A six-year-old girl sits for a pastel portrait by an unknown immigrant artist. Fifty years later, he asks her to write his story. INTO THE LIGHT is a profound, visual narrative of hope, courage and healing in the face of evil. It relates the epic life journey of artist Kalman Aron as he emerges from the ashes of the Holocaust to explore the nature of humankind, his own humanity and the mystery of life—all on canvas. What unfolds is a visual record of one man’s remarkable evolution from darkness to light. Healing himself through his art, Kalman Aron’s example offers hope to all. Available October 2012 from Hard Press Editions.

EVENTS 2012/2013

October
Washington National Cathedral, Perry Auditorium, Washington DC
Saturday, October 13, 2-4PM
Museum of Tolerance, Los Angeles CA
Sunday, October 21, 4-6PM
RSVP

November
Museum of Jewish Heritage, New York NY
Thursday, November 8, 6:30PM
RSVP
Washington National Cathedral, Perry Auditorium, Washington DC
Crossroads
Tuesday, November 27, 7:30-8:30PM

December
Library of Congress, AMED Reading Room, Washington DC
Tuesday, December 4, 12 noon

January 2013
Politics & Prose, Washington DC
Monday, January 28, 2013, 4:30PM

9 x 6”, 220 pages, 15 color plates.
Essays by Amy Goldin, Robert Kushner and others.
ISBN 978-1-55595-342-3

Edited by Robert Kushner with contributing essays by Elizabeth Baker, Holland Cotter, Michael Duncan, Oleg Grabar, Max Kozloff, Irving Sandler, Joan Simon, and Emna Zghal, this is the first-ever collection of essays by influential art critic, Amy Goldin. Over thirty essays taken from the pages of Artnews, Artforum, Art Journal, New American Review, International Journal for Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Art in America and her personal journals during the 60s and 70s, have been selected by artist Robert Kushner and relayed with insightful accounts from prominent art world writers.

Reviews have appeared in ArtDaily.org, ARLIS/ NA Reviews, The Silo by Raphael Rubinstein.

Michael Rush hosted Robert Kushner with Dominique Nahas at ArtOnAir.org for a discussion on Amy Goldin surrounding the publication of the book.

Book launch at DC Moore Gallery 2.16.12

11 x 11 inches, hardcover, 140 pages, 178 photos / illustrations (includes 11 black and white).
Authored by Aliza Edelman with contributions by Ron Bishop, Michele Cohen, John Driscoll, Barbara Anderson Hill and Jennifer McGregor.
Published by Hard Press Editions in association with Hudson Hills Press.
ISBN 978-1-55595-346-1

MARYLYN DINTENFASS PARALLEL PARK is the first book to document this internationally-known artist’s most recent work that reveals her life-long love affair with automobiles, especially the culturally iconic high-powered, sporty, sexy muscle cars that streamed out of Detroit from the late 1950’s to the mid-1970’s. This monograph is the story of Marylyn Dintenfass‘ most recent achievement:  one of the largest and most transformative art installations in the United States of the past decade.  The book expands upon Dintenfass’ drawings, monotypes and paintings on the automotive theme and critically explores how they are the genesis for this site-specific installation—the latest in a long series of such works—entitled Parallel Park  in Fort Myers, Florida. Parallel Park  is a major new study on the artist, a review of popular culture and gender issues in contemporary art, and an invaluable public art reference.

11 x 12 inches, 240 pages, hardcover, 115 color plates.
Written by Loring W. Coleman, NA, AWS; Edited by Hugh Fortmiller with a Foreword by Henry Adams. Published by Hard Press Editions in association with Hudson Hills Press.
ISBN 978-1-55595-341-6

Distinguished painter and teacher, Loring W. Coleman, shares his lifetime of art through a recounting of amusing and intriguing experiences as a student and teacher and as a distinguished plein air painter, especially of New England landscapes. Coleman has studied with New England notables Hermann Dudley Murphy, Charles Curtis Allen and Bernard Keyes. This charming and stimulating recount of the artist’s life also features 30 anecdotal essays showcasing paintings representative of his work from the 1950′s through the early 21st century. These cleverly drawn stories are derived from his own impressions and experiences during the creation of these paintings. Loring W. Coleman touches us in our knowing of a New England landscape and its deep impressions of leaning farmhouses, sagging Colonials with a few shingles missing, and barely-there barns. His style is exact, capturing weight, light and mood of each scene as if in conversation with it.

by Liz Riviere
Printed in the Brooklyn Rail, March 2011.

