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The New York Academy of Art is taking up a five-month residency at the Southampton Arts Center, where it will present 2020 Vision, a spectacular exhibition featuring over 60 artists and writers. Co-curated by Academy President David Kratz and Stephanie Roach of the FLAG Art Foundation, and edited by Emma Gilbey Keller, 2020 Vision will be on display from Saturday, July 25 through Sunday, December 27.

"The pain, loss and uncertainty of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. The awakening cry for social justice following the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery and many others. The unnerving possibility of global recession. 2020 has already experienced seismic events that are shifting values and shaping our choices as citizens and as creators," Kratz and Roach noted. "Artists and writers are always the antennae of our society, all the more so at a time as challenging as this one.  They have an opportunity—some might say, a duty—to interpret this moment and imagine the world not only as it is, but also as it could be."

2020 Vision will encompass visual artworks from art students and rising stars to contemporary icons, as well as a myriad of texts, such as poetry and essays, and video diaries.

"This is the guiding challenge of the group exhibition, 2020 Vision.  We asked artists, writers, and creative thinkers to consider three questions of critical importance: Our lives will never be the same, but what will change look like? What do we want to keep as we rebuild? And what must we guard against?" they said.

Christine Berry appointed as part of the Awards Committee for the New York Studio School 2020 Alumni Exhibition: Mercedes Matter Awards Announcement & Discussion

“In Between,” the title of Susan Vecsey’s show, refers both to the strange period of quarantine we currently find ourselves living in, as well as the double nature of the painter’s work, in which she floats an acquaintance with artists such as Mark Rothko and Helen Frankenthaler and their landscape-influenced abstractions with her own experience of non-objective art in response to the natural world (Vecsey lives part of the time in East Hampton). The work is subtle, deliberately beautiful, and historically cognizant of the New York School and its history during the past half-century, in particular the ongoing perceptions of a Color Field predilection. If one felt compelled to make a choice, it can be said that the works tend to lean in the direction of landscape; their simplicity makes them strong in an abstract sense, but we never lose the implication that we are close to land, to water, and to the sky. Individually, the paintings are attractive, but there is also a cumulative effect, in which the paintings work a sympathetic magic by creating a pastel-like mood and atmosphere, in which both the beauty of nature and also of art are handled with a notable measure and restraint.

The condition of being in between needs to be remarked upon; much of good painting today plays with the idea that an imagery can share aspects of stylistic genres that play off of difference in their essence. Yet it can be noted that nothing is purely abstract nor entirely figurative. Elements or parts of the painting can flow in and out of meanings that take on both styles. It is hard to see both approaches occurring in the same moment; we remember those visual paradoxes where, looked at one way, the image represents one kind of object; and then, when the mental intelligence shifts, another image comes into being--but both images cannot be processed at the same time. Perhaps Vecsey’s general achievement is to render a visual system that jumps from a particular manner of looking into another. While this process is not new--we have the extraordinary achievement of Rothko, mentioned above--its innate complexity and willingness to occupy different ways of seeing within the same composition make it wonderfully current, not to mention extraordinarily interesting as art.

 
Frank Wimberley
All About Ronnie

Susan Vecsey
Untitled (Yellow / Lavender)

Sam Gilliam, Ribboned II, featured on Widewalls newsletter

In this video, Jill Nathanson gives a tour of her studio in Hoboken, New Jersey, featuring some of her paintings in progress.

Writing in 1981 of paintings made between 1955 and 1962, critic Theodore F. Wolff claimed that the work of Abstract Expressionist painter Yvonne Thomas (1913–2009) “reminds us that good painting is good painting regardless of the form it takes.”1 Wolff’s assertion must make the sober and disinterested scholar a little queasy, but it is typical, if somewhat strident, of criticism of Thomas’s work, in that it combines an appeal to quality with an acknowledgement of historical contingency. In this way it demonstrates the problem that Thomas’s work poses for educated viewers. Criticism of the last half century has tended to homogenize and dismiss gestural abstraction as an embodiment of inadvisably idealistic values, and as a foil to or baseline for the performative, sculptural, or photographic work that repudiated or grew from this kind of painting—consider for example the work of Carolee Schneemann (1939–2019). While painting itself currently enjoys wide and varied manifestations, and claims about Thomas’s sheer quality proliferate, a certain familiar aspect to her abstraction, as is evident in Summer Fantasy (1954; Pl. 1), was noticed in published criticism as early as 1956. This did not prevent Dore Ashton from attributing to her “genuinely fresh insights,” nor Donald Judd from excepting her from his nearuniversal condemnation of gestural abstraction with a positive review in 1960. 2

Born Yvonne Navello in Nice, France, in 1913, she moved to Boston with her family in 1926. She showed an interest and aptitude for art from an early age, and following studies at the Cooper Union began a career in commercial art in the 1930s. She married Leonard Thomas in 1938 (they lived in Newport, Rhode Island, during the war), and maintained close ties with the New York art world throughout her life (Fig. 1). She attended the Art Students League in 1940, and studied with Vaclav Vytacil. She also had private lessons with Dimitri Romanovsky (a Russian artist specializing in nudes and portraiture), and attended the Ozenfant School of Art. Nearly every published account of Thomas’s work mentions her participation in the innovative and short-lived painting workshop entitled “The Subjects of the Artists,” which ran from 1948 to 1949 and was initiated but abandoned by Clyfford Still and taken up by Mark Rothko, Robert Motherwell, William Baziotes, and David Hare. Barnett Newman joined in the second year. These sessions were an avenue for the five burgeoning Abstract Expressionists to share with an equal number of interested students, Thomas among them, their incipient methods of free painting, bidden by one’s  inclinations in the face of the materials and presumably conditioned by the subconscious mind. Ten years later and throughout her life, this sense of freedom remained in her paintings and works on paper, as a small but expansive gouache shows (Fig. 2; 1959).The aim, as Robert Hobbs and Barbara Cavaliere have shown in their landmark 1977 article, “Against a Newer Laocoon,” was to allow a less literary, less illustrative surrealism to take root. 3

In 1950 she enrolled in one of Hans Hofmann’s summer classes, and in the next decade was included in group exhibitions of artists identified with Abstract Expressionism, including those at New York’s Stable Gallery, from 1953 to 1957. The—only relative—belatedness with which Thomas came to Abstract Expressionism, the stylistic variety she pursued, and the nuanced and revealing critical account that exists, together resonate with contemporary concerns about painting’s viability that are rooted in midcentury abstraction and its reception. Continue Reading