Dorothy and Herbert Vogel were avid collectors of contemporary art and were well known throughout the New York art scene. Their world-class art collection began in a one-bedroom New York apartment while they lived on Dorothy’s income as a librarian and dedicated Herb’s income as a postal worker to the acquisition of art. Their collection steadily grew to more than 4,000 pieces. In 2008, the Vogel’s launched a nation-wide gifts program titled The Dorothy and Herbert Vogel Collection: Fifty Works for Fifty States with the help of the National Gallery of Art, the National Endowment for the Arts and the Institute of Museum and Library Services. The Vogel’s distributed 2,500 works from their collection throughout the nation, with 50 works going to a selected art institution in each of the 50 states. Consisting largely of works on paper, the Arkansas Arts Center was selected to receive the works for the state of Arkansas. This exhibition will feature the works from this gift. Artists include William Anastasi, Will Barnet, Michael Goldberg, Michael Lucero, Betty Parsons, Richard Tuttle and more.

Robert Duran American (Salinas, California, 1938-2005) active New York Untitled watercolor on paper 1970

Betty Parsons American (New York, 1900 – 1982, New York) Brush Up paint on weathered wood construction 1974

MASS PRODUCTION

We always appreciate getting photos from our customer’s sharing how they fit our gallery frames. This is a good example of fitting a large order of gallery frames with wood spacers.

Attaching spacers with clamps

Richard Tuttle Watercolor

“50 for Arkansas: The Dorothy and Herbert Vogel Collection”
September 21 – January 6, 2012
Arkansas Arts Center
Little Rock, AR

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Painting is an imperative act.  A contemporary force with the weight of historical precedent behind it, painting has offered me a language of authentic authorship.  Issues of representation and abstraction, form or formlessness concern me less than experiences which derive from a sustained investigation.  In the studio, my inner dialog guides an exploration of the the forms of persistent memory and the depths of space.  My paintings and drawings of the past decade have examined through a language of abstraction the notion of place.  Places once visited, invented or discovered, vaguely take shape in the colors of space and light. Readings from Bachelard’s seminal, Poetics of Space, have influenced what has become a decades-long search for an expansiveness in the painted form.  The poetry of Rilke and others inspires a use of the forms of landscape for the settings of experiences of intimacy.

The gray skies of New England, the expanse of the sea, the warm light of Fall, are subjects mined in my work, not in outward depiction, but rather through internalized experience.  In an effort to understand my own place among these fleeting images, I seek a language that draws on personal history as well as the history of painting while forging new path between abstraction and the realization of the image of place.

A sabbatical from teaching in 2007, allowed me a return to Italy where early experiences in landscape painting had help to shape the direction of my work today.  Spending time in the coastal landscape of the Maremma and among the ruins of the Etruscans had me reflecting again on the sea where, the earliest of civilizations took to their boats and scattered like seeds across the Mediterranean.  While the sea itself erases the paths taken, the artifacts, paintings and architecture continue to tell the story.  Images from the Etruscan tombs of Tarquinia of small boats and birds served as inspiration as I recall my own life around the ocean.  The serene beauty and silent witness found in the pastoral tomb sites has allowed an awareness of the past to seep into the present experience.

While light, weather and atmosphere act as the impetus in my work, it is my aim to probe the depths of an inner space through meditations in light and color.  I am searching through the language of contemporary abstraction, a deeper connection, an understanding of place and consciousness of the present moment.  The paintings themselves lie in the places between memory and new moments of discovery.  While bearing some outward resemblance to the late generation Abstract Expressionists, my work may be a continuation of many of those Modernist ideas though, it is my aim to find new ways forward through an inclusiveness of personal forms.

Michael Rich
Chace-Randall Gallery
September 21 – November 4, 2012
Reception: Saturday, Sep 22, 5 – 7 p.m.
49 Main St Andes, NY

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Deep Floating Profile: 121
Type: Floating Frame for 1-1/2″ deep canvas paintings
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Ying Li has been a customer for many years. I had the pleasure of doing a studio visit with her in New York City in February of 2011. Ying Li Studio visit. She was and is deeply engaged in her work. Her current exhibit is at Haverford College where she is a professor of art. The following is excerpted from the press release on the exhibit. 

