Interviews by Brainard Carey

Founded by art consultant Mary Dinaburg, critic Saul Ostrow, art historian Kathy Battista and financial planner Bryan Faller, Art Legacy Planning brings together a multiplicity of art world expertise to offer a much needed and unique organization. Our expertise, tacit knowledge and our active participation allows us to observe, analyze prescribe and facilitate the necessary course of action for our clients.

Mary Dinaburg brings to ALP four decades of experience in the art world. From setting up galleries and private advising to exhibitions and projects with major museums and corporations. She has worked all over the globe, with extensive experience in Asia. She has experience working with pre-eminent artists including, among many others, Julian Schnabel, Isa Genzken, Sigmar Polke, and William Wegman.

Born in Birmingham, Alabama, Patricia Thornley is a multi-disciplinary artist who lives and works in New York City.

She is a graduate of the Atlanta College of Art (BFA in Sculpture), the Whitney Independent Study Program (Studio), and Bard College (MFA in Photography).

In New York City she has been an Instructor at the School of Visual Arts and Pratt Institute. She has also been a Visiting Lecturer at the Massachusetts College of Art and an Instructor at the Vermont College of Fine Arts and Maine College of Art. She was a Fellow at the Salem2Salem Artists Residency Program, Germany. She has exhibited nationally and internationally at museums, galleries, artist-run centers, and site-specific curatorial projects. Selected venues include: P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center (NY), Whitney Museum of American Art (NY), AC Project Room (NY), Wexner Center for the Arts (OH), Walter Phillips Gallery (Banff, Canada), croxhapox (Ghent, Belgium), Paço des Artes (Sao Paulo, Brazil), and Alhamra Art Gallery (Lahore, Pakistan). Her work was featured in Views from the Avant-Garde at the 51st New York Film Festival.

Her most recent project, THIS IS US, is a seven-year series of artworks that emulate and embrace the collaborative fantasies we enact through popular media in the United States, as it shifts ubiquitous media forms to a place of social gesture, and acts of desire.

THIS IS US: The Western, 2018 asks the viewer to recognize the enduring stereotypes persisting in a culture still besotted by old mythologies, and to connect with them. The work ultimately speaks of the malleability of ourselves, to the interchangeable costumes we wear everyday, and the history and specificity of what we consider to be our personal choices.

“I use conversation, song, props, and cheap effects to create a dialogue between the participant’s actual identity and the mythologies that I, and our culture, imagine around them. In my role/performance as Director I expose my expectations, desires, and blindspots. The work speaks of that weakness—of an inability to disentangle one’s self from personal and cultural forces—and of our shared willingness, or need, to be transported.”

Deserter, 2018, Digital Pigment Print, 16 x 16 inches

Savage, 2018, Digital Pigment Print, 16 x 16 inches

Andrea V. Wright is a multi-disciplinary artist currently based in Bath, UK. She graduated

with a BA from Chelsea College of Art & Design in 1994 and embarked on a career in fashion, styling and music working with magazines such as The Face, Arena and Italian Vogue before re- engaging with her art practice in 2010.

Since graduating with Distinction, MA Fine Art, Bath School of Art & Design in 2016 she has been invited to exhibit in London at Arthouse1, Collyer Bristow Gallery, The Koppel Project, ’New Relics’at Thames Side Studios and Prevent This Tragedy at Von Goetz, Post Institute.

Andrea had her first Solo Show this year and was recently selected for the Jerwood Drawing Prize, 2017 and the Royal Society of Sculptors Bursary Award 2017/18.

Laplace, 2018. Latex, neon light, steel, pigment, paint, tape and found object. Dimensions variable. Photography by Corey Bartle Sanderson © DATEAGLE ART 2018

Vertical Accension (2016) Y Steel, Wood, Paint, Rubber and Tape

photo by Ashwini Bhat

Forrest Gander, a writer and translator with degrees in geology and literature, was born in the Mojave Desert, grew up in Virginia, and taught at Harvard and, for many years, Brown University.

Among Gander’s most recent books are Be With, winner of the 2019 Pulitzer Prize, the novel The Trace, and Eiko & Koma. Gander’s recent translations include Alice Iris Red Horse: Poems by Gozo Yoshimasu and, with Patricio Ferrari, The Galloping Hour: French Poems of Alejandra Pizarnik.

