DART Diary: THE PARTY & Beyond
Thursday, November 14 · 7 - 11pm at Angel Orensanz Foundation
The year's most anticipated networking schmooze-fest celebrating the American Photography 40 and American Illustration 43 winners is just 20 days away—get your tickets here!
Once again AI-AP brings the art, photo and design communities together in a one-of-a-kind, trifecta gathering of photographers / illustrators / and creatives to launch the new AP40 and AI43 hardcover award books. American Illustration and American Photography (AI-AP) offer an expansive view with hundreds of images selected by an outstanding jury from thousands of entries submitted to our two annual competitions.
American Illustration 43 designed by Paul Buckley with Brianna Harden [above]. The Jury: Michael Houtz, GQ; Chuck Kerr, Entertainment Weekly; Julia Knetzer, Garden and Gun; Lisa Larsen-Walker, ProPublica; Taylor Le, Los Angeles Times; Kelly Lynch, Workman Publishing; Chris Mihal, Southern Poverty Law Center; Anjali Nair, WIRED; Marci Senders, Disney/Hyperion; Minh Uong, The New York Times; Alexandra Zsigmond, The New Yorker
American Photography 40 designed by Thomas Alberty; cover photo by Lindsay Kreighbaum [above]. The Jury: Thomas Alberty, New York Magazine; Michael Baca, BASIC Agency @ Google; Lydia Chebbine, The 19th News; Donna Cohen, Bloomberg; Amy Feitelberg, Freelance Director of Photography; Natalie Gialluca, Vanity Fair; Julie Hau, National Geographic; Stephanie Heimann, The New Republic; Gabriel Sanchez, The New York Times; Christine Walsh, South James; Alison Wild, Entertainment Weekly
Angel Orensanz Foundation, 172 Norfolk Street New York, NY
And here at DART, we celebrate three AI multi-award winners with exhibitions coming up soon—and continuing:
Friday, October 25, 6-8pm: Esther Pearl Watson | Generating Auras at Andrew Edlin
The paintings featured in this exhibition, Esther Pearl Watson’s third with the Andrew Edlin Gallery, were inspired by the artist’s stay in Italy this past summer, caring for her father in his hometown of Ferno. “…my father who is seventy-eight, was in a motorbike accident in Italy. He spent three months in the hospital, and I found myself traveling back and forth [from her home I California] as a long-distance caregiver,” Watson said. “There is a painting in the show, Generates Auras, that features a large stoic donkey.
“Donkeys are often used as guardians of herds, bonding with them and protecting them from predators, she continued. “I have to be a guardian for my dad. Lately, I’ve thought a lot about comets. The auras they create are spectacular. In his own way, my father is like a comet, generating his own aura, shaped by the changes in his body and mind. Just as a comet emits invisible light, he radiates a presence and energy that is deeply felt but not always seen.”
Andrew Edlin Gallery, 212 Bowery, New York, NY Info
Saturday, November 9, 5-7 pm: Anita Kunz | Original Sisters at Norman Rockwell Museum
Original Sisters is a series of portraits that reveals and honors the contributions of history-making women. To create the series, award-winning illustrator Anita Kunz carefully researched, wrote about, and portrayed each subject, sometimes compiling scant available information to establish a more complete picture. Her portraits present famed and lesser-known women in the fields of art, science, technology and invention, education, history, and politics, offering a needed expansion and revision of the historical record. In the words of author Roxane Gay, Original Sisters offers “possibility and promise …. You will be introduced to many of these women for the first time, because history is rarely kind to women until it is forced to be.”
Kunz’s project began in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic when the artist spent hours in her Toronto studio seeking inspiration by searching the internet for information about notable women in history. Though the subject had always interested her, Kunz realized that her knowledge base was limited, and she became determined to fill in the gaps. She began painting portraits of accomplished women across time, cultures, and geography, accompanied by texts she assembled to tell their stories. These portraits form the ever-growing nucleus of Original Sisters: Portraits of Tenacity and Courage, an exhibition and book that together bring to light hundreds of women trailblazers who made and changed history.
Norman Rockwell Museum, 9 Glendale Road Route 183, Stockbridge, MA Info
Continuing through December 6: Drawing Lessons: Poems by Paul Jaskunas, Art by Warren Linn at MICA
In the shadow of ongoing ecological and political crises, artist Warren Linn and writer Paul Jaskunas have collaborated on a timely, provocative series of images and poems. The project began with a sketchbook created by Linn in 2022-2023. Sketchbook #1 2023 was acquisitioned by the Art Institute of Chicago Print & Drawing Collection November 2023. Inside its pages, Linn fashioned an assortment of contorted seaborn travelers that animate drawings, collages, and paintings infused with the irreverent, manic energy of bebop and the uncanniness of dystopia. At once comic and disquieting, undeniably contemporary yet steeped in tradition, Linn’s images tap into the apocalyptic anxieties of the age.
Over the past year, moved by the artworks’ vitality, Jaskunas has written dozens of ekphrastic poems in dialogue with this sketchbook and other pieces in Linn’s oeuvre. Rather than describing the art, the poems riff off gestures and visual ideas enacted by Linn, crafting poems touched with dark comedy, grief for a fallen world, and the playful tenacity of the blues.
Warren Linn, MICA Professor Emeritus, is a visual artist whose work has garnered numerous awards including AI43, as well as gallery and museum credits. He has exhibited nationally and internationally since the mid 1960s, and for fifty years, his editorial illustrations appeared in major print-media outlets throughout North America.
MICA, Pinkard Gallery, Bunting Center, 1401 W. Mt Royal Ave., Baltimore MD Info
If you would like to subscribe to DART: Design Arts Daily, please go here