Artgirlrising

“Bedimmed Boundaries: Between Wakefulness and Sleep” is a new show and series of paintings and video installation by Wangari Mathenge at Nicola Vasell Gallery

Wangari Mathenge (b. 1973 in Nairobi, Kenya) lives and works in Chicago, IL. She holds degrees from Howard University and Georgetown University Law Center and an MFA in Painting and Drawing from the School of The Art Institute of Chicago.

After a career in international business and law, Wangari Mathenge began pursuing her painting practice professionally in 2019. Mathenge’s work is a visual testimony to the black female experience of existing simultaneously within two cultures-traditional African society and the Diaspora. Figurative, patterned, and brightly-hued, her paintings are lively and generative. Her rich compositions, emboldened with gestural strokes and mark-making, often depict close friends and loved ones. Mathenge’s portraits are slices of life, offering an intimate view into her subjects’ interiority.

Check out this show 💫💫
Artist:

The first major US retrospective of Vivian Maier’s photography is currently on display at Fotografiska New York until Sept 29.

Vivian Dorothy Maier (February 1, 1926 – April 21, 2009) was an American street photographer whose work was discovered and recognized after her death. She took more than 150,000 photographs during her lifetime, primarily of the people and architecture of Chicago, New York City, and Los Angeles, although she also traveled and photographed around the world

Maier is now recognized “alongside the greatest masters of the twentieth century

Amanda Wall is an American self-taught painter who lives and works in Los Angeles, California. A heady mix of voyeurism, exhibitionism, and 21st century existentialism, Wall’s work exposes the intimate and uncanny. With a shock of lurid colors in contrast to tender flesh tones, Wall’s distinctive palette touches on the nerve of vulnerability, desire and control. The subject matter, however, remains shadowy - a tension between abstraction and distorted reality, a conflict between the self and the void.

Artist

Painter Cecily Brown works at the intersection of figuration and abstraction: She fills her monumental canvases with intimations of body parts and virtuosic, gestural brushstrokes that resolve more or less clearly into art history–inspired scenes. Brown draws on a range of compositional tenets including the formal planes of Neoclassicism, the vigor of Abstract Expressionists.

Her paintings become intense, kaleidoscopic evocations of atmosphere and bodily experience. The artist studied at the Slade School of Art. She rose to prominence at the same time as the provocative Young British Artists, yet she kept her paintings decidedly separate from the movement. Brown’s powerful formalism won her fans around the world, and she has shown in cities including New York, London, Hong Kong, and Berlin.

Her work belongs in the collections of the British Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, the Tate, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Museum der Moderne Salzburg, among others. Brown also maintains a celebrated drawing practice. Among the most expensive living female artists, her work has sold for seven figures on the secondary market.

Georgia O’Keefe 💙 in a letter to Russel Vernon Hunter.

Have you felt the same this season? Let us know! Happy Tuesday 🌞

Dear community, how’s your week going so far?

Here’s a little motivation reminder for you to kick that door open 🚪💥💥💥

We totally understand that it’s easy to get overwhelmed with the tasks and the realities of the world.

But over the years, we’ve learned to really question our goals/tasks, and to lay down easy actionable steps to keep things simple!

Ask yourself this:

⚡️Why is this on my to-do list?
⚡️Why is it important to get it checked off?
⚡️What does a successful day mean to me?

Then break it down to simplest steps you can think of:

✍🏼 Start that draft
✍🏼 Lockdown creative desk hours
✍🏼 Eat a fruit!

And hopefully, this will help take away that big daunting feeling we all get before we start something new.

So… What are your plans for this week? 😉

💌 Photo from 💌

Oh Frida ❤️ Our muse, always forever. Happy birthday ✨

Magdalena Carmen Frida Kahlo y Calderón was a Mexican painter known for her many portraits, self-portraits, and works inspired by the nature and artifacts of Mexico.

Inspired by the country’s popular culture, she employed a naïve folk art style to explore questions of identity, postcolonialism, gender, class, and race in Mexican society.

Her paintings often had strong autobiographical elements and mixed realism with fantasy. In addition to belonging to the post-revolutionary Mexicayotl movement, which sought to define a Mexican identity, Kahlo has been described as a surrealist or magical realist. She is also known for painting about her experience of chronic pain.

Born to a German father and a mestiza mother, Kahlo spent most of her childhood and adult life at La Casa Azul, her family home in Coyoacán – now publicly accessible as the Frida Kahlo Museum. Although she was disabled by polio as a child, Kahlo had been a promising student headed for medical school until being injured in a bus accident at the age of 18, which caused her lifelong pain and medical problems. During her recovery, she returned to her childhood interest in art with the idea of becoming an artist.

