Tag Archives: colorful

Jordan Casteel

Jordan Casteel is from Denver, Colorado. She received her Bachelor’s Degree from Agnes Scott College in Decatur, Georgia, then her Master’s from Yale School of Art. Jordan Casteel’s first solo exhibit was displayed in the Denver Art Museum until August of 2019. The exhibit displayed thirty paintings collectively titled: Returning the Gaze. Jordan Casteel’s paintings create art out of everyday people, specifically Black people. Casteel’s motive is to reveal people who often go overlooked. Now living in New York, Jordan Casteel continues to paint portraits of Black men addressing Black masculinity as a part of her passion for social justice. Jordan is changing the way society views Black men while emphasizing Black culture and its pertinent impact on our society’s larger culture. Jordan gets inspiration from her neighborhood in Harlem, New York, which is still heavily populated by Black Americans. I am drawn to Jordan Casteel’s work particularly because she casts black men beautifully. I enjoy that she does not change the cultural parts of Black Americans to place them in her art. The Black men she paints are still dressed in their everyday attire. Some of Jordan’s paintings even show Black men naked. These paintings draw attention to Black men’s humanity. In Jordan’s paintings, it is very apparent that Jordan Casteel focuses on the people who surround her, people who she sees and finds a home in. The environment of the paintings, the clothing on the men, the objects in the paintings can all be identified as pieces of black culture.

Sources:

Artist 21, Jordan Casteel

https://art21.org/artist/jordan-casteel/

Denver Art Museum, Jordan Casteel: Returning Gaze

https://denverartmuseum.org/exhibitions/jordan-casteel-returning-gaze

Jordan Casteel, ABOUT

http://www.jordancasteel.com/about

Marela Zacarías – Tiffany

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Post By Tiffany Brady

Marela Zacarías is an artist from Mexico City, Mexico, specializing in the merging of sculpture and paint in a rather flowing way. Zacarías’s work embodies the challenge of making a sculpture fold and fall in the same way fabric may, while also filling her pallets full of color and vibrancy. Along with a large amount of pigment Zacarías uses, she also fills her winding sculptures with geometric shapes and designs.

According to Zacarías’s profile written on Art21, most of her works are, “built from window screens, joint compound, and polymer before being painted in bold, geometric, abstract patterns.”

As you would assume, Zacarías’s process for making these intricately wound pieces is “labor- and research-intensive,” as claimed on her own artist site. Most of her pieces are even designed for the exhibit she is working for at the time.

Art21 said, “Zacarías’s works are often inspired by the sites for which they are planned, such as Works Progress Administration murals in the Brooklyn Museum, Mayan textile colors for an installation in Mexico, and a map of Brooklyn for a new hotel in the borough.”

Not only has Zacarías taken part in numerous exhibitions, but she has also held solo exhibits and even commissioned large-scale permanent pieces for “Seattle-Tacoma International Airport, Facebook, the William Vale in Brooklyn, and the U.S. Consulate in Monterrey, Mexico,” according to her site.

The Brooklyn Paper also looked into these lively sculptures, saying, “Like much of Zacarias’s work, the sculptures are meant to interact with the architecture of a specific communal space — the pieces, resembling huge, living blankets, seem to have just finished crawling the walls and balconies of the museum’s cavernous entrance lobby.”

Zacarías’s way of breathing life into her sculptures translates with every twist and turn of the surprisingly harden sculptures she manifests.

Coatlicue’s Return: Solo Exhibition at Wasserman Projects in Detroit

Mark Whalen – Timia Knott

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Mark Whalen is an Australian-born, Los Angeles based artist. His artwork exhibits dark humor and vibrancy. The figures he puts in his pieces interact with space, time and narratives through his paintings and ceramic works.

“Grab Bag” Miniature collection and “Ramble Ramble”

Whalen is inspired to create these pieces based on his ongoing interest that he describes as “Life’s puzzling duality”. The overall feeling of his pieces gives the effect of discomfort or struggle. All of the characters are seen to be in states of work, play, pleasure or pain.

“3 men, 1 net”

In this piece, Each pastel male or female interacts with the objects around them as if they are struggling to get away or that they feel trapped.

In 2016, Mark Whalen’s work filled Australia’s Chalk Horse gallery. Each piece gives emotion to tension and anxiety based on how the characters react to the objects around them. His paintings, sculptures, and ceramics have been exhibited throughout Australia and internationally. His work is held in the National Gallery of Austalia, Artbank, and numerous other private art collections.

The Chalk Horse Gallery offers insight into Whalen’s pieces by commenting, “The exhibition sums up contemporary anxiety, that you see not only in art but also in fashionable dressing or other activities connected to our identities.” The pieces speak to people because they make people feel as if the characters are struggling with self-exploration which each person has dealt with sometime in there lives.

“Double Knot” and “Tied Up”

In the first piece, the two characters are sandwiched between three objects held together between a rope. This shows that you shouldn’t feel alone in situations.
In the second piece, the character is tangled between two ropes and seems to struggle while he looks down at himself. This shows the struggles of anxiety and finding balance in oneself.

“Squeeze” Miniature collection and A picture of Mark Whalen