Tuesday, November 22, 2016

‘Here Be Dragons’


Carmon Colangelo, "Mauve Sensing Green" (left) and "Remote Sensing" (right). Monotype relief prints, 47" x 35" each, both 2016.

Carmon Colangelo, “Mauve Sensing Green” (left) and “Remote Sensing” (right). Monotype relief prints, 47″ x 35″ each, both 2016.



"The compass rose spins out of control. Rule marks climb over geographic boundaries. The map enfolds the symbols of its making.

In the exhibition “Here Be Dragons,” now on view at the Jonathan Ferrara Gallery in New Orleans, Carmon Colangelo, dean of the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts, playfully but pointedly examines the limits of knowledge and the precarious social and political states that define our contemporary moment.

Printed at Flying Horse Editions in Orlando, these large-scale monotypes combine hand-drawing and digital manipulation with a range of materials and techniques designed to highlight the role of chance in shaping our own psycho-geographies. Drafting tools, leftover scraps from laser-cut architectural models and other found materials are recycled and reimagined as part of Colangelo’s personal taxonomy of images. The results are at once seductively tactile and spatially disorienting — and a fitting metaphor for the dangerous waters that, even in a time of increasing global connectivity, must surely lie ahead.

“Here be Dragons” remains on view through Dec. 31. For more information, visit jonathanferraragallery.com.” -Liam Otten


Carmon Colangelo is the Ralph J. Nagel Dean of the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts of Washington University.

For more information about the exhibition click here.


Tuesday, November 8, 2016

Tuesday, November 1, 2016

"Beyond Measure" Screenings



On Tuesday, November 1st at 7:00 PM please join us for a screening of "Beyond Measure" at the Regency Director's Cut Cinema at Rancho Niguel in Laguna Niguel. 

On Wednesday, November 2nd, at 7:00 PM we will  screen "Beyond Measure" at The Willows Community School in Culver City.

Following each screening, Vicki will be answering audience questions and joining a community discussion about healthy childhood and bringing innovative learning to our schools. Find tickets at the links aboveact soon; they’re going fast.

Vicki will also be signing copies of our NY Times Bestseller Beyond Measure: Rescuing an Overscheduled, Overtested, Underestimated Generation at these events.  


Tuesday, October 18, 2016

Artist Talk with Pat Sandler

"inside/out"
The Help Group's Village Glen School




“inside/out” is an exhibit of the photography and portraits of more than 20 young artists with autism and other special needs from The Help Group’s Village Glen School. The show was a multi-year project aimed at providing the environment, tools and teaching to encourage students to find their creative voice though photography and writing.  At the end of each project, student’s participated in a collaborative portrait session with Help Group Senior Clinical Director, Pat Sandler.

Wednesday, October 5, 2016

Friday, September 16, 2016

Opening Recpetion

inside/out
The Help Group's Village Glen School

Tuesday, August 23, 2016

"Beyond Measure" Screening


Hosted Pamela Mayers-Schoenberg and Sinai Akiba Academy
















Saturday, August 13, 2016

Hung Liu




Hung Liu at Nancy Hoffman Gallery
“American Exodus”
September 8 – October 22, 2016

The first show of the Fall season at Nancy Hoffman Gallery, entitled “American Exodus,” new oil paintings and watercolors by Hung Liu, opens on September 8 and continues through October 22.  This is the artist’s first body of work addressing American subject matter, images of the Dustbowl and Depression after photographs of Dorothea Lange.  Jeff Kelley has written about this exhibition, which is accompanied by a catalogue with three essays, and an interview with the artist.
“American Exodus”

