Austin Art Talk

"There is nothing wrong with failing. Failing is a learning moment. If you failed and you took the time to reflect and learn why you failed, and what you can do to change that course, and who can help you with that, most importantly, then you haven’t failed. You’ve just learned something."

Designer | Advocate | Educator

Knowledgeable Design Principal with solid grasp of development, implementation and optimization of communication and leadership skills. Goal-driven Graphic Designer successful at applying technical skills to create work that informs and engages customers. Clear communicator and collaborative team player with an eye for detail and skill in customer relations. Ready to bring 20+ years' experience to dynamic position in fast-paced environment.

Designer

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• Oen (@oen.hammonds) • Instagram

“My passion is around art because I know how wonderful it is to create. There are lots of fabulous programs for people to have food and shelter. Very Important. Very Important. But we as human beings need to have our souls fed. That’s what I see happening with Art From The Streets.”

Heloise Gold - Founder and Board Member At Large

Kelly Worden talking about the 27th Annual Show and Sale

Art From The Streets

Austin Convention Center

The mission of Art From The Streets is to provide a safe and encouraging environment where the positive spirit of homeless and at-risk people is nurtured through artistic expression, offering them a pathway to self-determination as a source of pride, achievement, social connection, and income through the creation and sale of their work.

AFTS is celebrating its 27th year! YEAHH!!

We provide a 4 times a week Open Studio for the artists to come and create throughout the year which culminates in this AMAZING show! There will be thousands of pieces of artwork for sale for you to choose from for all budgets! Many of the artists themselves will be attending to chat with you about their artwork and inspiration.

Come and invite your friends, colleagues and family to support this program but most importantly the artists!!

Suggested $5 Donation at the Door to support AFTS!

Be reminded 95% of artwork sales goes DIRECTLY to the artists.

Description of AFTS

Heloise Gold-Founder/Board Member At Large

The beginnings

Katrina Meredith-Volunteer

Volunteering

Hugh Miles-Artist

Coming to Texas

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• Art From The Streets

“As any conceptual artist you feel like you are a reflection of the people around you. It’s not like you do what people want. It’s more like you try to just feel, what is the concerns or what is the highlights of your society. And how to connect people. And how to connect with people. And that’s what I love making through art.”

I value the opportunities art provides me to connect with people on an emotional and intellectual level. Meditation on interior space, immersion into unique overlooked outdoor places, and examination of alarming social and political trends taking place in the world inform the artistic inquiries of my practice.

Bio

Austin-based/Egyptian-born Rehab El Sadek is a conceptual artist whose career has spanned over 25 years. Meditation on space and immersion into overlooked places inform the artistic inquiries of her practice. She has initiated workshops and creative social practice interventions on issues ranging from women’s rights in Sinai to the challenges facing disadvantaged children in Nairobi.

El Sadek has participated in group and solo shows at Lumen Travo Gallery (Amsterdam), Borusan Art Gallery (Istanbul), Ashkal Alwan (Beirut), the L.A. Freewaves Festival at MOCA Geffen Contemporary (Los Angeles), La Photographie Africaine (Bamako), and The Women's Museum (Dallas). In 1999, she was chosen by Jannis Kounellis for his Pavilion at Biennale Dei Giovanni Artisti (Rome). In 2009, she was part of “Rebelle: Art and Feminism 1969 - 2009” at Museum voor Moderne Kunst (Arnhem). Her awards and residences include the UNESCO-supported Artists’ Bursaries at Gasworks Artists Studios (London) and the Thami Mnyele Residency Award (Amsterdam). She is also the recipient of an Installation Prize at the Sharjah Biennale (Emirates).

In 2017, El Sadek was named the City of Austin’s first Artist-in-Residence, exploring environmental and social issues embedded in the city’s Watershed Protection Department. Her current, deeply personal work draws inspiration from ancient and classical architecture, modern architectural theory and explores broad themes of immigration, belonging, communication, and language. El Sadek holds a degree in art from the University of Alexandria (Egypt).

