January 9 – February 5, 2025
Sum of Its Parts
Searching For Marks
Herd Mentality
Opening Reception: Thursday, January 9, 2025 6 - 8pm
Carter Burden Gallery presents three exhibitions: Sum of Its Parts featuring mixed media, collage and textile works implementing a wide range of materials by Liz Curtin, Ann Winston Brown, Ann Kronenberg and Susan Newmark; and hand-built and potters wheel clay vessels by Gary DiPasquale, Searching for Marks featuring a visual language of marks and narrative paintings by Lance Paull; and On The Wall featuring the installation Herd Mentality exploring the beauty of animal life by Vija Doks. The reception will be on Thursday, January 9 from 6pm to 8pm. The exhibitions run from January 9 – February 5, 2025 at 548 West 28th Street in New York City. The gallery hours are Tuesday - Friday, 11 a.m. - 5 p.m., Saturday 11 a.m. - 6 p.m.
Sum of Its Parts
Liz Curtin
For Sum of Its Parts multimedia artist Liz Curtin implements found objects, rust, and the odd vintage item. She explores the world through her love of materials and techniques working mostly on paper or canvas and sometimes merging them with textiles and other media.
Primarily a mixed media/collage artist for the past 40 plus years she recently felt a calling to return to her first love of working with textiles. Combining many elements and repurposing and working from her stash she created “Quintessential Neighborhood” to document the place she’s lived in NYC for almost 50 years. A river, a park, the beauty of the four seasons, vintage brownstone buildings and nature’s glory were her inspiration. This piece is in the online show and print catalog Where The Light Gets In.
Several of the other pieces include textiles and other media and examine relationships of material to technique to thought. The exploratory process is vital to her process.
Curtin was born in The Bronx and lived in 5 different places before the age of 6, including Bombay, India which has had a profound impact on her life and art.
Curtin retired as the Director of Making Art Work at Carter Burden Network/Covello Older Adult Center in December 2023. She continues to teach a Mixed Media class once a week and work on her own art practice daily.
Ann Winston Brown
Ann Winston Brown works in Mixed Media painting which she describes as painting with paper. For Sum of Its Parts Brown builds layer upon layer of visual information using painting and printmaking as a medium to translate impressions, emotions and memories into a visual format. Certain parts become obscured while others bleed through from underpainting, forming the mixed media work. The work is as much about the materials as it is about the story she tries to tell in each painting. In the end it is the mysterious that Brown loves about painting and to be able to take the viewer on a journey of discovery.
Ann Winston Brown began her study of art in high school continued at the Fashion Institute of Technology and New York University, earning a B.A. and M.A. Degree. In 1980 Brown started her own business designing one-of-a-kind handwoven clothing which she ran for 18 years. She then returned to painting, a natural transition from weaving. She continues to work on mixed media paintings to this day.
Gary DiPasquale
For Sum of Its Parts most of the pieces the artist used the potters wheel in order to create a group of traditional shapes and forms. The works are both hand-built and made on the wheel. Some pieces are built in two halves and then put together in order to create larger forms.
DiPasquale calls it “Pot Luck” when he is on the wheel and doesn’t always know where his hands will lead in the throwing process allowing his knowledge of design and form to lead him as he works.
After the pieces are shaped he puts a strong focus on the surface design with ongoing experimentation with glaze layering, multiple firings and making many test tiles investigating pattern and texture. They incorporate colored clay slips for the first bisque firing and then glazes are brushed, poured or trailed onto the forms for the finished glaze firings.
The work is based on function but emphasis is on a more decorative purpose. Similar to sculpture, DiPasquale concentrates on the forms, texture and the color to complete the piece.
For many years the artist has been involved with the vase and vessel form, being inspired from a history of world ceramics ranging from very early times to the present. Greek and Roman pottery, Chinese vessels, Art Deco and African patterns all excite him and Inform much of what he does.
Living in New York City since 1980 and having a studio has played a very big part in the artist’s development and career as a clay artist.
Ann Kronenberg
For Sum of Its Parts Kronenberg is showing her Wheelie Hubcap sculpture series that recall jellyfish medusas and siphonophores —like the Portuguese man o’ war —poisonous, stinging, predatory carnivores in the phylum Cnidaria (comprising sea anemones, jellyfish, siphonofores, corals, and hydrae). These animals are particularly affected by climate change and pollution because they are unable to migrate to a more hospitable environment when they encounter these perils. Discarded plastic hubcaps actually being a part of these abstracted symbolic creatures, parallels the ingestion of plastic pollutants by real sea creatures. Further, a veiled threat is inherent within the sculptures themselves. Behind the luxuriant crocheted tendrils/tentacles and the distinctive hubcap designs lurks the poisonous sting of the jellyfish and siphonophore, as well as the destructive potential of climate change and pollution.
These sculptures are part of the more comprehensive Society’s Discards series. In this series, handmade textiles discourse with discarded manufactured elements. The content centers upon the place of handcraft in industrial society and the displacement of the industrial age by the computer.
The skeletal structures of Society’s Discards’ manufactured elements emphasize manufacturing as the structure of industrial society, denuded of human reference. Textiles represent handcraft’s role humanizing the industrial. The crocheted elements emphasize this process’s structural qualities integrating into the structure of industrial manufacture. As the digital revolution completely transforms manufacturing and global society, textile handcraft processes are flourishing, humanizing the sterility of the digital age.
