Integrazia.Group show curated by Moti Golan. Tel Aviv-Ayelet Hashachar Gallery. Kibutz Ayelet
Hashachar, Israel. July 2010
התערוכה 'אינטגרציה' נפתחה בגלריית "תל-אביב/איילת השחר" בקיבוץ איילתהשחר. אוצר התערוכה הוא מוטי גולן. בראיון משנת 2005 הוא אומר: "במלחמה לקיתי בהלם קרב קשה, ומשהו בפציעה עשה לי סוויץ'. מאז התחלתי לצייר עוד ועוד יצירות בנושא מיתוס הגיבור והלם קרב, שהציגו כיצד אנו, החיילים, נראינו מתחת למדים. י
Canal Street Gallery located at 2219 Canal St., Houston is proud to present seven local artists in a group
Read MoreDrawing performance with models outside of Art League Houston. July 7 6-9
Emily Sloan
Drawing performance with models outside of Art League Houston. July 7 6-9
Read MoreEvery day when we get dressed in the morning and look in the mirror, we face the issue of body image. So ingrained in us, it manifests in our walk, facial expressions and even in the way we relate to others. For personal or societal reasons, we often pair our body’s demand for...
Read MoreThe Facebook invitation for "Additional Support" at SpaceTaker's ARC Gallery curated by Lindsey Peyton briefly described the show as "exploring the body's need for support - for aesthetic enhancement, for physical augmentation, and for societal acceptance - and
Read MoreHOUSTON (May 4, 2010) - This May, the Spacetaker's Artist Resource Center (ARC) will host "Additional Support," a group exhibition featuring paintings by Hagit Barkai, body casting sculptures by Kelley Devine and small metal sculptures by Jessica Jacobi.
Read MoreSpacetaker’s new gallery space features group exhibit: Additional Support
Artist Resource Center (ARC) Features Artists Hagit Barkai, Kelley Devine, and Jessica Jacobi During May
HOUSTON (May 4, 2010) - This May, the Spacetaker's Artist Resource Center (ARC) will host "Additional Support," a group exhibition featuring paintings by Hagit Barkai, body casting sculptures by Kelley Devine and small metal sculptures by Jessica Jacobi. An opening reception will be held from 6 to 9 PM on Saturday, May 15th, complete with a fashion show of the wearable works and a live body casting demonstration. The show will remain on display through June 19th, and the public is invited without charge. The featured artists are currently Houston residents and were chosen to exhibit together due to their respective works’ treatment of the human form.
About Additional Support:
Support: to be capable of bearing; withstand.
The body demands support due to numerous physical and psychical circumstances. As the body progresses through it’s lifetime, its natural framework is challenged, and the need for additional support is revealed through the body’s awkwardness, vulnerability, and visceral nature. In response, individuals and society create various tools to hide, enhance, or transform the body (i.e. undergarments, piercings, etc.), enabling it to function in an acceptable way within society. Additional Support explores possible manifestations of such creations– if a body accepts society’s methods of support, is the body in turn accepted by society? The work demonstrates tension between acceptance of and repulsion to the body, calling into question the motivations behind such judgments and redefining the notion of “misfit.” In exploring the body’s incongruence with its surroundings, the three bodies of work represent failed attempts to reconcile the physical image of the body with self-image. The exhibition also plays with the artwork’s need for support to assume meaning: from the video and performances supporting the wearable art and the cast hangers giving a sense of the missing body, to the paintings negotiations with the frame.
About the Artists:
Jessica Jacobi’s small metal sculptures are designed to question methods for defining acceptable body conditions. Originally from Houston, she received her B.F.A.in Studio Art at the University of Texas at Austin and her M. F. A. in Metals and Jewelry Design from Texas Tech University. She has exhibited at national juried exhibitions -- from Elder Gallery in Lincoln, Nebraska to Meadows Gallery at the Center for the Visual Arts in Denton, Texas. She exhibited in 2008 Craft Texas show at the Houston Center for Contemporary Craft and her works have also been displayed at Runnels Gallery, Eastern New Mexico State University and Landmark Arts Studio Gallery at Texas Tech University School of Art.