Kahlo’s work as an artist remained relatively unknown until the late 1970s, when her work was rediscovered by art historians and political activists. By the early 1990s, not only had she become a recognized figure in art history, but she was also regarded as an icon for Chicanos, the feminism movement, and the LGBTQ+ community. Kahlo’s work has been celebrated internationally as emblematic of Mexican national and Indigenous traditions and by feminists for what is seen as its uncompromising depiction of the female experience and form.

🔔 WEEKLY RISE: ARTIST OPPORTUNITIES UP FOR GRABS!🔔

Find details and more opportunities at: ourweeklyrise.com

Link in our bio.

Weekly Rise is a one-stop shop for women and non-binary artists, powered by .history and

—

We are SOOOO excited to announce that we are hosting a LIVE online Q&A session with one of our favourite artists, authors and art entrepreneurs of all time - ! 💫✨🤩

We’ve absolutely loved Lisa’s work for years now, so it’s an honour to have her join us for this month’s Art + Chill online event, exclusively for our paid members. 🫶🏽🥰

In this session, Lisa will be doing a deep dive on one of her best-selling books: Find Your Artistic Voice: The Essential Guide to Working Your Creative Magic ✨🎨🖌️

If you’re already a paid member on WATWA, you’ll have received an invite to this special event in our bi-weekly newsletters! 💌 Make sure to check your inboxes and to secure your spot soon!

If you haven’t already, don’t worry — we’re sending out a reminder this afternoon, so keep an eye out! 👁️🔍

Want to join this electric event? Sign up as a paid WATWA member or upgrade your membership today to receive full access to all our membership perks! 🔥🔥🔥

Maja Ruznic (b. 1983, Bosnia and Herzegovina) is a New Mexico-based artist who paints diluted, out-of-focus figures and landscapes that explore nostalgia and childhood trauma and are influenced in part by war and the refugee experience. The ritualistic nature of her work reflects religious and mythological interests, including Slavic paganism and Shamanism. For six years following her graduation from the California College of the Arts, Ruznic worked with ink and watercolor in her small San Francisco bedroom. She refers to the loose, runny style she developed as “the drunken hand.” Ruznic has since expanded this gestural approach to oil, while still bearing the influence of water-based media.

Artist:

Anne Rothenstein grew up in a family of artists reaching back two generations. She spent her early childhood in the Essex village of Great Bardfield which was virtually an artists community. For some time Rothenstein tried hard not to become an artist and after doing only one year at Camberwell Art School in the 1960’s left to explore other avenues.

She wrote a great deal and had some short stories published and then, quite by chance, found herself cast in a television film. She spent the next ten years earning her living as an actress but, dissatisfied, gradually returned to painting.

She had two children in the early 80’s which was a turning point, and she began to paint full-time alongside bringing them up.

She had her first solo show in 1991 and has shown every 2 to 3 years since, as well as in a huge variety of mixed shows, including the Royal Academy. She is an RWA Academician and has been designing covers for The London Review of Books since 2012.

It’s no secret that the world has been hurting. We want dedicate today’s post to one of our favourite artists of all time! 💖The artist, illustrator, artrepreneur, author and podcaster extraordinaire; Lisa Congdon! ⚡⚡⚡

In the darkest of days, we can always rely on Lisa’s work to bring us light and hope. She is a force to be reckoned with. Lisa has made art for clients around the globe, including Target, Amazon, Google, Schwinn, Warby Parker, Method, Comme des Garcons, REI and MoMa, among many others.

And has exhibited internationally, including a recent solo debut show at Saint Mary’s College Museum of Art (California). Hold it Lightly features fifty-seven serigraphs created and displayed in dialogue with work by the 1960s pop artist Corita Kent. Opening concurrently with Corita’s heroes & sheroes series, Hold it Lightly brings forward Lisa’s graphic designs conveying messages and symbols of radical love and hope. ♡♡♡



She is the author of ten books, including Art Inc: The Essential Guide to Building Your Career as an Artist and Find your Artistic Voice: The Essential Guide to Working Your Creative Magic. She is the host of the podcast The Lisa Congdon Sessions (now on hiatus) and cofounder of The Long Table Collective.

Lisa is self-taught and didn’t achieve momentum in her career until she was nearly 40 years old. Despite her untraditional path, Lisa has achieved recognition, not just as an artist, but as a leader in the industry for her work in social justice, knowledge sharing, mentoring and teaching. In March of 2021, she was named “One of the 50 Most Inspiring People and Companies According to Industry Creatives” published by AdWeek. When she’s not making art, you can find her racing her bike around Oregon. She lives and works in Portland, Oregon.

