Virtual Gallery Talk

Because Abend Gallery is exercising caution and care for their patrons and public during the Coronavirus outbreak by closing their physical doors, they have opened up online gateways for you to still see the Artists Off Grid exhibition, and in these Gallery Talks, to get to know the artists.

Read More

Reformation 2017

The Reformation 2017 Lutheran Art Invitational celebrated the 500th anniversary of the Lutheran Reformation, at the YFAC Gallery at Bethany Lutheran College. 

EXHIBITION CURATOR AND CATALOGUE EDITOR: WILLIAM BUKOWSKI
CATALOGUE DESIGN: KAREE HENRICH
(c) Bethany Lutheran College, Mankato MN

Participating artists: Nathan Beilke, Anna Biedenbender, Jeff Bukowski, William Bukowski, Paul Burmeister, Charis Carmichael Braun, Jesse Cordes, Kristen Gjerdstet, Annette Hartzel, Lance Hartzel, Jason Jaspersen, Chad Lindemann, Karyn Lukasek, Ben Lundsten, Jim Matson, Jonathan Mayer, Don Moldstad, Eric Ouren, Andy Overn, Kurt Shrader, Erik Soule, Joey Steinbach, Paul Trapp, Alicia Ulm, Missy Vandermause, Anne Wendland, Malia Wiley, Denice Woller

Participating writers: Paul Burmeister, Tim Schmeling, Luke Ulrich

Reformation 2017

Installation view in the gallery at the Ylvisaker Fine Arts Center. 

Installation view in the gallery at the Ylvisaker Fine Arts Center. 

Lutheran Art Invitational

For the 500th anniversary of the Reformation, the Bethany Lutheran College Art Department invited 26 artists, two filmmakers and three writers to celebrate with works of paintings, prints, drawings, photography, ceramics, video and writings. Some of the artists are faculty members at Bethany Lutheran College, Wisconsin Lutheran College, or Martin Luther College. The other artists are alumni from these schools.

This exhibition is on display in the Ylvisaker Fine Arts Center at Bethany Lutheran College in Mankato, Minnesota, from October 1 until November 22, 2017. A gallery talk on “Luther, Vocation and the Arts” is scheduled for October 26, at 7:00 pm.

Participating artists: Nathan Beilke, Anna Biedenbender, Jeff Bukowski, William Bukowski, Paul Burmeister, Charis Carmichael Braun, Jesse Cordes, Kristen Gjerdstet, Annette Hartzel, Lance Hartzel, Jason Jaspersen, Chad Lindemann, Karyn Lukasek, Ben Lundsten, Jim Matson, Jonathan Mayer, Don Moldstad, Eric Ouren, Andy Overn, Kurt Shrader, Erik Soule, Joey Steinbach, Paul Trapp, Alicia Ulm, Missy Vandermause, Anne Wendland, Malia Wiley, Denice Woller; with participating writers: Paul Burmeister, Tim Schmeling, Luke Ulrich.

Reformation Reformed

I am pleased to have a work included in this invitational exhibition at Concordia University in St. Paul, MN, celebrating the 500th anniversary of Luther’s Reformation, on display Oct. 19 through Nov. 15, 2017 at the Concordia Gallery. 

Curator Keith J. Williams explains, "Martin Luther saw issues in his church and chose to try to reform the institution with an earnest intent to help foster a new relationship to spirituality among the people. Concordia University’s Reformation Reformed invitational exhibition asks Lutheran artists to envision works of art that creatively project forward the concept of ongoing 'reformation' into an unknown future."


