From the World War 2 refugee camps in Latvia to Australia to India, to USA and all over the world, Vija Vetra has danced and choreographed for over 80 years, modern and classical Indian dances.
She gave a command performance before Queen Elizabeth as well as Indira Ghandi. In Latvia she has received many awards for her work and is a “National Treasure.”

Join us for an evening of readings by Award winners Joan Hall poetry, Kelly Nicole Long poetry, Joyce Yaeger prose.

Native New Yorker, Joan Hall is a pioneer in the field of collage and assemblage illustration. Hall’s collages and assemblages have been exhibited in galleries and museums worldwide, including the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris and the Museo Tamayo in Mexico City. She was commissioned by the American Cultural Center to lecture, exhibit, and conduct workshops in France, India, Brazil, and recently lectured at The National Arts Club in New York City.

Joan illustrated “The Policeman’s Beard Is Half-Constructed”, the first book ever written by a computer with a program called Racter and published by Warner Books.
Known for her artwork, Joan has also been writing poetry since she was 8 years old, when her poem, “Spring” won best in class. She is presently illustrating a book of her own poetry.
She has been a resident of Westbeth Artist Housing in New York City since 1971.

Kelly Nicole Long (b. 1984) is a visual artist and writer living and working in Chicago, IL. She was born and raised in Jacksonville, FL where she both attended and taught in Catholic schools. The politically fraught Floridian landscape, along with her experiences in Catholic institutions inform her artistic practice. Long earned a BFA in Ceramics and Sculpture from the University of North Florida (2005), and an MFA in Visual Arts from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2016). Her interdisciplinary practice encompasses ceramics, installation, and writing.

For 45 years, Joyce Yaeger had a “day job” in public relations, moving on to the rest of her life in 2016. Her most recent paid job was as an exec at a mid-size PR firm in New York City. But her favorite job was as head of PR for The New York Public Library where she once had a private showing of the typewritten manuscript of Eliot’s ‘The Waste Land’ with Ezra Pound’s heavy black pencil edits. She also once held one of Virginia Woolf’s diaries in her greasy little hand (until it was politely removed). Very cool.

Most of the rest of her career, she developed and managed healthcare PR programs for Big Pharma She is a graduate of Syracuse University and started her career as a reporter for the Syracuse Post-Standard. She has lived in New York City since 1970 in lots of neighborhoods (East and West Villages, Chelsea, Gramercy, Hell’s Kitchen, Upper East and West Sides and Midtown West).

Today she lives in Midtown East with her partner Danielle of 11 years, and two cats, none of which write fiction. All four of them try to spend as many summer weekends as possible in Cherry Grove, Fire Island. In 1999, she was thrilled to receive the “MAGIC” award from Gilda’s Club, a cancer support community which she helped found. As a new writer of short fiction, she is even more proud of receiving the Miriam Chaiken Award for Writing.

Sympathetic Magic delves into the numinous and explores how different artists come to terms with the unseen through works that explore the bridge between the physical world and an invisible universe of memory and mystery.

The exhibition is about magical presence, about how the otherworldly manifests itself in each artist’s process.

Participating artists
Mara Alper, Desirée Alvarez, Jermaine Amuquandoh, Susan Austad, SoHyun Bae, Andrea Cohen, Elisa Decker, Mary DeVincentis, Gwen Fabricant, Mary Frank, Ana Garcès Kiley, France Garrido, Janet Goldner, Nancy Goldring, Ruth Hardinger, Erica Harris, Aristides Klafke, Pavel Kraus, Henrietta Mantooth, Brad Melamed, William A. Mills, Elaine Norman, Isabel De Obaldía, Chris Piazza, Kesler Pierre, Olga Spiegel, Sylvain & Ghyslaine Staëlens, Renée Stout, Marianne Weil, Tamara Wyndham, and Charles Yuen.

Individual pieces radiate a sense of transformative magic and remind us that magic is in the making and arises from alchemical processes, unseen forces, and dreams. Amulets, fetishes, and offerings capture the essence of shamanism through human interaction with plants and animals.

Some works have been designed for rituals to call down the gods, such as painted Haitian vodou altar bottles, and cornmeal vèvès drawn on the floor; photographs taken during ceremonies record moments of ecstatic trance.

