3/9/13

HindSight: DRAWINGS BY KEVIN BLYTHE SAMPSON AT INTUIT GALLERY SHOW

2/24/13

Kevin Blythe Sampson: the man and the Intuit exhibit in West Town By: Elaine Coorens

http://oururbantimes.com/arts/kevin-blythe-sampson-man-and-intuit-exhibit-west-town
Kevin Blythe Sampson: the man and the Intuit exhibit in West Town
By:
Elaine Coorens
Date:
02/24/2013
Ship

Kevin Blythe Sampson's An Ill Wind Blowing is a ship that is sailing in the Intuit: The Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art main gallery, 756 N. Milwaukee Ave., until Apr. 20. Created onsite as a three-piece sculpture, Sampson references Bob Dylan's song ”Blowin’ in the Wind” which Dylan took from a slave song entitled "No More Auction Block." Blending history with the world of today, the ship is a statement about three segments of the American population...the bourgeoisie, tea party and working class and poor.
BtwnArtWords

Kevin Sampson

This vessel was intended to be part of a large exhibit in New York's American Museum of Folk Art after President's Obama's first election. The museum's financial difficulties sunk its creation, which would have been 5-times the size of the Chicago installation. Over the last couple of years, Sampson and Cleo Wilson, the shows curator, Intuit board member and former Executive Director, have been collaborating to make this exhibition a reality in Intuit.
ShipPrt1

The Bourgeoisie--Part 1

"I am an ex-cop," says Sampson, "who has a lot of tea party friends. In this piece I'm assaulting everyone who makes me nauseous.
TheTeaParty

The Tea Party section

"The front represents friends who cuss me out as a conservative Democrat. They are liberal, elite yuppies. The middle is the nasty crowd. They are the ones obstructing the government to the point we can't function. It is the 24-hour news cycle of insanity. The back of the boat describes the poor and middle class."
WorkingPoor

The section representing the working class and poor

In a special showing of the exhibit, artist Bernard Williams, who in November received The Helen Coburn Meier and Tim Meier Charitable Foundation for the Arts Achievement Award, and Wilson talked with the artist, before others in the audience joined them, asking Sampson various questions about the boat and his career .

"Why did you chose a ship versus a pick-up truck as the symbol," asked Williams.
BWilliams

Bernard Williams
CWilson

Cleo Wilson

"A boat is symbolic of colonial times and war. The rats [which scurry around at the base of the ship parts] aren't jumping ship, they are the waves."

When Wilson asked him about his use of a vessel, Sampson explained, "Tragedy drove me to it. My cousin Carol died. That was when I made my first boat of wood from my backyard. Then friends were dying. My son died and then my wife. [The premature birth of his son in a high-risk pregnancy is what also took the life of his wife.] I was looking for answers, trying to make sense of my own spirituality."
NOBlock
AudiencePonders

Audience members were engaged and ponderous

"Would the ship have looked differently if you created it elsewhere rather than Chicago," asked an audience member. "Yes. I am process oriented. I never work alone. Here in Chicago, I don't have access to all my tools and materials. If done in New Jersey as a regular piece, it would have been built of wood that I would have painted and sanded.
Enchanted

As Sampson spoke, many were transfixed

"Creating this here, my sister [Donna Sampson] was here and my son came last week. I talked with all my friends on the phone and on Facebook. I showed them pictures… they made suggestions."

Williams asked how Sampson being a police detective and police sketch artist became an artist.

Donna Sampson told this reporter, "He has the soul of an artist. We would sit and paint for hours. Father told him he had to be a cop because in the 70s, you couldn't be an artist and make a living."
DSampson

Donna Sampson

Sampson, however, said, "Father was a civil rights worker. So I was a "we shall over come" baby. I grew up with everyone in the household from Dick Gregory to William Kunstler and, at one point, Malcolm X.

"My father was probably the greatest influence on my life. He wanted me to become a police officer so I went to college and partied too much. Came out of school, they said they needed black officers so, though I didn't like police too much, I took the test.

"The day I said I was going to join the police department, my mother took we to the post office and walked me over to the wanted posters. She said, 'You have to become a cop so you don't become one of the.

"I did drew cartoons of everyone in the Scotch Plains, New Jersey, police dept. One day the chief asked if I'd like to do police drawings. So I became a sketch artist...probably did a thousand of them, especially rape victims for 15 years.
GunDrawing

One of Sampson's drawings

"In the meantime, I figured that if you are going to be a composite sketch artist…you have to draw. They taught you how to make composites, but not how to draw. I enrolled in an industrial arts school, but by that time, I had become good at drawing and was also an airbrush artist. A friend was teaching there and she said that they needed an airbrush teacher. Having used an airbrush for a long time, I ended up teaching there until it closed, 20 years later.

Intuit's new hours are: Tuesday thru Saturday 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. with extended hours on Thursday to 7:30 p.m. Closed Monday and Sunday.

