Memory Entropy 4, 2020
Intaglio, photogravure, inkjet collage on Oguni Shikishi paper
7.5 x 7.5 inches
Born in Gee’s Bend, a small, black community in Alabama, Louisiana Bendolph is a well-renowned visual and textile artist among the younger generation of Gee’s Bend Quiltmakers. Incorporating shapes both dense and rich in color, Bendolph conveys abstracted pathways and emblems into her quilts and prints. Through varied geometries and compositions, Gee’s Bend quilts communicate the rich cultural history of African American quilting, often incorporating recycled clothes and fabrics to convey greater ideas of identity expression.
Bendolph was born in 1960 and has exhibited at the Addison Ripley Gallery, Washington, D.C., Greg Kucera Gallery, Seattle, WA; Philadelphia Museum of Art, PA; Paulson Fontaine Press, Berkeley, CA, among other venues . Recently, her work was included in the 2019 Virginia Museum of Fine Arts’ exhibition Cosmologies from the Tree of Life: Art from the African American South. Her work is held in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the U.S. Department of State, and the Foundation for Art and Preservation in Embassies.
DOORWAY TO A DREAM, 2013, etching, softground, color aquatint and spitbite, 28.5 x 32 inches
Memory Entropy 9, 2020
Intaglio, photogravure, inkjet collage on Oguni Shikishi paper
7.5 x 7.5 inches
Hybrid Being 1, 2020
Intaglio, photogravure, inkjet collage on Oguni Shikishi paper
7.5 x 7.5 inches
Memory Entropy 7, 2020
Intaglio, photogravure, inkjet collage on Oguni Shikishi paper
7.5 x 7.5 inches
Tanja Softić explores questions of communication, migration, and cultural identity in her paintings and mixed media work on paper. She was born in Sarajevo, Bosnia and later moved to America, spurring an investigation of personal and global belonging within her work. Her abstracted scenes simultaneously partition and overlap each other in a frenzy of web-like lines, creating a visually delicate and emotionally jarring atmosphere.
Softić lives and works in Richmond, Virginia, where she is a Professor of Art at the University of Richmond. She attended the Academy of Fine Arts of the University of Sarajevo and earned her MFA in Printmaking from Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia (1988, 1992). Her work is held in numerous private and public collections, including the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, Austria; the Ino-Cho Paper Museum in Kochi, Japan; the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C., and the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, Virginia.
Over a period of more than fifty years, my out-of-doors water-media paintings of the natural world have developed in favorite locations in North Carolina, California, New England, and Virginia. Although abstract, my recent paintings are carefully derived from drawings and life-studies from nature, and attempt to represent the processes of nature at work rather than pictorial description.
Although I feel that my painting directly responds to the environments that I work in, I usually do not paint from the landscape with the objective of achieving representational or “realistic” images. In fact, I have often made representational depictions of specific places after I have made many non-pictorial works in the same locale. This particular development reverses the usual assumption that “abstraction” develops from the confirmed experience of the study of “realism”.
My appreciation of the natural world is for the great variety of texture, light, form and eventful psychology that finds its maximum expression in its manifestations.
Sea Weave – 02-13-2020, 2020
Watercolor, mica on toned rag paper, under shaved beeswax
33 x 60 inches
Framed
Ray Kass lives and works in Christiansburg, Virginia and is a Professor Emeritus of Art at Virginia Tech. He earned his MFA in Painting from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and later founded and directs the Mountain Lake Workshop, a collaborative art project drawing on the customs and environmental resources of the New River Valley and Appalachian region. His work is in the collections of the Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach, FL; Taubman Museum of Art, Roanoke, VA; University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC; University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA; Boston Public Library, Boston, MA; Phizer Corporation, all, New York, NY; and Medical College of Virginia, SunTrust, and Ethyl Corporation all, Richmond, Virginia. He recently published The Mountain Lake Symposium and Workshop: Art in Locale with writer Howard Risatti.