ART: Lonnie Holley

On exhibit thru August 6 at Jeff Bailey Gallery in Chelsea:

Lonnie Holley: Assemblages and Drawings.

Holley, a self-taught artist, is a sixty year old native Alabamian whose work has been exhibited widely throughout the United States. This is Holley’s first solo exhibition with the gallery, and his first in New York in sixteen years.

Holley’s unique combinations of found materials and everyday detritus result in mysterious and powerful objects. They reference spirituality, African American art forms and history, nature, and family relationships. Simultaneously, the visual impact of Holley’s work invites comparisons to the work of other contemporary artists, and therefore continues to break down the distinctions often made between self-taught artists and those with an art education background.

Holley’s assemblages can be simple or complex in their composition. Along the Rails combines old wire, iron, wood, colored paper, cardboard, plastic and other materials. Assembled with both delicacy and verve, its title suggests a journey, escape or hardship. Molting Lonnie is composed of three parts: found concrete with a rebar that serves as the vertical support for a piece of molten iron. The top of the concrete base is splashed with red paint, dripping down the sides. The materials and their deft organization evoke a raw and formal beauty, while the title of the work suggests impending growth, a recurring theme in Holley’s art.

Featured prominently in Holley’s work is a facial profile, found in drawings, wire sculptures and carved sandstone pieces. Small or large, single or in layers, the profiles have open and expressive eyes. In the drawing I in the Teacher’s Chair, profiles face left and right, while one large eye dominates the center. A kneeling figure cradles a child, watched from above. It is a family or community of sorts, observing and caring for one another.

These faces and figures function as characters in an ongoing story. Indeed, Holley’s vivid descriptions of his art stress the interconnectedness of all people and things, both past and present.

Lonnie Holley was born in Birmingham, Alabama, and is the seventh of twenty-seven children. Against significant obstacles he has been a working artist for over thirty years. In Birmingham, he created a unique outdoor installation of his art on the acre of property where he lived, until a forced relocation seventeen years later. Holley lives and works in Harpersville, Alabama.

Holley’s work is included in numerous public collections: American Folk Art Museum, New York; Birmingham Museum of Art, Alabama; High Museum of Art, Atlanta; Milwaukee Museum of Art, Wisconsin; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; New Orleans Museum of Art, Louisiana; Philadelphia Museum of Art, Pennsylvania; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C., among others.

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ART: William Eggleston @ Cheim & Read (1/7 - 2/13)

An exhibit of new Eggleston photos opens today @ the Cheim & Read gallery thru 2/13!

From the C&R site: William Eggleston, born in 1939 in Memphis, Tennessee, is widely credited with having elevated the medium of color photography to the status of serious art. In the 1960s and 70s color photography was most commonly associated with such middle-brow phenomena as commercial advertising and the family snapshot, and only the black and white photograph was
deemed acceptable for display in a museum or gallery setting.

Indeed, Eggleston’s first one-man show at the Museum of Modern Art, New York in 1976, organized by John Szarkowski, marks the moment in the history of photography when color
photographs were first admitted for exhibition to the ranks of a major museum.

Eggleston’s most recent photographs, exhibited at Cheim & Read, give themselves over almost entirely to problems of composition, color, and texture; and yet they do so – remarkably – only within the confines of what could have been seen by the casual observer, whose distracted glance would normally pass-over the surfaces of the world and retain virtually nothing of it.

For instance, Eggleston’s photograph of bags of ice in a frosted-over freezer (the sort one finds at a gas station or convenience store on the outskirts of town) initially reads as a study in the subtle gradations of color and texture in the freezer’s whitish blue-green interior, thickly coated in tiny ice crystals, which form horizontal ridges that run from edge to edge of the vertically-oriented picture. Only when we make-out the red lettering on the clear plastic bags of “party ice,” are we able to orient ourselves with respect to what the photograph is a photograph of: a freezer of ice.

Eggleston’s photographs of the American south, for which he is best known, are highly regarded for the candor with which they document the ordinary barrenness of the rural and suburban southern landscape. But it is a mistake to regard Eggleston’s project as essentially documentary in nature. The artist’s painstaking attention to formal concerns such as color saturation and
pictorial composition in the images he captures gives his photographs a particular strikingness that stuns the viewer, compelling him or her to fixate his or her concentrated attention on the photographic image. Eggleston himself has explained his approach to photography as follows: “Essentially what I was doing was applying intelligent painting theory to color photography.” Perhaps we do best to understand Eggleston’s photographic practice in terms of the artist’s visual acuity, his gift for being able first to discern, then to isolate, those exceedingly rare moments when the banal materials of the everyday world are aligned just so to make that perfect, momentary image which transcends its own fleetingness through its coincidental engagement with artistic convention.

EAT: Tipsy Parson

Tipsy Parson is another name for a trifle which, according to What's Cooking America, "comes from the old French term 'trufle,' and literally means something whimsical or of little consequence."

Tipsy Parson is also, according to Urban Daddy, a new southern restaurant opening tonight in Chelsea:

Here to help cast off the shackles of May-only julep consumption is Tipsy Parson, a new Southern-living room dedicated to year-round seasonal fruit juleps, comfort food and the art of the biscuit, opening Monday (10/26) in Chelsea.

If you've been craving a dollop of Southern gentility... you'll want to drop by the two-room Parson...The front bar room feels like the bright, homey kitchen of an old Southern mansion, filled with a church pew for a banquette, lots of colorful knickknacks and plenty of secrets—like the julep slushie machine hidden behind the bar.

The back room is a bit darker, better for a long evening repast, and decked with antiques, tufted leather chairs and a communal table made out of an old cotton press.

There's even a little garden out back if you want to bring a cigar and contemplate life above the Mason-Dixon Line.

Read more here.

ART/SCENE: Central Green (VA) fundraiser @ Honey Space tonight!

Monday evening, May 18, Honey Space will host its first fundraising event for its next phase. The event, titled Visions and Sounds, will be a joint fundraiser and celebration with friend Tucker Robbins in mutual support of projects here, and Tucker Robbins' Central Green, Tucker's vision for breathing life into an historic community center- Central High School, in Painter Virginia. The event will be built around food and sound- a gourmet buffet dinner accompanied by The Gamelatron, the world's first and only fully robotic Indonesian styled Gamelan Orchestra by Zemi17 and the League of Electronic Musical Urban Robots (LEMUR); a live performance by songwriter Emily Arin, and sculptural sound installations by Thomas Beale and Adam Stanforth. Tickets are available online and at the door on a sliding scale of $35-$100. You can purchase them online at by following the link here.

About Central Green: Tucker Robbins' Central Green, currently in development with a planned opening date of late 2009, is a vision of a sustainable community center in Painter, Virginia, built around the traditional arts and local community and environment. Encompassing 23,000 square feet of historic Central High School, Central Green will include a residency program for both local craftspeople from the Eastern Virginia region and remote cultures abroad, an organic garden and restaurant, educational programs, and meditation and yoga classes, all powered by green energy technologies. You can learn more about Central Green here.