Studio Notes
Video Tour and Website for Joan Dreyer
Score explores 20 years of the work of Virginia-based mixed media artist, Joan Dreyer. While developing her MFA thesis at Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia, PA, Joan began taking tools, techniques and imagery that have been historically considered “women’s work” and transforming them into innovative, contemporary art that is responsive to the tone and tensions of our times. Created by combining fiber techniques with unexpected materials like X-rays, her work is a subtle art that asks questions about life, loss, symbolism, and the impact of war instead of providing one size fits all answers. The artist’s work provides a space for the contemplation of life stages that we all encounter. The result is a body of work that allows for meaningful but also multiple interpretations by the viewer.
Please visit Joan’s website and plan to see the exhibit.
Building Blocks – Agility
Remember the word “Pivot” from early 2020? We pivoted to Zoom and online social interactions. Everything changed over night. In March of 2020, I was working with a team to install art exhibits at NOVA, when we were told to leave the building and go home. We left the art on the wall. Just like that.
As I head into a new year with the Distinct Studios project, I am grateful for my family, friends and clients but I am also certain about my word for 2023 – “Agility”.
I learned Agile Development while building interactive media in the early 2000’s.
The agile practice is this:
Have an idea? Design it on paper and then prototype.
Test the prototype, make changes and then repeat until the concept is fully formed.
The goal is to “Fail Fast” but also efficiently and at a lower cost. The same iterative principle can be applied to creating art and small agile businesses.
“Fail Fast” is an entrepreneurial term. “Learn Fast” is my preferred mantra.
After we went into lockdown in 2020, I was constantly making adjustments. Plans were made and then the pandemic changed those plans. Did you ever have the thought in April of 2020 “We’ll open up again in a few months”? I can’t remember how many times I did.
I was “Learning Fast”.
As we shift away from the pandemic, it appears that we are in a new world. Art will continue to inspire and lift us but the economic environment is tougher than it’s been in years.
In the coming year, I will continue my agile practice as I test concepts, revise and build.
Thank you for your support this past year. I look forward to sharing news of upcoming projects and travels in 2023.
Stay Safe and Well over the Holidays!
Theresa Martin 2015, Private Collection
Adjoa J. Burrowes at Virginia Moca
Adjoa J. Burrowes’s work, “Run Down and Run Over” was selected for the juried group exhibition “Made In Virginia 2022” at the Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art where she won second prize for Best in Show. She was also asked to contribute tools and process materials to the museum’s educational Art Lab. Congratulations to Adjoa and to all the participating artists from the state of Virginia!
Installations shots by Echard Wheeler, Courtesy of Virginia Moca
Long Front of Culture
My mother, Helen Schrider Higgins earned an MFA from Catholic University in Washington DC in 1955 at the age of 25. She was the first woman to be admitted to the MFA sculpture program at CU. ( She become a student at CU in the late 40’s not long after they admitted women to the school. )
As a child you don’t contextualize your parent. My memories as a child of the late 60’s and 70’s was one of being around art, artists and books. In lieu of dolls, I received pastels and sketchbooks as gifts. This was my norm. My context.
In her later years, she and I would – at least once a year – find ourselves having lunch in the courtyard cafe of the West Wing at the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC. While we always talked about art, at these courtyard lunches we starting to go deep into her story and her experience around the emergent Washington DC art community of the 1950’s.
Our National Gallery conversations gave me a strong foundation when I had the opportunity last year to delve into the time period of the 1950’s while collaborating with Catholic University on an exhibit of her art work.
In my research, I did a deep dive into Black Mountain College, the Bauhaus artists, Bernand Leach, Shoji Hamada and other influences.
One of the most interesting insights for me came from a book that I found at the Phillips Collections museum shop in a moment of serendipity.
It was “The Free World, Art and Thought in the Cold War” by Louis Menand, an English Professor at Harvard.
He did extensive research and wrote about culture in the time period that she came of age as an artist.
The insight from Menand was regarding the art critic/art world power broker Clement Greenberg. Yeah – that guy.
I was not aware that Greenberg received plenty of what we call today “pushback” during his heyday.
Greenberg constructed a top/down art world structure. In his peak years, Greenberg championed the abstract expressionists as the pinnacle of art. Later in the 60’s, he was overwhelmed by the popularity of pop art and his power within the art world of his time declined – although his writing maintained a strong hold on academia for decades.
The key point that I learned from “The Free World” was that the term “The Long Front of Culture” that was coined by the British art critic, Lawrence Alloway.