Kelley Devine studied sculpture and visual arts at Southeastern Louisiana University and has now exhibited at various shows from Jonathan Ferrera Gallery in New Orleans and SLU Visual Arts Society Exhibitions in Hammond, La. to Galleria Lazzara and Sculptures by Design Studio in Houston. Devine describers herself as “a mother, artist, entrepreneur and student” and says her art helps her communicate what she sees as the opposing forces within the human psyche. “As a painter and a sculptor, I strive to incorporate the concept of how self-perception and internalization differs from the perceptions and assumptions of others, by combining materials, applications or images that are visually and psychologically contrary to one another.”
Originally from Israel, Hagit Barkai received an MFA degree from Penn State University, a B.A. in Philosophy from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and also studied at the Jerusalem Studio School. Her work has been shown in exhibitions at Praxis Gallery, New York; Houston Art League; Chashama, Gallery, New York ; Crane Gallery, Philadelphia; Fe Gallery, Pittsburgh; and the Pennsylvania State Museum, in Harrisburg. She has been featured in the Houston Chronicle; the Pittsburgh City Paper, and in Research Penn State. Awards include the College Art Association Professional Development Fellowship in Visual Arts in 2008, first place for the Visual Arts in the Graduate Research Exhibition at Penn State University in 2007, a travel grant to Israel from The School of Visual Arts at Penn State in 2006, and being selected to represent Penn State in the Big Ten Conference in Chicago in 2006.
Barkai said she looks at “body languages of vulnerability, awkwardness and misfits as expressions that move between acceptance and resistance.” She seeks to maintain balance between one’s struggles to gain visibility and struggles to escape it. “I paint bodies for what they fail to be, for how they fail to settle in any image or concept that confine and regulate them, and for how they are never able to close the gap between appearance and experience,” the artist explains. “I am painting in an attempt to capture this moment of losing and gaining respectability.
For more information about Spacetaker, visit the www.spacetaker.org.
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About Spacetaker:
Spacetaker is a 501(c)3 professional organization and Artist Resource Center located in Houston’s First Ward whose mission it to provide artists and small non-profits access to economic development, continuing education, and networking opportunities to support their professional growth. Spacetaker is located at 2101 Winter Street, Studio B11 Houston 77007.
www.spacetaker.org
Art League Houston is pleased to announce ConcealDisclose, an exhibition of paintings by Hagit Barkai and photographs by Tala Vahabzadeh, which will be on view in the ALH project space May 8 through June 19, 2009. The opening reception for the exhibition is Friday, May 8, 2009 from 6:00 - 8:00 p.m., with an artist talk by Hagit Barkai at 6:15 p.m.
Read MoreGulf Coast Art Corridor with labotanica present:
la lengua muerta
Opening reception: Friday, April 9, 2010, 6-8pm
Exhibition Dates: April 9 – May 15, 2010
labotanica is open to the public saturday, 1-5pm
labotanica presents La Lengua Muerta (The Dead Tongue) an exhibition of new works driven by private conversations about deciphering how Latin we still are. A group of uprooted and acclimating emerging artists are both subversively and romantically embracing classification as a point of departure to investigate their historical and current geography.
A panel of established artists, curators and critics: Elia Arce, Margarita Cabrera, Aisen Chacin, Delilah Montoya, Ruben Cordova and Surpik Angelini, will participate in dialogue at labotanica, offering the artists their Latin Label experience. At the core of these dialogues lays the need to move beyond traditional categories of “Latin American Art” and to frame new definitions, visual languages and creative practices among these artists in Houston.
La Lengua Muerta will yield visual and performance works to be as diverse (in form, subject, aesthetics, and influences) as being Latin American.
Participating artists include: Daniel Adame, Chuy Benitez, Aisen Caro Chacin, Claudia Cruz, Sebastian Forray, Jonathan Lopez, Angel Quesada, Cheyanne Ramos, Stephanie Saint Sanchez, and Alex Soares.
La Lengua Muerta is a Gulf Coast Art Corridor project curated by Aisen Caro Chacin
La Lengua Muerta is a Gulf Coast Art Corridor project conceived and commissioned by Elia Arce, and supported by an Arts and Activism Exchange grant. Arce is currently an Artist-In-Residence at DiverseWorks supported by a New Voices Fellowship, a Ford Foundation Initiative.
Texas National 2010, curated by Judy Pfaff. Cole Arts Center, Nacogdoches TX, April 10.
Texas National 2010, curated by Judy Pfaff. Cole Arts Center, Nacogdoches TX, April 10.
