“I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” – Maya Angelou.

Lorraine O’Grady Concept Artist

Lorraine O’Grady has lived at Westbeth for decades. One of the most significant figures in contemporary performance, conceptual, and feminist art. O’Grady is widely known for her radical persona Mlle Bourgeoise Noire, and has a complex practice that also encompasses video, photomontage, concrete poetry, cultural criticism, and public art. The artist has consistently been ahead of her time, anticipating contemporary art world conversations about racism, sexism, institutional inequities, and cultural oversights by decades, and her prescience has inspired younger generations of artists.

These parallel threads—of outward critique and inward reflection—are some of the many binaries that O’Grady’s work addresses. By putting seemingly contradictory ideas together, O’Grady questions the power attached to such oppositions as Black and White, museum and individual, self and other, West and non-West, and past and present.

NY Times Interview
Brooklyn Museum exhibit

Nasheet Waits Drummer

Nasheet grew up at Westbeth with his brother Shareef, and continues to live here with his own family. His interest in playing the drums was encouraged by his father, legendary percussionist, Freddie Waits.

Receiving his Bachelor of Arts in Music, Waits studied privately with renowned percussionist, Michael Carvin. Carvin’s tutelage provided a vast foundation upon which Waits added influences from his father, as well as mentor Max Roach. It was Max that first gave Nasheet’s formidable talent international spotlight, hiring him as a member of the famed percussion ensemble M’BOOM.

Waits has been heralded for his musicality and creativity by such virtuosos as Ed Thigpen, Max Roach, Andrew Hill, and Stanley Cowell. True to his personal philosophy of the necessity to balance Tradition and Modernism, Waits collaborates and performs regularly with a wide range of artists.

Profiles in Art Interview
Drum Compilation

Patti Bown Musician

Patti Bown (1931-2008)
A resident of Westbeth for almost two decades, and raising her son, Anthony, here, Patti Bown was American jazz pianist, singer, and composer. Born in Seattle, Washington, Bown studied classical piano from a young age. As a teenager, she began performing in Seattle’s Jackson Street jazz scene. She attended the University of Seattle on a music scholarship.

During 1958, she recorded an album, Patti Bown Plays Big Piano. In 1959, Quincy Jones invited her to join a big band he was assembling for a European tour of Harold Arlen’s musical, Free and Easy. . Bown recorded with Quincy Jones several times from 1959 to 1961.

Bown also recorded with artists such as Duke Ellington, Sarah Vaughan, and Benny Golson. Many of the artists Bown recorded with also recorded some of her compositions. She collaborated with lyricists such as Maya Angelou and Buddy Bernier. From 1962 to 1964, she was Dinah Washington’s musical director.

In 1972, Bown was musical director for Joseph Papp’s production, Ti-Jean and His Brothers, which debuted Off-Broadway. She was also active in the theater in other capacities, playing piano and acting in productions such as Woodie King, Jr.’s Christchild (1992).

In 1996, she received a lifetime achievement award from International Women in Jazz, and in 2006 she received the Mary Lou Williams Women in Jazz Award.

Bold Face article
Big Piano

Hugh Hurd Activist/Actor

Hugh Hurd joined with Maya Angelou and Godfrey Cambridge in organizing one of the the first benefits in NYC in support of Dr Martin Luther King, jr. Later he co-founded and let the Committee for the Employment of Negro Performers.

His most notable acting roles were the 1959 film Shadows directed by John Cassavetes and a major role in the Japanese film The Catch (1961), as a prisoner of war.e also had roles in The Winner (1963), For Love of Ivy (1968), The Hot Rock (1972), Blade (1973), A Woman Under the Influence (1974), The First Deadly Sin (1980), Liebestraum (1991), Jumpin’ at the Boneyard (1992), and Who’s the Man?

n 1964, Hurd was the subject of a portrait painted by the noted artist Alice Neel.[6] The painting is titled “Hugh Hurd” and is currently held by Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art.

Hugh and his wife Merlyn raised three daughters at Westbeth, Michelle Hurd, Adrienne Hurd, and Denise Hurd. Because of his involvement in the community, Hugh was affectionally known as the “Mayor of Westbeth.”

