My mother also encouraged me without thinking about it, having taken me to the Met and the Frick Collection when I was very young and having intellectual conversations about art at a very young age. This was unheard of having been raised in a very tough neighborhood in the Bronx.

LO: What are the themes of your work and what inspires you to make art?
MB: My paintings are based on mythology, superstition, religion, and race. It is not necessarily a theme I set about going after, but they tend to go in that direction.

LO: Who are your influences? Teachers, artists?
MB: Michael Goldberg, Lucio Pozzi, and Marilyn Minter were teachers of mine whilst going to SVA. They were the ones I felt a close connection to. In my early years I obsessed with many of the female surrealists, including Leonor Fini.

LO: Why do you think art is important for the world and why is it important for you as an individual artist?
MB: I often think about this and think about how the average person would think it that it is a very bourgeois activity. Especially being a woman and a person of color, I often think about my roll as an artist. I began my early training in art school as an abstract painter because of the push to be one and how it was looked down upon to be a figurative painter. But, I felt I had so much to say as a woman, a person of color, and one who came from a poor working class family. So, in my third year I changed and began to make paintings which, to me, had more meaning and a subtle message that sometimes incorporates the figure.

LO: What advice would you give other artists who want to exhibit in NYC etc?
MB: My advice would be to not judge a book by its cover. Generally the ones who look the least important are the ones that are actually the most important, and have a website!

LO: Please talk about upcoming bodies of work, shows etc that you have coming up.
MB: I am continuing my series of paintings from the influence of living on the upper east side and dealing with class, race, and the bourgeois culture. I will be part of a summer group exhibition, “Juicy” at Gitana Rosa Gallery, Chelsea, opening June 19, as well as artmrkt Hamptons, from July 10 – 13. I am also excited to announce a group exhibition that I am curating, “The New Bitch, Twilight of the Idols.” It will be open from September 4 – October 4 at Gitana Rosa Gallery, Chelsea.

The post Talking Mythology, Race, and Class with Michele Basora appeared first on NY Arts Magazine.

At the Institute of Contemporary Art is Expanding the Field of Painting, highlighting works from the ICA collection that challenge the orthodoxy of traditional materials, subjects, and techniques of the genre. While challenging the orthodoxy of painting’s, well, everything has been going on for generations, the selections here have spark and sex appeal—there is an especially thrilling corner of the show that faces off a typically pneumatic and glowing Lisa Yuskavage with a full length nude portrait of a very pregnant young woman by Alice Neel. The iconic Marilyn Minter Green Pink Caviar video plays in the middle.  The Minter video’s swirling tongues and puffy lips look like sea creatures as they rudely cavort across a candy-smeared surface in slow motion. It is not usual to be presented with so much raw female sexual imagery that somehow maintains the figure’s subjectivity.  Expanding the Field of Painting closes October 2014.

Also at the ICA is the first museum retrospective of the outspoken and influential painter Amy Sillman. It is she we have to thank in part for the current trend in juicy abstraction that flirts with figuration. But she should be revered for the way she has rigorously searched for and found forms and painting processes that can convey the paradox of being a thinking, feeling, sexual being that lives in and through a gendered body. She is one of the most authentically existential painters working right now. In the last gallery, on a small screen, is Sillman’s animation of a Lisa Robertson poem.  To create the animation, Sillman made over two thousand ‘paintings’ on her i-pad. They seamlessly morph into one another as she narrates Robertson’s poem as a voice over. While surrounded in the gallery by some of Sillman’s largest, most tour-de-force paintings, this collaboration of voice and moving image just might be the key work to understanding Sillman’s concerns. While the retrospective is worth a trip to Boston (I recommend a meal at Sam’s afterword), the six minute video can also be found below. Amy Sillman: one lump or two is up till January 5th, 2014.

Leidy Churchman’s show, Lazy River, just opened at the Boston University Art Gallery. His enigmatic works point to paintings future where the traditional relationships between object and subject have been divorced. Churchman often paints figuratively, and the show is predominantly filled with small, thinly painted and yet vibrant works, whose names belie their subject: Rat, Lemon, Pizza Box, Devil. The straightforwardness of these works, their charm and feeling, leaves one straining to connect them in a narrative or other type of structure. While Churchman denies this pleasure, he may be remarking that as our relationship to imagery loses its scaffolding in this contemporary age, what remains is no less heartbreaking, and perhaps much more playful. Don’t step on the giant floor painting. It is called Pool.

Lazy River is open until October 20^th, 2013.

By Emily Auchincloss

The post Report from Boston, Fall 2013. appeared first on NY Arts Magazine.

by: Arianne Milhem

Summer of Photography
July 12 -September 21, 2013
Carolina Nitsch Contemporary Art
534 W 22nd St. NYC
carolinanitsch.com

The post Summer of Photography at Carolina Nitsch Project Room appeared first on NY Arts Magazine.