Read MorePresented by Art League Houston at Art League Houston
May 8-June 19, 2009
Art League Houston is pleased to announce ConcealDisclose, an exhibition of paintings by Hagit Barkai and photographs by Tala Vahabzadeh, which will be on view in the ALH project space May 8 through June 19, 2009. The opening reception for the exhibition is Friday, May 8, 2009 from 6:00 - 8:00 p.m., with an artist talk by Hagit Barkai at 6:15 p.m.
Both women come from the Middle East, and their works are filtered through the vantage point of personal experience. Although they work with different media, subjects, and approaches, both Vahabzadeh and Barkai deal with issues of concealment and disclosure, hence the title of the exhibition.
Hagit Barkai is from Israel. "Growing up in the ideological atmosphere in a Jewish Settlement Bet El in the West Bank, I was at the center of an increasingly hostile moral and political quarrel, which resulted in extremely defensive attitudes. Part of my education included a rewrite of events and ways of thinking that did not sustain the religious and national convictions while at the same time assuming to hold ideals such as liberalism, democracy and basic human rights. I see this work as creating a visual echo of public discourses that weave a camouflage around such events."
Her paintings focus on public and private demands addressed to the body. Viewing the body as the primary receptacle in which rights are given and removed, and through which histories take place and are understood, Barkai's subjects stand as metaphors for those social imperatives which direct and enforce aspects of identity and self. Through observations of body language, Barkai depicts the body for what it fails to be - how the body refuses to settle into any image or concept that confines and regulates, and how the body can never bridge the gap between its outward appearance and its inner realm of experience.
The series Every Body Knows is deeply informed by Barkai's personal history, and questions the borders, both literally and metaphorically drawn between victimization and victim-hood. Within Every Body Knows are four families of characters - the Blindfold, the Vomiters, the Middays and the Waiters, whose imagery stems from real events which form the basis of the political atmosphere in Israel, including unjustified detainments, public strip-searches, harassments, violence, and torture, all dependent upon a person's identity.
The portraits in Barkai's series Cross attempt to blur the line or "border" between young and old, alive and dead, normal and monstrous. In these, Barkai also demonstrates how the potential of a person, and the threats to that person's body are not so very different things. By creating images of newborns, along with, the dying, deformed or traumatized, the artist constructs a realm inhabited by those no longer fully existing, those not yet fully realized, and those that are for one reason or another considered not to be there at all.
Tala Vahabzadeh's current series of photographs are based on her personal experience of being an Iranian/Muslim woman undercover since she was nine years old. These works seek to show the conflicting worlds of tradition (public life) and modernity (personal life) and the effect this conflict has in the lives of contemporary women in Iran. Through simple, fairy tale like stories, Vahabzadeh uses the image of the veil in both its traditional iconic sense, and as a metaphor of the lack of freedom. Herself as subject, Vahabzadeh uses various props and arrangements, and different printing processes to create the appropriate ambience and atmosphere needed to expose the meaning behind her untitled pieces. In one work, the fully veiled Vahabzadeh perches high in the branches of a tree.
The image of a woman as a bird is based on a common joke in Iran that compares a woman wearing full veil to a black crow. In another photograph, the artist is hunched down, surrounded by greenery, as though in a garden. Again fully veiled, she munches on an apple, and on top of her head she wears a mask, which depicts the typical face of innocence in Persian Miniatures. As one might guess, this photo is a metaphor for Eve and the original sin. By not covering her face with the mask, Vahabzadeh asserts herself as a normal woman, who like any other woman is not that innocent, and is subject to on occasion doing "wrong" things.
Vahabzadeh says "These photographs are a representation of how I feel about being forced to cover myself and how in constantly being physically censored, I both consciously and unconsciously apply that censorship to my personal life."
ABOUT THE ARTISTS:
Hagit Barkai is from Israel and currently lives in Houston. She attended The Jerusalem Studio School and the Maryland Institute College of Art, and has a B.A. in Philosophy from Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and an M.F.A. from Penn State University, School of the Visual Arts. Her work has shown at venues that include the Susquehanna Art Museum and the State Museum in Harrisburg, PA, Penn State University in State College, PA, and Crane Arts in Philadelphia, among others. In the summer of 2009 she will be in an exhibition organized by MFANow entitled Identity, Self, which travels to New York, Los Angeles, and Beijing.
Among her awards are a 2008 CAA Professional Development Fellowship Award, 2007 First Place for the Visual Arts in University-Wide Research Exhibition, and a Penn State University Graduate Student Travel Grant to Israel.
