A Pedagogy of Tears
AIDRON DUCKWORTH GALLERY 169 Coffey Street, Redhook, Brooklyn, NY https://duckworthgallery.com/event/craig-stockwell-and-friends/
Artists:
Craig Stockwell (b. Cambridge, Mass. 1952) began his studies at Dartmouth College and Rhode Island School of Design. At RISD he studied with glass artist Dale Chihuly and went on to do work in glass in Minneapolis, Boulder, and Boston. His work moved on to conceptually based sculptural installations and was shown in New York, notably at PS 1 (MOMA). That particular installation was chosen from PS 1 and included in a show of Eight Sculptors (including Louise Bourgeois, Mark Di Suvero, Jackie Ferrara, Alan Saret, and et. al.) The New York work was widely reviewed including The New York Times, The Village Voice, Newsday, and The Soho News. In 1988 he settled in New Hampshire and made an intentional decision to confine his work to the restrictions of painting as a method of creating a sustainable daily practice. He received an MFA degree from Vermont College of Fine Arts in 2000.
Stockwell was awarded a Fellowship from the Sharpe-Walentas Space Program in Brooklyn for the years 2013-14. He was represented by Genovese/Sullivan in Boston. He has shown his drawings and paintings extensively in New England and nationally. His work is in many permanent private and public collections including the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. He was included in the 2003 exhibit at the Museum, “Visions and Revisions: Works on Paper 1960 to the Present,” curated by Clifford Ackley. He was a 2002 recipient of a New Hampshire Independent Artists Grant. He was included in the 2016 Biennial at the DeCordova Museum In Massachusetts.
Stockwell lives in Keene, New Hampshire. He has taught at Keene State College, Marlboro College, Union Institute and University, and Vermont College of Fine Arts (MFA). From 2013-20 he was the Director of the Visual Arts Program at the low-residency MFA at NH Institute for Arts. Recently he has taught in the MFA programs at Lesley University and MassArt.
Patricia Miranda is an artist, curator, and educator based in NYC. She is founder of The Lace Archive, an historical community archive of thousands of pieces of lace and family histories, The Crit Lab, graduate-level critical seminars for working artists, and MAPSpace project space. She works with donated and found textiles from The Lace Archive, an historical community archive of thousands of pieces of lace and family histories. The aggregation of individual stitches into monumental works makes visible the untold stories of economic labor, and labor of care, in the lives of women. In their exaggerated scale and insistent tenderness the works are feminist manifestos of softness. Miranda has received grants from the Barbara Deming Fund for feminist work; Ruth and Harold Chenven Foundation;Northern Manhattan Arts Alliance; two artist grants from ArtsWestchester/NYSCA; Anonymous Was a Woman Covid19 Relief Grant; and was part of a year-long NEA grant working with homeless youth .
Born 1971 in Memphis, TN (USA); Currently based between Belfast, Northern Ireland and Birmingham, England
Brian Bishop is a visual artist and educator based in the UK who teaches at Birmingham School of Art. He attended The School of Visual Arts in New York, NY; Memphis College of Art in Memphis, TN (BFA 1993); and Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, MI (MFA 1995). Prior to joining the faculty at Birmingham City University in 2024, he taught at Framingham State University outside Boston, Massachusetts for sixteen years with previous faculty appointments at The University of Alabama, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and in the MFA programmes at San Francisco Art Institute, New Hampshire Institute of Art and Massachusetts College of Art and Design.
His studio practice focused on photography and its relationship with the discursive and lyrical nature of painting has been widely exhibited nationally and internationally. In addition to an early curatorial career, he has taught on both the undergraduate and postgraduate level for nearly three decades.
Lucinda Bliss is an artist, writer, teacher, and administrator with 20 years of experience in higher education. She currently serves as Dean of the College of Arts & Media at the University of Colorado Denver. Her work has been shown at venues including the Stanley Whitman House Museum, Lamont Gallery at Phillips Exeter Academy, the Ogunquit Museum of Art, Aucocisco Gallery, Sharon Arts Center, Landmark College, Common Street Arts, Bates College Museum of Art, the Tucson Museum of Art, The University of New England, the Maine Farmland Trust Gallery, Dinnerware Gallery, and the Boston Center for the Arts, in addition to site specific installation work. She has enjoyed residencies at the Ucross Foundation and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, among others. Bliss has an MFA in Visual Arts from the Vermont College of Fine Arts (’99) and a BA in Art History from Skidmore College (’88).
Amy Theiss Giese is an artist and educator living in Boston, MA. Giese’s practice is grounded in photography but often is out at the edges of the medium, critiquing the materials of production and consumption, as well as searching for points of intersection with other mediums. Her work is also an ongoing attempt to location the self within distinct places and spaces, whether physical, psychological or virtual. Her work has been exhibited in the US, China, New Zealand, Czechia, and Scotland. She received her BA in Fine Arts from Amherst College (Amherst, MA) and an MFA in Photography from Parsons School of Design (New York, NY). She is currently the Program Director of the MFA in Fine Arts, low-residency at MassArt in Boston.
