We’ve seen quite a few artist-supported groups, teaming up with owners of empty ground-floor space, filling windows with art during this very difficult year, as we search for fun ways to connect while socially distancing.
But way before COVID-19, the nonprofit, ChaShaMa, supported artists by partnering with property owners, transforming unused space. In addition, they have provided free art classes for under-resourced communities, subsided 200 artist work spaces, and given 170 artists free space to present plus much much more.
This month, ChaShaMa brightens up our Spring with five lobby exhibitions and six brilliant artists. Take a virtual tour of each, below.
Above, Elizabeth Knowles: Impulses and Incrustations, located at 200 Water Street, NYC.
Utilizing a variety of media, her work explores how both static and dynamic patterns in nature reveal the mysterious relationship between differing scales of perception, thereby connecting landscapes and life forms, physiology and physics, death and detritus, and growth and life
John Black: Alluring Language, 151 West 42nd Street, NYC.
Black’s current works are influenced heavily by Native American and African roots, allowing the works to connect the artist with his ancestors and to communicate that energy to an observer, in hopes to relay emotion.
Andrew Hockenberry: Little Giants and Common People, 1155 Avenue of the Americas, NYC.
Using music as a rhythm and flow to his. paintings, Hockenberry makes each piece balanced while experimenting with alternative applications and materials. It’s as simple as paint on surface, surface being anything to hold paint, paint being anything to make an impression on surface.
Megan Olson: The Language of Form and Color, 733 Third Avenue, NYC
Olson’s work is a combination of surrealism, and organic abstraction – part graffiti, part calligraphy – it has been called, “both highly abstract and persuasively realist.” Her obsessive attention to detail led to abstraction, as she began to search for worlds within the details, microcosms becoming macrocosms
Mike Childs: Painting Works: 2008-2020, 675 Third Avenue, NYC
The formal approaches and compositional elements seen here reflect Child’s propensity to view the world as a series of starts and stops. He views his paintings as images which employ both one perspective, and several at the same time.
Sasha vom Dorf: Sonic Sunlight, 1133 Avenue of the Americas
Our ability to travel the cosmos being limited, vom Dorp built a machine in an attempt to observe elemental transactions. He created a mechanical solution to what is a metaphysical problem, forcing basic elements of perception – sound, light, and matter – into a single frame.