Tala Vahabzadeh is from Tehran, Iran and currently lives in Houston, Texas. She received a Bachelors in Photography from the University of Tehran and is a Masters Candidate in Photography/Digital Media at the University of Houston. While living in Tehran she worked as a commercial photographer for an advertising and industrial photography company, and also assisted on a major documentary photography project that focused on the historical monuments of Iran. She has exhibited her work in both Houston and Tehran, at venues that include the University of Tehran, The University of Houston, Lawndale Art Center, Commerce Street Artists' Warehouse and Lone Star College, among others.
This project is funded in part by a grant from the City of Houston through Houston Arts Alliance. This project is funded in part by Texas Commission on the Arts. This project is also funded in part by the Houston Endowment, Inc., The Brown Foundation, and the Wortham Foundation.
ABOUT ART LEAGUE HOUSTON: Art League Houston is one of Houston's longest operating non-profit visual arts organizations and was the first alternative art space in Texas. Founded in 1948 and incorporated as a non-profit organization in 1953, Art League Houston (ALH) was created to promote the public appreciation of and interest in the visual arts. During the past 61 years, ALH has provided over 760 exhibitions to the Houston community, showcased the work of nearly 22,200 artists, and instructed over 35,000 students through the Art League School and Outreach Program. OUR MISSION The mission of Art League Houston is to cultivate awareness, appreciation, and accessibility of contemporary visual art within the community for its cultural enrichment. Art League Houston provides an opportunity for all members of the community to experience the contemporary visual arts. We achieve our mission through exhibitions, education and outreach programs.
Art League Houston acknowledges the following private foundations and corporations for their support this season: Laurie and Kevin Foxx and Aqua Foxx Productions, Houston Endowment, Inc., Brown Foundation, Inc., Eleanor and Frank Freed Foundation, John P. McGovern Foundation, Mrs. Katherine McGovern, JPMorgan Chase Foundation, Oshman Foundation, Target, and the Wortham Foundation, Inc. Art League Houston also wishes to thank its many generous individual donors for their support.
Painter Hagit Barkai has lived in Houston only since September. But when ConcealDisclose , her two-person exhibition with photographer Tala Vahabzadeh, opens tonight at Art League Houston, she’ll already have fulfilled a dream that might have been difficult to realize in her native country,
Read MorePresented by Art League Houston at Art League Houston
May 8-June 19, 2009
Art League Houston is pleased to announce ConcealDisclose, an exhibition of paintings by Hagit Barkai and photographs by Tala Vahabzadeh, which will be on view in the ALH project space May 8 through June 19, 2009. The opening reception for the exhibition is Friday, May 8, 2009 from 6:00 - 8:00 p.m., with an artist talk by Hagit Barkai at 6:15 p.m.
Both women come from the Middle East, and their works are filtered through the vantage point of personal experience. Although they work with different media, subjects, and approaches, both Vahabzadeh and Barkai deal with issues of concealment and disclosure, hence the title of the exhibition.
Hagit Barkai is from Israel. "Growing up in the ideological atmosphere in a Jewish Settlement Bet El in the West Bank, I was at the center of an increasingly hostile moral and political quarrel, which resulted in extremely defensive attitudes. Part of my education included a rewrite of events and ways of thinking that did not sustain the religious and national convictions while at the same time assuming to hold ideals such as liberalism, democracy and basic human rights. I see this work as creating a visual echo of public discourses that weave a camouflage around such events."
Her paintings focus on public and private demands addressed to the body. Viewing the body as the primary receptacle in which rights are given and removed, and through which histories take place and are understood, Barkai's subjects stand as metaphors for those social imperatives which direct and enforce aspects of identity and self. Through observations of body language, Barkai depicts the body for what it fails to be - how the body refuses to settle into any image or concept that confines and regulates, and how the body can never bridge the gap between its outward appearance and its inner realm of experience.
The series Every Body Knows is deeply informed by Barkai's personal history, and questions the borders, both literally and metaphorically drawn between victimization and victim-hood. Within Every Body Knows are four families of characters - the Blindfold, the Vomiters, the Middays and the Waiters, whose imagery stems from real events which form the basis of the political atmosphere in Israel, including unjustified detainments, public strip-searches, harassments, violence, and torture, all dependent upon a person's identity.
