Medrie MacPhee in Group Exhibition at Schroeder, Romero & Shredder, Reviewed by Roberta Smith in The New York Times

Art in Review  ‘VIVID’ and ‘PAVERS’ 
By ROBERTA SMITH 
Published: January 20, 2011  

Schroeder Romero & Shredder

"This incautious, ecumenical exhibition of paintings by women spans several generations, styles and a range of reputations. Organized by Janet Phelps, an independent curator, it teeters between a mess and an amazing show of artistic force. The majority of the 30 works on view are all recent and usually quasi-abstract or quasi-figurative, depending on how you look at it. Either way, they define an elastic field of activity. 

The more established figures include Dona Nelson, Nicola Tyson and Harriet Korman, who all lean toward abstraction, as do Barbara Takenaga, Rosanna Bruno, Medrie MacPhee, Sigrid Sandstrom and Jennifer Coates. Karen Heagle, Mala Iqbal and Andrea Champlin revisit still life with varying degrees of realism and juiciness but unwavering conviction, while Iona Rozeal Brown, Judith Linhares and Carrie Moyer focus, more or less directly, on the female nude."

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View exhibition here

ALLYSON STRAFELLA in 'Drawn/Taped/Burned/" @ the Katonah Museum of Art

Drawn/Taped/Burned: Abstraction on Paper, an exhibition of 74 works on paper by 66 artists drawn from a New York private collection. 

"Drawn/Taped/Burned is curated by Ellen Keiter for the Katonah Museum of Art in Westchester County, New York. The exhibition is on view at the Katonah Museum from January 23 through May 1, 2011. For more information on visiting the exhibition, please visit the Museum’s website.

This virtual catalogue pairs each artwork with a written response by one of 45 contributors, including 34 artists, eight scholars, a curator, an editor, and a poet."

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Elena del Rivero on Allyson Strafella

 "The beauty of Allyson Strafella’s carbon paper drawing process lies not only in the unique work of art that is its product, but also in the way her use of a simple and common duplicating device—carbon paper—calls to mind the most central elements of the art of drawing. Throughout human history—from the ancient times of the Altamira caves, through the Renaissance, to the present —carbon has been a primary tool for the creation of images and text. Using a typewriter, generally the means for creating duplicates with carbon paper, Strafella instead wounds the paper, allowing the carbon to bleed forth in images loaded with timeless visual meaning."

MARK SHEINKMAN in 'Drawn/Taped/Burned/" @ the Katonah Museum of Art

 Drawn/Taped/Burned: Abstraction on Paper, an exhibition of 74 works on paper by 66 artists drawn from a New York private collection. 

"Drawn/Taped/Burned is curated by Ellen Keiter for the Katonah Museum of Art in Westchester County, New York. The exhibition is on view at the Katonah Museum from January 23 through May 1, 2011. For more information on visiting the exhibition, please visit the Museum’s website.

This virtual catalogue pairs each artwork with a written response by one of 45 contributors, including 34 artists, eight scholars, a curator, an editor, and a poet."

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Teo González on Mark Sheinkman:

"Rubbing and erasing, dark and light, simple yet complex; all of these contradictions weave together to form 9.21.95 – a graphite drawing, which artist Mark Sheinkman erases as much as he draws.

The piece, as non-referential as it is, brings to mind a number of interpretations: flowing water, piled fabric, a fuzzy TV screen – all of it with a subtlety that makes the image soothing and enveloping.

Wide streaks stretch horizontally while wisps of vertical lines tug downward, suggesting a fluidness that is wholly organic in composition. The act of adding and removing these graphite lines forces the eye to slow down and to submit to these crosscurrents of flow long enough to ride their waves — an effect so arresting, you never want to let it go."

ALLYSON STRAFELLA | 'WORKSIGHT' Opening photos

Marco Breuer in Conversation with Brett Littman: Podcast

November 16, 2010

School of Visual Arts: Photographer Marco Breuer speaks about his body of work and his exhibition at Von Lintel Gallery in New York with curator and critic Brett Littman. Breuer's solo exhibition, "Nature of the Pencil".

Born in Germany, Breuer has work in numerous museum collections including The Museum of Modern Art, New York; the New York Public Library; and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Brett Littman is the executive director of The Drawing Center in New York and the former deputy director at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center.

Presented by the BFA Photography Department and Dear Dave, magazine.

Hear Podcast on iTunesU

ALLYSON STRAFELLA | WORKSIGHT - Opening Reception: Thursday, January 13 , 6-8 PM

Left: path: left, 2010, typed colons, transferred from red carbon paper onto blue paper, 16 1/4 x 10 3/4 inches, unique.
Right: path: right, 2010, typed colons transferred from black carbon paper onto blue paper, 16 1/4 x 10 3/4 inches, unique.

Von Lintel Gallery is pleased to announce its first solo exhibition of new drawings by Allyson Strafella.

