Ilya + Emelia Kabakov > Carolyn Castano
Carlos Lama > Elisabeth Houston
Laurie Lambrecht > May Sun
Joseph Liatela > Badly Licked Bear
Donald Lipski > Raul Baltazar
Sutton Lynch > Yrneh Gabon Brown
Josephine Meckseper > Jiayun Chen
Paul Miller > Lucia Santini Ribisi
Tanya Minhas > Allison Wyper
Richard Mothes > Kristin Calabrese
Michelle Murphy > Sarah Beadle
Jill Musnicki > Victoria Vesna
Eileen O’Kane Kornreich > Iman Person
Dalton Portella > Ryat Yezbick
Jaanika Peerna > Marcus Kuiland Nazario
Toni Ross > Sharon Barnes
David Rothenberg > Beatriz Cortez
Will Ryan > Jody Zellen
Sara Salaway > Melinda Altshuler
Matthew Satz > Katie Grinnan
Bastienne Schmidt > Jisoo Chung
Barry Schwabsky > David Schafer
Christine Sciulli > Karen Lofgren
Arlene Slavin > Jenny Yurshansky
Janice Stanton > Kearra Gopee
Christina Sun > Catherine Scott
Carol Szymanski > Xiouping
Sara VanDerBeek > Alicia Serling
Ryan Wallace > Joshua Aster
Ross Watts > Justine Harari
Allan Wexler > Dan Kwong
Nina Yankowitz > Francesca Gabbiani
Darius Yektai > Barbara McCarren + Jud Fine
Almond Zigmund > Marissa Mandler
ABOUT WARREN NEIDICH
Warren Neidich uses written texts and neon-light sculptures to create cross-pollinating conceptual works that reflect upon situations at the border zones of art, science, and social justice. His performative and sculptural work Pizzagate Neon (2018), recently on display at the Venice Biennale 2019, analyzed, through a large hanging neon light sculpture, fake news and the post-truth society. Selected exhibitions include the Whitney Museum of American Art, PS1 MOMA, White Columns, Walker Art Center MIT List Visual Art Center, (Cambridge), Los Angeles County Museum of Art, National Museum of American Art (Washington D.C., US), Museum Ludwig (Köln, Germany), Haus Der Kunst (Munich), Zentrum für Kunst and Media (Karlsruhe, Germany), ICA London, Palais Tokyo (Paris, France), Villa Arson (Nice, France) and Kunsthaus Zürich. He has been a visiting lecturer in the Departments of Art at Brown University, GSD Harvard University, Columbia University, Princeton University, University of California, Los Angeles, the Sorbonne in Paris, France; and the University of Oxford and Cambridge University in the UK. His work has been the subject of over 150 magazine and newspaper articles, including The New York Times, Time Magazine, Artforum, Art in America, Kunstforum International, The Art Newspaper, Smithsonian Magazine, The Chicago Tribune, Hyperallergic, Artnet, GQ, Forbes, Vogue IT, Monopol, Performance Art Journal, , Time Out, The New Yorker, New York Magazine, Los Angeles Times, The Village Voice, and Frieze.
CONCURRENCIES: Charlotte Salomon and Eva Hesse: The Visitors
On June 25th, 2022 I held an open studio to share works created for my 2021-22 Santa Monica Artist Project Fellowship:
Charlotte Salomon and Eva Hesse: Genius, Trauma and the Invention of New Forms of Visual Art in Response to the Holocaust
Employing research, artistic production, public engagement, the project investigates, compares and links the lives and the groundbreaking work of Jewish women artists Charlotte Salomon and Eva Hesse on the basis of their shared experience of trauma and loss through the Jewish Holocaust, the remarkably similar intimate traumas of their families (both lost their mothers to suicide), their invention of new forms of visual art through which I posit they respond to and attempt to cope with these traumas, their early deaths, and the emotional involvement of each with a charismatic and powerful male artist who proved to be influential, even pivotal in the development of their work and artistic/creative breakthroughs.
Themes of the project include being a woman artist, being a Jewish women artist, being an artist during or affected by a profoundly turbulent time in history, the relationship between internal and external turbulence and the creative act and the transformative power of the creative process: the triumph of the imagination as opposed to the triumph of the will.
On a broader scale, the project examines, through these two geniuses, ways in which the creative process can transform traumatic pasts, and how trauma can elicit the creation of new forms, voices and materials that outlast their makers and continue to reverberate throughout the ages, inspiring posterity.
As part of my Fellowship project commitment, I created a series of works responding to these artists: their oeuvre, their lives, their concurrencies. I was thrilled to welcome friends, colleagues and students to share the works and say hello! (All images by Steve Hankins Photography)
Thank you all, and thank you Steve Hankins, for your beautiful photography and capturing of the event.
CONCURRENCIES: Charlotte Salomon and Eva Hesse: The Works
On June 25th, 2022 I held an open studio to share works created for my 2021-22 Santa Monica Artist Project Fellowship:
Charlotte Salomon and Eva Hesse: Genius, Trauma and the Invention of New Forms of Visual Art in Response to the Holocaust
Employing research, artistic production, public engagement, the project investigates, compares and links the lives and the groundbreaking work of Jewish women artists Charlotte Salomon and Eva Hesse on the basis of their shared experience of trauma and loss through the Jewish Holocaust, the remarkably similar intimate traumas of their families (both lost their mothers to suicide), their invention of new forms of visual art through which I posit they respond to and attempt to cope with these traumas, their early deaths, and the emotional involvement of each with a charismatic and powerful male artist who proved to be influential, even pivotal in the development of their work and artistic/creative breakthroughs.
Themes of the project include being a woman artist, being a Jewish women artist, being an artist during or affected by a profoundly turbulent time in history, the relationship between internal and external turbulence and the creative act and the transformative power of the creative process: the triumph of the imagination as opposed to the triumph of the will.
On a broader scale, the project examines, through these two geniuses, ways in which the creative process can transform traumatic pasts, and how trauma can elicit the creation of new forms, voices and materials that outlast their makers and continue to reverberate throughout the ages, inspiring posterity.
As part of my Fellowship project commitment, I created a series of works responding to these artists: their oeuvre, their lives, their concurrencies, some of which I share here: (All images by Steve Hankins Photography)
Working title: “Concurrencies I“, 2022, repurposed denim, linen thread, gold thread, hemp cord, varnish
Working title: “Concurrencies II“, begun, 2022 (unfinished), repurposed denim, linen thread, gold thread, varnish , to be developed
Working title, “Finally“, 2022, canvas, burlap, acrylic paint, hemp cord
Working title, “Finally“, 2022, canvas, burlap, acrylic paint, hemp cord, (details)
“I Can’t I Won’t I will I Do“, 2022, repurposed cotton table runner, hemp cord, acrylic paint
“It’s Not Black and White“, 2021, Bookboard, mulberry paper, repurposed typewriter tape, canvas, hemp cord, (exterior)
“It’s Not Black and White“, 2021, Bookboard, mulberry paper, repurposed typewriter tape, canvas, hemp cord, (exterior/interior)
“Forest Through The Trees“, 2021, bookboard, hemp cord, watercolor paper, acrylic paint, wood, canvas, repurposed typewriter tape, lace, (exterior)
“Forest Through The Trees“, 2021, bookboard, hemp cord, watercolor paper, acrylic paint, wood, canvas, repurposed typewriter tape, lace, (detail)
Working title: “Charlotte Salomon-Eva Hesse: Concurrencies“, 2022, repurposed family album, burlap, linen thread, collage/paper, (exterior)
Teaching Artistry Live and In-Person!
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!