Many images bear witness to the presence of an intangible magic and serve as portals to another world. Layered like double-exposures, they transport the viewer to an imagined realm.

Illumination from within transforms wire mesh and painted papier-mâché sculptures. Microcosms of the larger ever-changing universe, they invoke nebulae, icebergs calving and melting, or volcanic eruption.

Sculpture, paintings and wall-hung works emphasize the sensuality of materials, shifting the focus to the alchemical process of their creation. A Kabalistic Tree of Life on newspaper conjures a ghostly ward imbued with mesmerizing power. A small naked figure stands at the opening of a jaguar’s ravenous maw.

Gallery Event
Poetry and Music
April 8, 2018 Sunday 4PM – 6PM

For further information
Elisa Decker:
Telephone: 212-691-8266
Email: elidecker2@gmail.com

Amy Dos Santos Self Portrait 2018 C print glossy

April 20-28, 2018
Opening Reception: Thursday, April 19, 6 – 9 PM

Westbeth Gallery
55 Bethune St
New York, NY 10014
Gallery hours: 12-6pm daily
finearts.parsons.edu
finearts.parsons.edu/2018mfathesis [Live April 11th]

Parsons School of Design at The New School is pleased to announce the Parsons Fine Arts 2018 MFA Thesis Exhibition Hybrid of Being curated by Kalia Brooks Nelson, showcasing work by Manar Abdelmaaboud, Layo Bright, Shuyi Cao, Joshua Coates, Gal Cohen, Freddie Dessau, Amy Dos Santos, Sareh Imani, Paloma Jimenez, Paulina Kim Joo, Andrés Martínez Ruiz, Lisa McCleary, Seungkyung Oh, Rebecca Ou, Anna Parisi, Al Prexta, Tianyu Qiu, Kevin Quiles Bonilla, Andrew Sapala, Zac Spears, Scynge Xing, Shunran Xue, and Steven Yang.

The artists in this show use the hybrid form to subvert concepts of singularity. Each artist takes a unique approach to representing the mixed parts that portray human reality more accurately. In so doing, their work helps the viewer understand how the exchange of materials and ideas become a currency by which new associations of subjective experience are formed. A myriad of themes are at play: the politics of nationality, race, labor, gender, and sexuality, that directly inform the way the human body appears in the world – as well as the relations of power that are inflicted upon it. The show also features artwork that evokes the faculties of the mind – memory, language, consciousness, and judgment – as they are informed through psychological events, social interaction, mundane objects, technology, education, and the built environment. The artists in this exhibition undermine the myth of essential unity to create space for new radical affiliations to develop in artistic practice, and cultural consciousness. This exhibition rests on the notion that difference creates a productive opportunity for disparate resources, techniques, and origins to discursively express the plurality of the human experience.

Kalia Brooks Nelson is a New York based curator and educator. She holds a PhD in Aesthetics and Art Theory at the Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts, Portland, ME and is an ex-officio trustee on the Board of the Museum of the City of New York.

Parsons Fine Arts MFA is a dynamic two-year, cross-disciplinary program committed to expanding the formal, intellectual and conceptual dimensions of emerging artists’ work. Studio-based research and scholarship extends the boundaries of contemporary cultural expression, developed through a global understanding of the arts. Parsons Fine Arts is committed to diversity among students and faculty that provides a potent learning community. Housed within both Parsons School of Design and The New School University, the Fine Arts program is uniquely positioned within a progressive educational environment. Our international student body has access to a wide spectrum of activities, ranging from rigorous formal and aesthetic investigations to
cross-disciplinary collaborations with design, performing arts and humanities students, to public forums that address pressing social and political concerns. Our Visiting Artist Lecture Series and our Critic and Curator Series features renowned, multidisciplinary artists, curators and critics. In 2018 visitors include: Jamian Juliano Villani, Wu Tsang, Ajay Kurian, Adriane Colburn, Carlos Motta, Kameelah Janan Rasheed, Heather Hart, Derrick Adams, Mernet Larsen and Mika Rottenberg.