Concordia Art Center at 1301 Marshall Avenue, St. Paul, MN   (Frontispiece: Junker Jörg, 1521, Intaglio, Diego Lasansky,(2015)

PALETTE at Abend Gallery

June 15th - July 8th, 2017    ■    Opening Reception: June 15th, 6-9pm    ■   1412 Wazee Street, Denver, CO 80202    ■   Curated by Dina Brodsky & Trek Lexington

abendgallerylogo.jpg

Participating Artists: Liz Adams-Jones, James Adelman, Erin Anderson, Steven Assael, Daniel Bilodeau, Luis Borrero, Maya Brodsky, Charis Carmichael Braun, Zach Brown, Sue Bryan, Garrett Cook, April Coppini, Diana Corvelle, Benjamin Craig, Cara DeAngelis, Dimitri Desiron, Michelle Doll, Daniel Doubrovkine, Heidi Elbers, Christian Fagerlund, Shauna Finn, Julien Gardair, Nick Gebhart, Jennifer Gennari, Alonsa Guevara, Andrew Haines, Eben Haines, Joshua Henderson, F Scott Hess, Rafael Hoekstra, Caitlin Hurd, Kieran Ingram, John Jacobsmeyer, Yunsung Jang, Marshall Jones, Kit King, Evan Kitson, Brandy Kraft, Maria Kreyn, James Kroner, Shawn Krueger, Andrew Lenaghan, Amber Lia-Kloppel, Tim Lowly, Daniel Maidman, Brian Mashburn, Adam McGalliard, Anna Mogilevsky, Tun Myaing, Jessica Pisano, Kim Power, James Raczkowski, Per Elof Nilsson Ricklund, Matt Rota, Nicolas Sanchez, Denis Sarazhin, Raphael Sassi, Victoria Selbach, Josh Suda, Maria Teicher, Mark Trujillo, Emilio Villalba, Melanie Vote, John Wellington, John Wentz, Timothy Wilson, Zane York, Miles Yoshida

AbendGallery_Palette_spread.jpg

No Net Ensnares Me

To create art is also an act in self-sufficiency, intelligence, and courage ... and the eleven women artists in No Net Ensnares Me assert their own independent wills to make. Fastidious technical knowledge, exploration of materials, and emphasis on craft and skill demonstrate that these artists, and their artworks, speak in a voice as clear as Jane’s.

Read More

Nasty Women Exhibition

I am pleased to be included in the Nasty Women RI Exhibition hosted by Hera Gallery in Wakefield, Rhode Island. The "seminal" Nasty Women Exhibition which originated in Queens NY was started Roxanne Jackson and Jessamyn Fiore as a "group exhibition that serves to demonstrate solidarity among artists who identify with being a Nasty Woman in the face of threats to roll back women’s rights."  

The Nasty Women RI Exhibition is also a fundraiser to benefit Madre, an organization that helps women all around the globe fight for their rights. The Nasty Women RI curatorial & support team at Hera Gallery includes Andrea Sepe, Jackie Lemmon, Nycole Matthews,  Mara Trachtenberg, and Sharlene Santos.

What the 50 Memorable Painters from 2015 Painted in 2016

After being highlighted as one of 50 Memorable Painters in 2015 by curators John Seed and Didi Menendez, PoetsArtists published a follow-up: “What the 50 Memorable Painters from 2015 Painted in 2016.” This is a copy-paste and selected-screenshot (and condensed) record of the webpage that was originally published: http://www.poetsandartists.com/magazine/2016/12/27/what-some-of-the-50-memorable-painters-from-2015-painted-in-2016

We revisited with some of our 50 Most Memorable Painters from 2015 to see what they have been up to. From the sampling of the artwork you see here, they are still as memorable as ever. It has been a tough year for many.  As publisher, I thought it best to not bring you another list this year.  Instead let's treasure what we already have and hang on to it for little longer.  I think Ron Francis' painting cumulates how most of us feel about 2016. Please read the statements of each artist's recap of their year and take a look at last year's edition here.

For next year we are going to publish a 100 Great Figurative Artworks anthology. Notice that we are focusing on the amount of artwork and not the number of artists. Steven DaLuz will be selecting the works. Information is coming to us from everywhere and I think it is important to have some sort of anthology to offer our readers, galleries, art enthusiasts and collectors so they may have a starting point and then they may take it further from there. 

For me, I already have 2017 firmly planted in our calendar with group shows in New York, Denver, Chicago, and Los Angeles with a possible one still in the works in Florida. We are also now publishing heavily on our blog which is feeding information about our community of artists and poets to Apple News. Lorena Kloosterboer one of our staff writers will continue to publish articles about our artist in our blog but more importantly I have given her the position of the head writer.  Take a look at her introduction and blurbs about the art in FORMATION at Bernarducci.Meisel. 

