At the Flomenhaft Gallery in Chelsea major works by 10 master artists share an exhibit: Emma Amos, Paul Brach, Neil Folberg, Rimma Gerlovina and Valeriy Gerlovin, Mira Lehr, Dina Recanati, Miriam Schapiro, Roger Shimomura, Jaune Quick-to-see Smith and Flo Oy Wong. Several of the artists are part of what constitutes the tapestry of America, and like the others, continue to express something essential in their life and in their art.
Emma Amos was the only woman in the historical Spiral Group formed by Romare Bearden. With a spectacular palette, using oils and fabrics that refer to her African American heritage, her work, such as “Let me Off Uptown,” 2000, is invested with the yin and yang of life, its rhythms, and her personal as well as societal ideas.
Paul Brach was the Dean of Cal Arts and under his guidance it became one of the finest art schools in America. “Red shift,” 2004 is a painting for those who love beauty. It is the sum of a lifetime exploring what color can mean and what thinking is all about. Wrote New York Times critic Grace Glueck, “ Paul’s subject is nothing less than the cosmos, and invokes infinity by means of orbs, circles and luminous color effects.”
Photographer Neil Folberg, born in San Francisco, studied with Ansel Adams, and settled in Jerusalem in 1976. In 2002, his book of photos was winner of the New York Book Show prize, First Place Photography. Our works on view, “L’Arlesienne” and “Lucie Rouart” 2005 are portraits from a commission to create photos about the lives and world of the French Impressionists. He crossed barriers of time and culture to immerse himself in the 19th century art world. His works are a déjà vu and new view of what the Impressionist artists might have done if they were accomplished photographers.
Russian émigré collaborative artists, who came to America in 1980, Rimma Gerlovina and Valeriy Gerlovin, were founding members of the Underground Conceptual Movement in Soviet Russia. The photographs represented here are not portraits. They play with paradoxes that go beyond reasonable logic. “Bird” 1989 and “Translucent Book” 2001 personify different stages of psychological and visionary experiences. The Gerlovins have been featured in major publications and have had solo exhibits in many major museums since coming to the U.S.
Mira Lehr, born in Brooklyn, moved to Miami Beach where she founded the Continuum Gallery, the first all women’s art co-op in the Southeast, and also served as a trustee on the Dade County Art in Public Places Trust. She was inspired in her poetic art by Hans Hoffman and had worked closely with Buckminster Fuller and landscape architect Dan Kiley. These associations led to her focus on nature as well as on form and structure. Works such as “Ting Tang” 2005 or “Bosworth Alley” 2005 incorporate images from the natural world in dialogue with layers of color and geometric shapes. Recently her works have so inspired the Odegard manufacturers, they created a collection of hand-knotted rugs, which they have exhibited in four cities along with her paintings.
Dina Recanati, Born in Cairo, Egypt, lives in New York and Israel. She is the recipient of the King Solomon Award, the Louise Waterman Wise Award, and many others. Among the museums that have featured her art are the Jewish Museum, New York, the Tel Aviv Museum, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Ramat Gan, and more. The Untitld works shown here, #19 and #32 2004-05, are about rehabilitating materials of folded cloth . Like shadows, their meanings are about survivorship of other destroyed objects, part of an endless chain of reconstruction, and the striving for continuity, if only temporarily.
Miriam Schapiro is the mother of femmage and a pioneer in the Pattern and Decoration movement. For good reasons her work is in most major museums in the U.S., Europe, Australia and Israel. The Miriam Schapiro Archives for Women Artists at Rutgers University was established in January 2006. The works on view, “Two Among Many” 2005 and “Life With Dolls” 2006, Miriam, a colorist par excellance, is inspired on the one hand by dancing lessons she took as a child in the Dalcrose method, a simple use of motion from running, skipping and moving one’s body in an imaginative way, and then by her grandfather who invented the first doll with movable eyes, Miriam went on to explore and research dolls, finding many associations that dolls have for various cultures and the multiple forms they can take.
Roger Shimomura’s paintings, inspired by personal experiences, address socio-political issues of Asian Americans that have often been inspired by 56 years of diaries kept by his late immigrant grandmother. Most of his artistic career has been fueled by an ever-growing awareness of the unique contributions that Japanese Americans have made to the social and historic fabric of this country. The “Nikkei Story”2005 is a narrative work, tracing Roger’s grandmother’s travels from Tokyo to America as a picture-bride with a photo of her groom to be in her hand, and reference to her as a midwife to over 1000 babies. It points up Roger’s feelings for pop art, for the way Japanese were caricatured during World War II, and much more.
Jaune Quick to see Smith is a painter and printmaker who exhibits and curates native exhibitions and has lectured internationally at over 185 universities, museums and conferences. She is an activist for contemporary American Indian art. Blending her native American and western cultures with sensitivity she has created a powerful work in “Buffalo,” 1992 and “Reverence” 2004-05 reflects her belief in the universe as too precious to destroy with all things human, people, animals, insects, also plants interrelated.
Flo Oy Wong is a mixed media painter and visual storyteller about Chinese American people she finds heroic. She uses flags of the United States to which she adds stories of the Chinese American entry at Angel Island in San Francisco such as that of “Lee Suk Wan 1930” 1999, old suitcases created with memorabilia from their entry into America as “My mother’s Baggage #2” 1997, and fabric scrolls that comment on the racial profiling that led to nuclear scientist Wen Ho Lee’s incarceration for 278 days, falsely accused of transferring secrets to the Chinese Government called. She call the scroll “Kindred Spirit #4” 2003.