Sharon Wilson

Sharon Wilson is trained as a painter, but has since developed her career as a multimedia artist and curator who uses video, found objects, digital imagery, drawings, and sound. Interested in the media as a divisive tool for shaping public motivations, as well as looking at the edifices of architecture, of which social control is inherent, yet not explicit, her work is about democracy. Her work often manifests itself as site-specific commissions, which seek to subtly reveal, and at times, subvert the social mechanics and contentions of any given context.


Wilson has spent ten years with a variety of site-related contemporary art commissions and community-engaged projects under galleries such as V&A, Tate, Waygood, and the Shipley Art Gallery Gateshead. Much of her work is driven by social engagement and inclusion. With public places as a forum for her work, Wilson, at times, creates no division between herself—the artist practitioner—and the volunteering public, who become part of the enquiry, thus blurring the distinction between the creative facilitator and the public, which allows them to have an equal role in the artwork. The approach is holistic, as the final outcome of the artwork is often less of a priority than the process of engagement itself.


http://www.nyartsmagazine.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=576454:sharon-wilson-&catid=455:we-love-ny
http://www.axisweb.org/seCVWK.aspx?ARTISTID=13794

Cabinet of the North, 2007Audio, cabinet, glass bulbs, archival material and found objects

Swan Hunter Welding Mask, 2008Found objects

The End of the Rainbow is Nigh, 2008Audio, cabinet, glass bulbs, archival material and found objects

Edward Berge

Edward Henry Berge was an American sculptor born in Baltimore, Maryland in 1876. He is mainly known for his bronze monumental works and figures. He died in his native city in 1924.

He studied at the Maryland Institute and was part of the first class of the Rinehart School of Sculpture, which comprised three boys and four girls, and is currently known as the Maryland Institute College of Art. The other two boys were J. Maxwell Miller and Hans Schuler. Upon completion of Rinehart School study, the three went together to Paris where they enrolled in the Académie Julien for three years and studied under Charles Raoul Verlet and Auguste Rodin. Edward Berge was a member of the National Sculpture Society and the National Arts Club.^[1]

Berge mainly worked in marble and bronze and completed many monuments, portrait busts and relief sculptures, many of which are on display outdoors or in public buildings in Baltimore City, including:

• Armistead, Fort McHenry.
• Chapin A. Harris, Wyman Parkway and 31st St.
• Latrobe, Broadway and Baltimore St.
• On the Trail, Clifton Park.
• Sea Urchin, Johns Hopkins University.
• War Memorial, Cherry Hill Administration Building.
• Watson, Mt. Royal Terrace at North Ave.
• Wildflower, Homeland Garden.

http://www.worldlingo.com/ma/enwiki/en/Edward_Berge

John Mason

John Mason ('57), born in Madrid Nebraska in 1927, began exhibiting his powerful ceramic work at L.A.’s legendary Ferus Gallery in the late 1960s. He was one of the leaders of a revolution that transformed clay into a fine art medium. Mason is closely allied with Peter Voulkos, and the pioneering Otis Clay group. During the 1950s and 1960s, both master ceramicists pushed the boundaries of functional ceramics to create massive, energetic sculpture that broke the field wide open.

As a sculptor, Mason has always demonstrated an intuitive understanding of the plasticity of form. He works with relatively simple three-dimensional forms to exploit his interest in spatial perception, mathematical progression, and modular repetition. His fascination with torque and rhythm results in forms that twist, curve, spin and wind in space. He builds huge, rough pots, walls, monumental rectangles, x-shapes and crosses that communicate vitality as well as grace.

http://www.otis.edu/alumni/outstanding_alumni/john_mason.html

Anthony Caponi

Anthony Caponi is an artist, educator, poet, philosopher, innovator and engineer. For 60 years, Caponi has lived, worked, taught, and created his art in Minnesota. His distinguished career has carved an indelible mark in the cultural history of the state and contributed immeasurably to the wealth of arts available to its citizens.

At age 89, Caponi continues to create with energy and inspiration. Caponi Art Park and Learning Center, the manifestation of his 50-year vision, has been a reality since 1992. This vision and creative spirit have built and literally sculpted this public creation for the delight of everyone. The concrete and dirt paths are Caponi’s linear drawings retraced and animated by each person who walks them. The rock walls and shaped earth are his 60-acre sculpture into which conventional works are integrated. Since making a home in Eagan in 1949, the realization of Caponi Art Park crowns his life’s achievements.

