Hosted by Ben Carter
Two-part interview featuring Linda Sikora.
Linda Sikora: DARKENING GROUND, installation view, 2023. Photo by John Polak.
“Courtney Leonard is the local artist behind two new exhibits on Long Island, at the Heckscher Museum of Art in Huntington and Planting Fields in Oyster Bay. The Heckscher exhibit explores the different definitions of the word breach, focusing on the environment and Leonard’s heritage as a member of the Shinnecock Indian Nation.” – NewsdayTV
Courtney M. Leonard, Contact, 2,023…, 2023, detail. The Heckscher Museum of Art. Museum Purchase: Partial Funding from the Town of Huntington Art Acquisition Fund. Photo courtesy of The Heckscher Museum Art.
“Leonard has opened her first retrospective art exhibition at The Heckscher Museum of Art in Huntington. It showcases her work over the years, exploring ecological issues and Indigenous culture with the whale as a common thread.
Printed on a wall in the exhibit, Leonard poses the question “Can a culture sustain itself when it no longer has access to the environment that fashions that culture?”
In the face of land loss and climate change, she tries to answer that question through her art, speaking to her community’s resilience.
‘Ultimately, the thing that I’ve learned with the work of breaching this question is that we do our best to care for the place that we live on, because it is what we have, and what we love,’ she said.”
Courtney M. Leonard: Logbook 2004-2023, installation at The Heckscher Museum, 2023.
Beth Lipman’s Miles Law in:
AT THE TABLE
WCU Fine Art Museum at Western Carolina University | Culowhee, NC
August 13 through December 6, 2024
WCU Fine Art Museum at Western Carolina University| Culowhee, NC |August 13 – December 6, 2024
installation photos coming soon
“Transparent or opaque, fragile yet impervious, glass has inspired artists and designers, stimulated scientists and engineers, and captivated collectors with its beauty and practicality. Hillwood founder Marjorie Merriweather Post was no exception, and she amassed over 1,600 pieces of glass, created in the 17th-20th centuries in China, Western Europe, Russia, and the United States. This special exhibition will highlight this lesser-known aspect of Hillwood’s collection, featuring a range of styles and techniques, while placing the historic creations in dialogue with astounding contemporary artworks.
Contemporary pieces on loan for the exhibition, by artists Karen LaMonte, Tim Tate, Joyce Scott, Beth Lipman, Fred Wilson, and Debora Moore, will highlight the enduring fascination with glass and developments in the landscape of glass art. Works by artists Karen LaMonte and Joyce Scott will speak to Post’s love for beadwork and fashion, while a sculpture by Beth Lipman will replace a historic table collected by Post. Enchanting glass flowers and orchids by Debora Moore are juxtaposed with Hillwood’s fresh flower arrangements on view.” — Hillwood Estate, Museum & Gardens
“Miles’ Law is a new large-scale work designed to investigate Marjorie Merriweather Post’s use of diplomacy to bridge political, cultural, and societal divides. The sculpture is a rumination on Rufus Miles’s phrase, ‘Where you stand depends on where you sit,’ and explores how one’s view of a situation is shaped by one’s relationship to it. Post deftly employed domestic rituals that literally “brought people to the table” such as dinner parties and other social functions to subtly persuade disparate individuals to empathize with another point of view.” — Beth Lipman
Review by Mark Jenkins | June 26, 2023
artist Lauren Mabry in her studio, photo by Ryan Collerd, 2022
Virtual lunch hour with exhibiting artist Linda Sikora, as she sits down with local potter Mark Shapiro and curator Leslie Ferrin, to discuss her exhibition DARKENING GROUND.
Linda Sikora: DARKENING GROUND
on view at Ferrin Contemporary
April 22 – June 11, 2023
Linda Sikora’s studio is anchored in the genre of functional ceramics. Sikora is interested in the philosophical and the agency of things. Complex, colorfully decorated, and often conceptualized in prototype groups or series, the work draws from the traditions of European 18 & 19th century industrial production porcelain and common crockery infused with a freedom and lightness that is innovative and contemporary. Her work explores the dual nature of ceramics—as objects of beauty and as objects of use—questioning the blurred line between visual art and functional subjects in cultured spaces.
Sikora is the recipient of a United States Artists Fellowship, an award for excellence in teaching and has been recognized for her mentorship as an educator. Her work was acquired by the Smithsonian in 2022 and featured at the Renwick in their 50th-anniversary exhibition “This Present Moment: Crafting a Better World”. She is a renowned ceramics professor at Alfred University where she maintains an active studio practice and lives with her husband Matthew Metz and daughter.