VanDyke has served as a Visiting Faculty Fellow at The University of Chicago, Illinois State University, The Pennsylvania Governor’s School for International Studies, Krabbesholm Academy in Denmark, and The University of Alaska Fairbanks; has been a visiting artist and critic at many institutions, including CalArts, Columbia University, Florida State University, The Museum School in Boston, Cranbrook Academy of Art, Parsons The New School, Tyler School of Art Rome, American University, and the University of Tennessee Knoxville; and has served on the faculty of Mass Art, The University of the Arts, Sotheby’s Institute, The Corcoran School at GWU, Cornell University, and The University of the Arts/ Pig Iron MFA Program in Devised Performance. He is currently an Artist in Residence in Studio Arts at Bard College.
He has been a resident at many institutions, including Yaddo, The Hans Scharoun House of the Ferdinand Moller Foundation in Germany, Qwatz in Rome, The Swimming Hole Foundation, Loghaven, and at The William Penn Performing Arts Institute through a major Artists & Communities grant from The Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation.
VanDyke studied Art and Sociology at Washington & Lee University, and later attended the Glasgow School of Art and the University of Glasgow as the recipient of a Rotary International Fellowship. He received his MFA from The Milton Avery School at Bard College. He was a resident at the Atlantic Center for the Arts through a Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant, where he was mentored by the artist Paul Pfeiffer. In 2008 he attended the Skowhegan School for Painting and Sculpture, where he studied with Harmony Hammond, Julianne Swartz, Charles Gaines, Francis Cape, and Yun Fei Ji. He started his career as Director and Curator of the Susquehanna Art Museum in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.
Jason Stopa (b. 1983) is a painter and writer living in Brooklyn, NY. Stopa received his BFA from Indiana University and his MFA from Pratt Institute. His work has been reviewed in Artforum, Artsy, Hyperallergic, and The Brooklyn Rail. Recent solo exhibitions include “Joy Labyrinth” at Morgan Lehman (NYC) and “Hanging Gardens” at Atelier W (Pantin, FR) in 2019. A solo exhibition at Diane Rosenstein (Los Angeles, CA) is slated for late 2023. Recent group exhibitions include “Light,” at Miles McEnery (NYC) and “Wayne Thiebaud Influencer: A New Generation” at The Manetti Shrem Museum (Davis, CA). Stopa teaches at Pratt Institute, The School of Visual Arts, SUNY Fashion Institute of Technology, and works for an academic journal at Columbia University.
Artist Statement:
I make abstract paintings that reference utopian architecture. My oil paintings are made of thin washes using archetypal, geometric forms that resemble a kind of flattened sculpture. Many of my works use ornamentation, lattice and framing devices set against arabesque form. I’m concerned with the tension between geometry and sensual form. My color belongs to a historical lineage. You can trace a color through-line from Henri Matisse to Bob Thompson to Stanley Whitney. Color used here is saturated, spatial and idealistic.
Utopia, which was part of Modernist notions of progress, is a physical impossibility. Painting utopian architecture allows me to negotiate my relationship to progress in the 21st century. I am after an abstraction that is two-fold: one that is critical of our notions of progress and also opens up a horizon of possibilities. This ambiguity is what Edouard Glissant would call “creolization,” and in this way, my work also reflects my identity as a mixed man. Abstraction can also channel the ancient. I paint my monolithic forms with a severe aestheticism. I am concerned with touch and surface. I want my surfaces to emulate the washy, ceramic glaze of Ancient Greek pottery, which was in turn referencing Egyptian art.
In past exhibitions, I have painted wall installations of gates and stages. In these exhibits, the painted walls act as a stage for paintings to be hung on, whereas the paintings themselves are also a shallow stage. I’m interested in how mark-making can create physical and atmospheric sensations that vie with sculpture and perform a painting. In this way, my work seeks to question a painting’s status in relation to the wall and the social realities of a given architectural site.
Gaby Collins-Fernández is an artist living and working in New York City. She holds degrees from Dartmouth College (B.A.) and the Yale School of Art (M.F.A., Painting/Printmaking). Her work has been shown in the US and internationally, including at Peter Freeman, Inc., the Birmingham Museum of Art, Alabama and el Museo del Barrio, NY. Her work has been discussed in publications such as The Brooklyn Rail and artcritical, and on the video interview series, Gorky’s Granddaughter. She is a recipient of residencies at Yaddo (Saratoga Springs, NY), The Marble House Project (Dorset, VT), and the Elizabeth Murray Art Residency (Granville, NY), and a 2013 Rema Hort Mann Foundation Emerging Art Award.
She is also a 2023-4 resident of the Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program. Collins-Fernández is also a writer whose texts have appeared in Cultured Magazine, The Miami Rail, and The Brooklyn Rail. She is a founder and publisher of the annual magazine Precog, and a co-director of the artist-run art and music initiative BombPop!Up.