Hung Liu is primarily known as a painter of Chinese subjects, typically from the 19th and 20th centuries. Born in China in 1948, and living through the war, famine, and perpetual revolution of the Maoist era, it is little wonder that Liu’s paintings, since immigrating to America in 1984, are based on historical Chinese photographs. Her new paintings, however, are based upon the Dustbowl and Depression era photographs of American documentary photographer Dorothea Lange, whom Liu has long admired.
A resident of Oakland, California, the artist – whose retrospective exhibition was organized by the Oakland Museum of California in 2013 – was surprised to learn that her hometown museum was also the repository of Lange’s photographic archive. It also turns out that 2015 was the 50th anniversary of Ms. Lange’s death, and that 2016 will be the 50th anniversary of the establishment of her archive. Thus, since the fall of 2015, Liu has made regular research trips to the Lange Archive to select photographs from which to make paintings.
As a painter, Liu challenges the documentary authority of photographs by subjecting them to the more reflective process of painting. Indeed, much of the meaning of her paintings comes from the way the washes and drips dissolve the photo-based images, suggesting the passage of memory into history, while working to uncover the cultural and personal narratives fixed – but often concealed – in the photographic instant. She has written: “I want to both preserve and destroy the image.”  Given the historical, often tragic subject matter she represents, her style is a kind of weeping realism.

Shifting focus from the people in Chinese historical photographs to the migrants in the Depression-era photographs of Dorothea Lange may seem a surprise to Hung Liu’s audience, at first. But by training her attention on the displaced individuals and wandering families of the American Dustbowl (and beyond), Liu takes a second look at a society’s photographic remnants, and what she finds in Lange’s photographs are subjects whose overarching struggle and underlying humanity are not so different from the Chinese refugees, soldiers, prostitutes, and workers she has painted for decades. In Liu’s paintings, all are caught by the camera in an everlasting moment and then summoned, like ghosts, onto the waiting canvas, where they are painted in a mineral ground and washed in linseed oil.

The meaningful distinction is that the subjects in Liu’s new paintings are American peasants who, unlike their Chinese counterparts, may be stuck in poverty, but not in place. Chinese peasants are often scattered to the winds by the forces of history, while the Okies and Bindlestiffs in Lange’s photographs, though desperately poor, tend to be on the move, or settled temporarily in migrant camps. They were scattered by the forces of nature. Their common goal was to get to California, the promised land. Within twenty years of Lange’s photographs, mobility would become the great American metaphor. Though many of these migrants came to bitter ends, they most always came from somewhere else.
Trained in China as a Socialist Realist, Liu studied mural painting at the Central Academy of Fine Art in Beijing before immigrating to the United States to attend the University of California, San Diego. There, she was confronted not with the exhortation that art should “serve the people heart and soul,” but with the expectation that the artist should innovate and experiment. Over the years, however, Liu’s painting hand began to loosen its touch, allowing drips of paint and washes of linseed oil to run down the cotton-duck weave, sometimes draining away images like gravity drains life, or time blurs memory. In fact, the photographs were washed and blurry to begin with, so that their imperfections gave the painter license to improvise with her brush. In this she was reminded of ancient Chinese scholar-painters who used their own ink-filled hair to write calligraphy on mulberry paper – an enactment reinforced by her UCSD mentor, Allan Kaprow (the inventor of Happenings in the late 1950s). But more than anything, Liu’s fluid style of realism was a deeply personal critique of the rigid socialist realism in which she had been trained. Her great achievement as a painter has been to criticize the means of realist painting itself in order to arrive at a deeper sense of the subject’s truth. In this, Dorothea Lange gets Liu closer than ever to the pathos of their now-shared subjects. For this first time, thirty years after leaving China, Hung Liu’s weeping realism – like Lange’s dusty documentary photographs – is fully American; social, but no longer socialist.

Hung Liu was born in Changchun, China in 1948.  She grew up in Beijing during the time of Mao Zedong.  After finishing high school in 1968 she was sent to the countryside for four years during the Cultural Revolution where she worked with peasants in rice, wheat, and cornfields seven days a week.  During this time, she photographed local farmers with their families and also made drawings of them.  In 1972 she entered the Revolutionary Entertainment Department of Beijing’s Teachers College to study art and education.  After graduating in 1975 she began teaching art at an elite Beijing school, Jing Shan, and also began to teach a program for children on television, “How to Draw and Paint,” which lasted several years and was renowned.  In 1979 she attended the Central Academy of Fine Arts where she majored in mural painting.  In 1980 she applied to the visual arts program at the University of California, San Diego.  After being accepted, it took Liu four years to obtain a passport from the Chinese government. She arrived in California in 1984.

