News

Forrest Gander receives 2023 Literature Award | American Academy of Arts and Letters

March 7, 2023

New York, March 7, 2023 – The American Academy of Arts and Letters announced today the names of 18 writers who will receive its 2023 literature awards, to be presented at our annual Ceremonial in May. The prizes honor both established and emerging writers of fiction, nonfiction, drama, and poetry. The Academy’s 300 members propose candidates, and a rotating committee of writers selects winners. This year’s committee members were Amy Hempel (chair), John Guare, Elizabeth Kolbert, Sigrid Nunez, Mona Simpson, Rosanna Warren, and Joy Williams.

February 1, 2023

In the second of three innovative exhibitions featuring pairs of artists whose work is sometimes overtly, sometimes inadvertently linked through the intimacies of living together, Shoshana Wayne Gallery highlights the artwork of Ashwini Bhat and the poetry of Forrest Gander.

Ashwini Bhat grew up in rural, South India where she trained in a 2000-year-old dance form, Bharatanatyam, before coming to tour internationally with a contemporary Indian dance company. Her tumultuous, color-dappled ceramic sculptures relate the fire-and-earthquake-altered landscape of her adopted home, California, to female nature spirits of India. Bhat says she learned from dance how to keep her energy rippling and visible, even when her body is still, and only when her sculptures do the same does she think of them as finished.

January 29, 2023

Nature knows that people are a tide that swells and in time will ebb, and all their works dissolve… As for us: We must uncenter our minds from ourselves… And become confident as the rock and the ocean that we are made from.

- Robinson Jeffers

The earth upon which we stand is a roiling sea whose currents move in slow motion. The rise and fall of the earth’s crust arches through deep-time, rising and falling in subduction zones whose very existence is a recent arrival in our human understanding. Our sense of self and how we fit into the world and the cosmos shifts with each new insight into the natural world and the life systems that are constantly unfolding. We live in an imaginary bubble of self: our skin and consciousness protecting us and enveloping us in an evolutionary safety net.

Our search for stable homogeneity is a mirage. Like Shelley’s “Ozymandias”, the ruins of our anthropocentric hubris surrounds us, yet we build dreams upon these ruins, determined to hold onto an anchor of permanence in the slipstream of our shape-shifting world.

January 24, 2023

Transdisciplinary Artist

Penngrove, CA
2023 USA Fellow

This award was generously supported by the Windgate Foundation.

USA Fellowships are annual $50,000 unrestricted awards recognizing the most compelling artists working and living in the United States, in all disciplines, at every stage of their career.

After thirty-five years in Southern India, Ashwini Bhat now works in the California Bay Area. Coming from a background in literature and classical Indian dance, Bhat uses ceramic sculptures, installations, video, and text to develop a unique visual language exploring the intersections between body and nature, self and other. In her practice, she draws from her upbringing in a rural agrarian community. Her work shows the influence of syncretic shrines and rituals, along with non-logocentric and non-Western metaphysical concepts of empathy for the nonhuman. She sees her work, in part, as an act of mapping and remapping consciousness, contributing to a spiritual or psychological archive, with an emphasis on the transformative aspects of place.

Read More Here

Sculpting the Form: Ashwini Bhat’s Exploration of Body & Landscape | vibe house

*Sculpture by Ashwini Bhat, from the artist’s Alive series.*

January 10, 2023

By sarah rose etter

Sculptures such as this one could be an organ, a piece of earth, a sunset, and even a cousin to Louise Bourgeois’ Janus Fleuri series. Ashwini’s work almost demands that we see it from all angles, that we walk around, explore the work.

But back to the winding path of art: Ashwini, born in Southern India, began by studying classical Indian dance before transitioning to literature and then landing on sculpture.