2/14/13

ART IN REVIEW; 'Artists to Artists' -- 'A Decade of the Space Program' - New York Times

ART IN REVIEW; 'Artists to Artists' -- 'A Decade of the Space Program'
By ROBERTA SMITH
Published: May 24, 2002

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Ace Gallery

275 Hudson Street, at Dominick Street

South Village

Through June 1

This exuberant sprawl of work by 161 artists, which fills one of New York's largest commercial gallery spaces almost to bursting, opened with a crush that resembled Grand Central Terminal at rush hour. It celebrates the first decade of the Marie Walsh Sharpe Art Foundation's Space Program, which provides up to a year of free studio space in TriBeCa to participants selected by committees consisting entirely of artists. All but two of the program's alumni responded to the invitation to show something; each work was selected by the artist who made it.

The outcome is one of the more noninstitutional big exhibitions around, unskewed by curatorial taste or agenda, by budgetary latitude (obviously there are no commissioned works) or by distinctions of age, medium or place of residence. You could think of the show as a Whitney Biennial that chose itself. The installation is similarly random: it proceeds chronologically with the works by each year's artists grouped together, and a list of the members of the committee that selected the participants that year.

The show, which represents all major mediums, is a great chance to catch up on nearly every front imaginable. You'll see impressive pieces by young artists whose previous appearances may have escaped your attention, in my case people like James Sheehan, Jennie Booth, Ellie Lee, Jennifer Dubnau, Katherine Daniels and Max-Carlos Martinez. Also present are artists who have already emerged with a splash, among them Teresita Fernández, Josiah McElheny, Jennifer Bornstein, Arturo Herrera and Sarah Sze. Others made New York debuts this season, including Anna Sew Hoy, Dannielle Tegeder and Tim Doud.

Portia Munson, Rhonda Zwillinger and Janet Cooling are among the artists exhibiting promising departures from their previous efforts. And there are relative veterans of all persuasions, including Michael Smith, Carl Fudge, Mira Schor, Garth Evans, Phyllis Bramson, Glen Seator and Paul Laffoley.

Some of the other standouts are Tom Burckhardt's paintings, Tari Campbell's drawings, Kristin Lucas's mouse-pad drawings made as she works at her computer, Arthur Simms's sculpture and Kevin Blythe Sampson's altarlike amalgam of mediums. The catalog reproduces two other works by each artist and is a separate mine of information.

This exhibition attests to the widespread vitality of painting as well as to the effect of New York's serious real estate crunch on the arts. It answers the question of what philanthropists can do to help artists get started. And it demonstrates the efficacy of artist-run organizations, evidence that cultural institutions would do well to ponder. ROBERTA SMITH
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The New York TimeART IN REVIEW; 'Artists to Artists' -- 'A Decade of the Space Program' - New York Times

2/8/13

FOLK BABEL
Dai Costruttori di Babele alla Black Folk Art.
Inaugurazione Giovedì 7 febbraio ore 18.00
Dal 8/02 al 2/03/2013.

«Scendiamo dunque e confondiamo la loro lingua, perché non comprendano più l’uno la lingua dell’altro» [Gen. 11,7]
Le sculture di Mr. Imagination, Charlie Lucas, Kevin Sampson, Lonnie Holley realizzate durante la Biennale di Venezia del 2011 insieme agli scatti sui mondi visionari di Bonaria Manca, Giovanni Cammarata e Luigi Lineri. Dal profondo sud degli Stati Uniti alle espressioni di creatività ambientale del nostro paese. Alberto Ferrero, dal reportage realizzato nel 1989 a La casa del Cavaliere, opera dell’artista Giovanni Cammarata, Messina;
Salvatore Bongiorno, dal reportage realizzato nel 2010 a La casa dei simboli, opera dell’artista Bonaria Manca, Tuscania;
Rodolfo Hernandez, dal reportage Ogni Forma Illuminata realizzato nel 2010 a La cattedrale di sassi, opera dell’artista Luigi Lineri, Zevio (Verona).
www.rizomi.com

Torino News

TORINO, 06 February 2013

Mostre Folk Babel Dai Costruttori di Babele alla Black Folk Art dal 7 febbraio al 2 marzo 2013 Rizomi Art Brut Torino

dal mercoledì al sabato dalle 14 alle 17

Invia ad un amico

Folk Babel è la collettiva che inaugura, alla Rizomi Art Brut, il 7 febbraio (dalle 18.30).
In esposizione ci sono le opere di Mr. Imagination, Lonnie Holley, Kevin Sampson e Charlie Lucas create come improvvisazione creativa a partire da materiali di recupero durante la Biennale di Venezia del 2011 e le fotografie delle installazioni ambientali di Luigi Lineri (Zevio), Bonaria Manca (Tuscania) e Giovanni Cammarata (Messina).
Quelle di Alberto Ferrero, dal reportage realizzato nel 1989 a La casa delCavaliere, opera dell’artista Giovanni Cammarata, di Salvatore Bongiorno, dal reportage realizzato nel 2010 a La casa dei simboli, opera dell’artista Bonaria Manca, Tuscania e quelle di Rodolfo Hernandez, dal reportage Ogni Forma Illuminata realizzato nel 2010 a La cattedrale di sassi, opera dell'artista Luigi Lineri, Zevio (Verona).
Folk Babel è dunque un luogo di incontro di culture, quella del sud degli Stati Uniti e quella italiana, di linguaggi, di sovrapposizioni e di rispettose, ma audaci autonomie.
Termina il 2 marzo.

dal 7 febbraio al 2 marzo 2013

Rizomi Art Brut

corso Vittorio Emanuele II 28, Torino

dal mercoledì al sabato dalle 14 alle 17

2/6/13

Folk Babel / Agenda / Home Page - ContemporaryArt Torino Piemonte

Folk Babel
Dai Costruttori di Babele alla Black Folk Art
mostra
Rizomi Art Brut
dal 07/02/2013 al 02/03/2013
Folk Babel

Folk Babel è la collettiva che inaugura, alla Rizomi Art Brut, il 7 febbraio (dalle 18.30).