Hung Liu’s work has been shown at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York; The Chrysler Museum, Norfolk, Virginia; Contemporary Museum, Baltimore, Maryland; The Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Denver Art Museum, Colorado; de Saissset Museum, Santa Clara University, California; The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, de Young Museum, California; Fort Wayne Museum of Art, Indiana; Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art, University of Oklahoma, Norman; Heckscher Museum of Art, Huntington, New York; John Michael Kohler Arts Center, Sheboygan, Wisconsin; Knoxville Museum of Art, Tennessee; Monterey Museum of Art, California; National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.; New Britain Museum of American Art, Connecticut; Oakland Museum of California; Polk Museum of Art, Lakeland, Florida; Rutgers University, Paul Robeson Gallery, Newark, New Jersey; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, California; San Jose Museum of Art, California; Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Taiwan, Republic of China.

The artist’s work is included in the collections of Asian Art Museum, San Francisco, California; Boise Art Museum, Idaho; Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York; City of San Francisco, California; City of San Jose, California; Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento, California; Dallas Museum of Art, Texas; The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, de Young Museum, California; Fort Wayne Museum of Art, Indiana; Hunter Museum of American Art, Chattanooga, Tennessee; Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art and Design, Kansas City, Missouri; Kings County Public Collection, Washington; Library of Congress, Washington; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, California; Metropolitan Museum, of Art, New York; Mills College Art Museum, Oakland, California; Monterey Museum of Art, California; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.; National Museum of Women in Art, Washington, D.C.; Nevada Art Museum, Reno; New Britain Museum of American Art, Connecticut; Oakland Museum of California; Palm Springs Art Museum, California; Polk Museum of Art, Lakeland, Florida; San Francisco Federal Building, California; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, California; San Jose Museum of Art, California; Santa Barbara Museum of Art, California; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota; The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

She has received commissions for public art projects from Capp Street Project, San Francisco; City of Cerritos; Civic Center, San Francisco; Embarcadero Center, San Francisco; Highland Hospital, Oakland; Moscone Convention Center, San Francisco; San Francisco International Airport; Oakland International Airport; San Jose Museum of Art and the City of San Jose Collection; University of California, San Diego, all in California; and at the Center Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing, China.

The artist has twice been awarded a Painting Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts; Capp Street Project Stipend, California College of Arts & Crafts, San Francisco; Eureka Fellowship in Painting, The Fleishhacher Foundation, San Francisco; The Joan Mitchell Foundation, Painters Sculptors Grant, New York, New York; Russell Foundation Grant, University of California, San Diego.  She has won the San Francisco Women’s Center Humanities Award, California; Contemporary Art by Women of Color Artists’ Award, Guadalupe Cultural Center, San Antonio, Texas and Society for the Encouragement of Contemporary Art (SECA) Award, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, California.  She was Distinguished Artist in Residence, Jerome M. and Wanda Otey Westheimer Chair, University of Oklahoma, Norman, and has also received grants and scholarships from the University of California, San Diego and Mills College, Oakland, California.
Hung Liu resides in Oakland, California.

Hung Liu was dnj Gallery Director Pamela Schoenberg's professor at Mill's college.


Friday, June 3, 2016

dnj Artist: Gil Kofman

Currently featured in the 

Gil Kofman, Sister Series

To view more of Kofman's work click here.

Tuesday, May 31, 2016

dnj Gallery Artist: Robert von Sternberg


dnj Gallery artist Robert von Sternberg, recently had the honor of being included in an  artist/donor/special guests luncheon-reception at the Federal Reserve Board in Washington DC, in conjunction with their new exhibition Color, Line, AND Form: Works from the Federal Reserve Board Collection which included many pieces from THE MUSEUM PROJECT donation.