The portraits in Barkai's series Cross attempt to blur the line or "border" between young and old, alive and dead, normal and monstrous. In these, Barkai also demonstrates how the potential of a person, and the threats to that person's body are not so very different things. By creating images of newborns, along with, the dying, deformed or traumatized, the artist constructs a realm inhabited by those no longer fully existing, those not yet fully realized, and those that are for one reason or another considered not to be there at all.
Tala Vahabzadeh's current series of photographs are based on her personal experience of being an Iranian/Muslim woman undercover since she was nine years old. These works seek to show the conflicting worlds of tradition (public life) and modernity (personal life) and the effect this conflict has in the lives of contemporary women in Iran. Through simple, fairy tale like stories, Vahabzadeh uses the image of the veil in both its traditional iconic sense, and as a metaphor of the lack of freedom. Herself as subject, Vahabzadeh uses various props and arrangements, and different printing processes to create the appropriate ambience and atmosphere needed to expose the meaning behind her untitled pieces. In one work, the fully veiled Vahabzadeh perches high in the branches of a tree.
The image of a woman as a bird is based on a common joke in Iran that compares a woman wearing full veil to a black crow. In another photograph, the artist is hunched down, surrounded by greenery, as though in a garden. Again fully veiled, she munches on an apple, and on top of her head she wears a mask, which depicts the typical face of innocence in Persian Miniatures. As one might guess, this photo is a metaphor for Eve and the original sin. By not covering her face with the mask, Vahabzadeh asserts herself as a normal woman, who like any other woman is not that innocent, and is subject to on occasion doing "wrong" things.
Vahabzadeh says "These photographs are a representation of how I feel about being forced to cover myself and how in constantly being physically censored, I both consciously and unconsciously apply that censorship to my personal life."
ABOUT THE ARTISTS:
Hagit Barkai is from Israel and currently lives in Houston. She attended The Jerusalem Studio School and the Maryland Institute College of Art, and has a B.A. in Philosophy from Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and an M.F.A. from Penn State University, School of the Visual Arts. Her work has shown at venues that include the Susquehanna Art Museum and the State Museum in Harrisburg, PA, Penn State University in State College, PA, and Crane Arts in Philadelphia, among others. In the summer of 2009 she will be in an exhibition organized by MFANow entitled Identity, Self, which travels to New York, Los Angeles, and Beijing.
Among her awards are a 2008 CAA Professional Development Fellowship Award, 2007 First Place for the Visual Arts in University-Wide Research Exhibition, and a Penn State University Graduate Student Travel Grant to Israel.
Tala Vahabzadeh is from Tehran, Iran and currently lives in Houston, Texas. She received a Bachelors in Photography from the University of Tehran and is a Masters Candidate in Photography/Digital Media at the University of Houston. While living in Tehran she worked as a commercial photographer for an advertising and industrial photography company, and also assisted on a major documentary photography project that focused on the historical monuments of Iran. She has exhibited her work in both Houston and Tehran, at venues that include the University of Tehran, The University of Houston, Lawndale Art Center, Commerce Street Artists' Warehouse and Lone Star College, among others.
This project is funded in part by a grant from the City of Houston through Houston Arts Alliance. This project is funded in part by Texas Commission on the Arts. This project is also funded in part by the Houston Endowment, Inc., The Brown Foundation, and the Wortham Foundation.
ABOUT ART LEAGUE HOUSTON: Art League Houston is one of Houston's longest operating non-profit visual arts organizations and was the first alternative art space in Texas. Founded in 1948 and incorporated as a non-profit organization in 1953, Art League Houston (ALH) was created to promote the public appreciation of and interest in the visual arts. During the past 61 years, ALH has provided over 760 exhibitions to the Houston community, showcased the work of nearly 22,200 artists, and instructed over 35,000 students through the Art League School and Outreach Program. OUR MISSION The mission of Art League Houston is to cultivate awareness, appreciation, and accessibility of contemporary visual art within the community for its cultural enrichment. Art League Houston provides an opportunity for all members of the community to experience the contemporary visual arts. We achieve our mission through exhibitions, education and outreach programs.
Art League Houston acknowledges the following private foundations and corporations for their support this season: Laurie and Kevin Foxx and Aqua Foxx Productions, Houston Endowment, Inc., Brown Foundation, Inc., Eleanor and Frank Freed Foundation, John P. McGovern Foundation, Mrs. Katherine McGovern, JPMorgan Chase Foundation, Oshman Foundation, Target, and the Wortham Foundation, Inc. Art League Houston also wishes to thank its many generous individual donors for their support.