In esposizione ci sono le opere di Mr. Imagination, Lonnie Holley, Kevin Sampson e Charlie Lucas create come improvvisazione creativa a partire da materiali di recupero durante la Biennale di Venezia del 2011 e le fotografie delle installazioni ambientali di Luigi Lineri (Zevio), Bonaria Manca (Tuscania) e Giovanni Cammarata (Messina).
Quelle di Alberto Ferrero, dal reportage realizzato nel 1989 a La casa del Cavaliere, opera dell’artista Giovanni Cammarata, di Salvatore Bongiorno, dal reportage realizzato nel 2010 a La casa dei simboli, opera dell’artista Bonaria Manca, Tuscania e quelle di Rodolfo Hernandez, dal reportage Ogni Forma Illuminata realizzato nel 2010 a La cattedrale di sassi, opera dell'artista Luigi Lineri, Zevio (Verona).

Folk Babel è dunque un luogo di incontro di culture, quella del sud degli Stati Uniti e quella italiana, di linguaggi, di sovrapposizioni e di rispettose, ma audaci autonomie.

Termina il 2 marzo.

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Rizomi Art Brut
corso Vittorio Emanuele II 28, Torino
www.rizomi.itFolk Babel / Agenda / Home Page - ContemporaryArt Torino Piemonte

Folk Babel / Agenda / Home Page - ContemporaryArt Torino Piemonte

Kevin Blythe Sampson: An Ill Wind Blowing » INTUIT - The Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art

Kevin Blythe Sampson: An Ill Wind Blowing

January 11 - April 20, 2013

Curated by Cleo F. Wilson

Kevin Blythe Sampson poses with the completed ship. Photo © Cheri Eisenberg.

Intuit was pleased to host artist in residence, Kevin Blythe Sampson, over a two week period as he created a site-specific vehicle in Intuit’s Main Gallery using recycled materials. The sculpture evolved over Sampson’s two week residency as Intuit encouraged the general public to interact with Sampson while he was creating.

The sculpture is a boat-like vehicle built in three distinctively different sections. The front represents major corporations, the middle of the boat contains objects that represent the liberal elite and the rear section of the boat represents the working poor and homeless. “After thinking about the current state of politics in the United States and the current national conversation on civility, I have decided to build an environment that contains a symbolic vessel that will be powered by the wind that is blowing across the world,” says Sampson. The title of the exhibition, An Ill Wind Blowing, is in reference to the history of protest, the state of America today and the popular song ”Blowin’ in the Wind” by Bob Dylan.

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2/1/13

Jerry Saltz on the Outsider Art Fair -- Vulture

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Jerry Saltz on the Outsider Art Fair — and Why There’s No Such Thing As ‘Outsider’ Art

    By Jerry Saltz

Untitled, (Blue and Brown House with Chimneys), circa 1939-1942, by Bill Traylor, at the Outsider Art Fair. Courtesy of Ricco Maresca Gallery.

The Outsider Art Fair has been beautifully revived, and today through Sunday, you can see it in the charmed spaces of the former Dia Building at 548 West 22nd Street. Launched in 1993, the Fair spent many happy years in the Puck Building, during which time brilliant visionaries were seen for the first time — artists like James Castle, Morton Bartlett, George Widener, Melvin Way, Judith Scott, and A.G. Rizzoli, all now part of the "outsider" canon. Then the show hit a plateau about eight years ago and eventually went all but bland in an out-of-the-way office high-rise on West 34th Street. By last year, I thought we'd seen the end of a great thing.

The Chelsea dealer Andrew Edlin shows contemporary artists and also represents the estates of geniuses Henry Darger and Ralph Fasanella. In the past year, Edlin bought the fair, weeded out lesser dealers, added new ones, and moved the show to this beautiful space. For that intrepid effort alone, he deserves a key to the city. The show looks great here. There's more room, wider aisles, better light, less dross, higher energy. Search any of the 40 booths, and there's a good chance you'll uncover something newish worth your while. And not too overpriced. Maybe a few of these discoveries, too, will enter the "outsider" pantheon.

Which brings us to the the horrible Rubicon that still separates so-called "outsider," "self-taught," and "visionary" art from institutionally sanctioned official art. Now that even immigration reform can happen, it's time for MoMA — and all museums — to integrate "outsider art" into their permanent collections and erase that distinction for good. They need to allow these artists to take their rightful places in the canon. In addition to the artists mentioned above, visionaries like Hilma af Klint, Emma Kunz, Bill Traylor, Adolf Wolfli, Martin Rameirez, Minnie Evans, John Kane, Clementine Hunter, Hector Hyppolite, and others must be integrated into the canon. At the Fair, there's a 1939–1942 town scene by one of the greatest "outsiders" of them all, Bill Traylor, that would easily compare with any Picasso from the same period. Or, indeed, any artist.