“One does not so much enter into the landscapes of Ying Li as collide with them,” wrote Franklin Einspruch in Art in America last year. Li, a Haverford College professor of fine arts, uses high volumes of oil paint to depict the landscape. She works from a deep engagement with the material and visual possibilities of painting and builds a visceral connection with place. Her latest show, No Middle Way, which runs at Haverford College from Friday, September 7 through Friday, October 12, is curated by Einspruch, an artist in his own right and the founder of artblog.net. What he was initially moved by in Li’s work—the boldness of its color, the thickness of the paint, the evocative abstraction of her landscapes—is showcased and explored in his curatorial effort. 

No Middle Way reflects Li’s working attitude, the way she enters full-force into unfamiliar territory, both literal and artistic, employing observations, memories, art historical knowledge and pure instinct as she constructs pictures that delight and surprise. The breathtaking, diverse landscapes of Alaska, western New York, New Hampshire and even Haverford’s campus tell the stories not only of their locales, but of their creator, a Chinese-born artist with an “exquisite, almost-musical sense of color” (according to The New Yorker).  Those paintings are shown alongside a collection of 13 modern, abstract monotypes that riff on early 18th century paintings by French Baroque artist Jean-Antoine Watteau. Though Li rarely paints people into her landscapes, Watteau does, so those prints allow audiences to see what Li’s hand can do with the familiar shape of a head or flounce of a dress in her colorful, kinetic palette.

Li graduated from Anhui Teachers University in China and received an M.F.A. from Parsons School of Design. Her work has been featured in numerous one-person and group exhibitions both in the United States and abroad and is included in many public and private collections. She has earned the Henry Ward Ranger Fund Purchase Award, the Edwin Palmer Memorial Prize for Painting and Certificate of Merit, the Valparaiso Foundation Fellowship, the Kahn-Mason Foundation Grant, two Vermont Studio Center fellowships and two Heliker-LaHotan Foundation Fellowships. Additionally, she was an artist-in-residence at Dartmouth College last spring. She is represented by Lohin Geduld Gallery, New York.

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FLOATING FRAME

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Since its inception photography has played an important role in documenting the effects of war. This exhibit features four very brave photographers who show us some of the unintended consequences of war.

COLLATERAL DAMAGE: The Human Face of War opens at the Stephen Daiter Gallery Friday September 7th. The exhibit will be on view thru December 1, 2012. A reception for the artists will be held at the gallery on Sunday September 23 from 10 am to 1 pm. the reception is on the one year anniversary weekend of the repeal of “Don’t Ask/Don’t Tell.”

Some proceeds from the sales of prints in the exhibition will benefit post-traumatic stress support groups such as Wounded Warriors. In the case of sales of prints from the Gays in the Military series, funds will be sent to the Service members Legal Defense Network, an organization that advocates for LGBT personnel.  

The following tells more about the photographers featured in the exhibit.

Samantha Appleton examines the maleness of the atmosphere of war. She photographed men and boys, soldiers and civilians, as they move through the fog of war. Samantha Appleton is a photographer concentrating on historic trends. She began her career as a writer and became a photographer after assisting James Nachtwey. Her work strives to show that quiet, subtle moments make up the complicated components of large news stories. The bulk of her career has covered many of the most tumultuous, man-made events of the past decade. Primary stories have included conflict in Iraq, Afghanistan and Lebanon, social issues in Africa, and immigration in the US. She has won numerous awards including Pictures of the Year, World Press Master Class, American Photography and Camera Arts. She was most recently an Official White House Photographer for the Obama administration. In addition to her photography, she is currently writing a non-fiction book project on Iraq.

Vincent Cianni shares works from his ongoing project,  “Gays in the Military: How America Thanked Me”.  This oral history and photographic project documents gay and lesbian service members and veterans from World War II to the present and is based on their experiences in the military and the effects that the ban on homosexuality had on their careers and lives. Cianni is an award-winning documentary photographer and educator whose work explores community and memory, the human condition, and the use of image, word and text. His photo essay, We Skate Hardcore, (published by NYU Press and the Center for Documentary Studies 2004) was awarded the American Association of University Presses’ Best Book Design.  His photographs have been shown in numerous exhibitions nationally and internationally and a major survey of his work was exhibited at the Museum of the City of New York in 2006. With some eighty portraits and profiles already recorded the body of work presents a powerful indictment of entrenched military policies and protocols over the last half century.