My training in clay was on the kick wheel at Golden Bridge Pottery in Pondicherry, India. We made our own clay without clay mixers, pugmills, or slab rollers. While learning to center, I remember watching my teacher, Ray Meeker, working on 20-foot-tall sculptures. — Ashwini Bhat, Ceramics Monthly

Read More Here

This Artist-led Organization is Supporting Ceramic Artists of Color | Artsy

December 28, 2022

By Adam Chau

In the 1990s, a group of artists of color in the U.S. banded together in response to the lack of representation at ceramics conferences. Initiated by Bobby Scroggins, an artist and professor at the University of Kentucky, the group wanted to take a proactive approach to making the field of ceramics more inclusive. Rather than wait for an invitation to someone else’s table, they created their own. So began The Color Network, with a mission to promote the careers of ceramic artists of color through sharing information and opportunities across the United States.

In the early 2000s, the organization evolved to form a traveling exhibition and a website called Cultural Visions, headed by Paul Andrew Wandless. In 2018, what the organization refers to as its “third iteration” began. A new group of artists—originating from a panel discussion led by Natalia Arbelaez and April Felipe—picked up the baton and started hosting roundtable discussions to listen to the needs of the community, address new issues, and share opportunities. Much of the original concerns that artists were reacting to in the 1990s persisted, including a lack of diversity in higher education ceramics programs and the need to connect with artists of similar backgrounds.

Read More Here

5 Fascinating Artists From the Artnet Gallery Network Having a Moment This Fall | Artnet News

Anina Major, *Beneath the Docks* (2022). Courtesy of Shoshana Wayne Gallery, Los Angeles.

October 5, 2022

The Bahamas, where artist Anina Major is originally from, plays a central inspirational role in the works presented in “Inheritance,” her first solo show with Shoshana Wayne Gallery. Building a life and home away from The Bahamas led Major to explore the connection between self and place both from a personal standpoint as well as a social and cultural one. Although the artist works in many mediums, including installation and video, the stoneware pieces shown in this exhibition utilize a traditional weaving technique, plaiting, which she learned from her grandmother, and evoke themes of community and identity.

Read the full article here

Anina Major: Inheritance at Shoshana Wayne Gallery, LA | Ceramics Now

Anina Major: Inheritance at Shoshana Wayne Gallery, Los Angeles

September 30, 2022

Shoshana Wayne Gallery is pleased to present ‘Inheritance’ by Anina Major. This is the artist’s first solo show with the gallery.

The decision to voluntarily establish a home contrary to the location in which Major was born and raised (The Bahamas) motivates her to investigate the relationship between self and place. In search of a place to articulate the essence of her practice, the artist returns to the inspirational source of her work—the straw market, an actual place that possesses metaphorical meanings, to further explore her own migration and the emotional complexities of transactional relationships between people and places. At its juncture a sense of belonging is generated from a combination of characteristics, core values and deep-rooted histories that are often undervalued in the context of tourism.

Read the full article here

Pick of the Week: Anina Major | Artillery

Anina Major, *Scarlet Plum*, 2022, Glazed Stoneware. Image courtesy of Shoshana Wayne Gallery and the artist.

September 29, 2022

By Lauren Guilford

Vessels are containers–spaces for bodies of volume to dwell, to fill up–shaped by what they have held and what they long to hold. In Anina Major’s solo exhibition “Inheritance” at Shoshana Wayne Gallery, fragmented baskets molded from clay operate as metaphorical vessels for strength, legacy and identity. Major’s forms resemble the oleaginous scales of a snake, latticed cages, husks and shells. They appear in various states of creation and deformation–some are partially woven, some are punctured or smashed in, and some are seemingly disintegrating or in a state of oxidization–creating a kind of lyrical tension and balance. These vessels contain a private sense of spirituality and phenomenology; their uncanny forms are simultaneously anthropomorphic and organic while also referencing a specific place and heritage. Inspired by the familiar straw markets from her hometown of Nassau, Major references the woven goods created by her family and consumed by tourists. By alluding to traditional and familial basket weaving techniques (plaiting)–largely marginalized as “craft” and labeled “women’s work”–the artist reclaims cultural heritage and legacy by imagining her own migrational and artistic identity.