Ann Kronenberg is a visual artist and writer. She creates sculptural objects, installations, bookworks, works on paper, wearables, performance, handmade paper, and functional ceramics. Her writing concentrates on memoir, essays, and texts for her bookworks. A lifelong resident of New York City, she began making art at the age of two, encouraged by her art teacher/interior designer mother. Her art has been exhibited in New York City and nationally. Her related experience includes teaching art, art therapy, arts and non-profit administration, editing an artists’ newsletter, and designing children clothing for the retail market. Ann’s illustrations have been published in national magazines. Studying art and art history in many venues, she received an M.F.A. in sculpture from Hunter College. However, her undergraduate major was biological sciences (A.B., Cornell University), and she worked in laboratories for many years. Her science background continues to inform her subject matter and analytical approach to her art.
Susan Newmark
For Sum of Its Parts Nemark’s collages are woven on wood looms usually associated with carpets and wool. She is concerned with the erasure and growing extinction of our natural and human environments and the destruction of landscapes and cultural groups due to ignorance, cruelty, and genocide. Her work begins with traditional art forms including Persian rugs and the painted ceilings and walls that adorned Polish wooden synagogues. Newmark also use maps such as the water table charts of Long Island and street maps of the Bronx that evoke personal memories. She is fascinated with textiles and the contributions women have made with the simplest of materials to create essential objects for the home that sustained life. These objects were beautified through sophisticated design and craftsmanship, repeatedly mending, attaching and repairing. Newmark will continue to weave, and wrap, experiment with fabric, and construct dimensional small wall works.
Susan Newmark grew up in New York City and was trained as a painter and an art educator graduating from Hunter College, Hofstra University, and New York University. As an arts administrator, she directed the visual arts, artist-in-residence, and arts-in-education programs at Henry Street Settlement for many years, work that has greatly enriched her life. She is currently included with the Brooklyn Artists Exhibition celebrating the 200th birthday of the Brooklyn Museum. Newmwark has had solo exhibitions at Figureworks Gallery, bluetablepost, Garrison Arts Center, the Grand Army Plaza Brooklyn Public Library, and the galleries of St. John’s and John Jay College. Her collages and artists books have been in many exhibits including those at: Five Myles, Kentler International Drawing Space, Carter Burden Gallery, FDG Gallery, bluetablepost, Metaphor Gallery, The Parrish Museum, Southampton Art Center, and The Center for Book Arts. She has curated many exhibitions and organized Dialogues in the Visual Arts, an artist conversation series currently at Tribeca Performing Art Center and Grand Army Plaza Library in Brooklyn and teach art to adults.
Searching for Marks
Lance Paull
Using the building blocks of visual language Lance creates and searches for marks and narratives, much like the first marks left behind on the cave walls that echo the various symbols and narratives of who the artist is, and more importantly, who we are collectively. Art, religion, mythology, poetry, and the natural world inform and give context to his work. From these influences he invents, curates and builds on ideas and stories to express and provoke thought. Using figures, color, light and dark, Paull manipulates organizes and connects elements to the imagined present and a space where everything has its role. The unexpected waits to be discovered in this process—a complex world that includes a portion of artifice and magical thinking.
A visual storyteller by choice and temperament, Lance Paull started painting at age 8 —choosing art lessons over guitar—painting buffalos in snowy fields with a local Utah artist. As a teen, he traveled to Germany and Holland visiting museums and cathedrals, studiously filling sketchbooks and imagining life as an artist. With talent, passion and a little luck, after completing a BFA at the University of Utah, Lance was awarded a painting grant by the Greenshields Foundation that allowed him to expand his artistic journey to NYC and Boston. He pursued his love of painting and design at Boston University, studying with James Weeks and Phillip Guston, whose insights and approach to color, space and painting still inform him today. During this time Lance secured a position at the Art Institute of Boston teaching painting, drawing and design. In 1985, he had his first solo show at the Chapel Gallery in Newton, Massachusetts.
Using his talent for visual storytelling, Lance turned to advertising, working successfully as a Creative Director, winning recognition and accolades from: Cannes (Grand Prix), Clio, Andy, Communication Arts, One Show, and Archive for his creative work. In 2010, he returned to his essence as a painter, creating to intrigue and inspire.
Herd Mentality
Vija Doks
Herd Mentality is a 3 month On the Wall installation concept by Vija Doks. Each month she will create a different group of animals with her unique style. For her first month she will explore reindeer.
Doks' paintings, usually on a field of black emerging in ghostly and luminous white, create a striking contrast between subject and background. Her works showcase the diversity and beauty of animal life and emphasize their fragile position in our present man-made environment. Doks states, “Through these works, I hope to stir in the viewer a sense of joy and wonder and awaken them to the magic of animals. I am an environmentalist and animal lover and I hope to raise awareness of our interconnectivity through my art.”
New York-based artist Vija Doks was born in a displaced persons camp in Germany of Latvian parents. She grew up in Kalamazoo, Michigan and received a BA from Western Michigan University. Relocating to New York City in 1976, she received a MS in Library Science from Columbia University and worked as a Law Librarian until her retirement in 2016. Doks pursued her art career starting in the 1990s, by taking courses at the School of Visual Arts where she studied under Nancy Chunn, Georgia Marsh and Judith Linhares.
Her exhibitions include a solo show at the Brooklyn Parsonage Latvian Center, NYU's Small Works Shows curated by Ronald Feldman and Richard Witter, Exit Art, CurateNYC, Hudson Guild among others. Her painting Red Ibis was featured in the 2012 movie, The Oranges. In addition, Vija has published a cartoon cookbook Letts Eat, and her writing has been published in Paragraph and Law Lines.
Installation Views