Shadows film clip
Interview

Artwork by Olive Ayhens oil on canvas 48 x 62 inches

Exhibition Dates: January 27 – March 7, 2022

Masks required and social distancing with be observed and enforced.

NYC Culture Club: 
New York City Culture Club
NYC CC is located within Oculus, World Trade Center, New York City.

Curated by Laziza Rakhimova and Chris Costan

Participating artists:
Kim Abeles, Olive Ayhens, Elena Berriolo,
Chris Costan, Valerie Hegarty, Betsy Kenyon, Oskar Landi, Christopher Lin, Lenore Malen, Laziza Rakhimova, Tattfoo Tan and Marion Wilson.

Statement by Chris Costan

Compelled to act in accordance with concerns about planetary distress, each of these artists has expressed commentary or philosophies in the form of artmaking.

The artists incorporate concerns such as climate change, social justice, health and well-being, extinctions of flora and fauna and habitat loss, Some take a turn at the spiritual. All demonstrate the urgent need to live more responsibly given the Earth’s finite resources.
In Silent Spring, published in l962, Rachel Carson says “in nature, nothing exists alone.” Carson’s premise is that the actions of human
beings have had a profound impact on the natural world. All things in nature are interconnected and impacting just one part of the natural world will create numerous unintended consequences throughout the ecosystem.

The fragility of the natural world is on all our minds. Daily we hear of distress and destruction. Crucial decisions need to be made in the hopes of preventing the environmental crises from destroying

the planet as we know it. This exhibition and interactive event express the varying ways in which concerned artists are experiencing the earth in its currently critical state.

Creating art about these conditions is not new. Artists, writers and scientists have been addressing these challenges for decades. The movement continues to grow given the condition of the natural world and the omnipresence of climate destruction.
While we hope for a livable future, this show serves as a reminder: we must work together to reinforce an awareness that all life on earth is interconnected.

The exhibition is located at the World Trade Center complex in the Financial District of Manhattan, New York City, scene of violent occurrences in years past. And today it is indeed ironic that the World Trade Center complex exists in a flood zone from West Street inland to Church Street. In a note of hopefulness, the soaring, white transportation hub (the Oculus) at the World Trade Center was designed (by Santiago Calatrava) to evoke a bird in flight a symbolic, uplifting structure to replace the destroyed Port Authority Trans-Hudson (Path) rail station.

This show is an introduction to a forthcoming expanded version of
“In Nature, Nothing Exists Alone,” which will take place in the United Nations Lobby, scheduled for later in 2022.

Exhibition Dates: January 27, March 7, 2022 


NYC Culture Club: 

Information: https://www.nyccultureclub.com/about 

Press Inquiries please contact NewYorkCityCultureClub@gmail.com

Video Talk with curator Karen Wilkin, taped on March 14, 2022

Show Dates: MARCH 4-APRIL 1, 2022

Westbeth Gallery, 55 Bethune St,
New York NY 10014

Light of Day: The Language of Landscape is an exhibition of twelve contemporary artists exploring the possibilities of landscape painting today.

Curated by the distinguished writer and curator Karen Wilkin, Light of Day originated in brainstorming sessions among several NYC-based painters in 2017.

ARTISTS
Lois Dodd, Albert Kresch and Stanley Lewis. Light of Day artists include Temma Bell, William Christine, Diane Drescher, Howard Gladstone, John Goodrich, Elizabeth Higgins, Elizabeth O’Reilly, Tony Serio and Kamilla Talbot.

The Light of Day artists seek to re-engage our visual environment and the contradictory forces that have historically animated painting: the vital gestures of the observed world, and the innate energies of lines on a surface and colors on a palette.

The twelve artists have divergent backgrounds and pursue various styles, from brushy expressionism to resolute, geometric realism. But they share the goal of confirming how, even in the twenty-first century, landscape painting remains vital, just as long as land can be made to press up towards sky—and trees to rise, and clouds to loom— with the eloquent powers unique to painting. The challenges daunt, but the love of nature compels, and traditions of painting inspire.