Read the full article here

Gallery Rounds: Shirley Tse ‘The Magic Hour’ | Artillery

Shirley Tse, "Decommissioned Inter-Mission," 2022. Image courtesy of The Magic Hour.

September 28, 2022

By Jennie E. Park

Two works by Shirley Tse, originally exhibited indoors, are remixed under the spell of wild elements in The Magic Hour’s current iteration ‘time going backward and forward.‘

Founded in 2018 in Twentynine Palms, California by Alice Wang and Ben Tong, The Magic Hour has hosted six prior iterations (or experimental installations), each for ten weeks and anchored by a set of reconfigurable steel bars (co- produced by Dyson & Womack). Through their sojourn in this seemingly borderless desert tract named after a sliver of time, Tse’s Decommissioned Inter-Mission (2022) and Instant Archeology (2006) conjure space-time wormholes that decontextualize and recontextualize the pieces’ projections of our pasts-to-be.

Read the full article here

DA² 2022: Recent Decorative Arts and Design Acquisitions | LACMA Unframed

Anina Major, *The Eye*, 2021, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, gift of Kelly and Steve McLeod through the 2022 Decorative Arts and Design Acquisitions Committee (DA2), image courtesy of Shoshana Wayne Gallery and the artist

September 20, 2022

By Wendy Kaplan, Rosie Mills, Staci Steinberger, and Bobbye Tigerman

Bahamian artist Anina Major explores themes of identity, migration, and craft in her beautifully woven ceramic sculptures. Major’s grandmother taught her how to braid straw baskets when the artist was a child. Though often derided as women’s craft made for tourists, plaited straw objects have a centuries-long history that originated among the island’s Indigenous and enslaved West African populations. Major’s Plait series honors this tradition by recreating the technique in the enduring medium of clay. As she said in an interview: “The objects my grandmother made will deteriorate. They are made from the tree palms. There’s something beautiful about me taking that practice and putting it into an object that will exist as some kind of evidence that we were here.” The open, woven form of The Eye evokes a tropical storm, suggesting both the strength and fragility of the artist’s native country.

Read the full article here

Pick of the Week: Jinyoung Yu, 'the LIFE II' | What's on LA

September 1, 2022

By Jody Zellen

Jinyoung Yu’s poly vinyl chloride (PVC) and fibre-reinforced plastic works are fascinating and unsettling sculptures that explore the disparity between the inner and outer self. Numerous female forms stoically stand within the vast gallery with transparent bodies and painted faces. Some of the figures have multiple heads, more than two eyes and different hair colors and styles. Kitschy depictions of pets —cats and dogs— stand by these figures, more friend than foe. These animals are small and opaque rather than transparent. Upon entry, one encounters I am okay (2022), a freestanding, almost life-size depiction of an armless young girl (presumably the artist, suggesting all the works are quasi-self- portraits) made from transparent plastic akin to a blow-up doll. On the ground by her feet is a little dog. Both the dog and the girl are wearing the same flower patterned boots. The girl’s feet point inwards — pigeon toed. Though armless, her body cavity contains a flesh-colored hand that holds a yellow flower. The shape of the flower is repeated on her lips as well as on her forehead, where it appears to be a bruise. She stares ahead as if fighting back tears.

While I am okay is a solitary figure, in the Life #10 (2020), Yu combines five females huddled together, their bodies contorted in impossible ways as if participating in a collective armless hug. The sculpture has the feel of a three- dimensional drawing as the PVC shapes are surrounded by a deep brown line that differentiates the figures. The head and arm of a stylized cat emerges from the cluster of bodies, clinging to them with one paw in a manner that parallels the way they cling to each other. While Yu’s bodies are empty, her mask-like heads are more realistically rendered supporting flowing waves of black or brown hair. The faces are a light skin tone, the eyes wide and far apart, the lips are shades of pink and red referencing a range of Asian facial features. Are these the same women at different ages, friends or sisters? The subtle curves of each body suggest both love and interdependency.