Alloway argued for the arts to be viewed as part of a continuum. There are multiple genealogies of art – not one.
I am simplifying the argument about what constitutes high art but my point is that there are and have always been many different ways to create.
There are so many more artists now than there were in the 1950’s. The art world is much more diverse.
What moves you? What excites you? What do you want to see everyday?
Bibliography
The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War, Louis Menand, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 97803741584158453,
Seeing Slowly
In the US, Labor Day signals that summer is over!
Announcements for art gatherings, openings and lectures are streaming into my email box and onto my social media feeds.
Before the art season starts again, I’d like to share an experience that jarred me.
It’s about social media.
Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy Instagram. I post about art and artists.
Recently, I realized the need to slow down and return to the reason that I find art an essential part of my experience. I was looking at a large “coffee table” size art book of works on paper by the artist, Do Ho Suh. I stopped myself suddenly because I realized that I was flipping through the pages as if I was randomly scrolling through Instagram. I was scanning not seeing.
After multiple sessions of scanning the book, I had become aware. I slowed down. I began to experience his drawings and prints. The work began to reveal itself. It was an intense experience.
How do you look at art – both in person and online? How have social media platforms impacted the way you look and see?
During conversations about social media, I often advocate for social media as “Marketing” with a capital M. That’s it!
Until recently I had not considered its subtle but real impact on the way that I look and see.
For lessons in slowing down, I recommend a valuable book in my art book collection entitled “Seeing Slowly: Looking at Modern Art” by Michael Findlay. You may know his book “The Value of Art”. If you are new to the art, I recommend reading “Seeing Slowly: Looking at Modern Art” first before going on to “The Value of Art”. Both are well written but “Seeing Slowly” is more personal.
Check it out!
Bibliography
Seeing Slowly: Looking at Modern Art
Michael Findlay
Prestel, 2017
ISBN: 9783791383835
Slow Light IV on Vimeo
Slow Light IV by Chee Keong Kung
Wood, Metal Acrylic, color pencil, spray paint
14.5″ x 9″ x 1.5″
Chee’s work explores the tension between geometry and the gestural mark.
His work is in private, corporate, and institutional collections, including The National Museum Art Gallery of Singapore and The DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities. Slow Light IV and others are available through Distinct Studios Fine Art.
You can see additional videos on Distinct Studios Vimeo profile.
The Ostinato and Coda Series by Sarah J. Hull
The Ostinato and Coda Series by Fiber and Conceptual Artist Sarah J. Hull
Exhibition Dates: July 5, 2022 through August 15, 2022
Exhibit Reception and Artist Talk: Saturday July 30, 2022, 2-4PM
Distinct Studios Fine Art is pleased to present Sarah J. Hull’s Ostinato and Coda series in the Small House Gallery of Goodwin House in Alexandria, Virginia in July and August of 2022.
Sarah has a background in architecture, science and visual art. She received her BA in Architecture from Wesllesley College with pertinent course work at M.I.T. Her varied background informs her work including her explorations of music.
In her art, she explores the rhythmic variation in our daily lives. Using natural fibers and hand embroidery stitches, each work explores it’s “objectness” with the tension created between hand-stitched materials and the structure of the underlying grid. The resulting work creates a mediative presence.
In her process, she begins with a concept that has has inspired her. She then follows that idea in a series of works that create an iteration of the theme. The Ostinato series demonstrates this process elegantly. In music, an Ostinato is a short melodic phrase repeated throughout a composition, sometimes slightly varied. A rhythmic Ostinato is a short, constantly repeated rhythmic pattern. In the Ostinato series by Sarah, she uses the concept of repetition with slight variation to create fiber based works that hold their own as single works but displayed together form a visual melody.
Sarah currently lives and works in Washington DC. She is active in the art community through the District of Columbia Art Center (DCAC),
nationally through the New York based National Association of Women Artists (NAWA), and internationally through the UK based Society for Embroidered Work (S.E.W.). Currently, she is enrolled in the Royal School of Needlework’s Certificate & Diploma program and was a member of the 2019 – 2020 DCAC Sparkplug cohort. Most recently, she successfully presented an independent solo exhibition of her most recent series The Topologicals at Studio 1469 in Washington DC and was one of the artists in Distinct Studios first group exhibition in 2022, Before, During, After at Episcopal High School in Alexandria, Virgina.
In the Studio
Photo Credit: Oliva Weise