Author Archives: Christina

Jack Dowling featured in WestView News April 2016 series
West Village Original

photo David Plakke

photo David Plakke

Article by Michael D Minichuello
This month’s West Village Original is painter and writer John (Jack) Dowling, born in Woodbridge, New Jersey in 1931. After attending Cooper Union and teaching in Italy for a few years, he settled in New York to be a painter before eventually turning to writing. His stories have been published in the Hamilton Stone Review, the Barcelona Review, A&U Magazine, and American Writing. He has been a resident of WestBeth since 1971 and for fourteen of those years served as Director of the gallery there as well.

Jack Dowling spent the first two decades of his life in New York City as a painter. “There were centers of activity in the Village and I just quietly began to paint,” he says. “At some point I gave up painting abstractly because I wasn’t sure where that was going. One day, I picked up a snapshot of my parents on their wedding day and decided to make a painting from that. I developed that into a kind of semi-abstraction and got very involved in the sense of light, color, and shadow. That resulted in a whole series of paintings that had their initial source in photographs.”

What made him stop painting and take up writing? “It sounds like a sob story,” he says, laughing. “I had a large loft and I got involved in a court case trying to save it. It cost me money that I didn’t have, which sent me into the job market and diverted me from my painting. After three years, I lost the loft and I was homeless at 40!” He laughs. “But I got myself reorganized and into WestBeth in a ‘starter’ apartment. I was still working at the job that I had gotten to survive but I had also decided I didn’t want to paint anymore. In the meantime, I began to jot down various short observations and channel my creative energy in that direction.”

Does he find writing different than painting?……

Read rest of article here

More about Jack Dowling here

Kate Walter in interview about her book, “Looking for a Kiss” on LesBe Real Radio talk.

Air Date: March 3, 2016

Kate Walter author of the memoir Looking for a Kiss: A Chronicle of
Downtown Heartbreak and Healing hits home as she shares this captivating story with LesBe Real Team. Looking for a Kiss details the breakup of the author’s 26 year lesbian relationship and how she rebuilt her life emotionally and financially after being left broke and broken hearted. Her book has a hopeful message for anyone single after being in a long term relationship: you can heal your life and land up in a better place.
Kate’s essays and opinion pieces have appeared in The New York Times,
Newsday, New York Daily News, AM-NY, the Advocate, and many other outlets.
An award-winning writer who specializes in essays, memoir and creative
nonfiction, Kate teaches writing at CUNY and NYU. Kate has been living in
Manhattan since 1975 when she escaped across the river from New Jersey.

Check it out here: https://www.mixcloud.com/LesbeRealRadioTalk/kate-walter-author-looking-for-a-kiss/

And another interview here: https://westbeth.org/artist/kate-walter

More About Kate: www.katewalter.com

Produced By: LesBe Real Radio Talk – www.lesberealradio.com

Susan Berger is Joan Mitchell Foundation Artist-in-Residence in New Orleans, and has an installation at the Annmarie Sculpture Garden and Arts Center, Wash DC.

Susan Berger Artist in Residence.

Susan Berger has been accepted as artist-in-residence program at the Joan Mitchell Foundation Center. It is for the spring 2016. It runs from April 11 to May 6th, 2016. She will be working on a special project –a fiber piece. The Center is located on 2275 Bayou Road, New Orleans, LA 70119. Tel# 504-940-2500.

The Joan Mitchell Center’s Artist-in-Residence programming offers artists- from emerging to established, national and local – the time and space to create work, and the opportunity to engage with a community of artists i residency at the center, as well as with the vibrant arts community of New Orleans.” (from the website)

www.joanmitchellfoundation.org

Susan Berger’s new installation “Triangle Shirtwaist Factory and How it Changed Everything?”