January 13 — February 12, 2011

Opening Reception: Thursday, January 13 , 6-8 PM 

Allyson Strafella has been making drawings with a typewriter for 17 years, creating marks that have become her own visual language: a drawing language 'written' by type, and a written language drawn as mark and form. With each strike of the key, she pushes the paper to its physical limit. The typewriter is her tool, though not easily recognizable because her process is uniquely her own.

Mostly intimate in scale, each drawing is made by using a single key of punctuation mark. Strafella works the individual marks into densely concentrated compositions that derive from natural and constructed forms. When the marks are transferred from carbon to plain paper, the cerulean blue, deep red, vivid black or forest green forms pour on the paper's surface in such dense concentration they begin to eat their way through the material. When the marks are transferred from carbon to paper, negatives of her drawings are also produced. Together, this drawing duality creates a movement of recurring forms.

Allyson Strafella's work has been exhibited for nearly two decades, most recently in group exhibitions at the University of Albany, the Norton Museum of Art and the Katonah Museum of Art. Strafella is represented in numerous public and private collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University; the Hammer Museum; and the Yale Art Museum. The artist lives and works in upstate New York.

DLK: Top Photography Venues in New York in 2010

"In the past year, I have reviewed photography shows at a total of 77 different venues in New York and the surrounding area. After sifting through the best shows of the year in yesterday's post (here), I wondered about whether there might be some intriguing patterns if I looked more closely at the venues that were organizing those shows.

I've divided the venues into four groups: Specialist Photography Galleries, Contemporary Art Galleries (who show photography from time to time), Specialist Photography Museums and more general Art Museums (who also show photography from time to time). Of course we can quibble about which group a particular gallery belongs in, but I've done my best to locate them where I think they actually belong. I've then made two simple sets of calculations: a raw tally of the total number of shows I reviewed at each venue, and subsequently, the average rating I gave those specific shows.

In reviewing these statistics, keep in mind a couple of things: 1.) many of these places have multiple gallery spaces, and often run two or more exhibits simultaneously that I might review as separate and distinct shows, so while a normal gallery calendar might have 6-8 shows in a year, some of these locations have twice that many shows on view across the same period of time, and 2.) our rating scale has a high of 3 STARS and a low of 1 STAR..."

Contemporary Art Galleries
Cheim & Read: 3
Gladstone Gallery: 3
Pace and PaceWildenstein: 3
Von Lintel Gallery: 3

Read more @ DLK Collection 

What NOW? - Miami Herald Review

What NOW? Curating at warp speed for the Norton’s Art Basel show

By Tom Austin 

Special to The Miami Herald

"In synch with an era in which Wikileaks is no doubt ready to spill the beans on the Easter Bunny, the Norton Museum of Art in West Palm Beach has mounted Now WHAT?, an exhibition about the notion of how information is manipulated, withheld and spread all over the darn place like some Johnny Appleseed version of Big Brother. The conceit of the show actually mirrors the flying-blind techniques of daily journalism, for which some put-upon grunt on Grub Street tries to make sense of an event — and gather a semblance of truth — in a few hours, with the hope of writing something coherent for the next day’s paper.

As with most news hounds, Norton curators Cheryl Brutvan and Charles Stainback ventured down to Art Basel Miami Beach, sniffed around a bit and then made a quick decision about the breaking curl of contemporary art. They toured the main fair at the Miami Beach Convention Center and such satellite exhibitions as Scope and NADA, choosing 39 art works by 21 artists. Then, 10 days after the close of Art Basel, they presented the results of their intellectual exploration. The Now WHAT? opening was attended by some of the artists from the show and also blew up a whole slew of art-world constructs. Straight from the top, art exhibitions are supposed to take months, even years, to put together. Unknown artists, the eternal interns of life, are meant to suffer for decades before they are included in a museum group show. Perhaps only death, or so the cliché goes, will reveal the dirty truth of an artist’s worth.

The show committed a few missteps in its rush to make a pronouncement on contemporary art, but — given the time constraints — it’s definitely contemporary and not half bad. 

Many of the pieces are drawn straight from the media, such as Kim Rugg’s 2010 work The Story is One Sign, which the curators found at Pulse. Within an obsessive, way-detailed paper piece, Rugg obscured the information conveyed in 30 copies of the same front page of The New York Times. Essentially, Rugg papered the copies over one another, with each front page revealing a fragment of information: a letter of the alphabet, a dollar sign, a number, a bar code. It’s a long way from the great movie of journalism, The Front P age and the subsequent His Girl Friday, but the truths are fairly constant, according to Brutvan, "We all read all these newspapers, but how much of what’s been reported is true, and, in the end, how much do we really know?"

Another piece — Allyson Strafella’s Inverted red catenary , 2010 — was also unearthed at Pulse: Strafella endlessly typed colons on red carbon paper to form a beautiful arc. On the-exchange-of-information front is Julian Montague’s 2010 Volumes from an another piece discovered at Pulse. It’s clever stuff, for which Montague has created faux covers for found books bearing such titles as Imagined Intellectual History of Animals, Architecture and Man,Managing Structural Bird Problems, Atlas of an Infestation, Ecologies of Decay and Wildlife Incursions into Modern Architecture: An Interdisciplinary Symposium, Part 3."

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