He has a history of collaborating with artists such as Ann Hamilton, Sally Mann, Graciela Iturbide, and Vic Chesnutt. The recipient of grants from the Library of Congress, the Guggenheim, Howard, Whiting and United States Artists Foundations, Gander lives in northern California.

https://forrestgander.com/Books/Be-with-general.html

https://www.ndbooks.com/book/the-trace/

Ronnie Landfield, In the studio; photo by Ed Watkins, August 2019

I have had a wonderful and successful career as a painter since 1965. My work is rooted in the modernist tradition of 20th-Century art.

My inspiration has been my conviction that modern painting is fueled by the combination of tradition and the realities of modern life. Spirituality and feeling are the basic subjects of my work. They are depictions of intuitive expressions using color as language, and the landscape (God's earth) as a metaphor for the arena of life. The revelation of a primal image that delivers an immediate response in the viewer is my goal. Hopefully my paintings convey a felt perception of life, an awareness of the history of art, and a clear expression of my passion and sense of spirituality. I sense a visual music that externalizes what I feel within me and in the air.

As a teenager I was inspired to pursue a career as an artist. When I was about fourteen I made my first real paintings. Monet, Van Gogh, Matisse, Miro and especially Picasso and the Abstract Expressionists were important influences on my work. In 1961 I was inspired by a Life Magazine article on the Abstract Expressionists notably: Pollock, de Kooning, Gottlieb, Hofmann, Rothko, Still, Motherwell and Kline.

After several stints at the Art Students League, and a brief college career at the Kansas City Art Institute (1963), The San Francisco Art Institute (1964-65), and the University of California at Berkeley (1964), my professional life as a painter began in New York City during the Summer of 1965. During the summer and early fall of 1965 I rented several apartments and lofts on the Lower East Side. Finally in November 1965 I rented a loft with a friend of mine (a sculptor) in a building on Spring Street and Lower Broadway in Manhattan. A period of hardship including a devastating studio fire in February 1966 followed. I wrote a letter to the architect Philip Johnson and we had a meeting in his office in March 1966. The late Mr. Johnson was enormously encouraging and inspiring and he suggested that when I made some paintings I show them to him. I got a job in an advertising agency working as a commercial artist and I returned to painting in April 1966 by sharing a loft with another former classmate Dan Christensen at 4 Great Jones Street. The Border Painting Series was completed in July 1966, and soon after architect Philip Johnson acquired a painting: Tan Painting for the permanent collection of The Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery in Lincoln, Nebraska. Philip Johnson became my first important patron.

Ronnie Landfield, in the studio, 94 Bowery, NYC; November 1969 photo by Melissa Shook

When I was nineteen, by the Fall of 1966, after completing a major series of hard-edge border paintings, success as a painter began to materialize. The famous architect and collector Philip Johnson and the famous collector Robert Scull each acquired large paintings of mine. The Sheldon Memorial Museum in Lincoln, Nebraska acquired a painting of mine for its permanent collection. My circle of artistic friends and colleagues continued to grow throughout this period.

During the summer of 1967 when I was twenty, I rented a studio on the Bowery where I continued painting large abstract paintings. I was invited to participate in the Whitney Annual at the end of the year. My painting The Howl of Terror, hung opposite the Larry Poons painting and Larry and I met and became friends. I had two drawings and two poems published by the Letter Edged in Black Press. My work attracted considerable attention and I was invited to participate in important group exhibitions at the Bykert, Bianchini, and Park Place Galleries in New York; and my work was included in several publications notably an Esquire Magazine article on young artists in the Robert Scull collection.

I had a series of different and interesting jobs,

Walter Steding(born in Harmony, Pennsylvania) is an American musician and visual artist. Steding made his debut in New York City during the late seventies playing as a one-man band(predominantly as an opening act at CBGB's for bands such as Blondie, Suicide and The Ramones). During the eighties, Steding worked as painting assistant for Andy Warhol, who eventually became his producer.

A violinist, Steding first played with The Electric Symphony where he developed his own electronic instruments-namely a synthesizer triggered by a biofeedback device that coordinated his music with light up goggles. He later performed as a soloist at art galleries and eventually at clubs such as CBGBs and Max’s Kansas City. He has worked as a recording artist and performer with Blondie, Jim Carroll, David Byrne, Chic, Robert Fripp and Panther Burns. Steding was eventually dubbed "Doc Steding", the orchestra leader on Glenn O’Brien’s T.V. Party and subsequently, in 1980, he formed his band, Walter Steding and The Dragon People and released records on Red Star and Animal Records.

Steding met Warhol at a discotheque on lower Broadway called Infinity. After having spoken with Warhol about his music, Warhol invited Steding to perform at The Factory and he henceforth became friends and painting assistant to Warhol. Andy Warhol later acted as producer for Steding's musical exploits, even producing a music video for his single "Secret Spy" from his 1982 release, Dancing in Heaven.