About Parsons School of Design. Founded in 1896, Parsons has served as a pioneer in the field of Art and Design for more than a century. Based in New York and internationally active, the school offers undergraduate and graduate programs in the full spectrum of design disciplines. Critical thinking, research and collaboration are at the heart of a Parsons education. An integral part of The New School, Parsons builds on the university’s legacy of progressive ideals, scholarship and pedagogy. Parsons graduates are leaders in their respective fields, with a shared commitment to creatively and critically addressing the complexities of life in the 21st century.

In 2018, QS World University Rankings, a London-based higher education organization, named Parsons the number one College for Art and Design in the United States, and number two internationally.

For more information please visit finearts.parsons.edu or contact MFA Program Director, Associate Professor
Simone Douglas at douglass@newschool.edu

Actor with the Open Theater, Costume designer for Erich Hawkins Dance Company, Father of New York City’s Halloween Parade and creator of puppet shows with Mettawee Theater Company, Ralph Lee is the latest Westbeth Icon

Featuring Dr Jeffrey Naiditch, Elizabeth Abramova ANP, MSN, RN and our favorite pharmacist, Ilana Aminov BSPharm, RPh in an in-depth review of keeping healthy sexually. For all ages and interests, bring questions, get answers.

Refreshments and entertainment.

FREE

Let’s Talk is a series of health discussions by health professionals presented by our neighborhood Grove Pharmacy and Westbeth Artists Residents Council. Previous titles in the series include mental health, sleep disorders, music and memory and more.

Look for a Fall schedule in Sept 2018.

Artists in Exile is a collaborative effort by Westbeth to provide temporary residencies to artists at risk in their home countries.

Kanchana Ugbabe is a published short story writer and professor of English. She is currently on a joint appointment resulting from a collaboration of Fordham University’s English department, PEN America, and Westbeth Artists Housing. Kanchana has made the transition from India to Nigeria and writes fiction based on her negotiation with the new cultural terrain. Coming from an area torn apart by ethno-religious conflict, she also explores through her writing what it means to encounter terrorism in everyday living. Kanchana comes to us from Harvard where she was a Visiting Scholar in Women, Gender, and Sexuality studies.

Hadi Nasiri is a contemporary performance artist from Iran.

Avri Ohana was born in Casablanca, Morocco and immigrated to Israel at the age of 12, where he was raised and educated in a kibbutz. As a young man, Ohana was an early member of Ein Hod, Israel’s artist village, and it was there that he started to develop his artistic voice. His main influences during his formative years were the European Dadaist Marcel Janco, Dan Hoffner, the director of Bezalel Art School in Jerusalem, the optical and kinetic artist Yaakov Agam in Paris, and primarily –the painter Eric Brauer of the Vienna School of Fantastic Realism. Ohana’s exhibitions include solo and group shows in Israel, Europe and the United States.

I am a multi style artist for whom the freedom to create in any given manner and subject is of essence. In seeking the mystery of the unknown I respond to inner impulses and ignore intellectual and rational considerations. I am aware of being caught in a magical cycle, a journey that repeats itself again and again. The delicate balance and nuance between color and color, shape and shape, form and color, layer and layer is my interest. What is important to me is not how a painting is defined or classified but if it is breathing and alive.

Jack Dowling

Westbeth Icons is a project sponsored by Westbeth Artists Residents Council from a grant provided by NYC Councilperson Corey Johnson.

The project seeks to celebrate Westbeth’s senior artists who continue to produce work and in so doing provide inspiration for us all.

The first Westbeth Icon is Jack Dowling, who in addition to his painting, and printmaking, and writing short stories for the Hamilton Stone Review, among others, served also as the Westbeth Gallery Director for over 12 years. In that capacity he helped numerous artists with hanging their shows, curating their work, and writing letters of support to grant-giving cultural organizations.

On November 19, 2017, was an evening of celebration. It consisted of a filmed interview by Terry Stoller, heart-felt speeches by Beverly Brodsky, Jayne Holsinger, William Kennon, Christina Maile, and Jack’s brother, Douglas. The evening ended with a presentation of a Tiffany pen from Westbeth Artists Residents Council President, Geo Cominskie.

A video of the evening was filmed by Ted Timreck and Christina Maile, and edited by Tim Timreck

VIDEO