Robert von Sternberg, Untitled, 2016


Upcoming 2016 exhibitions featuring Robert von Sternberg include:

Color, Line, and Form: Works from the Federal Reserve Board Collection, The Federal Reserve Board Art Collection, Washington, DC

Visage: Photography from the Permanent Collection, Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art, Norman, Oklahoma

Into the Night: Contemporary Art and the Nocturne Tradition, Tucson Museum of Art, Tucson, Arizona

We Didn’t Start the Fire, Art on High gallery, Chestertown, Maryland 

Wednesday, May 25, 2016

Panel Discussion - Sunday May 22nd



Panelist include:
Barbara Cadow - Ph. D, Psychologist 
Gregory Keer - Dean and Chair, Visual and Performing Arts Dept. of deToledo High School
Darlene Basch - LCSW, Family Psychotherepist
Victoria Keating - Student at Harvard-Westlake School

Tuesday, May 10, 2016

"When did it stop being fun?"


Pamela Mayers-Schoenberg
featured in ArtScene's May 2016 issue

The exhibit continues through June 11th, 2016

Thursday, April 28, 2016

Save Bergamot Station

HELP US KEEP BERGAMOT STATION FROM OVER DEVELOPMENT!


Dear Friends of Bergamot Station,

In 2009, we sent an open letter to the community to save Bergamot Station and over 13,000 of our friends responded. Together we successfully stopped the MTA from turning the arts center into a maintenance facility for the Light Rail.  Just seven years later, as the Expo station nears its opening, we face another challenge to the arts and ask the Santa Monica City Council to shift and correct its priorities.

--Is a 6-STORY HOTEL & 30,000 SQUARE FEET OF COMMERCIAL OFFICE SPACE more important than a singular arts center in Santa Monica that is known throughout the world?

One of the unique qualities of Bergamot is the availability to park at a gallery or galleries of your choice.  Development will eliminate the parking and replace it with a lot on the site of the sanitation dept. that will hold less parking than we have now and make the galleries on the west end almost inaccessible. The view to the galleries will be totally obscured by the amount of construction/development that is planned.

--Should the Expo Station bring people to Santa Monica to yet another shopping center instead of a unique collective of art galleries and truly creative, cultural businesses?

--Who does the City Council support, Santa Monica residents and their families--or a private developer poised to profit on public property?

Bergamot Station is already profitable—and MEANINGFUL--and the galleries benefit the community, but the City’s current business approach is jeopardizing the survival of Bergamot’s legacy. 

Since 1994, the art galleries have provided year-round exhibitions free of charge to the public, in a casual, comfortable, accessible and inviting open-air space.  Bergamot Station is the largest public art space for non-profit events on the Westside and is the largest art gallery complex west of the Mississippi.  The gallery collective is an active civic partner and has hosted thousands of educational programs, non-profit events and fundraisers, supporting the Red Cross,  CLARE Foundation, Ocean Park Community Center, Los Angeles Ballet, and Step Up On Second, just to name a few out of the100's we have supported, and our past City partnership for the phenomenal program, Rosie’s Girls.  

We hope you will support us in telling the Mayor and the City Council that we must preserve this valuable cultural resource as it is – and not transform it into yet another dense, crammed development project and construction site creating more traffic and congestion. 


Please find the attached letter to send or customize it on your letterhead. Email it to the attention of Mayor Tony Vazquez, and copy all City Council members listed below. An asterisk (*) means they are up for re-election this November. 

LINK TO LETTER HERE: https://docs.google.com/document/d/16koSwgU0qEnfTAD9tfmUh7eG_pmVHje77Eo6owvd5d8/pub


*tony.vazquez@smgov.net: Mayor Tony Vazquez

kevin@mckeown.net: Councilmember Kevin McKeown

*gleam.davis@smgov.net: Councilmember Gleam Davis

sue.himmelrich@smgov.net: Councilmember Sue Himmelrich

pam.oconnor@smgov.net: Councilmember Pam O’Connor

*terry.oday@smgov.net: Councilmember Terry O’Day

*ted.winterer@smgov.net: Councilmember Ted Winterer

manager@smgov.net: City Manager Rick Cole

council@smgov.net: Santa Monica City Council


We value you for your support of the arts and kindly ask you to forward this email to your friends and colleagues so that they may join us in the effort to preserve Bergamot Station!