Mark Shapiro makes wood-fired pots in Western Massachusetts. A 2018 Smithsonian Artist Resident Fellow, Mark received a 2020 Center for Craft Research Grant to continue his study of Thomas W. Commeraw, which led to his co-curating “Crafting Freedom: The Life and Legacy of Free Black Potter, Thomas W. Commeraw,” currently on view at the New-York Historical Society. His book on Karen Karnes, A Chosen Path, was published in 2010. He credits Karnes, Michael Simon, and his collaborators, Sam Taylor and Michael Kline, as well as early American stoneware, as his main influences. HIs pots are included in numerous public collections.
More on the exhibition Crafting Freedom: The Life and Legacy of Free Black Potter Thomas W. Commeraw, co-curated by Mark Shapiro.
Find Linda Sikora and Mark Shapiro this summer at the Hilltown Six Pottery Tour, a weekend of tours and demonstrations coordinated by a group of nationally recognized potters based in the Hilltowns of Western Massachusetts.
Saturday, July 29
Project Art, Cummington, MA
Ferrin Contemporary, Sergei Isupov: PAST & PRESENT, 2022, Photo Credit John Polak
Artists represented in this 17th edition of Small Favors range from the most established ceramic artists in the field, to young artists new to the field. Small Favors engages artists’ creativity in new and exciting ways with the challenge of making pieces on a very small scale. For some artists, the work they create is similar to what they normally make, but at a reduced scale. Others use it as an opportunity to break away from what they create in their daily studio practice. There is an open call each year for juried work, as well as a group of invited artists who participate. This year includes artworks coming from Japan, China, and Budapest in addition to those from around the United States.
Preview the almost 400 small artworks ranging from ceramics to wood, metal, glass, fiber, paper, and paint.
Learn more about the Preview HERE.
This radio segment explores how Sergei Isupov and his family use their unique forms of art to express the current war’s affects on each of them.
“Sergei’s parents, Nelli and Vladimir, met in art school in the port city of Odesa in the late 1950s, during the Soviet period. They later settled in Kyiv to raise their two sons, Sergei and Ilya. And they basically insisted that their sons become artists, too.
Sergei’s mother, Nelli, and brother, Ilya, still live in Kyiv. And Sergei talks to them all the time. ‘Sometimes [when] I talk to my mom, I hear sirens in the back,’ Sergei said.”
Excerpts below recently published in The Craft Quarterly from the James Renwick Alliance.
Read the full article HERE.
“My mother Nelli can find something positive in everything that happens around her. Now because of the war, those with cars have left and she says she kind of appreciates that there are fewer cars and people in the city. She lives in the very center of Kyiv and still she goes for walks in the parks. She refuses to go to the bomb shelter even when the air raid sirens howl. During World War II, when she was three years old, she and her mother were evacuated via ship from Stavropol. Their ship was bombed while they were in the Caspian Sea but luckily they both survived.
My whole life my mother has been a working artist. Now, at age 83, she still works hard at her painting and exhibits her work a lot. She says that “people now need to see bright colors.” In March of last year, she had an exhibition at Sofia Kyivska. She went there every day and posted selfies with the visitors on her instagram feed–it looks so normal, and she looks very happy in her ceramic “garden of joy.” Then in July, she had an exhibition at the Bohdan and Varvara Khanenko National Museum of Art. That museum, housed in a beautiful 19th c. mansion, was severely damaged in a nearby Russian strike on October 10 and it’s feared that many parts of their extensive permanent collection may have been damage (editor’s note: Nelli removed her works from the gallery just a week before the bombing). – Sergei Isupov
Learn more about Nelli and her artwork HERE.
Follow Nelli on Instagram HERE.
Illuminating Space
exhibition by Nelli Isupova
The Kyiv Art Gallery National Museum
Kyiv, Ukraine
August 17, 2022
“My brother is also an artist. He evacuated two of his children from the city to a seemingly safe place. His other two children are older and were already in school or working outside of the country. But pretty quickly the war came right to the village where he had evacuated his children. Even with the bombing, he still managed to save them and get them out by making his way through roadblocks and along forest paths. He and his wife took them to the Polish border. The children and their mother have remained exiled in France. According to what we hear it is not easy for them, just as for any refugee.
My brother returned home to Kyiv where his pet was waiting for him. Soon he learned that a bomb had hit the house in the village where his children had been staying. The relative who had taken in his children was buried under the rubble of a fallen wall, but she survived. The children are physically safe, they were taken away in the nick of time.
My brother had a job in the advertising industry, but it is gone now so he works from home; his paintings are full of dramatic unreality. They are beautiful and not intimidating but these paintings are reminiscent of the events happening all around him. It may be obvious for those who know what he’s going through. The paintings do not sell now. Friends who can are helping him survive. He recently exhibited in Paris at a group exhibition with Ukrainian artists and for that he received permission to leave Ukraine for two weeks. He is 51 years old.” – Sergei Isupov
Learn more about Ilya Isupov and is artwork HERE.
Follow Ilya on Facebook HERE.
View a catalogue of additional artworks HERE.
Mark Shapiro, Artist Portrait, 2020, Photo by Carol Lollis
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