ARTISTS ‘BIOS

Temma Bell
Temma Bell (born 1945) is a painter who paints her surroundings both interior and exterior. Bell studied at Boston University, Indiana University and received B.F.A from the Philadelphia College of Art. Bell is a Native New Yorker who has also lived in Iceland and France. She currently lives on a farm in Delhi, NY with her husband and the youngest of her four daughters. She travels frequently to Manhattan and Iceland to paint and exhibit.

http://www.temmabell.com/

William Christine
William Christine received his master of fine arts degree from Brooklyn College, City University of New York. Christine has been an exhibiting painter for over 30 years. In 2003 he had a solo exhibition of his Grand Canyon paintings at the Allentown Art Museum. He has had 3 solo exhibitions at Prince Street Gallery, New York City. Currently he is Artist in Residence at the Reibman Hall Children’s Center, Northampton Community College, where he supports the implementation of the Center’s Arts-based curriculum.

http://william-christine.squarespace.com/

Lois Dodd
Lois Dodd was born in Montclair, New Jersey in 1927. From 1945-1948 she attended The Cooper Union in New York. In 1952 she was one of five artists to establish the Tanager Gallery, where she exhibited until 1962. From 1971 to 1992, Dodd taught at Brooklyn College, and has, since 1980, served on the Board of Governors of the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. She is an elected member of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters and National Academy of Design.

In 2012 – 2013 the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art organized a traveling retrospective of Dodd’s paintings. The exhibition was accompanied by the book Catching the Light (Barbara O’Brien, lead author). This year Lund Humphries published a monograph (Faye Hirsh, author) titled Lois Dodd, which launches the British publisher’s “Contemporary Artists Series” and is available from the gallery.

https://www.alexandregallery.com/lois-dodd

Diane Drescher
Born in Wisconsin, Diane Drescher is a New York City-based artist who finds inspiration in the parks of Northern Manhattan, and in the diverse landscapes of Cape Cod, Florida, and New Mexico. Austere and direct in composition, her paintings rely on the expressive power of color and vigorous brush work.

Drescher was a member of Bowery Gallery 2009-2019. During that time she mounted two solo shows, a two-person show, and participated in several group shows. Additionally, her work has been exhibited at the Manhattan Borough President’s Office, Westbeth Gallery, Space for Public Art- BID, Green Door Gallery in Brooklyn, Columbia University, Woodstock Artists Association & Museum, Long Island Museum, Edward Hopper House, Garner Arts Center, Boricua College, and NOMAA Gallery. Her painting, “The Bride Wore Black” was featured as an MTA subway poster (2017-2019). Her work is in many private collections. She studied at the Art Students League, the National Academy of Fine Art, School of the Art Institute in Chicago, and earned a B.S. from the University of Wisconsin.

https://dianedrescher.com/

Howard Gladstone
“As a visual artist, I negotiate the nominal and phenomenal: what I can name and what I cannot name.”
Howard Gladstone is a painter, sculptor, and filmmaker who was born, lives and works in New York City. He was selected for fellowships by the Illinois Arts Council, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Newington-Cropsey Foundation and the Abbey Mural Workshop. He received an MA from Governors State University; BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design; Certificate from the New York Studio School, and was awarded First Place in Painting at the National Academy. He is currently a Resident Artist with ChaShaMa, and the Founding Director of The Portrait Project, a collaborative of artists that portray one another.

http://www.howardgladstone.net/

John Goodrich
My goal is to capture visual aspects of the world in a language of forms unique to painting. I see this language as a play of colors and shapes that reveals the deeper character of objects: their stature, weight, and motion – in short their pictorial role – within a painting’s rectangle. Matisse’s words serve me as a touchstone: “Giotto is the summit of my desires, but the road leading to an equivalent, in our age, is too long for one lifetime.”
John Goodrich’s paintings have appeared in solo shows at Bowery Gallery in New York City and the Contemporary Realist Gallery in San Francisco and in group exhibitions at Elizabeth Harris Gallery, Kouros Gallery, Lori Bookstein Fine Art and other galleries in New York City. His work has been reviewed in The New York Times, The New York Sun, The New York Observer, The New Haven Register and other publications. A writer on art, he was a regular contributor to Review magazine, The New York Sun, and CityArts. He currently teaches studio classes at Haverford College and Borough of Manhattan Community College.

