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Hamilton Spectator
13-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Hamilton Spectator
A Curve, Not a Line: 50 Years of Passion, Progress, and Perspective at the Art Gallery of Burlington
'Time is anything but a line. It's a helix, a spiral — generations building a collection through generations of makers, scholars, and curators who have been in this space,' says the Art Gallery of Burlington's Artistic Director and Curator Suzanne Carte. Carte uses this idea of non-linearity to describe the organic evolution of the Art Gallery of Burlington's (AGB) permanent collection. With its latest exhibition, 'A Curve, Not a Line,' the gallery invites audiences to step into a reimagined version of its 50-year legacy. 'A collection is built not only by makers but by scholars and curators who have contributed to this space,' Carte explains. 'To think it was built from point A to point B negates all the work that happens in between, the relearning we can do from the objects, the artists, and the many individuals who have donated their time and energy to telling stories.' Over the past five decades, the AGB has become a national leader in contemporary ceramics, now home to over 4,000 pieces. But Carte, who joined the gallery in 2019, sought to uncover the personal, communal, and emotional narratives behind each object. She approached the collection as a listener, collaborator, and storyteller. 'It takes a full team to do this,' she says. 'Our collections manager teaches me so much. And physically handling these works during the installation gave me a bodily experience of the collection, a privilege, especially when considering objects that were meant to be touched, used, brought to your lips, sat on, or stood on. Holding them with my white glass gloves; this space is a privilege I'm acutely aware of. For me, the learning happens through tactility and experience, rather than reading.' Carte spent time in the vault, understanding the collection's depth and its weight — literally and metaphorically. 'The title 'A Curve, Not a Line' speaks to the idea that collections don't develop in straight paths,' she says. 'They loop back. They spiral. They shift depending on who's telling the story.' Rejecting a chronological or medium-specific structure, Carte drew inspiration from a moving exhibition she once saw at the Brooklyn Museum, curated by a director retiring after decades of service. 'He picked all his favourite works; they were his legacy, and he put them all together in one room. As an audience member, I thought, 'What is even happening here? This is bonkers. No curator would ever throw all this together.' But once I understood the intention, it was so touching and joyous.' She wanted to channel that spirit: to focus not just on aesthetics, but on the totality of the collection. 'We have works that are brilliant demonstrations of ancestral techniques, pieces made with different clay bodies, sculptural forms, whimsical, and functional alike. It was important to look at the whole picture,' Carte says. 'And to invite a team to help choose what they found meaning in.' That sense of collectivity echoes the spirit of community gatherings like Culture Jam, which Carte recalls fondly. 'It's that feeling you understand, the heart. And this is the heart, right? The art. The ability to bring people together and find deeper meaning in these pieces. Not just looking at them, but seeing into them.' Carte organized the exhibition thematically around gestures and experiences: words and movements that come from the body and emotions. Across several gallery rooms, more than 200 works are displayed in clusters. Ceramics are suspended from ceilings, embedded into floors, and placed at unexpected heights, inviting viewers to crouch, stretch, and move. 'I wanted to create an embodied experience,' she says. 'To make people aware of their physical relationship to the objects.' She also dismantled traditional curatorial hierarchies by inviting staff from across departments, not just curatorial roles, to help select works and write exhibition texts. 'It brought so much life and a different lens to the collection,' Carte says. 'We want everyone to feel like they belong in this space.' This collaborative approach mirrors the collection's evolution: shaped over time by artists, collectors, donors, curators, and community members. 'The idea of permanence suggests something fixed, but we want people to understand this collection is constantly evolving,' Carte says. 'It responds to the times, to the people, to the questions we're asking.' That responsiveness is vital in a Canadian art context reckoning with exclusion and erasure. A Curve, Not a Line makes space for voices long marginalized in museum narratives. 'We're thinking about what voices are missing, what makers have been underrepresented, and how we can ensure this is a collection for the future,' Carte says. 'One that reflects the fullness of our communities.' That future-oriented vision includes showcasing emerging, racialized, queer, and otherwise underrepresented artists. Carte is also committed to addressing Indigenous representation in the collection, currently at just 1%. 'Curating isn't just about selecting and displaying objects,' she says. 'It's about listening. We need to reconcile with the fact that our collection includes only 1% Indigenous representation. And we're talking about an art form as old as the Earth itself. It needs a greater connection to the land's stewards and water protectors.' Building that representation, she says, is a key priority, through Indigenous Shared Circles and new acquisitions that honour artists previously overlooked. Carte's reflective and inclusive approach has resonated widely. Artists are grateful to see their earlier works revisited. Visitors have commented on the warmth and accessibility of the show. And Carte herself remains moved. 'One of the most beautiful parts of this process was discovering how much care had gone into building this collection over the years,' she says. 'Every piece has a story. Every story connects to someone.' While the exhibition honours five decades of art and community, it also looks ahead. Carte hopes A Curve, Not a Line inspires visitors to consider the stories public collections can tell and the roles they can play in shaping them. 'This isn't just about looking back,' she says. 'It's about imagining what comes next.' As the AGB continues to evolve, Carte is committed to keeping the collection alive: growing, shifting, and shaped by many voices. 'We want to build something that reflects who we are,' she says. 'Not just who we've been.' A Curve, Not a Line is on view at the Art Gallery of Burlington through the fall. Visitors are encouraged to take their time, move with the curves, and listen closely, because in this space, every spiral has a story to tell. Error! Sorry, there was an error processing your request. There was a problem with the recaptcha. Please try again. You may unsubscribe at any time. By signing up, you agree to our terms of use and privacy policy . This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google privacy policy and terms of service apply. Want more of the latest from us? Sign up for more at our newsletter page .