Steding currently lives and works in New York City. He is a successful painter and has written, directed, scored and acted in films and plays including Not Quite Love, Time Capsules, Polyester, Union City, and ''Downtown 81''. He is currently a member of the rock band, Crazy Mary.

Kader Attia, artiste a lancé depuis deux ans le lieu LA COLONIE (barré) dans le 10ème arrondissement de Paris. Photo by Camille Millerand

Kader Attia grew up in Paris and in Algeria. Preceding his studies at the École Supérieure des Arts Appliqués Duperré and the École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, and at Escola Massana, Centre d'Art i Disseny in Barcelona, he spent several years in Congo and in South America.

The experience of living between different cultures, the histories of which over centuries have been characterised by rich trading traditions, colonialism and multi-ethnic societies, has fostered Kader Attia’s intercultural and interdisciplinary approach of research. For many years, he has been exploring the perspective that societies have on their history, especially as regards experiences of deprivation and suppression, violence and loss, and how this affects the evolving of nations and individuals — each of them being connected to collective memory. His socio-cultural research has led Kader Attia to the notion of Repair, a concept he has been developing philosophically in his writings and symbolically in his oeuvre as a visual artist. With the principle of Repair being a constant in nature — thus also in humanity —, any system, social institution or cultural tradition can be considered as an infinite process of Repair, which is closely linked to loss and wounds, to recuperation and re-appropriation. Repair reaches far beyond the subject and connects the individual to gender, philosophy, science, and architecture, and also involves it in evolutionary processes in nature, culture, myth and history.

Following the idea of catharsis, his work aims at Art’s re-appropriation of the field of emotion that, running from ethics to aesthetics, from politics to culture, links individuals and social groups through emotional experience, and that is in danger of being seized by recent nationalist movements

In 2016, Kader Attia founded La Colonie, a space in Paris to share ideas and to provide an agora for vivid discussion, that extends his praxis from representation to action. Focussing on decolonialisation not only of peoples but also of knowledge, attitudes and practices, it aspires to de-compartmentalise knowledge by a trans-cultural, trans-disciplinary and trans-generational approach. Driven by the urgency of social and cultural reparations, it aims at reuniting which has been shattered, or drift apart.

Kader Attia's work has been shown in group shows and biennials such as the 12th Shanghai Biennial; the 12th Gwangju Biennial; the 12th Manifesta, Palermo; the 57th Venice Biennial; dOCUMENTA(13) in Kassel; Met Breuer, New York; Kunsthalle Wien; MoMA, New York; Tate Modern, London; Centre Pompidou, Paris, or The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York - just to name a few. Notable solo exhibitions include “The Museum of Emotion”, The Hayward Gallery, London; “Scars Remind Us that Our Past is Real”, Fundacio Joan Miro in Barcelona; “Roots also grow in concrete”, MacVal in Vitry-sur-Seine; „The Field of Emotion“, The Power Plant, Toronto; Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney; SMAK, Gent; Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt; Musée Cantonal des Beaux Arts de Lausanne; Beirut Art Center; Whitechapel Gallery, London; KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin.

In 2016, Kader Attia was awarded with the Marcel Duchamp Prize, followed in 2017 by the Prize of the Miró Foundation, Barcelona, and the Yanghyun Art Prize, Seoul.

Schizophrenic Melancholia, 2018, Exhibition view “The Museum of Emotion”, Hayward Gallery, London, UK, 2019 Courtesy of the artist and Regen Projects, Photo : Marc Domage

Shifting Borders, 2018, 3-channel HD digital film on 4 screens, 16:9, colour, sound each, vintage chairs and leg prosthesis. “The Paradoxes of Modernity”, 43:19 min., “Recycling Colonialism”, 32:12 min.,

I'm a writer, director/choreographer, and educator of movement, theater and djembe drumming. I was born in Ex-Yugoslavia (Today Slovenia), where I studied visual art, ballet, piano, and theater. I moved to the UK to study dance & theater, and 3 years later to the United States. I've graduated from the London School of Contemporary Dance in Choreography. I completed Liberal Arts (emphasis in Psychology), MA in Media from the New School University, in NYC. In 1993 I gave birth to my daughter and stopped traveling for work. Now I live in NYC and am returning to creating stage arts.