Prizer Arts & Letters

Through January 4th, 2020

With Transient, artist Rehab El Sadek continues her exploration into issues related to immigration, belonging, communication and language. Utilizing sound installation, photography and the written word, El Sadek meditates on residential spaces and our relationship to them and to each other.

Artist statement

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• Home | Rehab Elsadek

"It’s always scary to stop doing something. But if you don’t stop doing something, you can't do something new. Every time I’ve stopped doing something other opportunities came, or I had time to try something new."

Text courtesy of Keith's website.

Meet Keith

Besides being the proud owner of 32” paella pan, Keith is an artist, designer and maker. Hailing from the East Coast, Keith got to Austin as quickly as possibly with this wife and three children. Previously he had a studio and contemporary craft gallery on Cape Cod for 12 years.

Keith’s aesthetic comes from the singular idea that “objects matter,” and his work reflects that simple phrase, exemplifying clean, polished and modern design.

A past-president of the board of Big Medium, the arts nonprofit that produces the East Austin Studio Tour, West Austin Studio Tour and the Texas Biennial, Keith currently sits on the board of the Austin Food and Wine Alliance, the advisory board of Austin Bat Cave and is an active supporter and advocate for the Andy Roddick Foundation.

When he’s not behind the wheel, he can be found making strong espresso, epic playlists, hosting as many rad events in town as possible and driving his kids to their soccer games.

EAST AUSTIN STUDIO TOUR

Canopy

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• Keith Kreeger Handcrafted Porcelain Ceramics – Keith Kreeger Studios

“My goal has always been to make a painting breathe with realism, but when you get up to it you can really see the brush quality. That is what I’ve always been drawn to when I look at work. That has been my obsession since I was very young.”

Karen Offutt was born and raised in Dallas, Texas by a creative family who encouraged her to explore her artistic talent from an early age. Her father was an artist and her mother is a designer and owner of a needlepoint company. Throughout her formative years, Karen excelled in art classes and participated in several art exhibits. As a young adult she sought a more serious outlet for her talent. Not finding the ultimate education for the type of realism she sought, Karen found art related jobs to keep her motivated. Learning to paint with oils was her goal and found that opportunity Austin Fine Arts Classes where she learned a more classical approach. From there, she attended workshops from nationally re-nowned artists and from there began to find her own path in her creative journey.

From her studio in Austin, Karen approaches her paintings with an atmospheric sensitivity combining shape, tone line, and color. The inspiration of her preferred subject matter comes ultimately from the figure. "I have always loved painting people whether in natural surroundings or in a more staged setting." “As and artist, I am very aware of my environment which invites me to be a constant observer. I see potential in everything and my emotional reaction guides me to the specific inspiration. There are different aspects to my painting, for example technical skill, creative freedom and emotional truth. My goal is to create work that guides all these elements in a direction that moves me."

When we met

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• Karen Offutt Fine Art

"The nature of the business is relationship building. With clients, with artists, with framers and installers. The people that make up this whole ecosystem we call the art world. Even people who come and pack the work and ship it, even they need to understand. Building up trust with all of these people I think is important. So in building relationships you have to be true to who you are as a person. I think it is something we re-learn even on a personal level, is just being true to who you are and knowing who you are. And I think you will be more successful if you have a good handle on what that is."

Text courtesy of Susannah's website

SKM Art Advising is a vital resource and partner for collectors, designers, and artists. Relationships are central to our mission, and our clients’ vision is our primary focus. We work closely with collectors across the United States to build meaningful art collections, interior designers to put the finishing touch on their gorgeous projects, and artists to understand the business of art. By working with SKMAA, our clients gain access to our positive industry relationships, and benefit from our extensive industry experience.

Founder Susannah Morgan has built a career in New York and Austin both in the residential and commercial sectors as an art consultant and gallery director. Susannah founded SKM Art Advising with the goal of connecting collectors and designers with meaningful artwork. She is active in the community, building strong relationships throughout Austin, Texas, and the United States with artists, gallery owners, and collectors.