Read the full article here

Jinyoung Yu, "LIFE II" – Incollect

Installation view of the LIFE II — Installation view of Jinyoung Yu | the LIFE II. Image courtesy of Shoshana Wayne Gallery in Los Angeles.

August 17, 2022

By Benjamin Genocchio

Jinyoung Yu is that rare breed of artist, someone who makes exquisitely crafted, collectible artwork that nonetheless has a profound conceptual dimension. This is the young Korean artist’s first solo show in the United States, presented at Shoshana Wayne Gallery in Los Angeles in collaboration with Choi & Choi Gallery in Seoul, South Korea and Cologne, Germany. It is a smashing success.

Sculpture is her medium and transparent PVC her core material. But her obsessive subject matter is the human mind, particularly tension between our sense of inner self and outer presentation to the world. Her multiple identities, for that is what these sculptures are, physical representations of ideas of self, or three-dimensional characters, are molded from PVC with painted plaster elements.

Read the full article here

Shirley Tse’s Ecology of the Everyday – Hyperallergic

Shirley Tse, "Framing Device" (2020), Giclee print mounted on sintra, basement window, wood, 45 1/2 x 29 x 14 inches (all images courtesy Shoshana Wayne Gallery)

July 27, 2022

By Vanessa Holyoak

LOS ANGELES — The Hong Kong-born, California-based artist Shirley Tse left her Los Angeles home behind for the coastal town of Lompoc, California, during the course of the pandemic. The artist’s personal experiences are inextricable from her artwork: Each piece in Lompoc Stories, her solo exhibition at Shoshana Wayne Gallery, is priced at $3,360, a number that reflects the fixed monthly cost of renting her Los Angeles studio in order to sustain her visual practice. The decision to price her work this way became a conceptual element of the show, which centers on themes of sustainability, both ecological and economical. The press release includes the following note from the artist: “Lompoc Stories began as Los Angeles became unsustainable to me. I wish to shift the focus from commodity to sustaining the condition for making work.”

Fittingly, the stakes of the sculptures and video pieces that make up Lompoc Stories are both loftier and more equitable than the whims of the commodity-driven art market. Building on Stakeholders, Tse’s body of work representing Hong Kong at the 2019 Venice Biennale, Lompoc Stories ask incisive questions about what it means to hold a stake on a planetary scale, in the context of anthropogenic climate change. In light of the societal upheaval prompted by the pandemic — and the extreme economic disparity it exacerbated — and in search of a more sustainable art practice, the artist’s relocation to Lompoc (whose name means “stagnant waters” or “lagoon” in the Chumash language of Purisemeño) reflects these broader conditions. These aspects all intimately inform the enmeshed conceptual and material choices that make up her exhibition.

Read the full article here

An Opulent Revival - Max Colby: Revival at Shoshana Wayne Gallery - Art and Cake

Installation view of They Consume Each Other (2018-2021), photo: Ian Byers-Gamber

May 17, 2022

By Genie Davis

Max Colby: Revival, through June 4th at the Shoshana Wayne Gallery, is a mixed media explosion of color and materials, dimensional rainbows of sculptural works.

The show features two separate series, with perhaps the standout being “They Consume Each Other,” an instillation of 42 sculptures seated on ornamental glass plinths. Exuberant in palette and bursting with flowers, feathers, and beads, individually they would be involving, over-the-top but lovely works. Compiled, they are an extravaganza of textures and shades, reminiscent in their own way of the fragile extravagance of Fabergé eggs.

The display is reverential, as the pieces are positioned as if on an altar of sorts. While many of the materials used are not those usually considered a part of a fine art exhibition, her montage-like use in clustered decadence elevates them. Unsurprisingly, they are highly textile, richly textured, and go beyond the conventional sculptural form. Some are egg shaped, some shaped like fat pickles or dildos.