With this outmoded discrimination still in place, the story of art is woefully misrepresentative — a lie, even. Millions of viewers and thousands of nascent artists are being denied the chance to see some of the best work made in the last 100 years simply because it was once decided that to be an artist meant having had preapproved training. It's a self-perpetuating false distinction, like the one art historian Linda Nochlin famously wrote about in 1971, asking, "Why have there been no great women artists?" The answer to this brilliant rhetorical question, of course, was that to be a "great artist," one had first to be trained in the academy via drawing the nude. Since women weren't allowed into academe and were considered too pure to look upon the nude, they couldn't be seen as "great."

Similarly, MoMA and other museums once drew strict lines between insider and outsider because they were beset by accusations that modern art could be made by disturbed people and untrained artists. Thus "outsider art" had to be left out in the cold, out of fear. Those embattled borders are long gone; the wars were all won. Museums: I say it's time for you to set aside these old chauvinisms. There are no more excuses. You're on the wrong side of history. Your definitions of art are reductive and insular where they need to be inclusive and expansive. You've hit a wall. Change — or wither with your prejudices and die a slow death.Jerry Saltz on the Outsider Art Fair -- Vulture

Outsider Art Fair Opens at 548 West 22nd Street - NYTimes.com

Art Review
Feeling Right at Home on the Fringe
Outsider Art Fair Opens at 548 West 22nd Street
Linda Rosier for The New York Times

Outsider Art Fair “26 Raimbilli Cousins” (1980-1994), mixed mediums on cardboard, by Gayleen Aiken, at the Luise Ross booth at 548 West 22nd Street. More Photos »
By ROBERTA SMITH
Published: January 31, 2013

The Outsider Art Fair, a wonderfully eccentric jewel in the crown of New York art fairs, has a renewed radiance. For the first time in its 20-year history, it occupies a building retrofitted for art: the clean, well-lighted spaces of the former Dia Art Foundation. This places it in the western reaches of Chelsea, once again confronting the world of contemporary insider art with irrefutable proof that the most lasting work comes from unstoppable emotional necessity, an especially useful lesson for the moment.

Since its inception, the fair has been pivotal in establishing the importance and richness of 20th-, and now 21st-century, folk, outsider and self-taught art and for virtually introducing greats like James Castle, Morton Bartlett, George Widener and others to the public. But it has had some ups and downs. Founded by Sanford Smith in 1993, it was first held on the ground floor of the venerable Puck Building on Houston Street, close by SoHo, then still heavy with art galleries. The Puck’s quirky, irregular spaces seemed made for the oddities of outsider art, but in 2008 the building became unavailable. For the next five years, the fair was held on — or exiled to — an upper floor of a generic office building on 34th Street, where it did not flourish.

Last year the 34th Street space shut down, and Andrew Edlin, an art dealer and fair participant since 2004, urged Mr. Smith to move the fair to Chelsea. Shortly thereafter Mr. Edlin offered to buy it, and a deal was struck. With Mr. Smith staying on as a consultant, some new exhibitors were attracted, and others weeded out. Voilà: the 2013 Outsider Art Fair, transformed.

With its generous booths and wide aisles, the 21st incarnation has a big-fair feeling. But with 40 participants, it does not exhaust. Art, dealers and visitors all can breathe. The rooftop is kitted out with a large heated tent where snacks are available and panel discussions staged. (The program, which looks interesting, has been organized by Valérie Rousseau, an art historian and curator who is married to Mr. Edlin and has recently joined the staff of the American Folk Art Museum.)

This year’s fair offers a dizzying array of outstanding things to see and some impressive new names. Established artists — Bill Traylor, Martín Ramírez, Adolf Wölfli, Joseph Yoakum, John Kane, Sister Gertrude Morgan, Sam Doyle and Mr. Widener — dominate the booths of Ricco/Maresca, Dean Jensen, St. Etienne and Carl Hammer, which also has five canes with expressively carved and inlaid handles made by an artist known only as Stick Dog Bob for members of a Black Power group in Chicago during the 1960s. St. Etienne has papered the upper tiers of its walls with a fascinating timeline about the emergence of outsider art and self-taught art and their European counterpart, Art Brut.

Du Marche, a newcomer from Lausanne, Switzerland, has devoted most of its space to Alöise Corbaz (1886-1964), the great Swiss outsider, known for her nearly fluorescent colors and voluptuous figures. You can immerse yourself in the art of Haiti, Jamaica and other Caribbean locales at Pan American Art Projects, Bonheur and Bourbon-Lally, where bright sequined voodoo banners are piled high on tables.

It adds to the show’s clarity that nearly a quarter of the booths feature just one artist. Gary Snyder is surveying the work of the painter Janet Sobel (1894-1968), who worked in several modes of peasant-art-flavored figuration and also made dripped abstractions before Jackson Pollock. Luise Ross has the colorful, carefully captioned crayon drawings of Gayleen Aiken (1934-2005), a Vermont outsider, and a cluster of 26 nearly life-size bucktoothed people in painted cutout cardboard called the Raimbilli Cousins, that Aiken made to keep her company. Kinz-Tillou has devoted its space to the work of Winfred Rembert, a self-taught artist born in 1945, who creates vivid family portraits and scenes of chain gangs working in cotton fields by applying dye to large sheets of carved and tooled leather. C. Grimaldis, a Baltimore dealer, has returned for the third year with the wonderful paintings of Giorgos Rigas, 92, whose populous scenes of life in the Greek mountain village of his childhood are every bit as good as Grandma Moses’ work.

