Rooted in Spirit, Solo Exhibiion
Angela Pilgrim
March 14, 2024 – April 20, 2024 at Art Center Sarasota
Drawing on a skillful fusion of printmaking, painting, and mixed media, Angela Pilgrim imbues each work in “Rooted in Spirit” with a sense of depth and dimensionality, presenting each subject as an essential living, breathing entity. The collection centers around depictions of friends and family, immortalizing their essence and lives like memories marked onto paper. The spirits of these subjects run deep - carrying importance essential to document further visualizing stories around identity, faith, and resilience. Multilayered prints reflect complex dimensions of existence – how we love ourselves, find spirituality, and carve spaces of rest.
Feature Wall
Rememory
Angela Pilgrim
September 8, 2023 – October 21, 2023 at Open Studio Toronto.
The diptych portrays a figure lost in thought as they gaze back into a mirror that reflects on their past self with a sense of rememory.
The artwork in Rememory captures nostalgia as a powerful magnet that draws the figure toward their past experiences. The figure is suspended in a liminal space between past and present, captured in a moment of reflection and introspection. Through the use of the mirror as a portal to the past, the artwork explores the complexities of memory and how it can shape one’s present and future. Overall, this printmaking artwork invites the viewer to reflect on the magnetic pull of nostalgia and how it can impact our journey of growth and self-discovery.
Open Studio was founded in 1970 as an ‘open’ space governed and supported by artists who wanted to continue their printmaking practice in an inclusive, communal setting. Printmaking requires specialized equipment, space, and expertise to manage complex chemical processes that demand specific health and safety measures. Open Studio was established as an Artist Run Centre (ARC) to fulfill these needs, providing a studio space where artists can work using various print media techniques, including intaglio, lithography, relief, screenprinting, and more, with expert help as required.
Today, Open Studio is the only artist-run printmaking centre in Toronto that offers affordable, comprehensive access to printmaking facilities and related programs for local, national, and international artists. Apart from full-time post-secondary programs, Open Studio is the foremost organization in Toronto that provides this range of facilities for printmaking artists. They continue to serve artists through facility rentals, residencies, printing services, and art sales. They also provide the public with opportunities to appreciate printmaking through our artistic programming and educational services.
The Power of Portraiture: Selections from the Department of Drawings and Prints, The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
The Department of Drawings and Prints boasts more than one million drawings, prints, and illustrated books made in Europe and the Americas from around 1400 to the present day. Because of their number and sensitivity to light, the works can only be exhibited for a limited period and are usually housed in on-site storage facilities. To highlight the vast range of works on paper, the department organizes four rotations a year in the Robert Wood Johnson, Jr. Gallery. Each installation is the product of a collaboration among curators and consists of up to 100 objects grouped by artist, technique, style, period, or subject.
Featuring a dazzling selection of prints and drawings ranging in date from the early seventeenth century to the present and including several new acquisitions, the current installation explores themes of artistic lineage and homage with a primary focus on portraiture. At its heart are works by members of Black Women of Print, a collective founded by Tanekeya Word to promote the visibility of Black women printmakers and create an equitable future within the discipline of printmaking. These dynamic images pay tribute to earlier Black women artists, among them Elizabeth Catlett and Emma Amos, whose works are also on view. Their prints, along with those by Lorna Simpson, Charles White, Fred Wilson, and John Wilson, reveal the expressive potential of portraiture. By depicting both anonymous sitters and well-known figures such as Malcolm X, Lena Horne, and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., these artists call attention to the relationship of representation and power. Willie Cole’s monumental works further extend the boundaries of the genre, using steam irons and ironing boards to point to histories of unrecognized labor.
Placed in dialogue with Cole’s prints are earlier images of European street vendors and of women engaged in domestic work, revealing the ample but ultimately partial vision of labor put forth by the Western pictorial tradition. Also featured in this rotation is a selection of woodland drawings by artists active in Central Europe between the late eighteenth century and the early twentieth. Together with depictions of narrative subjects set in the woods, these works demonstrate the appeal of the forest as a vehicle for the study of light and color and as a subject embedded with rich associations. Finally, a group of witchcraft scenes by Jacques de Gheyn II, Giovanni David, Francisco de Goya, Eugène Delacroix, and Odilon Redon trace the evolution of nightmare imagery—and the complicated societal values it reflects and perpetuates—across nearly three centuries.
Rubber City Prints launched the Women’s Printmaking Invitational (WPI) 2022, hosted by Kent State University at Stark.
Now, more than ever, women command the fine art printmaking field and deserve to have their unique perspectives showcased. The goal of this exhibition was to highlight women printmakers and give them a space to connect and support each other. Their voices may express a diverse range of imagery, content, and processes, but they are united by their shared experience of being a woman in the once male-dominated world of printmaking.
Rubber City Prints was started by a group of women printmakers from Kent State University who were about to lose their studios because they would be graduating. It was their goal, and RCP’s mission, to offer local artists the facilities and opportunities needed for the art community to thrive in downtown Akron, Ohio.
Black Histories, Black Futures.
Curated by young scholars as part of the MFA’s new partnership with local youth empowerment organizations, “Black Histories, Black Futures” focuses on works by 20th-century artists of color. It represents a major rethinking and reinstallation of a central area in the Museum that stretches between the Huntington Avenue and Fenway entrances. Forming a literal centerpiece of the MFA’s 150th anniversary celebration in 2020, the exhibition carves out a space for stirring exploration and celebration of Black histories, experiences, and self-representations.
The exhibition includes works by well-known artists such as Archibald Motley, Norman Lewis, James Van Der Zee, Gordon Parks, and Dawoud Bey and brings fresh attention to artists with connections to Boston, such as SMFA graduate Loïs Mailou Jones and longtime South End resident Allan Rohan Crite. The teens organized the exhibition into four thematic sections: “Ubuntu: I am Because You Are” presents images of community life and leisure activities; “Welcome to the City” focuses on paintings of urban scenes in both figurative and abstract styles; and, with photographs and works on paper depicting intimate moments from everyday life, “Normality Facing Adversity” and “Smile in the Dark” both consider the radicality of simply being oneself.