Friday, April 22, 2016

Opening Reception - "When did it stop being fun?"

Thru June 11th, 2016
Tuesday - Saturday 10am - 5pm



Opening reception photos of "When did it stop being fun?" 
by Pamela Mayers-Schoenberg
“When did it stop being fun?” includes a short film by Dora Schoenberg, an original documentary photographs by Lewis Hine and Helen Levitt, work by children artist, and an interactive installation room with a visual test that shows the need for problem solving.

Tuesday, April 5, 2016

Vicki Abeles book signing and lecture at dnj Gallery

Vicki Abeles 
Lecture and Book Signing of "Beyond Measure"

Wednesday, April 20, 2016




Wednesday, April 20, 2016

Vicki Abeles Co-Director and Producer of film "Race to Nowhere," will be speaking about her new film and book, "Beyond Measure." This event will also feature a book signing hosted by Diesel Bookstore 

"Beyond Measure lays bare the striking evidence that America's obsessive achievement culture is making our children sicker, not smarter. And front and center are promising solutions -- the stories of courageous communities around the country who are working together to break free from achieve-at-all-costs expectations. 
With in-depth research, personal anecdotes, and a dose of common sense, it shows communities how to realize their collective power to change the system to better reflect our true values: health, happiness, and genuine learning for our children."

Please RSVP on our Eventbrite page.

Thursday, March 17, 2016

When did it stop being fun?


Pamela Mayers-Schoenberg

Including children artist: Drawings= Hannah Ascher, Macabee Ascher, Jonah Danesh, Breyden Javaheri, Rhiana kassin, Chloe Nissanoff , William Quintero, Nathan Remeny, Yosha Reiss, Joey Schoenberg, Cameron Singer, Misha Nehorai Tome ,Sheridan Weiss, Sloan Weiss, Abbie Youssefzadeh; Selfies= Anja Clark , Sydney Garnett, Cailee Grayhorse-Pupecki, Kala Fejzo, Mila Fejzo , Nina Juarez, Jade Nakash, Dahlia Trilling, Aidan Schechter, Noah Schechter , Dora Schoenberg, Nathan Schoenberg, Desiree Shadi, Sam Zukin; Video= Dora Schoenberg

April 16 - June 11, 2016


This exhibition explores the emotions of children as they progress through their education. At the start of a child's formal education there is excitement, enthusiasm and a love of learning. The young student is eager to learn and is pleased to be in this new setting. But, as children age, things change. Kids become sleep deprived and lack adequate nutrition, trying to keep a balance. Many become extremely focused on academic scores and grades.

Opening reception, April 16th, 6 - 8pm

Saturday, February 13, 2016

Fotofilmic Village


The Village - a retreat which combines individual professional development time with 3 leading artist in the contemporary photography field with the idyllic experience of a small island lifestyle.

For more information click here.

Saturday, January 16, 2016

Nancy Baron : Lenscratch Interview

dnj Gallery artist

Add On

"I like to discover the uncharted center of the universe next door, and capture the majesty
 of the often plain and unexpected settings in which like-minded people find a place to belong."

To read more on the interview, click here

Friday, January 8, 2016

.

dnj Gallery artist


The MoonArk is a sort of eight-inch-tall portrait of humanity, with more than 200 artists and designers contributing to it.



"One of the murals in the Meta-sphere Chamber, "Texts to Elaine," features personal photographs Dylan Vitone sent to his wife over a five-year period. "Cynical me is critiquing the way we broadcast our life. The sentimental me is kind of celebrating this thing that's really important for me and trying to give it more meaning than it actually has." Dylan said.

To read more on the NPR story, click here.