As before, the fair suggests that the line between outsider and insider art becomes blurrier with each passing year. At Ames you can marvel at the exquisite, dreamlike collage drawings of Deborah Barrett, which suggest a blend of Jim Nutt and Lynda Barry, as well as the more naïve renderings, mostly of people in urban settings, by Esther Hamerman (1886-1977).

At Mr. Edlin’s booth the self-taught wizard Brent Green, known in the regular art world for stop-action animations and installation works of a Southern Gothic ambience, contributes a loose-limbed hanging sculpture in carved and painted wood: “Angel With Listening Machine.” Laura Steward, a new participant from Santa Fe, N.M., is displaying numerous round and square coins made of silver or melted pennies, by Thomas Ashcraft, a self-taught astronomer, for use in other realities. Also here, a life-size woman fashioned from coyote skin turned inside out (or not, when hair is needed) by Erika Wanenmacher, a practicing witch who claims that it is a spell.

At the same time the fair also gives glimpses of just how limitless the outsider realm remains. Several little-known or virtually unknown artists make very strong impressions, none more so than Renaldo Kuhler, 81, presented in a special exhibition, whose dense drawings portray an imagined world, Rocaterrania, complete with its own alphabet. At Henry Boxer, note the delicate reimaginings of Cambridge University drawn by John Devlin, a Canadian artist, who had a nervous breakdown there as a young divinity student, and the hybrid creatures, rendered in chain-mail patterns of ballpoint pen by Mehrdad Rashidi, an Iranian artist living in Europe.

At Cavin-Morris the intricate drawings of M’onma, a Japanese man in his 60s, consist of layers of gossamer images that resemble ghostly tattoos and must be among the gentlest expressions of the horror vacui ever made. Don’t miss the amazing hand-built pots, decorated with sinuous reliefs of animals and figures, by Georgia Blizzard (1919-2002), at Tanner-Hill.

Two new wood carvers stand out: John Byam, a maker of small but rough everyday objects and weapons sprinkled with sawdust at Edlin; and, at Lindsay, Stephen Sabo (1903-2002), who made variously painted miniature tableaus, reliefs and individual sculptures of animals and birds. Chris Byrne, a newcomer from Dallas, is presenting the spookily realistic heads of Frank Bender (1941-2011), a self-taught forensic sculptor who helped solve cold-case crimes by intuiting how perpetrators and disappeared victims alike might look years later. The heads are displayed with relevant news clippings.

What else? Plenty. The works by Japanese outsiders at Yukiko Koide Presents include the entrancing abstract drawings of Eiichi Shibata, an autistic artist inspired by soap and bubbles. At Institute 193, a nonprofit gallery and publisher from Lexington, Ky., notice should be taken of the pieced-together panoramic photographs of Albert Moser, the tumultuous ballpoint pen drawings of Beverly Baker, and much else.

There are the displays brought by dealers of contemporary art who handle outsider material in a limited way: at Vito Schnabel, the eerie paintings of candles on old windows by Vahakn Arslanian; at Feature, the calligraphylike drawings of the Kowa people of central India, who have no written language; and at Laurel Gitlen and Sorry We’re Closed (a Brussels gallery), the latest drawings from Michael Patterson-Carver, depicting extremely orderly protests with people carrying signs.

This fair has rarely made a better case for itself, for the field of artistic activity whose depth it only hints at and for the increasing futility of cordoning off that field from the rest of today’s art.

The Outsider Art Fair continues through Sunday at 548 West 22nd Street, Chelsea; (212) 337-3338, outsiderartfair.comOutsider Art Fair Opens at 548 West 22nd Street - NYTimes.com

1/30/13

“Well Gol-l-ly”: Jim Nabors marries longtime male partner - Salon.com

Friday February 1Friday February 1“Well Gol-l-ly”: Jim Nabors marries longtime male partner - Salon.com

1/26/13

ArtSlant - An Ill Wind Blowing: Kevin Blythe Sampson - Bad at Sports - 2013-01-25 21:52:31

1/25/13

Review of Kevins Show at the Intuit In chicago

An Ill Wind Blowing: Kevin Blythe Sampson

January 25, 2013 · Print This Article

The boat was supposed to be five times this large. Kevin Blythe Sampson was slated to create an epic vessel for “Vision and Vernacular: Eight African American Artists in Venice,” an exhibition of African-American self-taught artists and graffiti muralists organized by the American Folk Art Museum in New York for the 2011 Venice Biennial. But as the troubled museum faced collapse, sponsor funding was pulled and the show canceled. A year later, the former executive director of Intuit, Cleo Wilson, who knew of the artist’s frustrated plans for the epic ship, began talking with Sampson about traveling from his homework of Newark to Chicago to be the second artist in residence at the museum and create a site-specific sculpture related to his original plan in Venice. Sampson arrived on January 11^th and has been putting together An Ill Wind Blowing for the two weeks since, using recycled material from previous work and found objects from the back rooms of Intuit. The result is a multimedia interactive installation with an aesthetic of contingency, vulnerability, and stratification that corresponds shrewdly to the thematic content of the show.