With all the talk about the disappearance of bees lately, I thought I’d head off to see a modern hive of another sort. This weekend brought me to Fotan,  a section of Kowloon, just North of Kowloon Tong, to ‘one of the most important creative clusters’ (as the catalog introduction says) in Hong Kong.

Two weekends in January featured open studios in which the public could visit artist studios and galleries of  ten industrial buildings all within walking distance from eachother. In a limited amount of time before the studios opened to the public, I made it to the building #1: The Wah Luen Industrial Center.

While the sun basked the outdoors in a piercing white light, it was dark and frigid in these hallways and a stank perfume spanked you at the entrance from the fish ball factory next door.  I felt a little funny venturing as a lone female into an empty pink accordian-doored elevator wide enough to safely accommodate me and the contents of my entire apartment.

Thirteen floors, but the elevator only takes you to the tenth. I climbed the remaining three, immediately aware of the building’s  history.  Before most Hong Kong factories made financially necessary retreats back across the border into China, the steel worker, the seamstress, the toymaker were the original worker bees here. Now these thirteen parallel honeycombs have been white washed and replaced by the contemporary artist: worker bee by choice.

I was pleased to see the sculpture of Danny Lee Chin-Fai at his 12th floor workshop.  Danny is one of the most successful sculptors in Hong Kong and his Dance of Clouds and Rain sculpture is a permanent fixture in the

lobby of the Macau Grand Hyatt. Three life-size motorcycles lined the floor of his studio in various stages of completion, it seemed. Edges smoothed and rounded, one was in stone, another appeared to have been dipped like a strawberry in a flawless coating of molten silver. In the back of his workshop, a large mercury-like ‘droplet’ rang distant bells with Anish Kapoor’s Cloud Gate. He was preparing for a solo show Reconstructing Landscape at the Hong Kong Art Center and the imminent publication by AsiaOne of a plush 230-page book covering two decades of work.

On the 10th floor, it wasn’t just Chow Chun Fai’s charisma that drew a crowd.  Chun-Fai works with several different mediums that all seem to feed off of eachother: paintings of  old Chinese movie scenes (every English subtitle written along the bottom carrying a double entendre), photos of paintings, video stills of old movies, painting of Hong Kong street scenes and the beloved Hong Kong taxi (he used to drive one). Perhaps most successful was the image on the ceiling of the artist’s studio, The Creation of Adam (2006), a mocking recreation of a little something you might see in the Sistene Chapel.

34cm high by 74cm wide, the image is, in effect, a collage like piecing-together of 3×5” photographs. Upon closer inspection, one sees that both God the Father and Adam are self portraits of the artist, which seem to speak to the artist’s ability as creator to reproduce, replicate oneself through art. As Chow Chun Fai relates, “In contemporary art, the artist precedes the art” and, thus, his perpetual use of self-portrait in all of his work is perhaps his best calling card.  Adam’s body has been reconfigured with a highly polished plastic musculature of a doll and, equally as striking, once-winged angels encircling God have now been replaced by plastic doll faces. This piece breathes “Made in China” and his references to fabric and dolls are a direct retelling of China’s position and role in global commerce as a place where the rest of the world comes to have things made– as well as a reference to an awareness of his immediate surroundings and their  history– the warehouse where he comes to work every day.

by Liz Riviere
printed in the  Brooklyn Rail,  July/August 2010.

As the ferry World Star rumbled rhythmically across Victoria Harbor to its dock in Wan Chai, scene of the 2010 Hong Kong International Art Fair, it was a particularly robust sunny day—as if someone magically erased the thick felt of pollution that normally clings to the tall towers of Hong Kong Island like some sort of futuristic moss. Hong Kong: Westernized, yet sitting comfortably in the palm of China as a SAR (Special Administrative Region), its community and people have prospered from its status and enjoy the celebrity. This is the perfect spot for an all-Asia Art Fair and ART HK is it. (All I could think was that it had better be worth it if I was going to trade the best day Hong Kong has seen in months to be inside a giant box.) Would the fair be a tool for featuring Western Art for the astute Asian collector, I wondered? Or was it, in fact, a showcase of Asian Art for a multi-cultural audience?

I braced myself for another repetitive display of what have become successful trademarks of this new chapter in Asian contemporary art. I was ready for an abundance of doe-eyed innocents and glorified manga-esque characters with enhanced anatomy and exploding genitals; for futuristic fairy-like beings with exaggerated facial features floating through mushroom bogs leaving behind a dusting of sparkles. I braced myself for Murakami, Murakami, more Murakami, and Murakami copycats.

