At the Art of the Matter

            A descendent of three Maori tribes, Fiona Pardington was born in Devonport, New Zealand. She attended Orewa College and the Elam School of Fine Arts where she ultimately earned a DocFA. She specializes in ‘pure’ photographic darkroom techniques including hand printing and toning. In the late 1980s she began challenging the social documentary photography eventually embracing the still-life format to raise awareness of the importance of conservation. She has had solo shows throughout New Zealand. Her work is included in public and private collections worldwide.  In an interview for the Auckland Art Gallery in conjunction with her exhibit,  A Beautiful Hesitation,  Pardington provided insight into her approach: “I think it is best to understand my still-life photographs as small alters or  Tu Ahu . A tabletop is a place for concentration, and you could call it ritual, but it’s also just the thing we do when we are...

  Pia Camil was born in Mexico City. She holds a BFA in painting from the Rhode Island School of Design and an MFA from the Slade School of Fine Art, London. She returned to Mexico City in 2009 where she formed a band with Esteban and Ana Jose Aldrete and began designing sets and costumes to enhance their performances. In the years that followed she incorporated sculptural elements into her paintings and began to embrace the inclusion of mass-produced apparel such as t-shirts and blue jeans for sculptural installations.  Her work is included in the collections of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Centre Pompidou and the Blanton.                With Lover’s Rainbow , Camil took a leap forward in her sculptural installations. Originally created for Desert X, 2019, Camil, while still embracing mass production as the source of her media, moved on from the soft, forgiving and even playful sculptures she had formed from textiles,...

Richard Bell was born into the Kamilaroi tribe in Charleville, Queensland, Australia. As a young man in the 1970s he became an activist for aboriginal self-determination. He willingly admits that his art background is rooted in ‘tourist art’. He only decided to step over the line into ‘fine art’ when a friend observed that his political messages could reach a wider audience through art than by participating in protest marches. He has been exhibiting nationally and internationally for more than 25 years and his work, which includes paintings, video art, installations, text and performance art is held in the collections of the Art Gallery of New South Wales, the National Gallery of Australia, and the Queensland Gallery of Modern Art.  ME , Bell’s self-portrait, chosen for the current exhibit for its bold colors, seems, in style, to be an amalgam of Van Gogh, Warhol and Lichtenstein. It was painted specifically as a 2015 Archibald Prize entry. As Bell tells it, he chose himself for th...

                       It’s 1822. James Monroe is in his second term as president —after squeaking past John Quincy Adams by one electoral vote—and the population of the United States is closing in on 10 million. In New Haven, cattle have been banished from grazing on the green, a regular steamship schedule has been established to and from New York City and James Hillhouse has seized upon the local enthusiasm engendered by the opening of New York’s Erie Canal to promote a plan linking Long Island Sound to the Farmington Valley. It’s also the year that a 19 year old from Orange, Connecticut—who, as a child, had watched the work of architect David Hoadley rise in the form of his hometown’s Congregational Church—comes to New Haven to seek his fortune as a builder.  His name is Sidney Mason Stone. He is a descendant of Connecticut Colony founders and Mayflower pilgrims who will be forced to make his w...

            For centuries blankets have figured in the daily lives of Native Americans across the continent. Not only are they part of everyday life, serving as both covering and ceremonial clothing, but they were employed as trade items in the early encounters with colonists and suspected of being used as a tool in what may have been the first instances of germ warfare. Despite their ubiquity, and their contradictory connotations, Native peoples have, as is often the case, used this utilitarian item as a mode for creative expression, developing methods of construction and design that produced prized items.  In recent years, Indigenous artists have expanded their view of the lowly blanket even further, using them as a sculptural material, subjects of films, and keepers of stories as well as a material for the continued development of design and technique.  The examples of contemporary blanket artistry to be gathered for this exhibit...

               2020 was to be the fifteenth year of the  In the Spirit Contemporary Native Arts Exhibition  offered by the Washington State Historical Society of Tacoma, Washington in collaboration with the Tacoma Art Museum and The Museum of Glass as a showcase for northwest Native art. If all had gone according to plan, entries would have been submitted, a panel of jurors would have scrutinized them, each according to their own background and preferences--and biases. Then their choices would have gone on display for the public to enjoy for several weeks leading up to a free day-long indoor and outdoor festival which would include an Indian market and the presentation of awards to the artists.  But then the coronavirus hit. The exhibition’s planning committee scrambled to salvage the 2020 show and finally decided to stage it online. Artists sent photos of their work, the jurors undertook the burden of selection based on 2-dime...

                              It was August 2012. New York City attorney Patti Skigen was returning from her annual trip to SWAIA’s Santa Fe Indian Market with an intriguing item among her purchases. Although the central focus of Skigen’s personal collection was pottery, she had chosen to buy a basket  created by Shan Goshorn who was at the market for the first time.  Goshorn, an Eastern Band Cherokee, was known in contemporary Native American art circles for her large-scale, hand-colored black and white photographs that, following in the footsteps of Fritz Scholder--who was, admittedly, one of her major influences--drew attention to the stereotyping and racism Indians endured. Surprisingly, however, the Indian Market-novice had won the Innovation Prize for basket work. And so Skigen decided to invest in Goshorn’s new endeavor despite the unpredictability of its future in the world o...

                       What is most striking about Julie Buffalohead’s  Indifferent,  2017 (acrylic, ink, graphite, collaged on Lokta paper, (29 7/16 x 58 ¾ inches), may not be the image’s animal subjects set in contrast to a deep blue background, but, rather, its title. Armed with the word ‘indifferent’, the viewer comes to the work with a keener viewpoint, an informed perspective.             One discovers  Indifferent  tucked away near the conclusion of the ‘Beings’ section in Yale University Art Gallery’s 2019-20  Places, Nations, Generations, Beings: 200 Years of Indigenous North American Art  exhibition, unframed and protected by a glass case.    Approaching the case, it becomes apparent that the reason for this special treatment is the piece’s intriguing substrate--a thick paper (Lokta, according t...