sketch of Sampson’s proposal for Intuit

Now retired, Sampson worked for twenty years as a composite sketch artist while a police officer in New Jersey, after a superior in the department noticed the cartoons he doodled of everyone and sent him to sketch artist school. There, Sampson jokes, he discovered that he actually had to learn to draw, but when he enrolled at the Newark School of Fine and Industrial Art, he was immediately recruited to teach airbrushing there and stayed for decades. Now focused on teaching younger students, Sampson collaborates extensively with graffiti artists and muralists and dismisses the label of “outsider,” dryly noting that the label tends to make contemporary African-American art more palatable to certain white collectors. Sampson has been focusing on sculpture, particularly movable memorials, since 2000 (he’s been struck in Chicago by the white painted bicycles of cyclists killed by cars); and his first vessels and ships, now a common theme, began as responses to family tragedies. But it’s Sampson’s background as a self-identified “ex-cop with lots of Tea Party friends” as well as a “civil rights baby” that helps to explain the surprising complexity and ironic humor that coexists with An Ill Wind Blowing’s deadpan directness about politics and history.
The conceit of the ship is a way of conceptualizing the brokenness of contemporary America. Divided into three sections, with space in between filled by rubber rats (“You think about rats jumping off a sinking ship, but I think of them as the waves floating the boat,” Sampson mused during a Q&A yesterday at Intuit), the prow of the ship is filled with artifacts of the “liberal elite,” including work by established artist friends, copies of The New Yorker, and other cultural superstructure signifiers. A fishing net repurposed as a basketball hoop stands as an homage to Obama, and visitors are encouraged to write their own political frustrations onto scraps of paper emblazoned with pictures of politicians, crumple them up, and try to make a shot. (Sampson, whom I spoke to during the installation process, originally wanted to create an analogous interactive “penny toss” for the poor at the back of the ship but couldn’t fit it in to the space). This kind of provocative, deceptively simple trope marks the piece as a whole; the middle section of the ship, representing the “nasty” contingent of politics and the “24 hour news cycle of insanity,” obstructs and separates the front of the ship from the stern, which is filled with debris and objects of the poor and working class, including a picnic basket of Cheetos and white bread, plastic coins, and chicken bones. Deeply textured and layered, even burdened, with physical symbols, the boat is the clear star of the exhibition; but related drawings that fill the gallery walls (including one of the best abstract portraits of Mitt Romney I’ve seen, depicting him as a tentacled alien driving a car with a shark-toothed grill) offer charged but more delicate, often humorous counterpoints. Earlier sculptures by Sampson, including an early ship, give a sense of the artist’s larger sensibility. And lyrics to folk songs (Bob Dylan’s “Blowing in the Wind” and the African-American ballad whose tune Dylan appropriated) face off from the walls on either side of the ship; Sampson is deeply interested in the history of folk music in America, and the opening of An Ill Wind Blowing at Intuit tonight will feature folk ballads by Mark Dvorak.

An Ill Wind Blowing

But the symbolism of each individual element in An Ill Wind Blowing matters less to Sampson than process, whether political protest or art-making. He collaborates as a rule, constantly recycles work, and considers most of the finished work disposable. “I never work alone, and I work listening to CNN instead of music,” he laughs.
An Ill Wind Blowing opens tonight at Intuit, the Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art, and runs through April 20^th.

Written by Monica Westin

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An Ill Wind Blowing: Kevin Blythe Sampson : Bad at Sports

An Ill Wind Blowing: Kevin Blythe Sampson

January 25, 2013 · Print This Article

sketch of Sampson’s proposal for Intuit

An Ill Wind Blowing

Written by Monica Westin

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1/20/13

Newark Art and Artists (Part II) – Newark Public Library

Newark Art and Artists:
Prints, Photographs, and Other Works on Paper from the
Special Collections of the
Newark Public Library (Part II)

Willie Cole. Home and Hearth, 2011. Serigraph on paper. Publisher: Printmaking Center of New Jersey. Special Collections Division, Newark Public Library. Library purchase with funding from the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation, 2012.

Curated by Jared Ash
Main Library, Third Floor Gallery
5 Washington St., Newark, NJ

January 23 – May 25, 2013

exhibition

opening reception

programs

press release

Exhibition

Robert Birmelin. The Hand, 1985. From the series, "Half Truths." Etching and aquatint on 3 copper plates. Special Collections Division, Newark Public Library. Library purchase, 2001.

Newark Art and Artists is a two–part exhibition of prints, photographs, books, and other works on paper, that either have Newark as their subject, or are created by artists who have lived, studied, worked, or were born in Newark. The exhibition includes works created between 1800 and 2012, and is drawn entirely from the holdings of the Special Collections Division of the Newark Public Library.

James Edward Jones Remembering, 2007. Linocut with watercolor. Special Collections Division, Newark Public Library. Gift of the artist.

Part I of the exhibition,which ran from October 3, 2012 through January 12, 2013, presented works primarily from the 19th and early/middle–20th centuries. Part 2 of the exhibition, opening Jan. 23, features approximately one hundred works created between 1937 and 2012 by a wide range of contemporary, living artists. In addition to artists most frequently associated with Newark such as Willie Cole, Chakaia Booker, and Jerry Gant, the exhibition presents works by a number of other world–renowned artists with Newark roots, including Robert Birmelin, Barbara Kruger, and George Tice.