But what I got was totally and utterly lost. 10a.m. suddenly became 3p.m. and I hadn’t seen the hours pass. With over 155 galleries from 29 countries, it was especially inspiring to see some really top-notch, sophisticated, buyable not-so-Western artwork. I followed wafts of conversation, noted the crowd pleasers and counted the colored dots on labels. Sure, Damien Hirst was fully represented, as was Antony Gormley, Yinka Shonibar, and Gilbert and George: many “blue chip” artists were here that earmark an event of premier distinction and yet, all of the works became part of a glorious and elaborate puzzle of energy, creativity, and multi-nationalism to rival the definition of its host city.

Murakami’s “Louis Vuitton” paintings, a life-size figure and some happy smiling flowers all made it here, but it was just enough and not too much— kind of like the right amount of croutons in a perfect Caesar salad. And yes, my apprehensions were confirmed: all the trademarks were here but, as it has been pointed out to me, there is definitely something to be said for the number of Chinese adults who lament the idyllic liberty of a childhood sacrificed in the name of education. It is not uncommon when visiting my Chinese, Korean and Japanese friends (who are in relationships or married) to view a precious selection of pristine Hello Kittys and pixies on their beds as if “in mourning.” From stationery and umbrellas to t-shirts and cell phone accessories, everyone in Hong Kong seems to have a cartoon doppelgänger. While toddlers and teddy bears streaming across a starry moonlit night just aren’t my thing (sorry, then, to the artist who goes by MR.), there IS an audience for you—and it’s a big one. (Just look at Japanese artist, Yoshitomo Nara’s Rock N’ Roll and Roll that was sold at the fair by Marianne Boesky for $350,000.)

Sperone Westwater chose to feature the work of Beijing born Liu Ye. His medium-size canvases, harkening to Dutch portraiture blended with a little Pierro della Francesca, hover successfully between fantasy and reality. The first piece that caught my eye was “Hans Christian Andersen in the Snow” (after Albrert Kuchler), 2005. Ye preserved this beloved author of childhood storytelling indefinitely in a giant pastel snow globe. A second canvas, “Small Painter,” of a young Chinese girl who appears no older than two, sits facing the viewer. Before her on the table, she has completed a pencil outline of Miffy on paper. The drawing is flanked on either side by colored pencils and the subject holds a red colored pencil. She looks at the viewer in hesitation, wondering if red is the appropriate choice for the next stage of her drawing. The child has drawn Miffy in near perfection, and yet she fears making a mistake. Ironically, it was a non-portrait that hit a high-note. Liu Ye’s “Composition with Bamboo and Grass” (2007–08) sold for US$650,000.

Hong Hao’s large-format photography of “gatherings” of rather banal household items had me coming back for more at the Beijing Commune booth. His arrangements of accumulation are crafty and unexpected; haunted and sentimental. “Bottom No. 6” features inverted drinking vessels made of porcelain and china that, from afar, read as a pleasing abstract of round shapes, giving the illusion of octopus suction cups or even coral. Yet, detail reveals each vessel has a story. A birthplace indicated by a factory stamp and then a lifetime of unexplainable chips or the sparkling luster of good fortune. Likewise, “Book,” 2009 gives the impression of a maze of some sort, or buildings perhaps, yet it was simply a crammed horizontal network of books placed vertically with covers touching, dense with pages—the spines hidden from view. This simple inversion of organization gives Hao’s work a feeling of patchwork bordering on abstraction. The yellowed pages of these books speak clearly of a time in China’s not-so-distant past when owning an extensive book collection was forbidden.

One could not miss the abundance of Damien Hirsts on display at White Cube. Repent, 2008, was a dizzyingly bright and controlled arrangement of butterfly wings resembling a cathedral stained glass rosette. “The Inescapable Truth” (2005)—the first of his formaldehyde works to be shown in China—was also on display. (ART HK later reported that it was sold at the fair by White Cube for £1.75 million.) Hirst’s work made its way into several other booths, perhaps as some sort of beacon to the hungry status-seeking collector. Nevertheless, it is always a pleasure to stop and soak in his celebrity.

Perhaps the most viewed was Anish Kapoor’s “Untitled,” 2010, that looked, in this Hong Kong setting, like a giant lacquered rice bowl affixed vertically to the wall. Standing in front of it, one is transported to the hall of mirrors at the state carnival. Suddenly impossible to discern between concave and convex, one is instantly inverted within this high-polished monochrome bubble of illusion. (Lisson Gallery sold “Untitled” for £550,000.)