Ashley Gilbertson goes to the heart of the matter with a quiet homage to the soldiers who will never come home in his “Bedrooms of the Fallen”.   This haunting project, begun in 2007, speaks volumes in its silent observations of the upended symbols of safety, privacy and comfort  – bedrooms  furnished as if the young people had just stepped away, and tended to like precious grave sites by bereaved parents.  “Bedrooms of the Fallen” debuted in the New York Times Magazine and went on to win the National Magazine Award for Documentary Photography. Gilbertson, who won the prestigious Robert Capa Gold medal, was a freelancer in his twenties from Australia when he first began going to Iraq, mostly for the New York Times. Four years of his experiences have been recorded in WHISKEY TANGO FOXTROT (The University of Chicago 2007).  Gilbertson is represented by VII agency and has recently been examining veterans’ issues including Post Traumatic Stress and suicide for Time Magazine, the Virginia Quarterly Review, and the Times.

Stephanie Sinclair creates compassionate art reportage out of almost indescribable pain. Her photographs in this exhibition center on the suffering of the women of Afghanistan.  Her subjects have been the victims of such pernicious and continual violence at the hands of men that they have taken to acts of self-immolation.  Sinclair gained the trust of these women, in treatment for the self-inflicted burns at a rudimentary public hospital in the town of Herat in western Afghanistan.  By consenting to be photographed at their most vulnerable, these women exhibit a rare bravery – a protest against the forces that brought them to commit such acts of utter desperation. Prints from this series were exhibited at the Whitney’s 2010 Biennial as “Self-immolation in Afghanistan: A Cry for Help”.  A second project exhibited “Never Ending War” documents her experience in Iraq. Sinclair, who covered the start of the war in Iraq for the Chicago Tribune, is a photojournalist known for gaining unique access to the most sensitive gender and civil rights issues around the world. She covered troubled regions in the Middle East for six years as a freelancer and is now represented by VII photo agency.  She contributes regularly to National Geographic, the New York Times Magazine, Time, Newsweek, Stern, Geo, and Marie Claire, among others.  She has been the recipient of numerous awards for her humanitarian reportage.

Ashley Gilbertson “Whiskey Tango Foxtrot” series	Ashley Gilbertson “Whiskey Tango Foxtrot” series
Samantha Appleton “Men with War” series	Samantha Appleton “Men with War” series
Stephanie Sinclair “Self-immolation in Afghanistan: A cry for help” series	Vincent Cianni “Gays in the Military: How America Thanked Me” series

COLLATERAL DAMAGE: The Human Face of War
September 7, 2012 – December 1, 2012
Stephen Daiter Gallery
Chicago, IL

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Concentrating on the 1970s, but spanning to the present day, Horenstein’s gritty, black-and-white photographs capture the irrepressible spirit of an American institution. Some say the 1970s were the last great decade of country music—between the pomade, plaid jackets, and goofy hillbilly jokes of the 1950s and the more polished “Urban Cowboy” sound of Nashville in the early 1980s. Horenstein’s work captures it all, from the roadside seediness of TJ’s Lounge to the backstage glamour at the Grand Ole Opry. From bluegrass festivals and country music parks to the honky tonks and dance halls, these images picture such celebrities as Dolly Parton, Jerry Lee Lewis, Waylon Jennings, up to a recent cardboard cut-out of Garth Brooks (which speaks volumes about the artist’s personal opinion of the direction the genre has taken of late). However, the photographs feature not only the stars, but also include the familiar venues and enthusiastic fans who sustain them.

Henry Horenstein is the author of more than thirty books to date. His work is represented in the collections of a long list of public institutions including the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the Museum of Art, Princeton University, New Jersey; the High Museum, Atlanta; the Fogg Museum of Art, Cambridge, Massachusetts; and the George Eastman House, Rochester, New York. He is a professor at the Rhode Island School of Design, and resides in Boston.

“Henry Horenstein: Honky Tonk: Portraits of Country Music”
September 6 – October 12, 2012
ClampArt New York, NY

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METRO GALLERY FRAME

Standard Profile: 106
Type: standard gallery frame
Wood & Finish: maple wood frame with charcoal finish
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