Boston Globe
03-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Boston Globe
Rosalind Fox Solomon, whose photos captured emotional nuance, dies at 95
Ms. Fox Solomon was sometimes compared to Diane Arbus, and like Arbus, she studied with the great Austrian emigre photographer Lisette Model. But unlike her more famous peer, Ms. Fox Solomon captured sometimes off-putting subjects with a warm intensity that infused them with humanity, even if they appeared strange or unappealing at first glance. The white woman in 'Poke Bonnet, First Mondays, Scottsboro, Alabama' (1976), in Ms. Fox Solomon's 2018 book, 'Liberty Theater,' appears pleased with herself and overconfident, potentially queasy attributes given the time and place. Like the subjects of Ms. Fox Solomon's other portraits, she dominates the frame. But she is not an Arbus freak; nor is she grotesque. She is a familiar sort of woman in early middle age, not a caricature of a white Southerner. Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up The Black child in 'Girl Rising, Mississippi' (1977) gazes away from the camera, seemingly filled with determination. But Ms. Fox Solomon captured a world of hurt in the child's liquid eye, set jaw, and slight grimace. Advertisement It was that ability to convey emotional nuance -- what writer Teju Cole called, in a review of 'Liberty Theater' in The New York Times, 'her special ability to register tiny interstitial moments' -- that excited critics. Advertisement The portraits 'pin her subjects in situations of inadvertency, when their faces and bodies are between one attitude and another,' Cole wrote. Those were the moments, Ms. Fox Solomon's camera seemed to say, when subjects were most susceptible to interpretation. Similarly, a portrait of young Israelis in uniform, included in the collective exhibition 'This Place' at the Brooklyn Museum in 2016, shows their pensive and sometimes playful faces, a world away from war. Another photo shows a middle-aged man with a Star of David tattoo on an Israeli beach, looking proud but uneasy. "Jerusalem, Israel, 2011." Rosalind Fox Solomon/MUUS Collec Her pictures from Israel were 'arguably the most deeply human images in the show and perhaps the most traditional, reaching back to the work of Diane Arbus, Paul Strand and Eugène Atget,' Times critic Roberta Smith wrote. Ms. Fox Solomon came to photography relatively late, around the age of 38, as the somewhat restless (by her own account) but socially conscious wife of a Jewish businessperson in Chattanooga, Tenn. She had grown up in suburban Chicago and had known antisemitism as a child. And from her arrival in the South, in the early 1950s, she was aware of the inequities, racial and otherwise, around her. Her husband's family owned movie theaters, including a segregated one -- her book 'Liberty Theater' was an allusion to it. The nuanced view of Southern society that informs the book took shape during this period, as she suggested to an interviewer for the Smithsonian's Archives of American Art in 2016. In Chattanooga, Black and white people lived in proximity to one another, as elsewhere in the South, and racism, as she saw it, was shaded, not monolithic. Advertisement 'I knew that the people in Chicago, and the people that I knew in New York, they just had absolutely no connection in any way to African Americans,' Ms. Fox Solomon said. 'And in Chattanooga there was more connection, or there was more possibility.' "Valentine Boxes, Chattanooga, Tennessee, USA, 1976." Rosalind Fox Solomon/MUUS Collec In 1968, while visiting Japan, she found herself unable to communicate with the people she was staying with, and her Kodak Instamatic became 'a way that I just could communicate with myself,' she told the interviewer. It was an epiphany. She came to realize that 'something is different about me when I'm taking pictures,' she said. 'I connect with something in myself that's different than when I'm in social contact.' What that something was, she didn't specify. But she told the interviewer, 'I always have tried as much as possible to connect my inner feelings to my pictures.' "Landmine Zone, Pnom Penh, Cambodia, 1992." Rosalind Fox Solomon/MUUS Collec Rosalind Fox was born April 2, 1930, in Highland Park, Ill., to Vernon Fox, a businessperson who worked in his family's wholesale tobacco and candy enterprise, and Joelle Wellman Fox. She received a bachelor's degree in political science from Goucher College in Baltimore in 1951. Soon after, she met her husband, Joel W. Solomon, and they moved to Chattanooga, where she became the Southern regional director of the Experiment in International Living, an exchange program for high school students. It was after visiting Japan -- in early 1972, the year after Arbus died by suicide -- that she accompanied her husband on a business trip to New York. There, she met Model, a pioneer of street photography, who had immigrated to the United States in 1938. Model was immediately impressed by the photographs Ms. Fox Solomon showed her. 