Patrick Alston • Javier Arce • Elise Asher • Michael Assiff • Sari Dienes • Dan Flanagan • Al Freeman • Coulter Fussell • Hervé Garcia • Patrick Dean Hubbell • Brittany Kiertzner • Nancy Lorenz • Christabel MacGreevy • Holly Ballard Martz • Joe Overstreet • Jeanne Reynal • Edith Schloss • Mònica Subidé • Valerie Theberge • Jon Tierney • Paul Waters • Letha Wilson • Nadia Yaron
Earth, Wind, and Fire brings together 23 cross-generational artists working with themes of the land, rewilding, traces of nature, and intersections with the body, consumerism, and the urban landscape. The historic and contemporary artists in the exhibition live and work across the country and internationally, in both rural and urban settings.
Several artists incorporate elements found in nature into the materiality of their work. Patrick Dean Hubbell (b. Navajo, NM, 1986), a Diné artist who lives and works in Navajo Nation, uses natural earth pigment, along with oil and acrylic, in his draped, folded, and deconstructed canvases. His paintings refer to the geometric designs of Navajo textiles and explore abstraction through the lenses of both modern and Indigenous art. Javier Arce’s (b. Santander, Spain, 1973) oil paintings, which depict vivid natural scenes of trees and blooming wildflowers, are stretched on repurposed untreated wood sourced from the artist’s countryside environment in Cantabria, Spain. Jon Tierney (b. Connecticut, 1967), a ceramic artist who lives on the East End of Long Island, gathers pebbles, shells, and other natural materials that become integral to the making process. Incorporated into the clay body, these elements burn away or melt during firing, leaving behind rugged, jagged surfaces that evoke erosion, geology, and the passage of time. Nadia Yaron (b. Sao Paolo, Brazil, 1978), a sculptor working in the Hudson Valley of New York, hand-carves salvaged wood and stone. Balancing shapes on top of one another, her work contemplates the impermanence and constant movement of nature with the most weighty and permanent of materials.
Totemic forms characterize the work of two artists in the exhibition. Valerie Theberge (b. Chicago, IL, 1969) creates towering glass mosaic sculptures containing voids, openings and passageways to explore the movement between the material and immaterial worlds. Brittany Kiertzner (Arisawe, b. St. Regis Mohawk Reservation, NY, 1985), who is a member of the Saint Regis Mohawk Tribe, Iroquois Nation, integrates traditional weaving techniques into three-dimensional forms by piercing, pulling, and warping fiber over armatures composed of wire mesh, upholstery fabric, and plaster. The resultant forms are monolithic and totemic in their presence.
In others’ work, the landscape is present in traces. Coulter Fussell (b. Columbus, GA, 1977) makes textile works repurposing donated fabrics using quilting, photography, and sculpture techniques. Her works on view incorporate a single repeating photograph taken during outdoor adventures in rural Mississippi hill country, where she lives and works. These ghostly forms, printed on translucent fabrics, echo, and sometimes clash with, the quilted and printed fabrics layered beneath them. Letha Wilson (b. Honolulu, HI, 1976) also incorporates nature photography into her work – in her case, printing photographs onto sculptures constructed from industrial materials like welded Corten steel, poured concrete, aluminum sheeting, and vinyl. The photographs, of desert sunsets, rock formations, and palm trees, are among images Wilson has taken while traveling in Hawaii, the American West, and Iceland. Nancy Lorenz (b. New Jersey, 1962) is known for juxtaposing luxurious and everyday materials; in her Sunflower wall works, she layers gold leaf and gesso on wood panels to explore the transient beauty of nature, and reflect on the geometry of its forms. Sari Dienes (b. Debreczen, Hungary, 1898; d. Stony Point, NY, 1992), who is known for monumental rubbings from sidewalks in New York City, created artwork from natural and built environments. She would collect natural materials, like shells, flowers, and grasses, and add layers of rubbing, printing, or stamping by working from these elements to create expressive and emotive compositions.