Jerry Gant. The Art and Love of Jerry Gant: Stencils from 20027–Present, 2012. Unique artist's book; aerosol stencil and marker on fabric. Special Collections Division, Newark Public Library. Library purchase, with funding from the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation, 2012.

Artists in the exhibition include: Ibrahim Ahmed, Manuel Acevedo, Sunmarie Allen, Will Barnet, Herbert Beerman, Robert Birmelin, Tom Bish, Mary Lou Bongiorno, Jerome Bongiorno, Chakaia Booker, Dan Brophy, Eleta Caldwell, Willie Cole, Lisa Conrad, Cicely Cottingham, Roy Crosse, Kevin Darmanie, Evonne Davis, Victor Davson, Donald Farkas, Helen Frank, Jerry Gant, Matt Gosser, Gladys Barker Grauer, Grigory Gurevich, Akintola Hanif, Florian Jenkins, James Edward Jones, Robert Knight, Barbara Kruger, Hal Laessig, Donald Lokuta, Maria Mijares, Nell Painter, German Pitrie, Rocco Scary, Kenneth Schnall, Helen Stummer, George Tarr, George Tice, Bisa Washington, Emma Wilcox, Fran Wilner, James Wilson, and Dmitrii Wright, among others.

Will Barnet. Mary, 1937. Lithograph. Special Collections Division, Newark Public Library. Library purchase, 1938.

The exhibition also includes several works by the late Will Barnet, as a posthumous tribute. Early in his career, Barnet, who passed away in November at the age of 101, taught at the Newark Normal School, which later became Kean University and moved to Union Township.

Sunmarie Allen. Newark City Scene Two, 2010. Intaglio print etching. Special Collections Division, Newark Public Library. Library purchase with funding from the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation, 2013

Opening Reception

Wednesday, January 23, 6:00–8:00pm
7:00pm – Curator's talk by Jared Ash on "Art, Artists, and the Newark Public Library: 110 Years and Counting"
Main Library, Centennial Hall
5 Washington St.

Featuring an informational overview of art–related events, initiatives, and resources for Newark artists at the Newark Public Library, and remarks by the curator about the exhibition.

Lisa Conrad. St. Michael's, 2011. Screenprint and wax on embedded handmade paper. Special Collections Division, Newark Public Library. Library purchase with funding from the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation, 2012

In recognition of the number of artists in the exhibition who are former faculty or alumni of Arts High School and/or the Newark School of Fine and Industrial Arts, the Library is especially encouraging other alumni and faculty from those schools to attend the January 23rd opening reception.

Programs

Art Portfolio Review and Resource Fair
Saturday, March 9, 2013, 1:00–4:00pm
Centennial Hall, Main Library

James Wilson. Rising Down, 2012. Acrylic on canvas. Special Collections Division, Newark Public Library. Library purchase, with funding from the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation, 2013

In conjunction with the exhibition, the Library will be hosting its second free Portfolio Review and Art Resource Fair. Presented in partnership with the Paul Robeson Galleries of Rutgers–Newark, the portfolio review offers artists the opportunity to have their work reviewed by one of four distinguished curators: Mary Birmingham, Curator, Visual Arts Center of New Jersey; Kevin Darmanie, Founder/Director, Kedar Studio of Art; Evonne Davis, Artistic Director, Gallery Aferro; and Adrienne Wheeler, Owner, Adrienne Wheeler Gallery.

In addition to these curators, review participants and other visitors will have an opportunity to meet representatives from a broad range of art organizations, and discover new places to show art, see art, sell art, and create art in Newark. While there is no fee to participate, artists interested in having their portfolios reviewed are encouraged to reserve a review slot in advance. For reservations and additional information, contact Anonda Bell, Director & Curator, Paul Robeson Galleries, at galleryr@andromeda.rutgers.edu, or 973–353–1610.

Donald Lokuta, Untitled [Group portrait of neighborhood children and teenagers; Napoleon Street and New York Avenue], 1976. From the series, "Ironbound: Newark, New Jersey." Special Collections Division, Newark Public Library. Library purchase, 1980.

Art and Artist Resources

The Reference Center at the Library maintains a guide to online resources and internet links related to art broken down into several categories including art history, image collections, opportunities for artists, photography, prints, and sculpture. The guide is available at: nplwebguides.pbworks.com/w/page/5673336/Art.

Funding for the exhibitions, portfolio reviews, and resource fairs has been provided in part by the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation. Additional funding from the Dodge Foundation has enabled the Library to purchase works by contemporary Newark artists for the Library's Fine Prints and Photographs Collection, and to expand the total number of Newark artists represented in the Collection.

Gladys Barker Grauer. I Wish the Rent Was Heaven Sent, 1992. Color lithograph. Special Collections Division, Newark Public Library. Gift of the Rutgers Center for Innovative Print and Paper, 1993.