Caponi devoted more than 20 years working with the community and educating local government on the importance of art. Not only has Caponi through his own untiring physical effort literally hand built this park, his home and studio, miles of paths, vistas and outdoor sculpture sites, he has worked diligently with the county, city and state to establish Caponi Art Park as a viable entity and independent foundation. Through his commitment, Caponi Art Park has grown into an established arts organization that serves thousands of visitors a year. Learn more about the history of Caponi Art Park.

(http://www.caponiartpark.org/about/founder/)

"Walk in Outer Space "

"Capriccio"

"Snake"

Jim Dine

Tools + Fire, 2010
Painted bronze
93" x 108" x 63"


Two Big Black Hearts by Jim Dine (bronze)

Jim Dine was born in Cincinnati, Ohio in 1935. He grew up in what he regards as the beautiful landscape of the Midwest, a tone and time to which he returns constantly. He studied at the University of Cincinnati and the Boston Museum School and received his BFA from Ohio University in 1957.
American pop artist Jim Dine (June 16, 1935) is sometimes considered to be a part of the Neo-Dada movement. Like pop artists, Dine incorporates images of everyday objects from everyday life such as tools, rope, shoes, neckties, and other articles of clothing, and even a bathroom sink, to his canvases and in his art.

Dine, renowned for his wit and creativity as a Pop and Happenings artist, has a restless, searching intellect that leads him to challenge himself constantly. Over four decades, Dine has produced more than three thousand paintings, sculptures, drawings, and prints, as well as performance works, stage and book designs, poetry, and even music. His art has been the subject of numerous individual and group shows and is in the permanent collections of museums around the world.
http://www.novakart.com/JimDine_Info.cfm?ArtistsID=369&Object

Giuseppe Joseph D'aste

Giuseppe Joseph D'Aste (Italian/French 1881-1945) An extremely  rare 1920's silvered bronze lost wax group of Diana and the hounds. Signed J.D'Aste. Foundry seal for Susse Frères Paris.Also written on underside Premiere Eperve ( First cast ) Made In France. His early works from 1905-1915 were of Neapolitan children but while living in Paris later works captured the Art Deco movement of the 1920's.- similar to the "LaStele" group of artists and the works of early impressionist French sculptor  Joseph Bernard 

Dimensions : Height 22 inches by 22 &1/4 inches in length.

http://www.jennmaur.com/scsubjectindex/scartistspages/DASTEfeaturedartistpage.htm

Alan Emerson Hicks

Alan Emerson Hicks was born in 1964. He was born and raised in the Chicago area. Alan's work focuses on a social commentary through and about the disposal of trash today.

“My artwork is about transformation. I collect plastic commonplace objects and societal detritus, bottles, grocery bags, caps, hangers, video tape and use them to make sculpture. I want the viewer to see the objects of their everyday lives anew, hopefully changing the way they dispose of these items…My work is a commentary on what our society views as important and unimportant,” says Hicks.

He attended Lindblom Technical High School and received a Bachelor's of Fine Art Degree from Illinois State University. While Alan was in school he studied sculpture with regards to multi-media formats, woodworking, metal smithing, drawing and printmaking. Once he graduated, Hicks began his career as an artist and worked with a variety of mediums until he found the passion of turning trash into a social commentary on society's views of what is important and what's unimportant.

(http://chicagoartmagazine.com and http://2006.chicagocalling.org/index.html#artists )

Blue Boy, 2007

plastic found objects, and a light box base

Butterfly Grande, 2007

plastic found objects/trash

200, 2007

heat manipulated plastic bottles, lightbox

Photos/Information:http://crazy8art.com/section/20442_Crazy_8_ART_by_Alan_Emerson_Hicks.html

Charles LeDray

workworkworkworkwork

For over 20 years, New York-based artist Charles LeDray has created handmade sculptures in stitched fabric, carved bone, and wheel-thrown clay. LeDray painstakingly fashions smaller-than-life formal suits, embroidered patches, ties, and hats, as well as scaled-down chests of drawers, doors, thousands of unique, thimble-sized vessels, and even complex models of the solar system.

The exhibition gathers approximately 50 sculptures and installations, from seminal early works to the first U.S. presentation of MENS SUITS (2006-2009), his highly acclaimed project presenting three complex, small-scale vignettes of second-hand clothing shops. The ICA will also premiere Throwing Shadows(2008-2010), an extraordinary new ceramic work including more than 3,000 vessels made of black porcelain, each less than two inches tall.