The intersection of city life and urban landscape characterizes four artists in the exhibition. Patrick Alston (b. Bronx, NY, 1991) creates paintings that engage socio-politics, language, and the psychology of color. His abstract networks of highly-keyed color synthesize elements of the urban landscape, the universe, and personal identity. Dan Flanagan’s (b. Madison, WI, 1983) paintings, which are also defined by networks of color, exist at the intersection of abstraction and figuration, painting and drawing. Living and working in Bushwick, he is heavily influenced by New York City, thinking of the work as a way of naming emotion, grief, and memory. Michael Assiff (b. St. Petersburg, FL, 1983), a painter and sculptor in Queens, New York, explores the ecology of the United States via its supply chains using low-relief plastic paintings and cast concrete elements. Joe Overstreet (b. Conehatta, MS, 1933; d. New York, NY, 2019), who lived and worked in the East Village for decades, used abstraction to express issues of social justice and civil rights. His work was inspired by the sidewalks, storefronts, and local jazz haunts of his neighborhood, but he also layered this with memories of looking at fields through screen windows of his family’s porch in rural Mississippi.
Two artists in the exhibition work with materials from quotidian life, sculpting them into landscapes of form. Holly Ballard Martz (b. Los Angeles, CA, 1965) intertwines familiar objects – including vintage quilts, bra straps, hair, silicone, and discarded injection needles – in meticulous sculptural formations. Al Freeman (b. Canada, 1981) reproduces everyday items at an exaggerated scale, rendering them in puffy, tactile materials. Partially deflated, she playfully imbues the objects as drained of their virility, satirizing runaway consumerism.
Memory, poetry, folklore, and the body connect with the natural world in the work of another group of artists. Mònica Subidé (b. Barcelona, Spain, 1974), who lives and works in Barcelona, creates dreamlike paintings in which the magnetic and secretive faces of the figures are complemented by limb-like floral arrangements. Christabel MacGreevy (b. London, United Kingdom, 1991), a British artist working in London, paints her stoneware vessels with figurative, bodily images inspired by a feminist re-reading of the symbolic languages of folklore and mythology. Edith Schloss (b. Offenbach, Germany, 1919; d. Rome, Italy, 2011), who was an accomplished writer, as well as a painter, spent the 1940s and 50s immersed in the downtown New York art world, and the interchange between poets and painters. In the early 1960s, Schloss moved to Rome. Her paintings explored the intersection of the intimate and the sublime. Her paintings represent, as she wrote, the “quiet and balance in still lifes of homespun objects lined up against the pageant of the sea.” Elise Asher (b. Chicago, IL, 1912; d. New York, NY, 2004) was also a poet-painter, who integrated poetry into her works—first thematically in her early abstractions, and then by integrating text into her compositions. Her canvases of the 1950s and 60s blend calligraphic handwriting with color and brushwork. Paul Waters (b. Philadelphia, PA, 1936), a Black artist living and working in the East Village, combines a symbolic language with an intuitive, playful process. Waters uses his fingers to apply paint, and a pair of scissors as his “drawing” tool. His canvases are filled with repeated silhouettes made from cut canvas shapes, which often reflect experiences in nature and his grandparents’ farm.
Other artists explore the landscape through a topographic or cartographic perspective. Jeanne Reynal (b. White Plains, NY, 1903; d. 1983), a mosaicist who worked at the intersection of Surrealism and Abstract Expressionism in mid-century, used individual hand-cut mosaic tiles to create topographic and resonant surfaces. Hervé Garcia (b. Nice, France, 1971), a French artist and musician, works with restored linen, joining and overlapping pieces of the material to create a montage effect. The fields of fragmented and undulating forms, interrupted by frayed edges of fabric, evoke landscapes viewed from an aerial perspective and split by tectonic fracture, and the rhythms of flowing water.