LookSEE

Since the 1960s, multidisciplinary artist Howardena Pindell has been pushing the limits. She was one of the first women of color to curate at a major museum, an abstract painter when black artists were expected to represent their ideas figuratively, and overt about social and political issues when abstract artists where expected to produce work free of such “impurities”. She broke the boundaries of painting itself, using unconventional materials and techniques in her work from the beginning of her career. And she continues to challenge art world dogma as her career moves into its 6th decade. Join LookSEE for a conversation with Howardena Pindell and co-curators Valerie Cassel Oliver and Naomi Beckwith as they discuss Pindell's career and the current exhibition, Howardena Pindell: What Remains to Be Seen.

Harrison Walker describes what he does as creating prints and/as objects. In his first solo exhibition at Candela Gallery, he presents his Portals project. In this series, he uses the most basic elements of photography - light, paper, and chemicals - to explore color, chemistry, and psychological perception. Each of Harrison’s striking images are the same in some very important ways - he uses the same steel disk in each piece, placed in the same place on uniformly sized paper. And yet, there is endless variation in the work, which consists so far of over 130 prints. Each of the prints embodies his effort to push the boundaries of what he does not fully understand or control, whether it is the chemical process of making the print itself, the celestial worlds that inspire his work, or the meditative act of looking at the work and the responses it provokes.

Chris McCaw first encountered a darkroom when he was 13 years old, and he has been making photos ever since. What he does is straight photography - a lens, the light, a camera, and something to receive the light. That’s it. Elemental. Elemental is also the perfect description of the primary subject of his work - the movement of the sun across the landscape, often in the most remote places on Earth. Chris has taken his homemade, monumental cameras to the Mojave Desert, the equator, and the Arctic Circle to photograph the cycle of night and day in its variations. The images that result have a reverence to them, a deep sense of respect and awe that these timeless processes and places exist and go on every day without regard for us.

Born in Lima, Peru, Maria Chavez is an an abstract turntablist, sound artist, and DJ. Accidents, coincidence, and failures are themes that unite her sound sculptures, installations, and other works with her solo turntable performance practice. She visited Richmond for a ten-day artist residency at the University of Richmond and to kick off Sound Arts Richmond, a citywide sound arts festival that continues through August of this year. I spoke with Maria as she was installing Topography of Sound: Peaks and Valleys Series, a solo exhibition of new paintings and illustrations based on microscopic images of vinyl and needle. Chavez chose to show this work as two-dimensional rather than as a sound installation because, in the sound arts world and in the art markets, the expectation is that sound art can only be emitted sound from a speaker or from a person. And, as you will hear, Chavez is not a person who likes to be boxed in by external expectations.

Many people think about photography as a way of stopping time, preserving what we are seeing in the moment the picture is made. But Chester Higgins uses his camera to search for the unseen and make it visible. He challenges what we think we know and asks us to see the spirit, giving visual definition to the lived human experience.

Chester’s works are currently on view at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts as part two of a series of exhibitions showing images from the Black Photographers Annual, a 4-part publication that was inspired by the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and 70s. Volume two was the first to include images made by earlier generations of black photographers, one of whom was P.H. Polk. Chester Higgins first encountered Polk’s work as a student at Tuskegee Institute, where Polk worked as the official photographer, and Chester brought Polk’s work to the attention of the publisher of the Black Photographer’s Annual. Both Polk and Higgins worked to create opportunities for the black community to see itself through the eyes of its own artists, rather than be contented with a view of itself presented by others.

Bruce Wilhelm wasn’t born a painter, but almost. From the time he got his first set of paints as a teenager, painting has been at the center of his life. It’s how he works out thoughts and feelings. As a very shy young man, it was a way for him to put himself out there without words, and it is still a very intuitive process for him. In a new body of work, Bruce has wholeheartedly embraced abstraction. In his previous work, he often used figures to anchor work that explored many of the same themes seen in these new paintings - layering, construction, destruction, and reconstruction, color, and form. Now he has set the figure aside in an exploration of pure abstraction in large scale work that has an engaging presence and energy.

Categories of the past are collapsing in contemporary art. Artists use the medium and materials that are the best conduit for personal, political and social messaging, and often their artistic practices include many processes at once.

As they looked closely at work being made by contemporary artists, curators Stefanie Fedor and Melissa Messina repeatedly saw the quilt being used by contemporary artists as a medium to explore questions and communicate messages. They put together an exhibition that allows artists to tell us why the quilt right now. I spoke with them both, and quilt artist Gina Adams, just as the show opened.

On first look, the flowers that are the primary subject of Nancy Blum’s work are reassuringly familiar. But look for a few moments, and you begin to notice that things are not what they seem. These drawings portray botanical superheroes with agency and power without relation to human beings - we are not a part of their world. The riotous energy that is barely contained in Nancy’s detailed wonderlands doesn’t depend on us. These plants carry on joyfully without us.

Visiting an artist’s studio is a precious gift, and visiting the studio of fiber artist Michael-Birch Pierce is a special kind of awesome. His studio, in an old warehouse on Mayo Island in the middle of the James River, is a sensuous experience. Crystals and sequins sparkle from every surface, and sumptuous fur, velvet and lace are piled in every corner. Michael-Birch uses these materials in his work, using his background in fashion design to exquisitely craft sculptural pieces that challenge to viewer to think deeply about the identity that we wear. At the same time, Michael-Birch recognizes the courage of vulnerability as a way to claim who we are and connect authentically with others. Michael-Birch’s lush and revealing work is a part of the current costume and textiles exhibition at The Valentine, Our Hearts on Our Sleeves. The brilliant Kristen Stewart, curator of the show, joined me in his studio for a joyful conversation about art.

For fiber artist Andrea Donnelly, the loom is a tool for mark-making, along with other materials like ink, dyes, and found items like milkweed pods. And making art is a full-body experience. When she finishes a piece, it contains not only the woven cloth and ink that we see, but also the marks of her body. The tension of opposing concepts also plays a big role in Andrea’s work - the discipline of weaving and the impulsivity of painting on cloth with ink, the presence of time and the shadow of memory, density and transparency, even the literal weaving, unweaving, and reweaving of cloth. What results is gorgeous and complicated, work that you want to spend time with. We spent some time with Andrea recently, ahead of her new solo show, Theorems and Poems, now on view at the Reynolds Gallery in Richmond.