26th Annual New Jersey Small Works Show

Susan Fidlon, City Life

The Mikhail Zakin Gallery at the Art School at Old Church is celebrating the 26^th Annual New Jersey Small Works Show with 47 works by 39 artists whose lives are connected in some way to the state of New Jersey.  The exhibition runs through July 31, 2015. An opening reception with the artists will be Wednesday, July 8 from 5:30 – 7:30 PM. The show and opening reception are wheelchair accessible and free to the public. All are encouraged to attend for conversation and light refreshments to celebrate the arts.

Patricia Malarcher, She

This year's juror is Meredith Lippman, a curator and arts professional in Hudson County who taught at the Art School for 17 years. Lippman’s expertise includes contemporary fine art and public arts programming. With deep roots in the arts and the Art School in Demarest specifically, Lippman’s curatorial cameo with the 26^th Annual Small Works Show is not to be missed. 

Artists from all over NJ are invited to submit their work and take part in the open competition. Meredith Lippman juried the show based on the individual merits of each work of art. The artist’s identity is not known at the time the selections are made. The single criteria for submitting work to this juried show is to have an autobiographical connection of some kind to the state of New Jersey. Submissions are received from Jersey ex-pats in places as far afield as Texas and California as well as from North, South and Central Jersey. The show becomes an artistic portrait of New Jersey by some of the many creative individuals who have called it home.

Win Zibeon, Beach Sleeper

The only limitation for the artists is that the work cannot exceed eighteen inches in any direction.  With size as the only restriction, the diversity and range of artwork becomes an exciting feature of the show. Works include photography, ceramics, printmaking, sculpture, drawing, painting, papermaking and collage. Functional and decorative works in clay, fiber and mixed media represent a range of treatments of familiar materials.  Sculptural pieces achieve a kind of moodiness and grace that brings ceramics to a new level. Works in the show from the vast field of photography are printed in traditional black, white and color, digitally manipulated and printed using alternative processes. Paintings and drawings depict scenes from backyards, world travels and great imaginations. The juror selected works that shared an edgy quality, while taking care to present a range of styles and techniques. The selections make for a well-rounded exhibition of works representing a range of artists living and working in NJ.

For more information about the exhibit or classes at the Art School, please visit our website at www.tasoc.org or call 201-767-7160. 

Register for Blast! Summer Art Program for Kids

There is still time to register for Blast of Art!, a week-long summer art experience for children ages 6-11. Classes are offered in two sessions (Monday – Friday) from August 10-14 and August 17-21. Children can be registered for one week or two and the schedule is structured to offer each registrant up to three classes daily, per week. 

Each class is staffed with an instructor and two aides, which lowers the child to adult ratio and provides individual attention to each child. Classes are all 90 minutes and a 45-minute midday break is scheduled for those students taking more than one class per day. 

Blast! Week 1 offers classes in color, pottery, printmaking and cartooning:
Adventures in Color! uses painting, collage and a variety of mixed media to explore new ways to see and use color. 

Clay & Pottery will offer experiments in hand-building and sculpting techniques as well as wheel-throwing to create functional and sculptural artworks. 


Stamp It Out will focus on various forms of printmaking on fabric and paper, including stamp making with found objects, tie-dye and making marbled papers. 

Drawing & Cartooning: Comic Con presents the basic drawing and storytelling skills needed to create comic art with an emphasis on gesture and expression.

Blast! Week 2 highlights a completely different curriculum with workshops in sculpture, clay, architecture, and painting:

Dynamite Sculpture uses works by Alexander Calder, Pablo Picasso and Louise Nevelson to survey sculptural mediums such as paper maché relief sculpture, wood assemblage, wire mobiles, plaster and cardboard construction. 

Handmade in Clay explores hand-building techniques in clay to create projects such as pots, wind chimes and puppets. 

Architectural Design uses hands-on model building and drawing to instruct students to build sophisticated structures, as well as draw plans and elevation, and create projects to scale. 

Playing with Paint & Pastels will teach painting and drawing through the exploration of color, texture and pattern using wet and dry mediums.

