Daily Art Fixx

Born in Brooklyn, New York in 1952, Rona Pondick studied at Yale University School of Art and received her MFA in 1977. She currently lives and works in New York City.

Pondick achieved international recognition in the early 1990s and since then has become one of the most accomplished sculptors of her generation.

“Over the past decade, she has combined both ancient sculptural methods and the latest 3-D computer technologies to produce a powerful group of sculptures that fuse human and animal bodies or human and flora forms. Pondick’s hybrids evoke compelling cultural parallels from the Egyptian sphinx and Ovid’s Metamorphoses to the disturbing promises of contemporary genetic manipulation.

I want to look at how sculpture is physical and how the physical makes psychological impact. Viewers have conscious and unconscious visceral responses to objects that they feel in their own bodies and that make psychological meaning. I am interested in looking at the way the psychological has been manifested in sculptures from all periods. When these different historic sculptures and mine are installed next to one another, there is a visual communication spoken in “body language” that needs little explanation. The sculptures start losing their historical place and take on more physical, emotional, and visceral relations with the viewer. Gestures and postures don’t translate solely into symbolic interpretations particular to a culture or time period. Otherwise, why would people look at historic work?”

Pondick’s work has been featured in solo and group exhibitions across the United states and abroad.  Her sculptures are in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, The Morgan Library & Museum, the Brooklyn Museum of Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, among others, and in prominent museums in France, Germany and Israel.  She has received numerous awards including a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship, a Mid-Atlantic Arts Grant and a Guggenheim Fellowship.

Pondick has lectured at many universities and institutions, including Harvard University, Yale University, Princeton University, Columbia University, the Museum of Modern Art (New York, NY), the Whitney Museum of American Art, Bezalel, Academy of Arts & Design Jerusalem (Jerusalem, Israel), and the Palais des Beaux Arts de Lille (Lille, France).

To see more of Rona Pondick’s work, visit RonaPondick.com.

Sources: Worcester Art Museum

Born in 1972, Del Kathryn Barton currently lives and works in Sydney, Australia. Barton has a Bachelor of Arts from the College of Fine Arts at the University of New South Wales where she has also lectured on drawing. Painting, sculpture and drawing are an integral part of Barton’s practice, drawing imagery from the human form and experience.

Since her first exhibition at Arthaus Gallery in Sydney in 1995, Barton has held several major solo shows as well as participating in numerous group exhibitions in Australia, New York, and Sao Paolo, Brazil.

Barton has been featured on the cover of Australian Art Collector and is listed as “Australia’s Most Collectible Australian Artist” by Australian Art Collector in 2007. Barton was awarded the Archibald Prize in 2008 and was a finalist in 2007.

For more information about Del Kathryn Barton, visit Karen Woodbury Gallery.

Born on June 15, 1917 in Brooklyn, New York, Lillian Bassman is considered to be one of the most important fashion photographers of the 20th century.

Bassman studied at the Textile High School in Manhattan, NY in 1933 and became an assistant painter at the WPA (Works Progress Administration) in 1934. In the 1940s, Bassman was working as a graphic designer when photographer Richard Avedon, a friend of her and her husband (Paul Himmel), encouraged her towards a career in photography.

Bassman’s most well known photos were taken from the late 1940s to the early 1960s and most were published in Harper’s Bazaar. During this time she also worked as an art director for Junior Bazaar and later for Harper’s Bazaar. At Harper’s Bazaar , “Bassman brought a sophisticated, new aesthetic to fashion photography with her elegant, moody, and often abstract images. Her work diverged from classic fashion photography in that she did not rely on beautiful models and clothes as the sole essence of her photographs.”

“Bassman’s experimental and romantic visions revolutionized fashion photography. Vanity Fair magazine singled her out as one of photography’s “grand masters. ‘Full of mystery, sensuality, and expressionistic glamour, Bassman’s dramatic black and white photographs capture secret moments and dream memories. Her work is elegant, graceful and totally original. Bassman’s unique images achieve their effect through darkroom manipulation, specifically by blurring and bleaching areas of the photographs.’”

By the 1970s, Bassman’s interest in “pure form” photography was at odds with the changing fashion industry.  She abandoned photography and turned back to painting, closing her studio for the next two decades.  She returned to photography in the early 1990s after a friend found a bag of Bassman’s negatives in storage. Bassman, who had always had an interest in the manipulation of photographs, began altering the pictures and bleaching out backgrounds, creating  dramatic effects.

At the age of 87, Bassman discovered PhotoShop and currently works daily in her studio “toying and reconfiguring” her photographs. “She claims a proud proficiency with her computer. It is a skill however that does not extend to the use of e-mail or Google. ” “I’m not interested,” she said, “in any of that.” (New York Times)

Sources: Farmani Gallery, New York Times

Related Books:
Lillian Bassman: Women
Lillian Bassman & Paul Himmel
The Model as Muse: Embodying Fashion

Sara Blake (aka ZSO) is an interactive art director, designer, and illustrator based in New York City. Blake graduated from New York University’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study with a concentration in Graphic Art and Postmodern Studies.

“ZSO (pronounced |zō|) is a collection of letters that I find aesthetically and phonetically beautiful. Together they make sound much like “so,” the adverb which means “to such a great extent.” I am a person of extremes, for better or worse (most often the latter), so the ring of it was fitting, and the moniker has since stuck for good.”

ZSO currently works at Euro RSCG where she focuses on digital design. By night, she also doubles as an illustrator for clients including Yen Magazine, The KDU, and Koko & Me. Blake is having her first solo gallery show at Friends of Leon Gallery in Sydney, Australia, in September 2010.

To see more of Sara Blake’s work, visit HelloZSO.com.

“Jennybird Alcantara is an artist living in San Francisco CA. She received her BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute. The majority of her work is oil paintings on wood but she also creates art dolls inspired by her paintings and acrylic works on paper. Her work has at its core a dreamlike narrative and through her paintings she contemplates the complex interconnectedness of opposites as seen through the prism of myth, fable and fantasy. Jennybird uses the symbolism of duality to explore the connection of life and death and the veil in between, as well as the relationship between the beauty and cruelness of nature, that of the natural world as well as human and animal nature. The anthropomorphic qualities in her characters show the relationship of the central figure to the world she inhabits.

Jennybird’s work has been exhibited broadly in the US and Europe. Her work has been published in the Hi Fructose Box Edition Set, Ideafixa Greatest Hits, The Age of Feminine Drawing, several small publications as well as Hi Fructose, Juxtapoz , Raw Vision and Art Doll Quarterly magazines.” (bio from artist website)

To see more of Alacantara’s work, visit JennyBirdArt.com.