Summer intern Megan McNealy & ArtFarm Coordinator Terez Iacovino fluffing the compost on the ArtFarm.

SCA and WSW team up to build ArtFarm Fence

What do you get when you combine 41 post holes, 123 pieces of rebar, 450 feet of deer fencing, 30 eager volunteers, three Women’s Studio Workshop staff, and our very own maintenance mogul Woody? A new fence for ArtFarm, that’s what!

From June 23-25, 722 Binnewater Lane will be bustling with over 30 volunteers from the Student Conservation Association’s (SCA) Hudson Valley AmeriCorps program. These SCA volunteers will be hailing from surrounding areas of Albany down through New York City. Over the course of three days members will work together to fence in the new 8,500 square-foot-plot of land located within walking distance just northeast of WSW’s main studio building. The fence will provide crops with protection against critters, but more importantly it will block off a steep drop off on the east side of ArtFarm, allowing staff and students the opportunity to safely explore and learn at the new site. [Read more →]

Past WSW intern & Artists’ Book resident Dani Leventhal is part of Greater New York, the third iteration of the quinquennial exhibition organized by MoMA PS1 and The Museum of Modern Art, showcasing some 68 artists and collectives living and working in the metropolitan New York area. The exhibition will open at MoMA PS1 on May 23 and run through October 18, 2010.

See Dani’s page on Studio Visit P.S. 1’s new web initiative that offers virtual presentations of artists studios. There are over 1000 studios online and it’s a great way to burn up some time on the web! Not only that, but if you are an emerging artist working in the 5 boroughs or greater New York (shouldn’t that include Rosendale?) you can submit your own studio. Get to work!

There will be an Opening Day Celebration for Greater New York is Sunday, May 23 from 12-6PM.

P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center
22-25 Jackson Ave at the intersection of 46th Ave
Long Island City, NY 11101
(718) 784-2084

Spring is here, the seedlings are sprouting, and it’s about time to get down to business–the business of farming that is. Our very own (former) intern, Teréz Iacovino, has become the new ArtFarm Coordinator here at the Women’s Studio. What is the ArtFarm you ask? Why it’s the Women’s Studio Workshop’s answer to self sustainable papermaking, and boy has it undergone a lot of changes recently. With renewed funding by the Student Conservation Association (SCA), part of Hudson Valley AmeriCorps, The Women’s Studio Workshop has been able to get the farm up and running again after two years of dormancy.

So far during her reign as the coordinator Teréz has moved the farm to a new 8,500-square-foot plot, dismantled and cleaned up the old site, scheduled some generous volunteers to come and remove those pesky rocks that are hindering our ability get planting, and scored us a bona fide SCA/AmeriCorps Service project for June this year.

An SCA/AmeriCorps service project will bring thirty volunteers out to the studio for four days to pound out a slew of tasks that need to get done before we can officially begin. Situated in the beautiful, nature- rich town of Rosendale, precautions must be taken to keep our plants going. Our volunteers will be making quick work of post-hole digging and fence installation, as well as installing not only a pedestrian gate, but a vehicle gate to provide easy and safe access to the farm. The great thing about SCA is that the volunteers are not just here work, they are also here to learn. Part of the service day will be dedicated to learning skills ranging from seed and plant identification to processing the plants grown on the farm into legitimate handmade papers.

It feels great to have this unique program up and running again. We are always looking for fun, interesting ways to bring art into the community and this is a program that really speaks to people.

Find out more about our community programs at the Women’s Studio Workshop website.

A WSW Artist-in-Residence Profile

By Steven Andersen

Tucked away on her website, Nicole Donnelly has a 10-second video clip of a wayward book as it’s tossed and tumbled by waves on the banks of the Thames. It’s one of those strange, serendipitous moments where a random event takes on a kind of transcendence. The pages of the book, discarded and soon to dissolve, are turned back and forth by each passing wave. It’s almost as if they’re being read one last time.
Much of Donnelly’s work captures this ethereal quality, a lightness in which curiosity alone might transform one state or form to another. The work practically calls out to be touched and manipulated. Her works in paper might resemble paintings, skins, even rocks and other organic forms, but always with a subtle twist that seems to be guided by the material itself.

SA: What are you working on during your residency?

ND: I wanted to get back to a project I started while I was still finishing up at grad school. I was taking over-beaten flax paper and casting it around rocks, I wasn’t really sure why or what it was going to be. I think fossil imagery is something I come back to a lot.

SA: A lot of your work has something of a fossil texture to it.

ND: I have a whole fossil collection—about 25 or 30 fossils that I have in a box—and I had actually cast each one of these little fossils that just about fit in the palm of your hand. I wrapped them up in this very, very thin flax. They came apart when I unwrapped them, so I glued them back together and they were like little cicada shells. And so I sort of lined them all up next to each other.

SA: I saw that piece online. I thought they were actually rocks.

ND: The big ones are rocks, and then there are the fossil duplicates. There are several rocks in a row of little paper-wrapped things—these hollow-paper shells—and those ones are the fossils. I’ve drawn a lot from them and done a lot of print-making using that same imagery, using the idea of a still-life or a study and kind of working from there.

On the table before us lies a pile of rocks, and fine ropes like grapevines, all made from paper. The rocks are light and pliant, and covered with faint printing, yet retain a sense—almost like a memory–of mass and density.

These are a continuation of that project, and I was really interested in the idea of first just seeing if I could print onto them while they were still wet because flax, when it’s over beaten, is a pretty resistant surface. It doesn’t take pigment very well.

SA: They look like faded tattoos. [Read more →]

A WSW Artist-in-Residence Profile

By Steven Andersen

Your Honor, this inmate would like to request time to arrange her business.

And what business would that be, ma’am?

My baby. This inmate requests to go home to pick up my baby. After that I have no problem to be deported.

This is a pivotal moment in a life, rendered with dialogue in an ink drawing by Tona Wilson. In a few strokes we are given rudimentary elements: A prisoner. A judge. A child. Deportation. Time. It is a charged, tense moment, but there is no emotion evident. This is not a plea, it’s a procedure. We can only infer who these people are and speculate about what they are feeling.

The same goes for Wilson’s oils of prisoners in orange jumpsuits sitting before cement walls. They are clearly, intensely thinking, but their thoughts, their stories, remain a mystery.

Walls figure prominently much of Wilson’s work—even when it’s far removed from the prison system. The walls are literal and metaphorical, built of cinder blocks or bones, or the accumulated jetsam of a lifetime. They seem oppressive, yet strangely mutable. In one image, people push wheelbarrows full of bones, build walls out of them, then whitewash the walls to hide the bones from view. All the while, we see through their gauzy bodies to the bones that are doing the pushing, building and concealing. Or is it obfuscating?

These walls are more than divisions, they are interstices, liminal spaces, and Wilson’s gaze is fixed on them. She is standing between cultures, between freedom and incarceration, often between life and death. There is palpable anxiety in that space, but it’s tempered by a persistent curiosity and met with an unblinking eye.

SA: Tell me about what you’re working on during your WSW residency.

TW: Well, I’m a Spanish interpreter. I mostly work in the courts, and nowadays I also work in the schools as well. Sometimes I do interviews in jails and prisons, or at the immigration board. I’ve done that work for years, and as I was working, I’d come home and make sketches of what I saw. Some of them I couldn’t publish of course, because they might be identifiable, but most of them are not. For a long time I thought it would be a good idea to do a book based on these sketchbooks and submit it for publication—sort of a graphic novel. [Read more →]