Tuition fees are $150 per class and all materials are provided. A Young Artist membership ($20) is also required for participation. Registration is open by phone, fax or in-person. Most classes are wheelchair accessible. Call 201.767.7160 or visit www.tasoc.org for further information. 

A complete schedule is available online at www.tasoc.org 

and in the Summer Catalog on pages 21-22.

From the Studio Classes... 2015

This celebrated event occurs each spring with an impressive exhibition of work notable for its sophistication as well as skillful technique. The school is a community of artists, some beginner and intermediate students, and many others who are quite advanced and clearly come to class as much for the company of others similarly engaged as for the very fine instruction and discussion to be found in classes in the fine arts and craft. The presence and generosity of these artist-students enriches the conversation for everyone and the annual student show is a witness to that.

The Art School at Old Church is presenting From The Studio Classes, an annual salon-style exhibition of artworks by members of the Art School's student body. The show is on view through June 20, 2015. This highly anticipated exhibition fills the galleries to capacity with a vibrant installation of over 200 works of art, shown in the school's Mikhail Zakin and Café galleries.

Each student is permitted to exhibit two pieces and the school’s gallery walls are almost overfilled with exciting new work. Much of it is for sale and this is a great opportunity to find something that you will surely treasure, whether jewelry, lamp worked necklaces, a crocheted jacket or vest, a great variety of bowls, a tea set, ceramic sculpture, mixed media, collage, assemblage, oils, acrylics, watercolors, prints and encaustics, along with a many striking and unusual photographs.

Regardless of medium, the range of work represented includes the traditional along with many intriguing investigations into abstraction. You will find realistic imagery and sculpture next to abstract figures, animal sculptures that charm and surprise, mixed media with parts that extend into real space, spirited abstractions next to exquisitely detailed watercolor landscapes, beautiful and dynamic charcoal figure studies next to photographs that intrigue with their unexpected focus and mood, and so much more. The gallery is wheelchair accessible and light refreshments will be served. The show remains on view until June 20, 2015 during school hours. You will find many opportunities for excellent discussion, connection, and, of course, purchase. All are welcome!

Art in Aboriginal Australia

In honor of the closing of Inside Tracks: Alone Across the Outback, Photographs by Rick Smolan, we are doing a segment on contemporary art from Aboriginal Australia on the Art School Blog. 

Contemporary Aboriginal art has the unique quality of being at once steeped in tradition and representative of individual artistic vision. In this way, the title of Ian McLean's book "How Aborigines invented the idea of contemporary art" rings true. Contemporary Aboriginal artists in Australia are expressing their ancestral culture with contemporary art supplies, creating works of an unironic brilliance rare in today's art market. Sales that have broken the $2 million barrier at international art auctions bring economic independence to marginalized communities with nary a tale of new found fortune gone awry.

Robyn Davidson's adventure, retold in her book and the recent film Tracks took place in the legendary desert wilderness of Outback Australia, known as the Bush to the country's natives. The incredible story, captured in the photographs by Rick Smolan and his book Inside Tracks, tells of the landscape and the hardships that befall a person alone in that challenging environment. The native Australians inhabited this land long before European contact, having developed a complex animist cosmology known as Dreamtime, with evidence in rock art dating back 60,000 years. Theirs is considered the oldest continuing culture, which has evolved with contemporary Aborigines into a vibrant contemporary art. 

As we celebrate the land down under, artistic excellence and boldness of vision, please take a moment to look at a few images collected here that received the Telstra Art Award (National Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander Art Award) for artistic excellence in 2014. They are shown here along with the Judge's comments.

Daniel Walbidi, Wirnpa & Sons, 2014

2014 General Painting Award
Uncommon in Aboriginal painting practices, silver and gold pigments are employed in Daniel Walbidi’s Wirnpa and Sons 2014 giving life to the stark bleached saltpans and the parched desert sand dunes of his homelands. The harsh nature of these lands is tempered by a delicate organic overlay that carries the stories of ancestral beings such as the jila (living water), rainmaker of the Great Sandy Desert. Daniel’s paintings are like satellite photographs that concentrate on typographical complexities while they also eloquently translate his people’s stories as told to him by elders. Daniel is a sophisticated colourist who utilizes both typical desert tones and saltwater hues to narrate the dual nature of the cultural heritage of Bidyadange with vibrancy and confidence.

