Peter Voulkos and the Ceramics Revolution of the 1950s

By Charles Kessler

As I noted in a recent post, ceramics, as an art medium rather than a utilitarian craft, has become popular with artists. In fact, discarding functionality for the more purely aesthetic or expressive is happening to all the applied arts: textiles, glass, graphic design. I've even seen jewelry and fashion that's so wildly outlandish it really isn't intended for ordinary wear.

There's a history in the evolution of ceramics that can put this phenomenon in context and enrich our understanding of it. Clay has long been used as a medium for sculpture – prehistoric figurines, Japanese Haniwa, Greek vases, etc..  But for whatever reason, ceramics was shunned as a medium for sculpture during much of the past few centuries. It was considered a craft – an applied art limited by the requirement that it produce something functional, like a plate or a vessel of some sort. As a craft, it was considered inferior to fine art.

The Bauhaus improved matters a bit by treating ceramics, and the other applied arts, with the same respect as fine art. Nevertheless, it was assumed that ceramics, along with the other crafts, would serve a utilitarian purpose.

Johannes Drisch, breakfast service, 1921-22, free thrown high-fired earthenware with slip decoration (private collection, included in MoMA exhibition, Bauhaus 1919-1933, Workshops for Modernity),

Peter Voulkos was the first person to radically change a craft medium into a viable art medium, some seventy-five years ago. Few people have had such an impact on an art medium as Voulkos, both as an innovator and as an inspiring teacher.

Peter Voulkos in his Glendale Blvd. studio with Black Butte-Divide, 1959.

When I came to Los Angeles in 1965, Voulkos and his students John Mason, Ken Price and others at the Otis Art Institute (they were typically referred to as the "Abstract Expressionist Ceramicists"), were regularly exhibited in major galleries and museums, but almost no notice was taken in the rest of the world, including New York. And, with the notable exception of Ken Price, it’s still pretty much the case.

Installation view, Ken Price Sculpture - A Retrospective, September 16, 2012 - January 6, 2013, (Los Angeles County Museum of Art, © Ken Price.  Photo © Fredrik Nilsen).

I believe this is about to change. The fact is, Voulkos is relevant today for the influence, direct or indirect, he's having on many vital young artists.

Until recently, Voulkos's sculptures looked dated, like a lot of the Abstract Expressionist sculpture of this period. Rather than being colorful, polished and relatively minimal like the ceramic sculptures of Ken Price, Voulkos' work looks rough, handmade – what is referred to today (in a good way) as "sloppy craft."  Also there is an emphasis on surface texture and materiality in his work.

Peter Voulkos, Little Big Horn, 1959, polychromed stoneware, 62 x 40 x 40 inches (Oakland Museum of California).

These are just the things that interest some of the most adventurous artists today. In contrast to the over-produced, highly polished art commonly found in Chelsea, there's a refreshing authenticity about handmade art. There's also a growing interest in surface and materiality (perhaps from a discontent with video). You can see evidence of these trends in Bushwick – one of the most vital art scenes in the world right now. (See my posts on Bushwick Open Studios here and here.) And Voulkos has had a direct influence, in this respect, on many important young ceramic artists, Sterling Ruby, Kathy Butterly, Nicole Cherubini, Arlene Shechet, Jessica Jackson Hutchins among them.

Installation view, Arlene Shechet, solo exhibition at Sikkema Jenkins & Co., 2013. 

Jessica Jackson Hutchins, Couple, 2010, couch, ink spray paint, charcoal dust, hydrocal, ceramic, 52 x 67 x 38 inches (Derek Eller Gallery).

Sterling Ruby, Basic Theology, 2013, ceramic, 20 ½ x 42 ¾ x 44 inches.

So what about Voulkos? What in particular did he do that was so revolutionary?

His major artistic breakthrough, in the early 1950s, was to create abstract ceramic sculptures from parts of wheel-thrown pots; that is, to build ceramic assemblage sculptures rather than monolithic vessels. He thereby not only broke away from the utilitarian, but he was no longer limited by what could be thrown on a wheel in one shot.

Peter Voulkos, Untitled, 1956, stoneware, 20 x 14 x 15 inches.

Later Voulkos innovated the use of epoxy glue rather than kiln firing to join parts, and epoxy paints along with colored glazes to add color to the sculptures.

Peter Voulkos, Red River, ca. 1960, stoneware with slip, glaze and epoxy paint,  37 x 12 ½ x 14 ½ inches (Whitney Museum). 

The other big innovation, large-scale ceramic sculpture, Voulkos developed with John Mason, one of his older and more advanced students. They shared a studio from 1957 until 1965 when Voulkos moved to Berkeley. (Update: See Frank Lloyd's clarification in the comments section below.) With the advice of Mike Kalan, a ceramics engineer, they built two industrial-size kilns capable of firing sculptures up to six feet high.

Peter Voulkos and John Mason in their shared studio, late 1950s.

In addition to being a great innovator, Voulkos was an inspiring teacher and, with his students, he spawned the "Abstract Expressionist Ceramics" movement. He was sociable, charismatic, rebellious and extraordinarily energetic. He was about the same age as his students, and he treated them more like colleagues than pupils. He worked alongside them and they exchanged techniques and ideas. Most important, since all Voulkos's students came from the crafts world, he introduced them into the fine arts world, and to the different intentions and values of that world.