I convey stories through text and theater that are expressive, creative, and unconventional. My performers must explore unusual spaces. In the process of my creation, all forces that are established in the process are equal between one another and at the same time can oppose one another: at all times they feel as one.  I focus on writing and directing stories, inspired by events, which cross-connect all arts and integrate. In the improvised sound, (collaboration with musicians), I find after a long hiatus, yet again a specific junction across impulse, which can be produced by live music. When staging my play the forces in my work can cancel each other out right in front of the audience and live in an emotional void, where new meaning is brought in.  Violent or idealized circumstantial thought processes and evidence of real issues become a physical experience. These create a new per-formative language, and the audience becomes alive!

Some works are: Dos Worlds (Drama &Film) Guernica Continuum (Drama & film), Virtual Truth (Poetry, Drama), Perfect Blend (Documentary story), Dos Worlds (Film), Come and Go (Stage), HP Madame (Stage), Jus Al’ Mae (Stage), First Day 47 (Solo), Ogun's Ardor (Solo), Footfalls (Solo), Abstractions (Solo), Streams (Stage story).  Works inspired by the writers and legends: Mother Courage (Brecht), Closed Door (Sartre), Tristan and Isolde (Myth), The Lost Ones 2 (Beckett). In NYC I created-produced and performed at Trinity Chapel, Carnegie Recital Hall, Cathedral of Saint John The Divine, Washington Square Church, Cooper Union Great Hall, Gowanus Arts Exchange. In Europe, I created and performed at Slovene National Theater, European Cultural Capital (Maribor), Cankarjev Dom and Dance Theater (Ljubljana), Croatia (Jeunesses Musicales International, Groznjan), State Theaters in Serbia, UK, and Italy.

In 1998 I co-founded Montclair Academy Of Dance and Laboratory of Music, where I've taught more than 2000 students (ages 3 - 18) how to critically and creatively think through dance, theater, and drumming. Teaching methods that I originated are very specific in goals: I would like for young pupils to live through and understand the world of art, focus that is gained and stimulus that is developed. Students develop a sense of leadership and confidence.

Maya MilenovicWorkman - AT MADLOM - Creating Copeliawth MADLOM kids

Maya Mielnovic Workman directed - DOS WORLDS - Blue (Dos Worlds)

Michele Cohen has served as the Curator for the Architect of the Capitol since October 2015, where she oversees the Curator division, including the photography and records branches, and is responsible for the stewardship of heritage assets throughout the Capitol Campus. She earned her B.A. in Art History and English Literature from the State University of New York at Buffalo and a Ph.D. in Art History from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.

She began her career as the Director of the Sculpture Inventory for the Public Design Commission of the City of New York.  From 1989 to 2009 she served as the Founding Director of New York City’s Public Art for Public Schools program, where she managed acquisitions, conservation of art, and a collection inventory for hundreds of school buildings.  More recently, she has been a college professor, independent curator, and public art consultant.

Her publications include The Art Commission and Municipal Art Society Guide to Manhattan’s Outdoor Sculpture (Prentice Hall Press, 1988), Public Art for Public Schools (The Monacelli Press, 2009) and chapters in The Decorated School: Essays on the Visual Culture of Schooling (Black Dog Publishing, 2013) and Theresa Bernstein: A Century in Art (University of Nebraska Press, 2013).

Murals designed by Constantino Brumidi in the Patent Corridor of the Senate wing of the U.S. Capitol after conservation, 2015. The murals were begun in 1857 and the fresco lunettes were added in the 1870s. Photo credit: Architect of the Capitol.

Andrei Farcasanu, photo by Xavier Gomez

Andrei Farcasanu is a Romanian photographer living and working in Barcelona, Spain. He works with black and white analog photography, hand made prints, small size. His work is focus on intimate pictorial photography used as a way of investigate the subtle details of everyday life.

Through his minimalist photography, the reduced size of his works, through the fact that the artist transforms the photos to a level of unique and singular object, the observer – in order to understand the message – has to come closer, to study the details, to slow down the rhythm of modern life.

Graduated from National University of Arts Bucharest, Academy of Fine Arts and majored in paintings (2003) he holds a Master degree in Photography and Live arts  (2005) and a PhD in photography with the thesis Social Photography (2013).

In the last years he won various photography contests and prizes - Joan Cabanas Alibau Photography Prize in 2015 and Barcelona International Photography Awards in 2016 Since 1999 he participated in exhibitions in Spain, Romania, Serbia, France, Greece, Poland.

His work is collected by institutions and private collectors through the world. In Spain he is represented by Valid Foto Gallery – an establish fine art photography gallery.

From the series The quiet sense of nature

From the series Timeless Interventions