LatchKey Gallery, in partnership with the Bronx Museum, ARTNOIR, Art in America, Art Money, BX200 and MW Projects, is pleased to present A Bronx Tale, segundo capitulo, an online exhibition and one day private studio exhibition experience featuring the works of Alteronce Gumby, Bianca Nemelc, Dario Calmese, Estelle Maisonett, Francisco Donoso, Lucia Hierro, Nate Lewis, Patrick Alston, Tariku Shiferaw and Renee Cox.
The exhibition takes place in a key part of the New York art scene, the South Bronx, where history has shown to be a creative mecca. In a landscape of diverse practices and perspectives, each artist discusses current urgencies in our society that tell the story of our contemporary human condition. From “deconstructing stereotypes to challenge the preconceived ideas of gender and race,” [1]to deconstructing the perception of abstraction and the mark-maker in order to include those that have been ‘othered’ by the dominant culture.”
On September 15th, visitors are welcome to float freely through the buildings or attend one of the curator-led tours where each will give voice to various themes found in the artists’ work. For more information and to RSVP to the event, please email: info@latchkeygallery.com
PARTICIPATING CURATORS:
Elizabeth Dee, Independent Art Fair, CEO and Co-Founder
Deborah Cullen, Executive Director, Bronx Museum
Patrick Rowe, Director of Education, Bronx Museum
Melinda Wang, Curator, MW Projects
Akeem Duncan, Editor at Large, Quiet Lunch
Laura James, BX200, Founder & Artist
ABOUT THE ARTISTS:
Alteronce Gumby is an artist and local of New York City. His artistic practice ranges from painting and ceramics to installation and performance. Gumby’s work has been exhibited at galleries such as Gladstone Gallery, American University Museum at the Katzen Arts Center and Camden Arts Centre. In his recent exhibition Catching the Holy Ghost at Parrasch Heijnen Gallery in Los Angeles, CA, Gumby explored color as it refers to transcendence from the physical, to the idea of the spiritual. Painting becomes the artists’ undeniable language of awareness, as an act of transcendence, offering a form of liberation and tranquility through color.
Bianca Nemelc is a figurative painter whose work navigates female identity both internally and collectively, bringing the inherent sexuality, strength and vulnerability of the female body to the forefront of her paintings. Born in New York City and currently working out of her Bronx studio, Nemelc’s work is inspired by her own investigative journey into her identity, paying homage to her heritage through the use of many hues of browns that make up the subjects of her work and using the body to connect with her audience in a way that feels personal and intimate.
Dario Calmese is an artist working in photography whose practice includes live performance, video, and text. He received his master’s in photography from School of Visual Arts and his bachelors in psychology at Rockhurst University in Kansas City. Classically trained in the performing arts, he uses his knowledge of movement, gesture, and psychology to create complex characters and narratives that explore history, race, class, and what it means to be human.
Estelle Maisonett is a mixed-media interdisciplinary artist that uses found objects, digital media, and sourced clothing to create life-sized collages that document the journey of consumers. Using sourced clothing she creates figures that are void of the human body to explore how the figures relationship to consumer products, location, and material impact the interpretation of their identity. The interior and exterior spaces she builds highlight the familiarity of her experience living in the Bronx and Dyckman, NY through digital media and found objects which she incorporates. Taking photographs and creating faux finishes of materials such as brick, concrete, wood or fabric, Estelle investigates materiality and how the relationship between object and environment inform perception of a figure or allude to ideas around access, economic status, race, gender, cultural background, and sexual orientation.
Francisco Donoso was born in Quito, Ecuador and grew up in Miami, Florida. He is a recipient of DACA and a fierce advocate for immigrant rights. After attending the prestigious New World School of the Arts, he received his BFA in Painting & Drawing from SUNY Purchase College. In 2012 he was a fellow at the New York Center for Art and Media Studies and in 2013 a Van Lier Fellow at Wave Hill. He was also the Artist in Residence at Stony Brook University and named a Hot Picks artist by Smack Mellon in 2014 & 2018. He participated in the Artist in the Marketplace program at The Bronx Museum in 2018 and was part of Race Forward’s Racial Equity in the Arts Innovation Lab in 2017 and 2019. His work “Cut Out (Ways of Being in NY)” was commissioned by the New York Community Trust in 2018. Francisco has exhibited throughout the US and Berlin and continues to work and exhibit in NYC. He is also the Program Coordinator for the Parsons Scholars Program, where he explores the intersections of art, education and social justice.
Lucia Hierro is a Dominican American conceptual artist born and raised in New York City, Washington Heights/Inwood, currently working in the Bronx. She received a BFA from SUNY Purchase (2010) and an MFA from Yale School of Art (2013). She has exhibited in shows at Tiger Strikes Asteroid in Brooklyn, Bronx Museum of the Arts, Sugar Hill Children's Museum of Art and Storytelling, Paris Photo, Casa Quien in the Dominican Republic and recently at Elizabeth Dee Gallery in Harlem. Residencies include: Yaddo, Redbull House of Art, Casa Quien, Fountainhead Residency, Bronx Museums Artist in the Market program. Her work is part of the JP Morgan Chase art collection and the Rennie collection in Vancouver.
Nate Lewis began his working career as a critical care registered nurse, he received a BSN in nursing in 2009 and has since then worked in a medical-surgical intensive care unit, a stroke unit, a neuroscience-surgical intensive care unit and a surgical recovery unit. He worked as a critical care registered nurse for nine years. He began pursuing the arts in 2008, first it was music, violin. He then started pursuing the visual arts in 2010. A self taught artist, drawing inspiration from anatomy, physiology, disease processes and his nursing experience as a care taker of patients and their family members he creates intricate 2-3d sculptures out of single sheets of paper that visually combines the aesthetics of drawing, sculpture, etching, embroidery, and textiles. His approach to his work is often instinctive and free while at the same time surgically precise.
Patrick Alston’s energetically creates works that, along with the interplay of titles, trigger thought-provoking and reflective topics including but not limited to socio-politics, materiality, complexities of identity, language, and the psychology of color.“I seek to contribute to the dialogue of the native black experience through the use of abstraction, opposed to the black figure, in an attempt to further expand the conversation of blackness outside of the physical and visual structures of figurative painting.” Re-contextualized subjects, rich palettes and complex compositions are dramatized, exhilarating energies, expressed through gestural mark-making (some of which are reminiscent of traditional New York graffiti). These images evoke harmonious tension and challenge viewers to look carefully at the world around them, discovering value in unconventional places.
Tariku Shiferaw was born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, raised in Los Angeles, CA, and presently lives and works in New York City. Through his current body of work titled, “One of These Black Boys,” Shiferaw explores mark-making in order to address the physical and metaphysical spaces of painting and societal structures.
Renee Cox is one of the most controversial African-American artists working today using her own body, both nude and clothed to celebrate black womanhood and criticize a society she often views as racist and sexist. Cox continues to push the envelope with her work by using new technologies that the digital medium of photography has to offer. By working from her archives and shooting new subjects, Cox seeks to push the limits of her older work and create new consciousnesses of the body. Cox's new work aims to "unleash the potential of the ordinary and bring it into a new realm of possibilities". "It's about time that we re-imagine our own constitutions." states Cox.
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[1]Artist Transforms Nude Bodies into Kaleidoscopic Human Fractals (NSFW), HUFFPOST by Priscilla Frank, December 2017 https://www.huffpost.com/entry/renee-cox_n_5669437
ARTWORKS