https://www.johngoodrich.net/

Elizabeth Higgins
Elizabeth Higgins was born in Toronto, Canada, in 1960. As a Helena Rubenstein Award recipient, Higgins earned her MFA from Parsons School of Design, where she studied with Leland Bell, Paul Resika, Albert Kresch and Robert deNiro, Sr. Prior to coming to New York in 1983, Higgins received her BFA from Queen’s University, Canada, where she studied painting and printmaking with JC Heywood, Ralph Allen and David Andrew.

Higgins’ solo shows include the Prince Street Gallery, New York, The Argazzi Gallery, Lakeville, CT and the Nancy Poole Studio, Toronto, Canada. She has also exhibited in group shows at the Ingber Gallery, New York, the Mangel Gallery, Philadelphia, the Addison/Ripley Fine Art gallery, Washington, DC, the ART/PLACE gallery, Fairfield CT, and the Carriage Barn Arts Center, New Canaan, CT.

She is now featured in two concurrent traveling exhibitions: Zeuxis –The Unstillife will be on display at the Delaware College of Art and Design, The Painting Center, New York, NY and the University of Arkansas Fort Smith. Also Zeuxis – Flowers as Metaphor will be shown at Hendrix College, Santa Rosa College and the Wiegand Gallery at Notre Dame de Namur University, Belmont, CA.

Her work is in corporate and private collections in the US and Canada.

https://elizabethhigginsartist.com/

Al Kresch
Albert Kresch (born July 4, 1922)[1] is a New York School painter who lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. One of the original members of the Jane Street Gallery in the 1930s, he exhibited in later years at Tibor de Nagy Gallery and Salander-O’Reilly Galleries. He is best known for landscape and still life compositions painted with evocatively rhythmic forms and vibrant colors.

Born in Scranton, Pennsylvania, Kresch moved with his family to New York in the 1930s. He began studying figure drawing at the Brooklyn Museum, but soon enrolled in the Hans Hofmann School. There he met Leland Bell, Louisa Matthíasdóttir, Nell Blaine, Judith Rothschild, Robert De Niro, Sr., and Virginia Admiral among other artists of note. These friendships proved a source of inspiration throughout much of his life. In the 1940s, he exhibited abstract work in his first two shows at the Jane Street Gallery, at a time when Abstract Expressionism was gathering steam. He soon embarked, however, on an independent path, inspired by his friend Jean Helion to return to representational painting. Friendships with poets Denise Levertov, and Frank O’Hara reflect the breadth of his interests. His painting philosophy was a subject of Levertov’s poems “The Dog of Art” and “Kresch’s Studio.”

Kresch won a Fulbright scholarship in 1953, aided in part by a letter of recommendation from his friend Willem de Kooning. Recent exhibitions of his work at Salander-O’Reilly Galleries won favorable reviews, and he was elected member of the National Academy in 2005.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Kresch

Stanley Lewis
Stanley Lewis was born in Somerville, New Jersey on October 31, 1941. He graduated from Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut in 1963 with a joint major in music and art. His painting teacher was John Frazer. He graduated with high distinction. In the summer of 1962, he studied with William Bailey and Bernard Chaet at the Yale Summer School of Art and Music. He received a Danforth Fellowship for graduate study and received an MFA from Yale University in 1967. His main teachers there were Leland Bell and Nick Carone.

He began teaching at the Kansas City Art Institute in 1969 in the painting department, working under Wilbur Niewald for 17 years. He joined the Bowery Gallery in NYC in 1986. Stanley taught at Smith College from 1986-1990 and then at American University from 1990-2002 working under department chairman Don Kimes. He retired from AU in 2002. He has taught summers at the Chautauqua Institution’s School of Art since 1996 and was on the faculty at the New York Studio School until the end of 2011.