While contemporary art has long inclined toward personal expression and individual concerns, current events have inspired many artists to politicize their aesthetic and conceptual approaches. These artists, moreover, have gone beyond exploring subcultures and bringing little-
Read MoreWhile contemporary art has long inclined toward personal expression and individual concerns, current events have inspired many artists to politicize their aesthetic and conceptual approaches. These artists, moreover, have gone beyond exploring subcultures and bringing little-recognized wrongs to light. Now they've taken up unswerving, no-holds barred criticism of the prevailing socio-political system. We haven't seen this kind of concentrated anti-war effort in the art world since Dada. While this is a strong statement to make, Fe Gallery's exhibition Pinky Swear: A Political Exhibition Addressing Promises is worthy of it.
The Urban Dictionary defines a "pinky swear" as an eternally binding promise made by two people hooking pinky fingers together. Breaking the promise is supposed to result in the offender losing his or her pinky. Curator Vicky A. Clark unites this concept of pledges with political commentary. The exhibition features works by members of Group A, an association founded in 1944 and credited with establishing the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts.
While all of Pinky Swear's works speak out against America's present political course, some are more searing in their condemnations than others. Perhaps the most conceptually compelling is Bob Ziller's 2007 sculpture "Trophy." It directly addresses the issue of broken promises, particularly those relating to the Geneva Conventions and the writ of habeas corpus, meant to prevent unlawful detention. Composed of a rusty shovel head mounted on a concrete cylinder, "Trophy" bears the scratched silhouette of the now-iconic hooded and wired Abu Ghraib prisoner Satar Jabar. The aggressive method by which the image was created -- by scraping away the shovel's surface -- and the conceptually shrewd use of the shovel itself contribute to the work's power: Shovels are funerary implements crucial to burial. They also imply hole-digging, both ideological and literal.
Hagit Barkai's oil on canvas "The Waiter" (2007), which depicts a near-faceless, naked figure apparently bound and seated on a wooden bench, and Judy Charlson's undated raku bas reliefs "Hanging Out in Baghdad" all deal with confinement, torture and the paradox of "forced democratization" on a more visceral level.
Another conceptual jewel is Wendy Osher's "Invisible Bridge," made from wire, rubber bands, chewing gum and newsprint. These materials, respectively associated with quick fixes and propaganda, would not bear the weight of a toy soldier. Yet the construction lingers above viewers, presenting letter-for-letter the Bush administration's comfortless message: "Stay the Course."
Paula Weiner's mixed-media work "Sedition Flag" depicts an American flag behind Plexiglas on which she has written: "Our Country 'tis of thee has secrets thou shalt never see." Alongside are citations from the 1917 Espionage Act -- implying the 1918 Sedition Act, which made speaking out against the government treasonous. Although the Sedition Act was repealed in 1921, Weiner points out that parts of the Espionage Act remain law.
Ultimately, Pinky Swear speaks to more than broken promises. It also reflects our tendency toward continuous, soul-sedating consumption. Witness Steve Hasley's "Toxic Iconography #1," featuring pretend explosives sheathed in Wal-Mart bags, and Jennifer L. Dinovitz's mixed-media medicine cabinet in "Hard Pill to Swallow."
There is much food for thought in Clark's exhibition and more complexity than can be explored here. Because the artists' passion is obvious, their messages compelling and their political engagement genuinely exciting, the exhibition is certain to stay with visitors long after they've left the gallery. The show's value, with its implicit call to think critically, goes beyond political appraisals. And while there is certainly the aforementioned whiff of Dada -- which revolutionized how art was used as a means of constructive dissent -- in Pinky Swear, the artists' dissent involves no gratuitous aesthetic anarchy or baffling logic. The messages are well reasoned, historically anchored and unequivocal.
Pinky Swear: A Political Exhibition Addressing Promises continues through Aug. 1. Fe Gallery, 4102 Butler St., Lawrencevillle. 412-860-6028
CAA initiated the program in 1993 to help student artists and art historians bridge the gap between their graduate studies and professional careers. The program’s main purpose is to support outstanding students from socially and economically diverse backgrounds who have
Read MoreThis past year, CAA awarded two grants and four honorable mentions through the Professional Development Fellowship Program.