Newark Art and Artists will be on view in the Main Library's Third Floor Gallery from January 23 through May 25, 2013. The exhibition and related programs are free and open to the general public during regular library hours, Monday through Saturday. For additional information, please visit www.npl.org,or contact the Reference Division through email at: reference@npl.org, or by calling 973–733–7779.

http://www.npl.org/Pages/ProgramsExhibits/Exhibits/NewarkArtII.html

1/17/13

Chris Christie slams NRA’s Obama daughters ad - Maggie Haberman - POLITICO.com

1/14/13

Japan’s Postwar Art Wave | ARTnews

1/13/13

Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art opens exhibitions by Kevin Blythe Sampson and C.T. McClusky

The First Art Newspaper on the Net Established in 1996 United States Sunday, January 13, 2013 Home Last Week Artists Galleries Museums Photographers Images Subscribe Comments Search Contact Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art opens exhibitions by Kevin Blythe Sampson and C.T. McClusky Sampson Proposal: The sculpture is a boat-like vehicle that will be built in three distinctively different sections. CHICAGO, IL.- For the first exhibition of 2013, Intuit: The Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art presents Kevin Blythe Sampson: An Ill Wind Blowing from January 11 - April 20. Intuit hosts artist in residence, Kevin Blythe Sampson, over a two week period as he creates a site-specific vehicle in Intuit's Main Gallery using recycled materials. The sculpture will evolve over Sampson's two week residency as Intuit encourages the general public to interact with Sampson while he is creating. The sculpture is a boat-like vehicle that will be built in three distinctively different sections. The front will represent major corporations, the middle of the boat will contain objects that represent the liberal elite and the rear section of the boat will represent the working poor and homeless. "After thinking about the current state of politics in the United States and the current national conversation on civility, I have decided to build an environment that contains a symbolic vessel that will be powered by the wind that is blowing across the world," says Sampson. The title of the exhibition, An Ill Wind Blowing, is in reference to the history of protest, the state of America today and the popular song "Blowin' in the Wind" by Bob Dylan. The Circus Collages of C.T. McClusky Intuit is also presenting The Circus Collages of C.T. McClusky from January 11 - May 25. We know very little of C.T. McClusky's biography except that he worked as a circus clown and spent the winter seasons of 1940-1960 at a boarding house in Oakland, California. Working with found materials, McClusky completed 53 collages on shirt cardboard incorporating foil, string, photographic illustrations and cuttings from animal cracker boxes. His evocative images are sentimental reflections on his time in the circus and depicts daily circus life creating windows onto a world peopled by bally broads, musicians, trapeze artists, and lion tamers. The work was discovered in a tattered black suitcase by John Turner at the Alameda Penny Market Swap Meet in California 1975. The Circus Collages of C.T. McClusky, featuring 24 collages and the suitcase they were found in, will be the first solo exhibition of McClusky's work in Chicago.

More Information: http://www.artdaily.org/index.asp?int_sec=2&int_new=60095#.UPLv7Bhc-P8[/url]
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Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art opens exhibitions by Kevin Blythe Sampson and C.T. McClusky

1/11/13

Sandra Sheehy - ‘Music From a Garden at Dusk’ - NYTimes.com

Art In Review

Sandra Sheehy: ‘Music From a Garden at Dusk’

By ROBERTA SMITH

Published: January 10, 2013

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Despite the considerable interest in outsider art, contemporary self-taught artists still often end up in a kind of limbo, largely ignored by the mainstream art world. If Sandra Sheehy, a British artist born in 1965, had been active the middle of the 20th century and perhaps been institutionalized, her entrancing, obsessive assemblages might appear in all kinds of artist-organized group exhibitions. Instead, she lives outside London and takes inspiration from her garden; her work has been seen in New York almost exclusively at the Cavin-Morris Gallery, whose specialties include art of the self-taught. Her third solo show there offers an excellent review of her work while suggesting ties to past and present eccentric abstractionists like Eva Hesse, Judith Scott, Jessica Jackson Hutchins, Alexandra Bircken and Anna Betbeze.

The first works Ms. Sheehy showed at Cavin Morris, in 2003, were wall pieces that resembled doilies run amok, or bits of colorful handmade moss. They were small, irregular pieces on which she sometimes drew or painted but more often built up with free-form embroidery, sewn-down bunches of fabric, shells, beads and small stones. By 2007-8 the pieces had grown larger, more dimensional and distended, resembling abstract rag dolls or big soft amulets. Then Ms. Sheehy shifted fully to three dimensions, making cocoonlike objects from chicken wire, fabric and paper that she then encrusted with bunched fabric, stitching, beads, sequins, shells and what not, all sheathed in semitransparent fabrics or extensive wrappings of thread or yarn.

The 27 works here represent all phases and show steady improvement, with two pieces that hang from the ceiling being especially good. But each of Ms. Sheehy’s efforts is an extravagant, compressed world unto itself, at once beautiful and grotesque, natural and willfully mad

Sandra Sheehy - ‘Music From a Garden at Dusk’ - NYTimes.com

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HOMEPAGE > News > FOLK BABEL DAI COSTRUTTORI DI BABELE ALLA BLACK FOLK ART DAL 7 FEBBRAIO AL 2 MARZO 2013 RIZOMI ART BRUT TORINO

Torino News

TORINO, 06 February 2013

Mostre Folk Babel Dai Costruttori di Babele alla Black Folk Art dal 7 febbraio al 2 marzo 2013 Rizomi Art Brut Torino

dal mercoledì al sabato dalle 14 alle 17

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Written by Monica Westin

Written by Monica Westin

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