The exhibit is called: “Threads: a sampling of fiber art” at the Annmarie Sculpture Garden and Arts Center, an affiliate of the Smithsonian, at 13480 Dowell Road, Dowell(Solomon), MD 20629.
The exhibition is in the Mezzanine Gallery and runs from March 18 to July 24, 2016. Hours are daily from 10Am to 5PM.

website: www. annmariegarden.org

Installation work: “Triangle Shirtwaist Factory and how it changed everything?” (30,000 women who marched before),”
Mixed Media: Fiber, rug-hooking , weave stitching , etc.
Received Puffin Foundation for the execution of the piece
2014-2015
90″(h) middle and 20′ width

Susan Berger #1 Annemarie Scultpure Garden
Susan Berger #2 Annemarie Scultpure Garden

Susan Berger #3 Annemarie Scultpure Garden

Susan Berger #4 Annemarie Scultpure Garden

FELDENKRAIS Class
at Westbeth

Westbeth_Flyer_10

Thursday at 4pm – 5pm,
Taught by Doron Tadmore Guild-certified Feldenkrais teacher

Westbeth Community Room 155 Bank St (enter through courtyard) between Washington and West Streets. Take A C L or E Train to 14th St and 8th Avenue and walk south to Bank St. Turn left.

$5.00 per class

Contact: Sandra Kingsbury westbethperformance@gmail.com

Sponsored by Westbeth Beautfication Committee

Awareness Through Movement consists of verbally directed movement sequences presented primarily to groups. A lesson generally lasts from thirty to sixty minutes. Each lesson is usually organized around a particular function.

In Awareness Through Movement lessons, people engage in precisely structured movement explorations that involve thinking, sensing, moving, and imagining. Many are based on developmental movements and ordinary functional activities. Some are based on more abstract explorations of joint, muscle, and postural relationships. The lessons consist of comfortable, easy movements that gradually evolve into movements of greater range and complexity.

Awareness Through Movement lessons attempt to make one aware of his/her habitual neuromuscular patterns and rigidities and to expand options for new ways of moving while increasing sensitivity and improving efficiency. There are hundreds of Awareness Through Movement lessons contained in the Feldenkrais Method that vary, for all levels of movement ability, from simple in structure and physical demand, to more difficult lessons.

A major goal of Awareness Through Movement is to learn how one’s most basic functions are organized and improve. By experiencing the details of how one performs any action, the student has the opportunity to learn how to:

attend to his/her whole self
eliminate unnecessary energy expenditure
mobilize his/her intentions into actions
learn and improve

Erica Fae directs and stars in new film TO KEEP THE LIGHT. See trailer here.

TO KEEP THE LIGHT trailer – feature by erica fae from Erica Fae on Vimeo.

for more info www.tokeepthelight.com
trailer edited by ramsey fendall

Maine, 1876. Tending the lighthouse on a remote island for her ailing husband, a woman confronts secrets buried in deep waters and navigates a hostile, new world.
Director: Erica Fae
Writer: Erica Fae
Stars: Jarlath Conroy, Erica Fae, Meagen Fay, Gabe Fazio, David Patrick Kelly, Antti Reini, Wass Stevens

Carol Hebald reads at Book Culture Bookstore on April 12, 2016 at 7pm

Carol Hebald. Photo John Turner

Carol Hebald.
Photo John Turner

BOOK CULTURE BOOKSTORE
536 West 112th Street
between Broadway and Amsterdam Avenues, NYC,
on Tuesday, April 12 at 7 p.m.

Carol Hebald will be reading from her forthcoming book length poem, DELUSION OF GRANDEUR, which wil be out in May 2016.

CAROL HEBALD was an actress for twelve years on the New York stage before enrolling as an English Major at the City College of CUNY, from where she graduated magna cum laude in 1969. Subsequently awarded a Teaching and Writing Fellowship in fiction at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, she received her MFA in 1971. A former associate professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Kansas, she is the author of three poetry collections, Colloquy, Spinster by the Sea and Little Monologs; the memoir, The Heart Too Long Suppressed; and the novella collection, Three Blind Mice.

Her novel, A Warsaw Chronicle, will be out next December.

Links to reviews of, and excerpts from her books are on her Web site: www.CarolHebald.com.