CAA initiated the program in 1993 to help student artists and art historians bridge the gap between their graduate studies and professional careers. The program’s main purpose is to support outstanding students from socially and economically diverse backgrounds who have been underrepresented in their fields. By offering financial assistance to promising MFA and PhD students, CAA can assist the rising generation during this important transitional period in their lives.
Unlike previous years in which CAA fellowships were awarded in two parts—$5,000 to the fellows at the outset and $10,000 to an employer (with a matching requirement) upon the recipients securing a professional position—fellows are now honored with a one-time grant of $15,000 to help them with various aspects of their work, whether it be for their job-search expenses or purchasing materials for their studio. CAA believes a grant of this kind, without contingencies, can best nurture artists and scholars at the beginning of their professional careers.
Both fellows and honorable mentions receive free one-year CAA memberships and complimentary registration to CAA’s Annual Conference.
Hagit Barkai is an MFA student in visual arts at Pennsylvania State University in University Park, where she is currently working on her thesis show, Every Body Knows. An Israeli native, Barkai received a BA in philosophy from Hebrew University of Jerusalem and studied painting and drawing at the Jerusalem Studio School.
Viewing the body as the prime location in which rights are given and removed, and through which histories take place and are understood, Barkai reflects somatic experiences in her work, seeing them as political, social, and psychological symbols. The bodies in her paintings are confined within the frame in unstable and uncomfortable positions. Her work focuses on conflicts regarding identities, morality, and difference, which are embodied through demands addressed to the body in public and personal spaces. She is influenced by cultural critics such as Julia Kristeva, Luce Irigaray, and Judith Butler, and by artists such as Hannah Wilke, Mona Hatoum, and Marlene Dumas.
Barkai’s paintings have been exhibited at Chashama Gallery in New York and at the Pennsylvania State Museum in Harrisburg. Her painting represented Pennsylvania State University at the Big Ten Conference in Chicago, Illinois. At Penn State, she received a first-place award in the university-wide Graduate Research Exhibition; a travel grant to Israel from the University’s School of Visual Arts; and a painting commission from the Alumni Association.
This past year, CAA awarded two grants and four honorable mentions through the Professional Development Fellowship Program.
CAA initiated the program in 1993 to help student artists and art historians bridge the gap between their graduate studies and professional careers. The program’s main purpose is to support outstanding students from socially and economically diverse backgrounds who have been underrepresented in their fields. By offering financial assistance to promising MFA and PhD students, CAA can assist the rising generation during this important transitional period in their lives.
Unlike previous years in which CAA fellowships were awarded in two parts—$5,000 to the fellows at the outset and $10,000 to an employer (with a matching requirement) upon the recipients securing a professional position—fellows are now honored with a one-time grant of $15,000 to help them with various aspects of their work, whether it be for their job-search expenses or purchasing materials for their studio. CAA believes a grant of this kind, without contingencies, can best nurture artists and scholars at the beginning of their professional careers.
Both fellows and honorable mentions receive free one-year CAA memberships and complimentary registration to CAA’s Annual Conference.
2007 Fellow in Visual Art
Hagit Barkai is an MFA student in visual arts at Pennsylvania State University in University Park, where she is currently working on her thesis show, Every Body Knows. An Israeli native, Barkai received a BA in philosophy from Hebrew University of Jerusalem and studied painting and drawing at the Jerusalem Studio School.
Viewing the body as the prime location in which rights are given and removed, and through which histories take place and are understood, Barkai reflects somatic experiences in her work, seeing them as political, social, and psychological symbols. The bodies in her paintings are confined within the frame in unstable and uncomfortable positions. Her work focuses on conflicts regarding identities, morality, and difference, which are embodied through demands addressed to the body in public and personal spaces. She is influenced by cultural critics such as Julia Kristeva, Luce Irigaray, and Judith Butler, and by artists such as Hannah Wilke, Mona Hatoum, and Marlene Dumas.
Barkai’s paintings have been exhibited at Chashama Gallery in New York and at the Pennsylvania State Museum in Harrisburg. Her painting represented Pennsylvania State University at the Big Ten Conference in Chicago, Illinois. At Penn State, she received a first-place award in the university-wide Graduate Research Exhibition; a travel grant to Israel from the University’s School of Visual Arts; and a painting commission from the Alumni Association.
