BravinLee programs

January 11-February 10, 2024

May You Live The Rest of Your Life

Tania Alvarez
Dina Brodsky
Thomas Doyle
Barry Hazard
Jennifer O’Connell
David Opdyke
Cate Pasquarelli
Polly Shindler

Exhibition Images

October 19- November 11th, 2023

Barbara Friedman and Barbara Sullivan

Project Room: Barbara Friedman and Barbara Sullivan

In Barbara Friedman’s recent body of work, “The Hysterical Sublime” she is thinking about wildlife, bodies, and the blurring of categories. In a brief statement, Friedman summarizes, “These are scenes of intimacy that we desire but also fear.  I want the work to have an alchemical ferocity and am hoping to harness vastness, trying to turn what feels like the sublime into actual creatures (sometimes human, sometimes not) that appear spontaneously and connect to each other in unexpected ways.  I don't start with pre-determined images.  Instead, I allow surprising incidents to emerge from spreads of pigment and then bring out the imagery that the dried oil spills suggest.”

Barbara Friedman has had over forty solo shows throughout the United States and reviews of her work have appeared in the New York Times, the New York Sun, The Irish Times, Newsday, Art in America, ARTS Magazine, Artweek, The Brooklyn Rail, Forbes and Whitehot Magazine.  She recently had a show of paintings from the Hysterical Sublime series in Brooklyn at Five Myles.  She lives, paints and teaches in New York City where she has been a professor of art at Pace University since 1983.

Barbara Sullivan’s make bas-relief fresco objects that are effigies of real things; distorting and flattening both the forms and the painted surfaces allows the viewer to question their perception of perspective. Her work is about revering “the everyday”. Re-making common things that are the basic things we use in our daily quotidian help to acknowledge and to revere the most mundane. In a recent statement, Sullivan states, “Our commonality within the everyday erases lines that divide us socially, racially, and economically. As I present the familiar, it is my hope that my audience will act as voyeurs eavesdropping with humor and irony back at themselves.

Sullivan attended Montserrat School of Art in Beverly, MA and Concept in Portland, She received a B.A. in Visual Art and Creative Writing at the University of Maine at Farmington and an M.F.A. at Vermont College. She has given many fresco workshops at colleges and art centers throughout New England and New York. She learned the technique of making frescoes while she was the chef at Skowhegan. She shows her work at Caldbeck Gallery in Rockland, Maine and recently had a retrospective at Emery Community Arts Center, University of Maine at Farmington 

EXHIBITION IMAGES

PAST:

Project Room: September 7 - October 14

Selections from our first annual Artist Book Week, including:Brian Block,  William Eric Brown, Jinghong Chen, Beatrice Coron, Ben Denzer, Peter Dudek, Dahlia Elsayed, Douglas Florian, Lucy Charlesworth Freeman, Robert Gunderman, Candace Hicks, George Horner, Jonathan Lasker, Jason Polan, Sara Press, Charles Ritchie, Derek Stroup, Martin Wilner, Amy Wilson, & Janine Wong.

+ two new paintings by Tracy Grayson.

Past:

Five Painters
Ralph Albert Blakelock
Tracy Grayson
Jonathan Lasker
Thomas Nozkowski
Jennifer Wynne Reevs

Exhibition Images

PAST:

Natasha Sweeten

Let's Get Lost, Paintings and Sketchbooks
April 14th - May 14th
Opening Thursday April 14th 6-8

Exhibition Images

Natasha Sweeten quirky paintings may not immediately appear to be narrative but the starting point is a perception, a snippet of conversation, the play of a shadow across a surface, a story, a verb-- anything large or small that may catch her attention.  From there she’s off and running, infusing forms with personalities to create a story, a vignette that can, as she thinks of it, solidly encapsulate a particular moment of her life. She works in the New York apartment scale tradition – usually no larger than 30 inches – in oil on wood panel, a durable unprecious medium meant to improve with age, withstand some wear and tear. Employing different methods of paint application and removal, her process often takes many months or years to complete.

Natasha Sweeten was born in 1969 in Lexington, Kentucky and received her BFA from the Cleveland Institute of Art in 1993 and her MFA from Bard College in 1996. She has exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Cleveland and the Edward Thorp Gallery, and been an artist residence at Yaddo, MacDowell and the PS122 Project Space Studio. In 2006 she was awarded a NYFA Fellowship in Painting, and her work has been reviewed in the New York Times, Art in America and other publications. Her most recent solo exhibition in New York City was What You Missed That Day You Were Absent at Marisa Newman Projects in 2021, which included seven collaborations with artist friends, each work in a different medium. Today she lives in Brooklyn and upstate New York with her family and a cockatiel who answers to Mercury.