In her free time, Susannah enjoys gardening, hiking, traveling, and spending time with her dog Maddy. She also volunteers her time with the Girls Advocacy League, a division of the Girls Empowerment Network in Austin.

[email protected]

512-299-3062

Austin, Texas

The Spaces Between

New works by Larry Goode

Opening Reception - Tuesday November 5 from 5:30- 8:00

Paris in a Bite

SKM Art Advising is proud to be mounting a series of curated exhibitions at The Gallery at Paris in a Bite in the Westlake neighborhood of Austin, Texas. Our intention with this series is to create a space of dialogue and to showcase work that we believe in.

Thursday, November 7, 2019

Big Medium 916 Springdale Rd, Bldg 2 #101

Join us for our November Coffee Chat with Susannah Morgan, an art consultant and artist advisor. Susannah will share insights into collector behavior and best practices for artists learned through her experience in the field.

Rebecca Jewell - Multicolored Songbirds, Hand-printed and coloured goose, turkey, dove, and pheasant feathers with hand-printed tissue on archival mountboard, 33x35”

SKM Art Advising is the exclusive broker for Rebecca Jewell’s work in Texas. We talk about this piece in the interview.

SKM art advising

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• SKM Art Advising

“The things that I think people don’t understand or misunderstand about me is that sometimes when I’m hanging out with friends or hanging out with piers, I can't help but make a joke or a comment about race. Because it is literally always there. It’s just always there. It’s an odd thing to constantly have that in your face all of the time. It’s heavy. I think it’s why black men die sooner than everyone else. That psychological weight is always there. And sometimes I wish I could explain to my friends what that's like. I wish there was a way to convey to people, and maybe that’s what I am trying to do with the art, what that constant pressure feels like, because it is literally constant”

ARTIST STATEMENT | as it pertains to the culturally based imagery.

In the African American community, we are slowly rediscovering our history that has not been fully illustrated. It’s my job as visual communicator to review historical information and inform the community by bringing these concepts to life and help visually define our identity. And to distribute these stories about the strengths and trials of the African American community.

I want to illustrate the life-cycle of the inner life of a black person. From innocent to informed. From recklessly defiant to determined. How the weight of American history can either crush you or harden you. And, how either result often has to be hidden from view just to get through the day. The anger of the African-American community is often portrayed as a threat. The anger of “traditional’ communities is depicted as righteous. This paradigm feeds stress and despair back into black lives and thus stokes the fires we try to simultaneously hide and harness.

Currently, there is a newly intensified wave of empathetic consciousness in all forms of artistic output. I want the community to seize this moment in history to create work that tells a story and compels them to seek out empathy and activism for the sake of others. My hope is the work I’m creating can help do that. I want to spark conversations that have, historically, been hard to start.

ARTIST STATEMENT | Concerning the landscapes.

I create free standing crumpled paper still lifes, then photograph them and manipulate the images until I’ve created something that straddles reality and fantasy. I want to show you something familiar and then alter your perspective. These shapes and “views” are familiar but I want to you conjure up places you have been and seen. Not simply reproduce a vista for it’s own sake.

I combine my love of photography, art and graphic design to create works that speak to the viewer by communicating something specific and obvious but also harboring subtexts that require repeated viewing or discussion. My work as a graphic designer has been to communicate quickly and efficiently through logo and branding work. That economy of message can be applied to art.

Laura Caffrey and Dave McClinton:

Atleier 1205

Gallery hours: 11am-6pm, Thursdays and Fridays, by appointment on other days and evenings

Meet the artists during the first weekend of East Austin Studio Tour: 11am-6pm, Saturday and Sunday, November 16-17

Saturday - 2:30 PM - 3:15 PM

Meet the official 2019 Texas Book Festival Poster artist, Dave McClinton, as he shares his work, including the dramatic image for this year’s poster, Burgeoning, a mixed-media digital collage made from crumpled paper, photographed and rendered as a mountain landscape. The idea for McClinton’s crumpled paper series was sparked when he noticed the discarded gift wrapping on his kitchen table looked like a miniature mountain sculpture.