Garawan Wanambi, Marrangu, 2014

2014 Telstra Bark Painting Award

Garawan Wanambi uses the expressive qualities of his clan’s geometric patterns as a medium for the representation of restricted sacred areas in Arnhem Land.  This work contains a narrative that involves the mosquito ancestor, a symbol of aggression, who fights with spears and who is known for creating spiritual danger. In Marrangu the designs represents a place at the mouth of a river where fresh water boils up underneath the salt water. Garawan focuses on the changing waters, from turbulent to calm, with an intricate weave of pastel colours that give great depth to his work. Viewers will be mesmerized by the distinctive patterns and the lustrous surface of the painting that imitate the idea of light on water. 

2014 Work on Paper Award
Nici Cumpston uses photography to convey a spiritual and cultural connection to her country, capturing a sense of mystery as well as the physical landscapes. Scar tree, Barkindji country straddles the line between the serene and the dynamic. Nici looks at degraded landscapes, which are surviving, and prospering, they become a metaphor for Aboriginal people and culture. She has transformed this black and white image through the colour that she vigorously applies, reinserting her presence into the landscape. With dynamism and spirit, colour bursts off the page and cannot be contained by the frame of the picture, similar to Indigenous culture and presence on country. 

Nici Cumpston, Scar Tree, Barkindji Country, hand-colored inkjet print, 2014

Cafe Gallery: Winter Workshop Sampler

Denise Kadar (pottery), Stephanie Maddelena (beads)

Stephanie Maddelena

Each winter, The Art School at Old Church offers a variety of workshops taught by visiting artists and faculty.  These workshops provide one or two day instruction ranging in different art mediums. Samples of work for several of the workshops can be viewed in a new exhibition in the Café Gallery through March 20^th. The workshop sampler exhibition included work in collage, pastels, cane/reed handled ceramics, and flame worked glass beads. With a selection of student work and the instructors own art, the exhibition encourages students to see work that will be made in each workshop.

This exhibition includes work by the Art School’s talented instructors and students; Marcy Cagan (collage), Denise Kadar (ceramics), Stephanie Maddalena (flame worked beads), and Karen O’Neil (pastels).

The Art School is pleased to present these opportunities for artistic growth in new materials. Come by The Art School to view the winter workshop samplers and make sure to register for one of the exciting winter workshops.  A description of each workshop offered can be found in the schools catalog and website at www.tasoc.org.

Marcy Cagan (left & middle), Karen O'Neil (right)

INSIDE TRACKS AT THE MIKHAIL ZAKIN GALLERY

A new exhibition of photographs by the highly acclaimed photojournalist and National Geographic photographer, Rick Smolan, is on view through March 4-31^st in the Mikhail Zakin Gallery. A free film-screening will accompany the exhibition on Saturday, March 7 from 5:00 – 7:00 PM followed with a talk by Rick Smolan, author and photographer of Inside Tracks. This bold, beautiful “smart phone enabled” coffee table book, is based on one of the most beloved stories in the history of National Geographic Magazine: 27-year-old Robyn Davidson’s 1700 mile trek across the Australian outback.  Davidson’s journey from Alice Springs to the Indian Ocean, accompanied by just four camels and a dog, inspired her own bestselling book, Tracks, a cult classic that has sold over a million copies, has been translated into 18 languages and is required reading in Australian schools.

Rick Smolan, the American photographer assigned by National Geographic to document her journey, had his own adventure tracking Robyn down in the desert periodically throughout her journey. The outback of Australia, seen through Robyn's eyes and Rick's cameras, is an ancient awesome landscape swept by rain, heat and dust and inhabited by all varieties of marauding life, from poisonous snakes to wild bull camels but is also inhabited by the caring aboriginal people of the Pitjantjatjara tribe and the outback farmers who encouraged and helped Robyn during her journey.

