July, 2024

Image: Self (Contained) @ Ryan Lee Gallery, New York City

Self (Contained) at Ryan Lee Gallery

Amanda Valdez, Damien H. Ding, and Holton Rower.

On view till August 16th at 515 W 26th St, NYC.

Curated by Elizabeth Denny and Katie Alice Fitz Gerald

Including work by: Paul Anagnostopoulos, Camille Billops, Brian Bress, Francesca DiMattio, Damien H. Ding, Lizzie Gill, Hannah Lim, Holton Rower, Stephanie Syjuco, Gabriela Vainsencher, Amanda Valdez, Paula Wilson.

Press Release HERE

Over/Under the Surface at The Ice House, North Haven, Maine

Emily Trenholm and Amanda Valdez

Curated by Emily Trenholm. Including works by: Angela Adams, Amanda Valdez, Alice Spencer, Rachel Gloria Adams, Grace Deggenaro, Emily Trenholm

Summer travel is here and despite rising temps in southern Europe, many are still gutting out vacations to Italy. Here is my plug for a magical corner an hour north of Rome. Last Spring I had a dream come true visit to The Tarot Garden, a sculpture park created by feminist icon Niki de Saint Phalle.

Situated on an old quarry road in the Tuscan countryside, Niki’s Tarot Garden is made of 22 sculptures ranging from 3 to 50 feet depicting each character in the major arcana of the tarot deck. From the High Priestess to Justice, she channeled her autobiography with these archetypes to fully realize a monumental interactive sculpture park.

For me it was a constant full body experience. The birds chirping in the bushes as we ascended into the garden, to the cool water and spray of the fountain at the foot of the Magician. Entering countless sculptures and feasting our eyes on mosaic patterns and images, nooking ourselves into curved benches, running our hands along each handmade piece of tile; it’s a pure gentle delight and a needed reprieve from the marble fatigue in Rome.

She opened the garden with The Magician mounted on the The High Priestess, both flowing into a pool of water in which The Wheel of Fortune, created by Swiss artist and ex-husband of Niki, Jean Tinguely, spouts water. A snake slithers out of the pool towards the Priestess while the larger of the three wheels with cut-out hearts, makes this gesture of spray non-threatening. To the left, the Empress is perched like a sphinx, imposing herself yet channeling the calm and care of a Madonna. Spread to the right, on top of the hill we see The Sun, whose arch we pass through to climb into the garden, The Hierophant, and The Hanged Man. An instant abundance of images.

Niki does away with right angles throughout the park, instead using curved lines to reference the nature of the characters and the land surrounding the sculptures. “The right angle comes to kill, the right angle is an assassin.”

The scale shift brings in monumental images of these archetypes at one moment, while suddenly the surface leads to autobiographical matrices mapped onto the ceramic tiles covering the sculptures. Her flow and use of the tarot as a pathway for processing her world is seamless. Where we comfortably explore, nestled in nature, an abundant world.

The Mother Artist: Portraits of Ambition, Limitation, and Creativity

by Catherine Ricketts

It’s a tricky task to center oneself within a body of research, to tell one’s story, while simultaneously telling the stories of contemporary women artists who are also mothers. Catherine Ricketts’ writing and reflections never feel indulgent, her revelations are examined, poetic, and decisively detailed in The Mother Artist: Portraits of Ambition, Limitation, and Creativity. Broken up into topics with 2-3 artists per chapter, their work/practice touches upon themes of Labor, Infancy, Sex, Balance, Weaning, Community, and Perseverance. She gives us pillars of the late 20th century: Ruth Asawa, Toni Morrison, and Senga Nengudi plus others who made their marks in the last decade like Carmen Winant and Madeline Donahue. She weaves their process, words, and experiences of mothering inside their homes and within their art worlds while marching us through her understanding of pregnancy, birth, the stages of new mothering, and back to pregnancy again. She does this while upholding her writing practice, navigating a global pandemic with a newborn, and creating communities in the wake of such upheavals. As I continue my way forward balancing the glories and challenges of being an artist and mother, I am mulling over all the strategies Ricketts shared.

Night Watchman

by Jayne Ann Phillips

A page turner of a summer read, the newly minted Pulitzer Prize winning, Night Watch had me in its grip. Jayne Ann Phillips sets this historical fiction, in the post civil war backwaters of West Virginia, between women trying to stay hidden high up on a mountain, the men who leave and seek them, and a holistic lunatic asylum. The story delves into memory, trauma, and the shape shifting required by some and sought by others in the aftermath of war. Switchbacking through the narration of the characters we are taken on a journey in a nonlinear way. Phillips allows the story to unfold with equal parts surprise and anticipation as the reader ascertains new meanings and revelations in the character’s strongly held secrets. Through sorrow, horror, and depravity we see these characters reaching for the supernatural and magic that nature has to offer and whose powers can transcend assault and adaptation.

Recipe of the Month

Surviving our first heat wave in New York, I got in touch with any and all cold salad things I could muster the will to prepare, after spending many-a-nights eating fruit, cheese, and bread and butter for dinner. Eventually I needed more variety, in enters a delightful Cheesy Chickpea Salad Toast: tangy from the cornichons, crunchy from the celery, and popping with dill, a vat of this is on repeat.

From the Archive

Grace, III, 2019 Embroidery, hand dyed fabric, acrylic paint, and canvas, 32 x 36 inches.