As a group they were hard-working, collaborative and highly competitive – but they were also independent and, to Voulkos' credit as a teacher, they all made very different ceramic art. (The term "Abstract Expressionist Ceramics" really only applies to Voulkos and the early work of John Mason. Later Mason became more of a Minimalist making highly refined constructivist tile walls and abstract sculptures.)

Installation view, John Mason, ceramic, 2014 Whitney Biennial.

In addition to Ken Price and John Mason, the other Abstract Expressionist Ceramicists incude: Billy Al Bengston, Michael Frimkess, Mac McClain, Jerry Rothman, Paul Soldner, and Henry Takemoto. And in 1959, when Voulkos moved to the University of California at Berkeley, James Melchert and Ron Nagle came under his influence.



* I'm grateful to my friend Ken Garber who loaned me his informative unpublished 1973 thesis about these artists. It helped put their achievement in context.

***

ADDENDUM: 

To prevent this post from getting clogged up, I heavily edited it. Here are some of the things I left out. Feel free to skip it if you want!

Publications about this art and period. Not many good ones, but here are two: 

• the 2012 catalog for a Scripps College exhibition entitled Clay’s Tectonic Shift; 
• and online, there is an article by Garth Clark, and several posts in the  Frank Lloyd Blog.

More on the visibility of these artists in New York – or lack thereof:

• John Mason had three sculptures and a ceramic wall in the 2014 Whitney Biennial, and the Whitney has a large collection of California ceramics — the Howard and Jean Lipman Collection – but they hardly ever show it, and none of it is on their website. (Update: See Frank Lloyd's clarification in the comments section below.)
• The Museum of Modern Art lists no work on their extensive website by Mason or Peter Voulkos, and only four minor lithographs by Ken Price – no ceramics. I contacted MoMA to find out if they owned work that wasn't on their site, and they said they had a Voulkos vase from 1956, and nothing by Mason.

Peter Voulkos, Jar, ca. 1956, stoneware, 22 inches high (MoMA).

• The Metropolitan Museum of Art lists some 400,000 works on their website including more than one thousand ceramic works from 1900 to the present, but nothing by Voulkos, Mason or even Price who was just given a major retrospective there. The Met did have a show of some work by Voulkos and Mason in 1998 as part of a small contemporary ceramics exhibition installed in a glass display case on the Great Hall Balcony. Not the most prestigious space, but it's something – and they continue to occasionally exhibit contemporary ceramics there.
• There are a few museums that seriously collect and exhibit ceramics: the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Carnegie Museum of Art, in Pittsburgh, and the Hirschhorn Museum in Washington D.C..

Hedges and provisos:

• Of course, there have been exceptions to the functionality requirement, such as Gauguin's disturbing stoneware sculpture that made me gasp every time I saw it at the recent Gauguin exhibition at MoMA. It's difficult to see in reproduction, and not easy in person either, but at her feet is a bloody wolf that she probably killed, and she’s holding a wolf cub – probably the cub of the dead wolf. This was Gauguin's last sculpture, and his biggest. He considered it his masterpiece and wanted it placed on his tomb.

Front, back and close-up views of Paul Gauguin’s Oviri (Savage), 1894, partly enameled stoneware, 29 1/2 x 7 1/2 x 10 5/8 inches (Musée d'Orsay, Paris).

• And needless to say, there's nothing wrong with craft ceramics; in fact, all of the ceramicists discussed here continued to make functional objects their entire careers. And, of course, some of the greatest, most breathtakingly beautiful art in the world is functional.

Unknown artist, Qing dynasty vase, 1713-22, porcelain with peach-bloom glaze, 7 ¾ inches high (Metropolitan Museum of Art).

Influences and inspirations for the ceramics revolution:

• In 1954, when Voulkos still considered himself a craftsman, Rosanjin, a well-known Japanese ceramicist, had an exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) that impressed Voulkos because the work was less refined than traditional pottery. Rosanjin's Zen aesthetic allowed for more chance and improvisation in the making, and for asymmetry and imperfection in the end product. In addition, even though Rosanjin continued to make functional vessels, he repudiated the craft tradition and declared himself a fine artist.

Rosanjin, Jar, 1954, 8 ½ inches high.

• Joan Miró worked with ceramics in 1947-48 and again in 1953-56, and Voulkos saw some at a 1959 Miró exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA).

Joan Miró, Monument,1956, earthenware, 28 1/4 x 12 3/4 x 12 3/4 inches (courtesy of the Chazen Museum of Art, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Terese and Alvin S. Lane Collection).

• Especially influential were the ceramics of Picasso who made a mind-boggling 2000 ceramic pieces in 1947-48, and even more in 1953.

Pablo Picasso with some of his painted ceramic works at his studio at Vallauris.

• They were impressed that Picasso and Miró didn't stop after the pot was thrown, but continued working on it, manipulating it, cutting it, and using the clay surface as a medium to paint on. And just the fact that artists with the stature of Picasso and Miro (and, BTW, Fernand Leger) made ceramics lent credibility to the medium as a fine art.