In a separate gallery, the “Shrouds” series is darker in tone, if not necessarily in aesthetics. The work in both series references body image as well as worldly values, prejudices, and presumptions.

Read the full article here

Moving Images: Sabrina Gschwandtner at Shoshana Wayne Gallery – Art In America

View of "Scarce Material," 2022, at Shoshana Wayne Gallery, showing *Guy-Blache Serpentine Dance Square*, 2021, and *Cinema Sanctuary Study 2: Alice Guy- Blache’s 1897 Serpentine Dance By Mrs. Bob Walter*, 2019.

April 13, 2022

By Leah Ollman

Sabrina Gschwandtner’s latest show at Shoshana Wayne Gallery in Los Angeles, “Scarce Material,” performs an act of historical remediation, recovering the names and works of under-recognized women filmmakers of the silent era. Her “quilts” spliced and stitched together from fragments of footage taken from those artists’ century-old works attest to the long-standing suppression of women’s voices. They do so as vivid objects in their own right, with tremendous visual kick and formal integrity, from their minute details to their arresting overall patterns.

The Los Angeles–based artist revitalizes works from French director Alice Guy-Blaché, considered the world’s first female filmmaker; Marion E. Wong, founder of the groundbreaking Chinese-American Mandarin Film Company; Germaine Dulac, whose 1928 Surrealist film predates the better-known work of Luis Buñuel; and the pioneering silhouette animator Lotte Reiniger. Gschwandtner sourced footage from international archives and made prints from their digital files on 35mm black-and-white film stock. Cut and sewn into traditional quilt patterns, the strips of film come to read as line and tone, even brushstroke and woven thread. Secondary matter, such as the numbers on countdown leaders and miscellaneous words of identification on the films, appear sporadically, oriented in all directions—a kind of charged, concrete poetry. Encompassing work made since 2019, the show presents five small quilts, each roughly one-foot square, as well as four larger quilts, some of which extrapolate geometrically from the smaller modules, mounted on lightboxes. Also on view are a video and related prints, some of them reproducing explanatory notes about the subjects and images.

Read More Here

Screen Credit: Artist Sabrina Gschwandtner on Filmmaking, Quilting, and the Forgotten Labor of Women – LACMA Unframed

March 8th, 2022

By Bobbye Tigerman, Marilyn B. and Calvin B. Gross Curator, Decorative Arts and Design

Sabrina Gschwandtner is a Los Angeles-based artist who works at the intersection of new media and traditional craft. Her video Screen Credit is currently playing on the monitors above LACMA’s Stark Bar through March 15, 2022, and will resume on June 21, 2022, following the upcoming exhibition Barbara Kruger: Thinking of You. I Mean Me. I Mean You. Decorative Arts and Design curator Bobbye Tigerman spoke with Gschwandtner about how she developed this body of work.

Spotlight: Tel Aviv Artist Orly Maiberg Obliterates Horizon Lines Through Her Abstract Landscapes - Artnet News

Orly Maiberg in her studio, 2021. Photographed by Orel Cohen.

January 13th, 2022

Artnet Gallery Network

About the Artist: Tel Aviv-based artist Orly Maiberg (b.1958) has spent her career exploring the tensions and harmonies between nature and the human figure. The scale of these figures has vacillated dramatically depending on the intentions of the series, from occupying the majority of the canvas in her “Bedroom Eyes” series from the early aughts, to being dwarfed by sublime and tumultuous surroundings in her recent works currently on view in “Where Do We Go from Here” at Los Angeles’s Shoshana Wayne Gallery. Maiberg’s works have been featured in exhibitions at the San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art, the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, the Israel Museum, and the Haifa Museum of Art.

