Currently Browsing: Debra Thimmesch
For artist Camille Eskell, the fez is laden with potent, personal symbolic meaning as vast as its far-reaching mix of geographical and socio-cultural connotations.
“I often use the fez cap,” she elucidates, “as a structural base for storytelling to signify the foundation, and the patriarchal base, established by both my grandfathers…”
Her grandfathers, resourceful patriarchs of an Iraqi Jewish family, were transplants to Bombay (present-day Mumbai) three generations ago.… read more.
Kenojuak Ashevak once told an interviewer that she aimed to make viewers happy with her colorful prints and drawings, a modest aspiration for an artist who has been referred to as a “national treasure” in Canada. Kenojuak rose to prominence in the late 1950s with her experimental printmaking, which seemed to white audiences in Southern Canada to be emblematic of the Inuit artistic aesthetic.… read more.
Photographer Spandita Malik has produced at least three portraits of Parween Devi. In each instance, the latter has been a partner in the creative process, contributing her expert needlework. In a portrait in Spandita’s Vadhu: The Embroidered Bride series, Parween sits for her bridal portrait in a plastic chair in front of a cabinet which holds an older-model television.… read more.
What better place to challenge doggedly heteronormative and white narratives of the American West than in Denver (CO), a city that instantaneously conjures romantic images of the free-wheeling, lawless, and emphatically heroic, white, and male Wild West?
Denver-based, queer artist Kenzie Sitterud’s exhibition From, Dawn at Denver’s Leon Art Gallery was that proverbial burr under the saddle of conventional Wild West mythology.… read more.
Brooklyn artist Lesley Dill was intrigued by the experiences of early settlers who attempted to traverse and put down roots in the American wilderness. As she began researching, she uncovered dramatic stories of European immigrants who, she explains, “were afraid of the wilderness out there surrounding them and the wilderness inside them.” … read more.
Diné (Navajo) artist Melanie Yazzie’s multimedia collages in the group exhibition, agriCULTURE: Art Inspired by the Land, at the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art (BMoCA), evoke an imaginary world whose story has been told via an ancient-seeming pictographic language.
The backgrounds of Yazzie’s panels are mostly dark and gestural, providing a dynamic setting for the combined objects, textures, and materials.… read more.