'She had a lot of confidence in me,' Ms. Fox Solomon told the Smithsonian interviewer. Advertisement Ms. Fox Solomon was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1979, and she traveled to Guatemala, Peru, India, South Africa, and elsewhere, photographing shamans, funerals, rituals, and festivals. Her work is in the collections of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and her 'Portraits in the Time of AIDS,' a searing vision of patients and caretakers, was acquired by the National Gallery of Art in Washington. In 2019, she received a lifetime achievement award from the International Center of Photography. Ms. Fox Solomon leaves a daughter, Linda Solomon Wood; a son, Joel Solomon; and eight grandchildren. Her marriage to Joel Solomon ended in divorce in 1984; thereafter, she lived in New York City. This article originally appeared in
Vogue
01-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Vogue
‘To the Ends of the Earth' by Jeanette Spicer
Artist's bio Jeanette Spicer has received grants from The Penumbra Foundation, The New York Foundation For the Arts, The Queens Council and The Magenta Foundation. She has shown her work at Rencontres d'Arles, Baxter Street Camera Club and Weitman Gallery in among other spaces. Spicer's series, To the Ends of the Earth was acquired by The Brooklyn Museum in 2025. Spicer published her first monograph Sea(see) with Kris Graves Projects in 2018, and To the Ends of the Earth with GOST Books in 2024, which is shortlisted for the Rencontres d'Arles Photo Book Award in 2025. She received her MFA from Parsons the New School for Design. Spicer lives and works in Queens, New York.
Forbes
18-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Forbes
Grace Hartigan, Mary Abbott, And Mildred Thompson: Three AbEx Women To Know, Love, And See
Grace Hartigan, 'East Side Sunday,' 1956, oil on canvas, 80 × 82 in., Brooklyn Museum, Gift of James I. Merrill, 1957, 56.180. In the late 1940's, North Carolina had a novel idea. To begin a state art collection. For the people. To be displayed in a state art museum in the state capital of Raleigh. No state in the nation had such a thing. A radical notion for place that at the time thought it was such a bad idea for Black and white people to eat together that it was illegal. Word of the idea spread. All the way to New York, newly minted as the capital of the Western contemporary art world following the tumult in Paris and mass exodus of artists out of Europe during World War II. New York gallerist John Myers caught wind of the idea. The gallery he co-owned was unusual in that it was a place for both artists and poets to show and discuss their work. And collaborate. One such poet was future Pulitzer Prize winner James Merrill. Merrill was raised in absurd wealth as the son of Charles E. Merrill, co-founder of investment brokerage firm Merrill Lynch. The poet Merrill was working with Myers' gallery to help fund purchases of work by the gallery's roster of artists for placement into museum collections. One of those artists was Grace Hartigan (1922–2008). One of those museums was the North Carolina Museum of Art. This story inspires 'Grace Hartigan: The Gift of Attention,' the largest exhibition of Hartigan's work in over two decades, on view through August 10, 2025, at the museum. Jared Ledesma is the Curator of 20th-Century Art and Contemporary Art at the North Carolina Museum of Art. Interested in the museum's connection to Hartigan, he began researching. He found a letter from Myers to Merrill where the gallerist relayed what was taking place in Raleigh with the new state museum and how the institution's associate director, James Byrnes, was especially keen on acquiring contemporary art. Another progressive notion for the era, particularly in the South. The gallery sent Hartigan to Raleigh to sit on a panel of jurors and judge the first contemporary art exhibition held there. This was near the peak of the Abstract Expressionist movement. The movement of Pollock and Krasner and Rothko and the de Kooning's and Hartigan and Mitchell. The movement that set New York and American painters atop the mainstream contemporary art world. Made them superstars. The first explicitly original mainstream, contemporary, American art movement in the eyes of many. Merrill funded an acquisition of Hartigan's work for the North Carolina Museum of Art, along with the Brooklyn Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, and others. The connection between Hartigan and Merrill, between painter and poet, sent Ledesma down a rabbit hole. 