Why We Like It: In 2015, after many years of painting in a realist tradition, Maiberg began to experiment with painting on loose raw canvas. This shift towards more free welding materials encouraged Maiberg to transform her style of representation. In her current works, viewers must search out the small isolated figures she paints moving precariously through disorienting abstract landscapes with no discernible horizon lines. In one painting a tightrope walker struggles to keep his balance; in another, a figure dives into a sea of purple and blue splashes. These scenes are ambiguous, filled with unresolved suspense, that draws the eye back, and back again.

According to the Artist: “My approach to painting changed when the canvas broke loose from its frame. The movement in the studio evolved intuitively, involving gestures of the whole body, laying the canvas on the floor, and kneeling over it, which allowed more freedom. Using diluted ink paint let in randomness, which led to abstraction. In ‘Where Do We Go from Here,’ I feel I am at an important phase in my artistic path, where I am challenged by abstraction, yet figuration is a crucial factor for me. The fragile human figures define the painted space, which is bound by somewhat vague rules… The works in this exhibition were completed recently. Some were painted while in lockdown and under restrictions at my studio space in Jaffa. Like many others, I too was trapped in this weird limbo and forced to self-introspect, contemplating and reassessing my views. With no horizon in sight, flying, falling, or suspended figures, freed or forever trapped in an illusionary, infinite world, emerged from my canvases.”

Above & Below at Shoshana Wayne - Art and Cake

Terri Friedman, If Only, 2020, Cotton, hemp, acrylic wool, chenille, metallic fibers, 82″ x 102 “ — Terri Friedman, *If Only*, 2020, Cotton, hemp, acrylic wool, chenille, metallic fibers, 82″ x 102 “

August 12th, 2021

By Betty Ann Brown

“Above & Below” at Shoshana Wayne Gallery presents twelve artists whose works relate, in one way or another, to the practice of weaving. The exhibition title refers to the way horizontal elements (wefts) are passed above, then below vertical elements (warps) on fabric looms. The practice of interlacing two distinct yarns or threads (or photographs or strips of, well, anything) at right angles creates a new “woven” surface. Weaving is the basis of textile production…but it is also linked to technology. The Frenchman Joseph Marie Charles, known as Jacquard (1752-1834), invented the first programmable machine to produce two-layered fabrics. His punched-card programming led to the development of computers in the 20th century.

That textile/computer connection is pertinent to the art in “Above & Below.” Several of the works echo traditional fabric forms: Frances Trombly’s cotton and silk scarves, Terri Friedman’s mixed media tapestries. Other works employ beading and embroidery (Yveline Tropéa and Madame Moreau). Gil Yefman combines wet and dry felting to produce a large white sheet covered with a bouquet of black, white and gray flowers. The technological element is seen in works like those of Dinh Q. Lê, who “weaves” strips of two distinct photographs in order to create complex new images and Sabrina Gschwandtner who combines polyester film and polyester thread to create an abstract diptych.
Read more here.

GALLERY ROUNDS: Shoshana Wayne Gallery - Artillery Mag

Elaine Reichek, "Sampler (A blurred region)," 2001. Courtesy of Shoshana Wayne Gallery. Photo by Gene Ogami.

August 7th, 2021

By Allison Strauss

Fans of Los Angeles’ Craft Contemporary museum will enjoy Above & Below at Shoshana Wayne Gallery. The exhibition features twelve artists working in textile art, ranging from ethnic craft traditions to the wildly unconventional.

The show marks the Los Angeles debuts of Madame Moreau and Yveline Tropéa. Moreau anchors the traditional end of craft in the exhibition with Henry Christoph flag, a beaded ceremonial vodou banner depicting Haiti’s revolutionary war hero and king. Tropéa’s canvases too are covered in beading, illustrating abstracted people and creatures that suggest folklore influences. The French artist lives part-time in Burkina Faso where she has been influenced by Yoruba beading, and where she hires and trains women–disenfranchised kidnapping survivors of Boko Haram–as beaders. Similarly, Gil Yefman felted a bedspread size wall hanging in the show with Kuchinate, a craft collective of African women refugees in Israel.
Read more here.