CHARLES LEDRAY: workworkworkworkwork will travel to the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.

website: http://www.icaboston.org/exhibitions/exhibit/ledray/

Charles, 1995

stitched fabric

Party Bed, 2006-7

leather, metal, ribbon, elastic, embroidery floss,

aluminum rivets, wood, and zippers

MENS SUITS (installation view), 2009

stitched fabric

Xiao Yu

Works in Xiao Yu’s exhibition Turn Around are not attached to any particular social context and knowledge. In these works, Xiao is obviously evading any textual meaning, which is often an unavoidable part in many works of Chinese contemporary art. In an unexpected way, the artist successfully appropriated the rich oriental quality of bamboo as a cultural symbol. Bamboo in the exhibition is flexible as water, still as mountain; its contours are sometimes light as soaring birds, ferocious as lurking tigers, or calm as caterpillars. Toughness and integrity, cruelty and tenderness coexist in Xiao’s work. The work is independent of the decoding of meaning—it evokes an experience in viewers, based on their instinct and meditation through their visual reaction.


http://www.nyartsmagazine.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=576467:communal-silhouettes-&catid=456:china


http://www.artlinkart.com/en/exhibition/overview/2c6azAnj?x=s&a=upcoming&b=01

Bamboo No. 5, 2010
Bamboo

Bamboo No. 2, 2010
Bamboo

Bamboo No. 4, 2010
Bamboo

Jean Shin

Biography
Jean Shin is nationally recognized for her monumental installations that transform everyday objects into elegant expressions of identity and community. For each project, she amasses vast collections of a particular object—prescription pill bottles, sports trophies, sweaters—which are often sourced through donations from individuals in a participating community. These objects then become the materials for her conceptually rich sculptures, videos and site-specific installations. Distinguished by her meticulous, labor-intensive process, and her engagement of community, Shin’s arresting installations reflect individuals’ personal lives as well as collective issues that we face as a society.

Her work has been widely exhibited in major national and international museums, including in solo exhibitions at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington DC (2009), the Fabric Workshop and Museum in Philadelphia (2006), and Projects at The Museum of Modern Art in New York (2004).

Other venues have been the New Museum of Contemporary Art, the Museum of Art and Design, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Asia Society and Museum, The Brooklyn Museum, Sculpture Center, Socrates Sculpture Park, and Frederieke Taylor Gallery in New York City. Site-specific permanent installations have been commissioned by the US General Services Administration Art in Architecture Award, New York City’s Percent for the Arts and MTA Art for Transit. She has received numerous awards, including the New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Architecture/Environmental Structures (2008) and Sculpture (2003), Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, and Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Biennial Art Award. Her works have been featured in many publications, including Frieze Art, Flash Art, Tema Celeste, Art in America, Sculpture Magazine, Artnews, and The New York Times.

Born in Seoul, South Korea, Shin attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 1999 and received a BFA and MS from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. She lives and works in New York City.

http://www.jeanshin.com/bio.htm

James Turrell

James Turrell was born in Los Angeles in 1943. His undergraduate studies at Pomona College focused on psychology and mathematics; only later, in graduate school, did he pursue art. He received an MFA in art from the Claremont Graduate School in Claremont, California. Turrell’s work involves explorations in light and space that speak to viewers without words, impacting the eye, body, and mind with the force of a spiritual awakening. “I want to create an atmosphere that can be consciously plumbed with seeing,” says the artist, “like the wordless thought that comes from looking in a fire.” Informed by his studies in perceptual psychology and optical illusions, Turrell’s work allows us to see ourselves “seeing.” Whether harnessing the light at sunset or transforming the glow of a television set into a fluctuating portal, Turrell’s art places viewers in a realm of pure experience. Situated near the Grand Canyon and Arizona’s Painted Desert is Roden Crater, an extinct volcano the artist has been transforming into a celestial observatory for the past thirty years. Working with cosmological phenomena that have interested man since the dawn of civilization and have prompted responses such as Stonehenge and the Mayan calendar, Turrell’s crater brings the heavens down to earth, linking the actions of people with the movements of planets and distant galaxies. His fascination with the phenomena of light is ultimately connected to a very personal, inward search for mankind’s place in the universe. Influenced by his Quaker faith, which he characterizes as having a “straightforward, strict presentation of the sublime,” Turrell’s art prompts greater self-awareness through a similar discipline of silent contemplation, patience, and meditation. His ethereal installations enlist the common properties of light to communicate feelings of transcendence and the Divine. The recipient of several prestigious awards such as Guggenheim and MacArthur Fellowships, Turrell lives in Arizona.
http://www.pbs.org/art21/artists/turrell/



