Ideas & Influences

Ideas & Influences

Artist’s notebook: Sue McNally

Artist Sue McNally, a 2015 Two Coats of Paint Resident Artist, lives in Newport, Rhode Island, where her recent work is on view at Overlap, a new artist-run space in the neighborhood. Overlap founder Susie Matthews, who has been making and showing her artwork in Rhode Island for over 25 years, wants the space to appeal to creative thinkers who live amid a bustling tourist trade that favors seascapes over more challenging propositions. To celebrate the opening of the gallery and Sue’s show, Two Coats of Paint invited her to share some of the ideas and influences that have helped shape her work over the years.

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Ideas & Influences

Julie Wolfe: Hunting and gathering

Conceptual artist Julie Wolfe’s show, “Opposing Forces,” at HEMPHILL in Washington, DC, is rooted in her practice of gathering images and data to explore the world around us and, just as importantly, our interior lives. Her intent is to guide the viewer through richly conceived systems of color, form, and language that often serve as markers of time.

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Ideas & Influences

Ideas and influences: Mike Cloud

Rather than parse the differences among us, Mike Cloud’s new paintings address the one experience we all have in common regardless of race, gender, ethnicity, wealth, or nationality: impending death. For his solo show at Thomas Erben, on view through November 2, Cloud has used stretcher bars, belts, fabrics, paint, […]

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Gallery shows Ideas & Influences

Fiction (and curatorial statement): THEY’RE MADE OUT OF MEAT

The following short story, “They’re Made Out of Meat,” was written by sci-fi writer Terry Bisson and published in Omni Magazine in 1990. An archly bizarre tale in which two higher-order extraterrestrials marvel at the fact that humans are composed of flesh and blood, it is the inspiration for an exhibition curated by Jennifer Coates at Platform Project […]

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Ideas & Influences

The Great War and Modernism

Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / The First World War � known as the Great War before it became necessary to number them � is one of history�s most celebrated lessons on two subjects in particular: how ominously easily it can be for a major war to arise, and the senseless […]

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Ideas & Influences

When art is a virtual token

First virtual gifting and sympathy flowers entered our world, and now Blockchain technology has made collecting expensive virtual art possible. According to Digitach,  Forever Rose, a digital file created by Irish photographer Kevin Abosch and GIFTO, a decentralized universal gifting protocol, has been sold to a collective of investors for cryptocurrencies with a value […]

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Ideas & Influences

Instagram: Evening at Mar-a-Lago

Contributed by Sharon Butler / This weekend, as hundreds of thousands of mad pink-hatters gathered around the world to protest the underhanded, misogynistic, and essentially anti-citizen agenda of the Koch-fueled, Putin-assisted Republicans, a very small segment of humanity who supports the chaotic mafia-style GOP government gathered at Mar-a-Lago to celebrate the completion of Trump’s first, and […]

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Ideas & Influences

Ideas and Influences: Brece Honeycutt

Artist and citizen naturalist Brece Honeycutt lives in Massachusetts, on a colonial farmhouse in the foothills of the Berkshire mountains. Fascinated with the history of her home and the surrounding land, she reads handwritten antique diaries at the local library, gathers old textiles, and creates natural dyes from the plants […]

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Ideas & Influences

An artist’s DNA: Jessica Weiss

At Outlet Fine Arts through Sunday, in her first solo exhibition in eight years, Jessica Weiss presents dazzling large-scale paintings of life-sized animal hybrids. Mashups of big floral prints, the paintings feature tangles of collaged fabrics, screened floral prints, and painted patterns that coalesce into anxious four-legged creatures with mask-like […]

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Ideas & Influences

Ideas and influences: Joy Garnett

  Joy Garnett is an artist and writer who, for the past ten years has served as the arts editor at Cultural Politics, a contemporary culture, politics and media journal published by Duke University Press. She also publishes the venerable art blog NEWSgrist. On the occasion of her solo exhibition […]

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