The incredible story is now a major motion picture titled “Tracks” from the Oscar winning producers of "The Kings Speech". In the film Robyn is portrayed by Mia Wasikowska (Alice in Wonderland) and Rick by Adam Driver (HBO's Girls). A special state of the art Canon projection system will be used for the March 7th presentation of the feature film.

At the film screening event, Rick will share images and behind the scenes stories from Robyn's adventure and will also autograph copies of Inside Tracks. The magnificently printed book features more than two hundred photographs from Robyn’s journey, many never published before, as well as an inside look at the making of the TRACKS movie, with scene photographs and excerpts from the script.

“To me” says Rick Smolan “what matters most is that she [Robyn]  permitted herself to listen to the little voice in her head that propelled her to set off on such a risky journey. My deepest hope is that Inside Tracks and Robyn’s belief that ‘an ordinary person is capable of anything’ will inspire readers to embark on their own voyage of self-discovery”

Special thanks to Hank Gans, photography instructor at the Art School at Old Church who helped organize this inspiring exhibition of photography. Please call (201) 767-7160 by March 5th to RSVP to the March 7th film screening. The exhibition and film event are wheelchair accessible. Gallery hours are Monday-Friday: 9:30 AM – 5:00 PM. Call ahead for evening and weekend hours.

Floating Islands on view in the Mikhail Zakin Gallery

Ken Cro-Ken, Brief Moment in Time in foreground, Ken Cro-Ken, There in background

Floating Islands is an exhibition of works by four contemporary artists making art with an environmental edge. A variety of materials and processes come together in this group show, immersing the Mikhail Zakin Gallery in sculptures, installations, paintings and a live painting experiment with nature.

We are proud to feature the works of Riccardo Berlingeri (Middletown, NJ), Ken Cro-Ken (New York, NY), David Purcell (Baltimore, MD) and Etty Yaniv (New York, NY) in this exhibit.

Riccardo Berlingeri, Deep Down

The exhibit takes its name from the floating islands of trash that have collected in the Pacific Ocean. These islands, inadvertently formed, have held up a mirror to our culture of use. This process of realization catalyzed by a physical form led me to think of the symbolic power of art in contemplating our experience of the world.

One of the most striking aspects of the exhibit is the way art can seem exclusively expressive of the self yet evoke a vast system of interrelation. Each piece in this show is seated squarely in the artists’ respective styles, established through ongoing practice and investigation of materials. And yet, each piece has the quality of being rooted in our society and performing an act of reflection, forming a conceptual bond with nature that can be collectively shared.

The works on view recap the awe of the natural, where seemingly disparate organisms interweave to create a tapestry of living beings and ecosystems. Together the artists have formed a humbling space, starting from scratch with layers of corrugated cardboard or colored pieces of newspaper that provide entry to a new slant on the physical world.

David Purcell, Memory of a Hike Through Echo Canyon

The exhibition is equal parts an ode to Mother Nature, an apology and a pledge. This is what we have done, this is what we love about living here, and this is what we hope for: a planet that we not only avoid offending, but one that we seek to love in all the ways in our power. Through understanding every crevice, walking through the logic that creates these forms, acknowledging the beauty of juxtaposition and the details hidden in plain sight, allowing ourselves to be humbled by the simultaneous representation of a river delta and the veins of a maple leaf, or getting our hands dirty and building monuments to our great mistakes.

Most importantly, and in the context of the Art School at Old Church, the exhibition is a manifestation of the power of the artistic process to transform inanimate materials into complex comments, critiques, and calls to arms regarding human society. We can all benefit from considering our actions as paths from creative ideas to material expression. The show is on view at the Art School, a gathering place for creative development, where it is hoped that all our lives will leave a mark and that mark will be deliberate and artful.

Join us for a reception with the artists Thursday, January 29, 2015 from 5:30 - 7:30 PM.

Etty Yaniv, Parallel Topographies in foreground; Ken Cro-Ken, There, in background