The only negative: Rikrit Tiravanija’s installation of two towering bamboo birdcages entitled “Ne Travaillez Jamais” at Tang Contemporary Art standing just inside the main entrance as most visitor’s initiation to the fair. Wrong place, wrong time. One of the towers looked an awful lot like the Bank of China Tower in Central and the last thing I wanted to be reminded of was that I am now one of those colorful birds captive and cramped, living in a vertical cubicle arrangement. It was an instant visual of life in Hong Kong and left me feeling rather anxious before I became a wandering calf in a maze of cubes.

One thousand artists were represented at ART HK and, now that the numbers are in: over 46,000 visitors attended—that’s a staggering 65% increase over 2009.

Make room on your calendar next year for ART HK: the latest “World Star” of contemporary art fairs. Asia is the new chapter in contemporary art history and the art market here is very, very, healthy—and it’s staying that way.

Chances are, if you had New England relatives, there was a ‘Frank Vining Smith’  in the house somewhere. Seems like I’ve spoken to more that one New England man in the last few weeks with a clear recollection of a Frank Vining Smith print in his childhood bedroom.  Much like Norman Rockwell or Andrew Wyeth,  the word on Frank Vining Smith  just keeps gaining momentum and his work is enjoying a new generation’s admiration. (The mounting auction prices say it all.)
So, here it is, hot off  the presses: the new, complete, definitive, comprehensive survey of the works of Frank Vining Smith. The publication coincides with a major exhibit of his work at the Heritage Museum and Gardens this summer (2010) in Sandwich, MA. I’m also lining up a bunch of lectures for author James Craig (from the opening of the exhibit at the Heritage Museum and Gardens to the Rockport Library, the Mariner’s Museum, the Hingham Historical Society with more to come).
Smith has great childhood ties to Hingham, Massachusetts and this rugged, untouched New England shoreline helped to inspire Smith’s palette and imagination on canvas. To support his painting, Smith worked as an illustrator for magazines such as Field and Stream and Outdoors and his illustrations  really set the tone for defining that post world-war, peace-time pastime of leisure. Frank Vining Smith was able to enjoy critical and financial success in his lifetime, but it wasn’t until he was 47 that he actually felt comfortable enough to leave his day job and pursue painting full-time.

What is there to say about Jerry that hasn’t already been said — or that he hasn’t already said himself?  Jerry’s got his finger on the pulse of the NY art scene ( and I think it extends a little further afield than that) — but he’s also extremely down to earth.  He loves what he does, and maybe loves coffee a little bit more!  This book has you chuckling the whole way through. I just had to break out my laptop to google all of the artwork. It was like my own private tutorial. We’ve put together some great engagements for him from X-initative (for the book launch) to the New York Foundation of the Arts that hosted him at Barnes & Noble on 86th Street.  He’ll be visting the Southwest in just a few weeks — Site Santa Fe will be hosting him on June 29th and then it’s on to the Oklahoma City Museum of Art in October.  In between, he’s been given an honorary PhD by New York Academy of Fine Arts, and has also made his break into TV as ‘THE’ art critic for the latest in a long line of reality shows: “A Work of Art: The Next Great Artist.” Don’t miss it on Bravo starting June 9th. (That’s Jerry reclining.)

c. E.Agostini/ Associated Press

Kenneth Snelson is at once photographer, sculptor, engineer, physicist, artist and inventor. Forces Made Visible explores 5 decades of his work. This publication coincided with an exhibit at the Marlborough Gallery in NYC.

11 x 12 inches, hardcover, cloth binding; 208 pages; 240 color plates and photographs
Interview by Carol Diehl, Essay by Lisa Corrin
Hard Press Editions in association with Hudson Hills Press
ISBN 978-1555953195
Limited edition DVD included

With 50 pounds of art supplies on his back, one French easel, a laptop and nine weeks in each location, Mike Glier is a plein-air painter with a modern day twist, traveling along the 70th line of longitude to the Arctic, Ecuador, the Caribbean, and New York City addressing the urgent issue of man’s connection to and place in nature.

Glier’s works are the basis of an ongoing project using the mathematics of cartography as a connection between his canvases. In along a long line  Glier was curious about the longitudinal line (70th) that sits under his studio.  He got out a map and followed that line to see what else was on it: the Antarctic, New York City, the Amazon and St. Johns Virgin Islands all sit in close relativity to that line. With weekly reports from the front lines, Glier shares  a developing composition, and then displays the finished artwork with in depth text and imagery. The connections and variations on landscape, vegetation and insects make for a dazzling color palette and a 21st century artist’s perspective on a very Darwinian approach to planet earth. Glier’s message: appreciate the uniqueness of Earth’s diversity.

Mike Glier has been featured in numerous publications. This is a great interview that appeared in Bomb Magazine.  You can also listen to an interview with Mike Glier on NPR’s Here and Now.