'I was aware of past exhibitions focusing on the painters and poets of the New York School, but I didn't find much focusing on Hartigan herself,' he told 'A lot has been written on Frank O'Hara and how the painters were, in some ways, his muse, but not the other way around, and I really wanted to bring Hartigan to the fore after finding so much work that she created that's really indebted to the poets in many ways.' The NCMA exhibition centers Hartigan's engagement with New York's contemporary poets during the 50's and 60's, arguably the pinnacle of her career, the period from which the artworks in the show are drawn. Hartigan created artworks in direct response to poems. Her Oranges paintings. There's a painting in the Raleigh exhibition called Snow Angel, so named a Barbara Guest poem. Merrill, a poet, of course, was a major patron. As were other poets who helped support Hartigan through the purchase of paintings. 'Daisy Alden, the poet, she bought two works by Hartigan. One was a portrait of her and her lover, Olga,' Ledesma explained. 'The poets also wrote art criticism. This was also a boost for Hartigan. She was a subject of a few reviews written in 'ARTnews' by Frank O'Hara and James Skyler, another thread in direct connection.' "Grace Hartigan: The Gift of Attention," installation view at the North Carolina Museum of Art. Hartigan is generally associated with the Abstract Expressionist movement. Unlike her Ninth Street female peers Helen Frankenthaler, Elaine de Kooning, Lee Krasner, or Joan Mitchell, however, Hartigan has not had a major show in recent years. The AbEx categorization in Hartigan's case is an oversimplification. Through 40 works, the NCMA exhibition reveals how she channeled both abstraction and figuration to create something uniquely her own. 'It relates to possibly why there hasn't been a large focus on Hartigan, I think ultimately, it's because it's hard to classify her work into one camp. The work is at one point abstract, and then another, very figurative, and then it also, at some points, falls in between,' Ledesma explains. 'That was her goal. She never wanted to be within one certain category. She goes back and forth between both styles, very rebelliously, I would add. She definitely embraced the all-over democratic style that she learned from Pollock firsthand, from seeing his cavasses, but then also the insertion of the figure from watching Willem de Kooning and his Women works, except her figures are just a bit more concrete and formed. She lives in between.' The show Hartigan visited Raleigh to judge in the 50's featured an amazing roster of artists including herself, Frankenthaler, Louise Bourgeois and Mary Abbott. 'Mary Abbott: To Draw Imagination" installation view at Schoelkopf Gallery New York. Abstract Expressionism is inseparable from New York, and for AbEx in the Big Apple, visit Schoelkopf Gallery where 'Mary Abbott: To Draw Imagination,' the first comprehensive survey of Abbott's (1921–2019) career, can be seen through June 28, 2025. The retrospective presents more than 60 works spanning from 1940 to 2002. Highlighted are Abbott's bold explorations of color, form, and media, tracing her evolution from early figurative works and Surrealist influences to her later large-scale Abstract Expressionist paintings. It will also bring to light Abbott's role as one of the few women artists deeply engaged in The Club, a members-only artists group dedicated to shaping the Abstract Expressionist movement. Born and raised on New York's Upper East Side, Abbott studied with George Grosz, Rothko, Barnett Newman and Robert Motherwell, and maintained deep artistic connections with André Breton, Hartigan, Pollock, O'Hara, and the de Kooning's. This retrospective presents rarely seen works from the Estate of Mary Abbott, among them, Abstract Expressionist canvases (1950s–60s) created in dialogue with Pollock, Willem de Kooning, and Joan Mitchell, highlighting her synthesis of action painting and automatic drawing techniques. Alongside Elaine de Kooning and Mitchell, Abbott was one of few women invited to join The Club, a group of artists dedicated to shaping Abstract Expressionism. Her work pushed the boundaries of the Abstract Expressionist movement and painting itself, incorporating diverse materials and tools, such as oil, oil stick, charcoal, pastel, collage, and paw and handprints. Installation view, 'Mildred Thompson: Frequencies' at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, May 10 – October 12, 2025. Photo: Oriol Tarridas. Abstract Expressionism was one aspect of Mildred Thompson's (1936–2003) creative output. That came later in a four decade career also featuring a most unusual period of reliefs, assemblages, and collages made out of wood. Examples of all can be found at 'Mildred Thompson: Frequencies' on view at the ICA Miami through October 12, 2025. The most comprehensive solo museum exhibition to date for the artist, approximately 50 works from 1959 to 1999–paintings, sculptures, etchings, drawings, assemblages, and