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[gallery ids="1399,1397,1400,1398,1401" type="rectangular"]Do you have your tickets to BAC's annual affordable art sale? AccessArt is taking place on Thursday, October 25th this year at Usagi NY in DUMBO and you don't want to miss out on your chance to add some affordable art to your collection! Read on to hear from a handful of this year's artists about their contributed works:
Iviva Olenick
Seed Pocket, 2018.
Indigo-dyed fabrics from Japanese indigo leaves, hand sewing, dried indigo flowers and seeds."Seed Pocket is the culmination of several years of research and multiple art-making processes. The fabrics are dyed from indigo plants I grew in collaboration with friends, fellow artists, the Education Greenhouse of the Brooklyn Botanic Garden care of Barbara Kushner Kurland, Wyckoff Farmhouse, and GrowNYC's Governors Island Teaching Garden.I set out to grow indigo in 2017 after reading the mythology around Eliza Lucas Pinckney, considered a colonial feminist and "American mother of indigo." This plantation owner's daughter is credited with having introduced a tropical crop and making it a cash crop through persistence and ingenuity. While Eliza had a mind for horticulture and business, as the story goes, the process of growing indigo and making dye from leaves is time-sensitive, labor-intensive and rarefied. While Eliza oversaw these processes, enslaved laborers enacted it. Through a 21st century lens, any story praising Eliza must also acknowledge the exploited labor that made indigo successful, and the ways slavery created a racial and socioeconomic stratification still in place."
-Iviva Olenick
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Callie Danae Hirsch
The Great Divide, 2018.
Acrylic on wood"My piece is a political statement about the great divide between those who have, and those who forever struggle to have. "
-Callie Hirsch
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Mary Rieser Heintjes
City Trees: Infinite Roots-vast, 2008.
Photograph"This photo is of a tree on a hill that I would visit often in Fort Greene Park on my way to and from home to work. The beautiful, huge, magnificent tree revealed so much both above ground and what was meant to be below ground. The root system was incredible—something I have never seen before as a result of it being on a steep hill of this man-made park and situated where water would flow and wind battered, causing erosion to reveal its root system. I felt in admiration of this "city tree" (as I call my collection of art sensitive to a tree's struggle to survive in the city environment) for enduring and living so long under these conditions, with such great character and might.I loved this tree. Recently, the parks department escalated the entire east section of the park taking out this mighty trunk and entire root system to plant a field of grass on the hill. Now it is COMPLETELY gone, although there is a slight indention in the ground of where it once was."
-Mary Rieser Heintjes
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Shemeul Phillip-Peters
DieuDonnè20184, 2018.
Savage handmade paper from pace paper, acrylic, and pastel on mylar"My childhood inspires the work I produce."
-Shemeul Phillip Peters
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Harvey Wilson
Intermezzo, 2018.
Acrylic on canvas"Looking at the white surface, and excited by its endless potential, I start to mix a color, draw a shape, or perhaps paint the entire space.Listening with my eyes, one gesture asks for another, and trusting my feelings not knowing what might occur, the painting paints itself.Eventually, every part comes together in a rapture of release.My prayer of being."
-Harvey Wilson
We have over 70 artists represented at this year's benefit--check out our online catalogue of artwork to see what you might want for yourself, and be sure to get your tickets to AccessArt here!