In Sept. 2004 he was in a two man show at Salander-O’Reilly Galleries. A long-time member of the Bowery Gallery, his most recent shows there were in February, 2005 and March, 2008. He was then represented by Lohin Geduld Gallery and had a one man show there October 13- November 13, 2010. The gallery closed in December of 2011. From Feb. 17 through April 8, 2007, he had a major retrospective at the Museum in the Katzen Art Center, American University, Washington, DC. There was a smaller version of that show at the Visual Arts Center of New Jersey, Summit, NJ, that spring. In 2005, he received a Guggenheim Fellowship. He has been elected to membership in the National Academy.

http://www.bettycuninghamgallery.com/artists/stanley-lewis

Elizabeth O’Reilly
Elizabeth O’Reilly grew up in Ireland and moved to the US in 1986. She received her MFA from Brooklyn College, and her B.Ed from the National University of Ireland. She has participated in residencies at the Ballinglen Foundation, Ireland, the Ucross Foundation, Wyoming, and the Ragdale Foundation, Illinois. She has received numerous awards, including a Pollock Krasner Foundation grant, a Charles G. Shaw award for painting and a Peter S. Reed Foundation Grant. A documentary on her work, Ealaiontóir Thar Sáile (An Artist Abroad) was shown on network TV in Ireland. O’Reilly has been showing at the George Billis Gallery in Chelsea, New York since 2000, and she participates regularly in the Royal Hibernian Academy annual exhibition in Dublin, Ireland. Her work has been reviewed in Art in America, The New York Sun and Art News, among others, and is found in many corporate and private collections both in the US and Ireland. Her paintings are in the State Department, Washington DC, the Office of Public Works, Ireland and the Memphis Brooks Museum in Tennessee.

http://www.elizabethoreilly.com/

Tony Serio
Working from observation, Tony Serio turns his focus to the urban landscape and Hudson River in Northern Manhattan. Using palette knife and brushes, he explores the terrain and architecture with a richly built-up paint surface full of light and atmospheric color observed in the moment.

Serio studied at Yale School of Art and Maryland Institute College of Art. Solo shows at the Bowery Gallery and other New York venues. Group shows include: Alpha Gallery, Boston, MA; The Drawing Center, NY; The Babcock Gallery, NY and The Hopper House, Nyack, NY. Awards include: Alice B. Kimball Grant for traveling in Italy, Yale University; Drawing Center Show Award and NoMAA (Northern Manhattan Arts Association) Grants in 2008 and 2011 to paint a series of Hudson River Greenway landscapes. Collections include Donald and Allison Innes, Columbia University and various other private collectors.

https://www.tonyserio.com/

Kamilla Talbot
Kamilla Talbot studied at the New York Studio School and The Rhode Island School of Design. Solo shows include Trygve Lie Gallery, NY; Charles P. Sifton Gallery, Brooklyn, NY; Bruno Marina Gallery, Brooklyn, NY; and at the Johannes Larsen Museum, Kerteminde, Denmark (2017). Artist residencies include a fully-funded residency at the Vermont Studio Center, as well as grants to paint in Maine, Italy, Newfoundland, and Iceland. In 2013 she was awarded a full fellowship to the Austevoll/Marstein Fyr residency in Norway. She teaches or has taught at the National Academy School; Brooklyn Botanic Garden; New York Studio School; New York School of the Arts; The Art Students League; as well as privately.

http://www.kamillatalbot.com/

EVENTS:
MARCH 5: An opening reception will be held 2-6pm

MARCH 14:Karen Wilkin will present a Zoom talk, “Nature and Culture: Some Contemporary Landscape Painters” at 7pm,
Visit www.light-of-day.com for details and to register.

CATALOG
A catalog with essay by Karen Wilkin accompanies the exhibition; preview and purchase at www.light-of-day.com.

GALLERY HOURS:
1-6pm, Wednesday through Sunday.

INFORMATION
For more information, please visit light-of-day.com r contact Diane Drescher at (917)660-0684.

ABOUT THE CURATOR:
New York-based independent curator and art critic Karen Wilkin is the Contributing Editor for Art for The Hudson Review and a regular contributor to The New Criterion, Art in America and The Wall Street Journal.