musical compositions–are brought together. Thompson's AbEx-leaning paintings and works on paper dazzle. They are characterized by energetic mark-making, a profound understanding of color, and complex, absorbing compositions. She was interested in physics and astronomy and through her own interpretation, sought to visually represent scientific theories and systems invisible to the eye. Often featuring radiating swirls of color and gesture, her showstopping paintings from the 1990s delve into the invisible forces of particle physics and quantum mechanics (String Theory, 1999) and magnetic fields (Magnetic Fields, 1991). In her 'Radiation Explorations' series (1994), she translated radiation and UV light into luminous colors and gestural brushstrokes. Later in her career, Thompson focused on cosmologies and astrological phenomena. For the first time in over three decades, a significant selection of her 'Heliocentric Series' (c. 1990–94) will be on display. These works are presented alongside her largest paintings, the series 'Music of the Spheres' (1996). Depicting Mercury, Venus, Jupiter, and Mars, each of the four paintings is accompanied by an original electronic music composition by Thompson. The tracks, collectively titled Cosmos Calling, evoke science fiction soundtracks and Afrofuturist music. Thompson described them as 'a journey through the soundscape of space inspired by the NASA Voyager recordings.'
New York Post
17-06-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Post
Trove founders ask $4.29M for their Brooklyn home
Perhaps it's no surprise this historic Brooklyn Heights duplex comes with some museum-worthy displays of wallpaper. Asking $4.29 million, its sellers are Jee Levin and Randall Buck — the founders of Trove, a modern wallpaper studio that manufactures its floral and nature-inspired displays in nearby Dumbo. With celebrity clients including Nicole Kidman and Mariska Hargitay, Trove's work can also be found in the permanent collections of the Brooklyn Museum and the Cooper Hewitt. Trove, known for its non toxic, eco-friendly and sustainable designs, has also worked with top interior designers like Jamie Drake, and the award winning architect and design firm the Rockwell Group. Hotels from the Hyatt Regency Paris Étoile to the W in San Francisco — and others in New York, Boston and Los Angeles — are also a large part of their client base. Trove can also be found at Holly Hunt New York. Advertisement 8 Trove wallpaper also dresses this powder room. Allyson Lubow 8 The grand living room. Allyson Lubow 8 Hand glazed tiles frame the original fireplace. Allyson Lubow 8 A view of the layout. Allyson Lubow Advertisement Levin and Buck are artists first. 'We think of it as a conversation between ourselves and then there is a bespoke element — an architect can come in and ask that our design be printed on silk, or have birds flying out the window, whatever is specific to the installation. We are a small design house with big capabilities because we are more flexible than larger firms,' Levin said, adding that they bring the outdoors inside with patterns that include forests, a grove of ferns and butterflies. 'We like to draw on the elements and portray the ethereal aspect of nature throughout our work.' 8 Jee Levin and Randall Buck. Sang An Their two-bedroom, 2.5-bathroom spread is at 220 Columbia Heights with its own garden — on what has been called the most coveted block in Brooklyn Heights. It's in a six-story, five-unit brownstone that dates to 1860. Advertisement The couple paid $1.87 million for the residence in 2013, according to property records. It's where they live with their two kids, a Shetland sheepdog, a cat and a bunny, and they are selling to move into a three-bedroom in the neighborhood, Levin said. 8 The exterior of 220 Columbia Heights. Allyson Lubow 8 This bedroom is awash in sunlight. Allyson Lubow Advertisement 8 The delightful private garden. Allyson Lubow One of the building's former owners, Austin K. Sheldon, a European-trained musician and hardware merchant who became president of the Brooklyn Academy of Music, added two upper floors to the structure between 1876 and 1884 that are different from the 'sober sandstone' below. He also added a since-removed pyramid-shaped roof, according to archival photos from the Museum of the City of New York. At a spacious 2,300 square feet, the couple's unit features original details like 10-foot ceilings, parquet floors, moldings and a fireplace framed in hand-glazed tile. There's also a turret dining alcove — naturally — with Trove-designed floral wallpaper and curved bay windows, and a chef's kitchen with custom cabinets. The lower level includes a guest bedroom and a bath, a mudroom — and a storage area that could convert to a home office, a studio or a playroom. The listing brokers are Abigail Palenca and Crystal Chancey of Serhant.
