FEBRUARY 26 – APRIL 30, 2011: THE NEWARK SCHOOL
The exhibition focuses on the contribution of New Jersey’s largest city to the history of art. Abstract expressionism of “The New York School” in the 1950s shifted the world’s art capital from Paris. Today, a nearly opposite school has evolved across the Hudson. Using found objects from an urban landscape that still resonates from the racial rebellions of the 1960s, artists of all colors, ethnicities, genders, ages, and sexual orientations have flourished in one of America’s most diverse large cities.
Artists include: Ibrahim Ahmed III, Aileen Bassis, James Brown, Jenny Zoe Casey, Nick Colbert, Larry Dell, JC Lenochan, Michael Manning, Maria Mijares, Jennifer Moses, Adam Nowicki, Ben Pranger, Robert Richardson, Charlee Swanson, Roger Tucker, and Noelle Lorraine Williams.
A panel discussion and award ceremony entitled “The New City: Urbanization and the Arts” will be held in celebration of the exhibition on March 23, 2011, 4-7pm at William Paterson University’s Ben Shahn Gallery, 300 Pompton Rd, Wayne, NJ 07470. Newark Mayor Cory A. Booker will be honored for his leadership in education and the arts. See more information here.
The exhibition at Arts High School includes student work inspired by cWOW’s January 13, 2011 ArtReach lecture by Petrushka Bazin, Willie Cole and Noelle Lorraine Williams. Arts High, founded in 1931, is America’s first public high school for the visual and performing arts, and includes among its graduates such cultural icons as Sarah Vaughan, Savion Glover, and Wayne Shorter, as well as Willie Cole and many other notable artists.
All venues are free and open to the public.
Ms. Petrushka Bazin is an independent curator, arts administrator, and artist, currently Program Manager of the Laundromat Project and guest curator at Art in Odd Places. She has worked at The Kitchen, Studio Museum in Harlem and SFMOMA, with many curatorial projects including Miranda July and Harrell Fletcher’s Learning to Love You More in The Netherlands. Bazin’s degrees are from California College of the Arts (MA) and NYU (BFA).
For more information on another exhibition of Newark’s artists at Ramapo College, please visit here