Some of the subjects we discuss:

Questions/reactions

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• Artwork of Dave McClinton // Austin, Texas

"At this point what makes me the most excited about the business, is trying to figure out how to build something that can be a sustainable platform for a number of different artists. It’s so hard to make a living in Austin as an artist or musician. Being able to bring people in and have us all working together on this thing has felt incredibly satisfying. To be able to stand back and watch these items being made by these people who I care so much about. I’m so proud of them and am excited to see where it will go because I am so inspired by them and all of their hard work."

About

Fort Lonesome is a design-forward custom western wear and chain-stitch embroidery studio based in Austin, TX. We work collaboratively with our clients to create works that capture the stories of their wearers, in an effort to create pieces that slowly and carefully consider the symbiosis of art, narrative, and technician-ship. Our process is led by considerations of necessity and sustainability, and our designs are inspired by the natural world and its visible and invisible energies.

Story

Company founder Kathie Sever began working in western wear in 2000. She found herself spending a fair amount of time returning to her attempts to rebuild and make functional a hundred-year-old chainstitch embroidery machine she’d purchased. These machines have a legacy of connectedness with much of western wear’s most famous tailors. At that time, information about or mentors in the use of these machines was near to nil, so the learning curve was long and slow. But after many years of tinkering and communicating with some far-away fellow comrades, the gifts these machines, and their ability to confer the energy and individualism of their operators, resulted in the birth of Fort Lonesome in the fall of 2012.

In the coming months and years the team at Fort Lonesome grew to include first Dana Falconberry, then soon after, Christina Hurt Smith and Amrit Khalsa, each of whom brought to the table strong backgrounds in diverse art and design, and whose collaborative approach to working together grew into a shared aesthetic and style.

Since then the company has continued to evolve and grow, but slowly and always with the intention of pushing the boundaries of this long lost art form.

Intro

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• Fort Lonesome

"I’m going to continue to push my work forward. The work has always come first. It has to be the work, because it’s no good if it’s not. That’s my philosophy. I don’t push that on anyone else. That’s just always been my thing. That the work has to do what it needs to do."

Deborah shares how her work has been evolving and where it is headed, her studio practice, as well as giving us a peek into some ideas for her upcoming one women show at The Contemporary Austin a year from now. I think Deborah proves that hard work, integrity, and persistence can change your life and the lives of others in a positive way. She is even planning to start a foundation to help other artists get the help that she so dearly needed to grow her career early on. If you haven heard our first conversation that covers the history of her life and career before last year, have a listen to Episode 19.

ARTIST STATEMENT

Whether I was aware of it or not, otherness has been at the center of my consciousness since the beginning of my artistic career. My early ideals of race and beauty were shaped by and linked through paintings of renaissance artists and photographs in fashion magazines. Those images were mythical, heroic, beautiful, and powerful and embodied a particular status that was not afforded equally to anyone I knew. Those images influenced the way I viewed myself and other African Americans, which led me to investigate the way our identities have been imagined and shaped by societal interpretations of beauty. Having one’s identity dismantled, marginalized and regulated to non-human status demands action. This led me to critically engage image-making in art history and pop-culture, and ultimately grapple with whatever power and authority these images have over the female figure.

My art practice takes on social commentary, critiquing perceptions of ideal beauty. Stereotypes and myths are challenged in my work; I create a dialogue between the ideas of inclusion, dignity, consumption, and subjectivity by addressing beauty in the form of the ideal woman, the Venus. By challenging Venus, my work challenges the notion of universal beauty—making room for women of color who are not included in this definition.

Wading through my work, you must look through multiple layers, double meanings and symbols. My process combines found and manipulated images with hand drawn and painted details to create hybrid figures. These figures often take the form of young girls. I’m interested in the way young girls symbolize vulnerability but also a naïve strength. The girls who populate my work, while subject to societal pressures and projected images, are still unfixed in their identity. Each girl has character and agency to find their own way amidst the complicated narratives of American, African American and art history.

BIO

Deborah Roberts (American, b. 1962) is a mixed media artist whose work challenges the notion of ideal beauty. Her work has been exhibited internationally across the USA and Europe. Her work is in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, New York; Brooklyn Museum, New York, New York; The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, New York; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, California; The Block Museum of Art, Evanston, Illinois; Blanton Museum of Art, Austin, Texas; Spelman College Museum of Fine Art, Atlanta, Georgia; Montclair Art Museum, Montclair, New Jersey; and The Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery, Saratoga Springs, New York. Roberts is the recipient of the Anonymous Was a Woman Grant (2018), the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant (2016) and a Ginsberg-Klaus Award Fellowship (2014). She received her MFA from Syracuse University, New York. She lives and works in Austin, Texas. Roberts is represented by Stephen Friedman Gallery, London and Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects.

The first interview

October 4, 2019 6pm-8pm

Book Release/Signing of "Deborah Roberts: The Evolution of Mimi"

Artist Talk: Deborah Roberts and Robert A. Pruitt

This event is free to the public but pre-registration is recommended.

Blanton Museum of Art

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

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• Deborah Roberts

"There are all these pressures and talks about how do you make your career. How do you make a living? How do you make it sustainable? How do you be an entrepreneur as an artist. And they are all great sounding, very trendy. But at the same time I want to come back and say, why did you want to be an artist? And what makes you want to wake up in the morning and run to the studio and make that thing. At the very beginning it was never for money, it was never for fame. It was something that’s driving you, that’s eating you inside. You have to get it out.

How do we hold ourselves accountable? How do we know we are doing something that’s meaningful to ourselves first? And therefore it is meaningful for our viewers. If I am spending hours and weeks and months to make this thing, why am I making it. And what does it mean to people when they are seeing it. It has to be beyond, wow this is beautiful, or this is really cool. It has to mean something. To me and to them."

Beili Liu is a visual artist who creates material and process-driven, site‑responsive installations. Oftentimes embodying transience, fragility, and the passage of time, Liu’s immersive installations are engaged with multifaceted dichotomies: lightness contrasted with heft, fierceness countered by resilience, and chaos balanced by quiet order. Working with commonplace materials and elements such as thread, scissors, paper, stone, fire, and water, Liu manipulates their intrinsic qualities to extrapolate complex cultural narratives.

Liu’s work has been exhibited in Asia, Europe and across the United States. She has held solo exhibitions at venues such as the Hå Gamle Prestegard, Norwegian National Art and Culture Center (2016, 2011), Hua Gallery, London, UK (2012), Galerie An Der Pinakothek Der Moderne, Munich, Germany (2011), Elisabeth de Brabant Art Center, Shanghai (2009), and the Chinese Culture Foundation, San Francisco (2015, 2008). Liu’s work has been showcased in group exhibitions at the National Museum for Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C. (2012), Hamburg Art Week, Germany (2012), the Kaunas Biennale, Lithuania (2011), and the 23rd and 25th Miniartextil International Contemporary Fiber Art exhibitions in Como, Italy (2015, 2013), among many others. Beili Liu is a 2016 Joan Mitchell Painters and Sculptors Grant recipient. Liu has been designated the 2018 Texas State Artist in 3D medium by the Texas State Legislature and the Texas Commission on The Arts.Born in Jilin, China, Beili Liu now lives and works in Austin, Texas. Liu received her MFA from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and is a Professor of Art at the University of Texas at Austin.

Intro

Banner photo by Scott David Gordon. Part of the Panorama365 project.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Intro music generously provided by Stan Killian

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• BEILI LIU 刘北立