We love you Lisa! Thank you for spreading messages of hope to the world! ✨🕊️

We hope her art makes you feel better, as it does for us. 💕

Keep on, keeping on! 💥💪🏽

Happy Monday!

Here’s a little motivation for you to kick that door open 🚪💥💥💥

We totally understand that it’s easy to get overwhelmed with the tasks and the realities of the world.

But over the years, we’ve learned to really question our goals/tasks, and to lay down easy actionable steps to keep things simple!

Ask yourself this:

⚡️Why is this on my to-do list?
⚡️Why is it important to get it checked off?
⚡️What does a successful day mean to me?

Then break it down to simplest steps you can think of.
✍🏼 Start that draft
✍🏼 Lockdown creative desk hours
✍🏼 Eat a fruit!

And hopefully, this will help take away that big daunting feeling we all get before we start something new.

So… What are your plans for this week? 😉

A well-known figure within contemporary Indian art, Rekha Rodwittiya rose to prominence internationally through the Eighties and Nineties with her forceful, vibrantly colored and idiosyncratic depictions of female forms and rituals.



The product of a liberal, middle class, highly educated cross-cultural household – her father was a Parsi and her mother a Roman Catholic from South India – since the 1970s Rodwittiya has forged her own distinctive artistic language. This too is a radical mingling: of Mughal painting from Persia and India, of folk art from the Indian subcontinent and of western traditions absorbed from books, travels and her time as a student at London’s Royal College of Art in the early 1980s. The vital thread, however, linking her work, is its celebration of female strength, even in vulnerability.



This autumn a new show of her work opens at Sakshi Gallery, Mumbai. Sixty this year, Rodwittiya’s most recent works incorporate autobiographical photographs and printed images with watercolor and acrylic paint. For some pictures, Rodwittiya reconceives an image from earlier in her career, building up an interior hinterland of elusive symbols and photographic images within the original bounding line. As such, they take her back to her formative years, at the renowned Faculty of Fine Arts at Baroda University.



A solitary child, home-schooled until the age of seven, painting and drawing had offered a potent release for her vivid imagination. At art school, however, under the inspiring teacher KG Subramanyan, Rodwittiya was encouraged to experiment across media, including photography. She remembers: “I would wander around Baroda taking photographs of street life.” She was fortunate to be part of a great movement of proudly self-confident experimentation and renewal of figurative painting in India.



Rodwittiya rejects the term “feminist artist” but she is, she agrees, undoubtedly both a feminist and an artist. As she puts it, “I live and breathe as a feminist so therefore that is the prism through which I perceive everything around me, and so therefore it would patina my art as well.”

REPOST 🔁 • On what should be the 51st anniversary of Roe v. Wade, I just want to point out that if our reproductive bits were made of guns we’d have all the rights, autonomy, and respect we deserve.

Rosalyn Drexler was one of the early artists to mine American kitsch and pop culture for her practice. In the early 1960s, Drexler created paintings by collaging images from B-movies, tabloids, and pulp novels directly onto her canvases, before painting over them in a cool, flat style with acrylic paint. These works were exhibited alongside paintings by Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, Tom Wesselmann, and others in the “First International Girlie Exhibit”, an early exhibition of the Pop movement. But unlike her counterparts’ smooth, machinelike methods of creating surfaces, Drexler’s hand was evident in her work. Her life has been as multifaceted as her subject matter; Drexler was a professional wrestler and a novelist, and has written, among other things, an adaptation of the screenplay Rocky.

Dreamy Afro-surrealist visions emerge from Akea Brionne’s layered works, which blend lens-based media, collage, and vibrant tapestries. Brionne’s practice delves into American and Caribbean colonial history, examining the lasting consequences of migration and displacement, and their impact on contemporary Black experiences of identity and belonging. Brionne’s influence is undeniable: She was recently named to Forbes’s 30 Under 30 list for 2024 in the Art & Style category.

This recognition coincided with a solo exhibition, “Trying to Remember,” at Library Street Collective in Detroit. Among the works on view was The Paradox of Eve (2023), a surrealistic portrait into which Brionne weaves biblical references. The forbidden apple held by the titular character becomes a lens through which the artist examines complex questions of morality and women’s self-discovery, rooted in her experience of growing up in a strict religious household.

Personal history also animates Mississippi Goddamn (2022), which combines archival and contemporary footage in a film set in Brionne’s familial home of Columbus, Mississippi. The artist’s body of work lends a voice to the untold stories of the American South, preserving memories that echo within marginalized communities today.

Brionne received her BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art and her MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art, where she was awarded the Gilbert Fellowship. Her work has been exhibited at the Brooklyn Museum and is held in the collections of the Baltimore Museum of Art and the Cranbrook Museum of Art, among others.

Via
Artist: