Folk Art from the Cargo Collection in Birmingham, AL
until December 30, 2018 In commemoration of Alabama’s Bicentennial, the Birmingham Museum of Art presents "The Original Makers: Folk Art from the Cargo Collection", an exhibition featuring more than 160 outstanding works of folk art from the Museum’s permanent collection. Works of art range from quilts, drawings and paintings, to wooden and metal sculptures, and functional objects such as bird houses – all made in Alabama and several neighbouring states. Birmingham Museum of Art
2000 Rev. Abraham Woods, Jr. Blvd, (Formerly 2000 8th Ave. N), Birmingham, AL 35203
artsbma.org
until September 9, 2018 "Coming to America", Billy White’s first showing in New York City with SHRINE, is titled after Eddie Murphy’s 1988 romantic comedy of the same name. Scenes from the film have evolved into a recurring subject in White’s work. All of his subjects are rendered with thick paint on canvas, markers and graphite on paper, or three-dimensionally with clay to create raw, evocative portraits. White has been working at the NIAD Art Center in Richmond, CA since 1994, and is represented exclusively by SHRINE. SHRINE, 179 East Broadway, New York
shrine.nyc
Danielle le Bricquir in Lannion
until September 1, 2018 Galerie Irène Bonny in Lannion presents a solo exhibition on the work of Danielle le Bricquir, whose colourful works convey childhood nostalgia, celtic tales, and visions from far away lands encountered during the artist's travels. Galerie Irène Bonny
9 Avenue Ernest Renan, 22300 Lannion, France
galerie-irene-bonny.com
August 18 and 25, 2018
September 1 and 8, 2018 Gallery Incurve Kyoto presents a solo exhibition of work by Hikoyuki Uchiage titled “I yearn to meet you”, curated by Taizo Wada. Hikoyuki Uchiage (b.1954) draws portraits of celebrities, with rustic lines and rich colours. The exhibition presents his unique portraits from the earliest works to the most recent. Gallery Incurve Kyoto
60-18 Mibutakahi-cho Nakagyo-ku Kyoto 604-8824, Japan
http://incurve.jp/english/info.html
Featuring: - Julia Sisi
- Metropolitan Museum
- Edmund Monsiel
- Kemel Leeford Rankine
- Jana Paleckova
- Josephine Tota
- Odinga Tyehimba
- Evelyne Postic
RV98 Article Preview:
The Surreal Visions of Josephine Tota
Colourful symbolism and a singular take on the American experience
Untitled, 1985, egg tempera and gold leaf on panel, 10.6 x 32.9 ins. / 26.9 x 83.6 cm, Memorial Art Gallery of the University of Rochester
Josephine Tota (1910–1996) was a seamstress and amateur artist who lived a conventional life among the Italian immigrant community in Rochester, New York. In her seventies, she spent countless hours painting in the privacy of her home, where she imbued over 90 small jewel-like paintings with the richness of her strange imagination. Despite the appeal of her bright, prismatic palette, unsettling narratives hopscotch around shifting spaces. Tota’s visions capture and condense anxieties accumulated over a lifetime. It is this powerful body of work – dozens of untamed paintings in egg tempera and gilding on board, completed at the end of her life – that the exhibition “The Surreal Visions of Josephine Tota” explores and advocates for inclusion into the canon of self-taught, visionary art.
Untitled, 1983, egg tempera on panel, 8 x 7 ins. / 20.3 x 17.8 cm, courtesy Rosamond Tota
Tota depicted her small-scale, encoded domestic dramas with an intrepid and intellectually playful approach to image making. Her images sprang from a deep well of memories and dreams. Themes of metamorphosis, family bonds, physical pain, human frailty, the natural world, loss and tragedy dominate her obsessive and otherworldly depictions. Their compact size encourages intimate viewing: the smallest is about 5 by 1.5 inches; the largest is 10 by 32 inches. These works were made for an audience of one: Tota.
Untitled, undated,1980s, egg tempera on panel,16 x 20.3 ins. / 40.6 x 51.6 cm, University of Rochester
Her unsettling, female-led narratives are rife with women subjugated by the circumstances of life or empowered with mystical and unknowable forces. Her most common motifs include anxious women, human/plant hybrids, the third eye, masks, tears of blood, clothing, and needles and threads. Eyes, a powerful source of Tota’s magic, were a source of profound anxiety for her as well. Due to her visual nature and the threat she experienced from cataract surgery during the height of her productive period, her omnipresent eyes – glaring, seeking, weeping blood – are laden with psychological weight. Images like these, not words, were the language in which Tota communicated. No papers or letters exist, and our knowledge of her life comes primarily from the personal accounts
of family members. The reward for the persistent and curious viewer of Tota’s paintings is an engagement with work that unfolds over time in labyrinthine tangles of both art-historical and personal references.
Untitled, 1988, egg tempera and gold leaf on panel, 10.5 x 13.75 ins. / 26.7 x 34.9 cm, courtesy Rosamond Tota
Born in Corato, Italy, in 1910, Tota felt a deep and abiding connection with the spirituality and mystery of the natural world. As a deeply sensitive and unusually bright and outspoken child, Tota often felt alienated from her family. Her feelings of isolation and marginalisation were reinforced by the circumstances of her life, including early experiences of childhood poverty and the trauma of immigrating to the United States at the age of ten. Similar to many immigrant women who have struggled with the displacement and duality of living between their home and adopted cultures, Tota often described feeling “torn” or fractured; in her paintings destabilised, unravelling identities take shape as women with multiple heads that grow from a single body. To read the rest of
this article, check out Raw Vision 98, out now!
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