Sky Spaces

Solstice

Mary K. Morse

Artist Statement

I drew and painted before I sculpted. In college I started drawing the figure -- always with a model in front of me. It became my principal subject right through graduate school. When I started fooling making sculpture it seemed natural to make human figures the subject of the work….exaggerating the movements of the figures in space. I found that about the "contours" that I lay down on paper with a pencil or chalk were the same ones that I needed to find as I shaped clay or wax into a figure's form. The difficulty and challenge lay in the integration of the multiple contours that are presented as you go around the form. I was delighted to discover the familiarity I found and seduced by the challenge.

When I started "dressing" the figures I identified them both with New Orleans' Mardi Gras Indians and with the non-western cultures of Africa, Oceania, North and South America that I had studies in art history courses. This "ethnographic" character of my pieces, I think, comes from an effort to give the figures humanity and an identity.

Although I have continued making pieces in this same vein recently I've been drawn to figurative situations with more contemporary content. I have been intrigued by the groups of day laborers and other street people that I see here in Austin. This has resulted in some new pieces with this urban content. A second group of "beach ladies" has also emerged and certainly comes from my memories of many annual gatherings of friends at Dauphin Island, Alabama. Not matter what the subject of the work is it is always about moments of humanness.

(http://www.broccagallery.com/morse-bio.html)

"Elementals"
Bronze
17" x 17" x 15.5"

"Five Elements"
Bronze
15" H x 6" W x 7" D

"Feeder of the King's Birds"
Bronze
24" H x 10" W x 16" D

Augusto Brocca

The owner and artist, Augusto Brocca, was born in Peru, and graduated from the University of Texas at Austin in Anthropology and Fine Arts. Brocca is known for his large award winning iron and glass fish sculptures. Recognized for his mosaic murals and oil paintings in a variety of themes, the artist has been commissioned throughout the country, Mexico, and Peru for his art.

(http://www.broccagallery.com/brocca-bio.html)

"Sea Water Fish"
Mosaic Installation
Eddie V's
Arboretum Blvd,
Austin, Texas

"Mermaid"
Life size
Concrete, Iron and Glass

"Eagle Man"
Iron, Bronze, Tile, Concrete
18" x 12" x 12"

Richard Hunt

Richard Hunt was born in 1935 on the south side of Chicago. Hunt began his career in sculpture in 1955. It was then, while he was still a student, that hunt began to exhibit sculpture around Chicago in all sorts of places, such as: art fairs, small galleries, local art centers, and more. During the twelve years that followed, Hunt's sculptural development grew as a private, independent, studio-based, and self-generated activity that responded to the stimuli he could supply and the skills he was able to master.

In 1967, I began work on Play, a commissioned sculpture which his studio was not able to accommodate. At this time he started to work on sculpture outside of his studio for the first time.He would work on a time and material basis in a metal fabrication shop, with the help of other men and machines. Richard Hunt says that his work on Play is what has essentially brought him to his second career, that of a public sculptor.

Hunt describes sculpture today by saying, "Public sculpture responds to the dynamics of a community, or of those in it, who have a use for sculpture. It is this aspect of use, of utility, that gives public sculpture its vital and lively place in the public mind. The challenges utility brings to the sculptor’s mind and art, are as varied as the people and the sites encountered with each commission. As sculptors in our time respond creatively to the challenges that the opportunities for the greater utilization of sculpture impose, we establish links with the greatest traditions in sculpture, and with the largest and most diverse audience sculpture has ever had."

(http://chicagoartmagazine.com/2010/09/thnkart-salon-presents-richard-hunt/ and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Hunt_(sculptor))

Oasis, 2003

Welded bronze, brass, copper, and stainless steel

We Will, 2005

Welded stainless steel

Play, 1967-1969 welded corten steel

Photos/Information:

http://chicagoartmagazine.com/2010/09/thnkart-salon-presents-richard-hunt/

and

http://www.richardhunt.us