I already have my eyes set past 2017 but first let's reflect on the art we created in 2016 and see where where our hard work will take us next.

—  Didi Menendez

In early spring of 2016, the loss of my full-time arts-admin work destabilized me. I set myself to see this situation (with the subsequent searching and interviewing for, and finally securing two part-time jobs) as a fertile place to grow my body of work which I intended to bloom into a robust studio practice. But every session in my studio was hard-won as my mental energy was spent sorting out What This Is Now rather than focusing my vision on my work. The work started to bog down as I floundered in the chaos between schedules/projects/responsibilities. I am grateful for the life jacket that was thrown to me in autumn, when I was included in “Point of Origin” at The Lodge Gallery. This show kept me afloat and I’ve since been able to secure lines to other exhibitions. Despite the instability, this year saw my paintings grow more bigger, more gutsy, more tenacious than they have been before. Even when I feel like I’m underwater!

— Charis J. Carmichael Braun

Point of Origin

THE BLOG

Point of Origin

10/27/2016 08:04 pm ET

Daniel Maidman
artist and novelist

I recently had an experience with a themed art show that turned out shockingly well. This was “Point of Origin,” curated by Dina Brodsky and Trek Lexington, and exhibited at The Lodge Gallery, on the Lower East Side. I’ve written about all these entities before, except for the mysterious Mr. Lexington. They’re all fixtures of the part of the New York art scene I’m involved in.

Brodsky and Lexington are phenomenal curators, and much appreciated for it - Lexington’s Instagram (@treklexington) was up to 172k followers last time I checked. So their invitations for this show went out, and I was fortunate enough to make the cut. The theme for the show was artwork painted on palettes. This is a pretty clever idea, because painters have an intimate and tactile relationship with their palettes. All painters have a different take on the palette - on its ideal shape, color, and placement, on what it should be made of, on the arrangement and amount of paint on it, on where and how to mix the paint. I myself am lazy as hell, and don’t like to clean palettes, so I use disposable wax paper palette pads. One upside of my arrangement is that if I like how a particular group of colors turned out, I can use a sharpie to label each color on the palette and save it. I have a library of such sheets.

For the show, though, I went out and bought a proper wood palette. In fact, it was an unusual enough format for a painting that virtually everybody was going to have to make a new painting for the show - they wouldn’t just happen to have something relevant lying around the studio. I looked at the artist list. It included a good fraction of the most talented and creative representational painters I know. It’s not a huge world. Although many of us haven’t met in person, we all know and admire one another’s work. These two features, that new work would be required, and that the field was full of excellent painters, resulted in the quality of the show. How? I think because we all got really competitive. Not to “win,” but simply to earn our spot amongst such peers. I know I immediately began trying to think of ways to do something better than I’d done before. I suspect others did too, in a virtuous cycle that resulted in the 50+ pieces presented.

Jason Patrick Voegele and Keith Schweitzer, whose project The Lodge Gallery is, hung it beautifully, and if you’re in town, you should go see the show; it’s up until November 13th. I’m proud to be included in it. A selection of pieces is included in the slideshow below. They all look better in person. They look like jewels. Go, go, go. Thank you to Brodsky and Lexington for honoring me with inclusion, to Voegele and Schweitzer for showing the work, and to the other painters for inspiring me to do better. I think this is how it should work.

—

Point of Origin
curated by Dina Brodsky & Trek Lexington
until November 13th, 2016
The Lodge Gallery
131 Chrystie Street, New York, NY 10002

Sing For Hope Piano "Ribbon Cutting"

To use a musical phrase, this "Ribbon Cutting Ceremony" was the elision* to the largest public art program in New York City: Each and every one of the 50 Sing for Hope Pianos has been permanently homed in an NYC public school after their musical sojourn through the City's parks and public spaces. These pianos will now go on to have a new and resounding life supporting kids who love to learn music.  

Read More