• But perhaps the biggest impact on Voulkos was the time he taught at Black Mountain College (BMC) in the summer of 1953, then a hotbed of experimental art activity. Because Voulkos was naturally sociable, he quickly became friends with many of the other teachers, especially the poet Charles Olson, the composer David Tudor and the painter Jack Tworkov with whom Voulkos traded work. He also met Robert Rauschenberg, Merce Cunningham, and John Cage whose performances profoundly impressed him. And Voulkos spent time in New York where he hung out at the Cedar Bar and befriended Franz Kline and many of the other Abstract Expressions. 

Two small but possibly significant details:

• Voulkos pinned black and white photos of Picasso’s ceramics to his studio wall as inspiration for himself his students. They thought the work in these photos was more brightly colored and bigger than they actually were, which is significant since that might be one reason they ended up producing larger and more colorful ceramics.

• In an interview reported in Clay’s Tectonic Shift, Ken Price said: "We thought we were pretty hot stuff until we saw him. ... Voulkos was capable of an almost inhuman capacity – he made fifteen pieces to everyone else’s one.”  

Some other Abstract Expressionist Ceramicists:

• John Mason, the other great innovator, experimented with the properties of clay, pushing it to its technical limits of thickness, size and weight. He did away with the throwing wheel altogether and instead he would slam large hunks of clay to the floor, mold them, join them together, cut them up into smaller sections that could be fired without exploding, and, after firing, join them together again into large ceramic walls. This was as close to "Abstract Expressionist Ceramics" as it ever got.

John Mason working on Blue Wall, 1959 (Photo from Frank Lloyd's blog).

John Mason, Blue Wall, 1959, ceramic, 96 x 252 x 8 inches (collection of the artist. Photo by Anthony Cuñha). 

• Ken Price, whom I just wrote about here, is closer to the Los Angeles “Cool School,”

Ken Price, G.L. Green, 1964, fired and painted clay on a wood base, 6 1/4 x 5 x 5 inches, Betty Lee and Aaron Stern Collection © Ken Price (from Ken Price, A Retrospective at the Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas, 2013).

• as is Ron Nagle.

Ron Nagle, Red and Turquoise Knob Job, 1984, glazed earthenware, 2 ⅞ x 4 ¼ x 2 ¼ inches (de Young Museum, San Francisco).

The others were (and are) all over the place from Pop to Funk to traditional craft pottery.

Michael Frimkess, Jumpin' at the Moon Lodge, 1968, glazed stoneware, no size noted (Scripps College Collection).

Jerry Rothman, Covered Olympic Vessel, ca. 1984, glazed earthenware with colored oxides in sand, 32 ½ x 11 inches.

UPDATE: The Los Angeles Times just published an obituary for Jerry Rothman.

And finally, my pet peeve about Los Angeles artists of this period:

• While the Abstract Expressionist Ceramicists considered themselves artists, they identified with blue collar workers and affected an anti-intellectual, macho, pose. This, unfortunately, set the tone for future LA art groups like the Ferus Gallery artists (below), the “Cool School,” and, to some degree, even the 1980s Cal Arts graduates. It was common for them to say things that used to infuriate me like "I don't look at art (or read about art), I just make it," as if they were proud of it. (Fortunately this wasn't true of most LA artists — my friends Ron Davis, Charles Garabedian, Karen Carson, Robin Mitchell, Allan McCollum, Pat Hogan and Peter Plagens among them.)

The Ferus Gallery Artists, 1959; from Left: John Altoon, Craig Kauffman, Allen Lynch, Ed Kienholz, Ed Moses, Robert Irwin, Billy Al Bengston (photo: Patricia Faure).

• Probably due to this macho ethos, the only women ceramicists I found even alluded to during this period were Susan Peterson, who taught Mason the craft of ceramics before he went to Otis, and two full-time ceramics students at Otis – Carol Radcliff and Janice Roosevelt. But I've never seen any mention of them in relation to Abstract Expressionist Ceramics.

A Culture-Filled Week in Jersey City

By Charles Kessler

No sooner had I recovered from Bushwick Open Studios when Jersey City, my home base, came on gangbusters with a week of visual art, theater, opera, pop and classical music and modern dance. All of it, at least everything I saw, of a high professional caliber; and everything was free or cheap!

Earlier in the week, at the Mana Art Center, I saw:

a major Milton Resnick retrospective (until August 1st);

a large exhibition of atypical work, at least work I never saw before, by Judy Chicago;

Judy Chicago: on the right is In the Beginning, 1982; and straight ahead is The Holocaust Project: From Darkness into Light, 1985-93.

a rare exhibition of all 26 of Picasso's typically masterful etchings he did to illustrate La Tauromaquia (The Art of Bullfighting), by José Delgado (until August 1st); and

I'm sorry to say, a pretty thin exhibition of contemporary art, All The Best Artists Are My Friends, Part 1 (until August 1st), curated by artist Ray Smith in the Mana Glass Gallery. It's worth the trip, though, just to see this extraordinary 50,000 SF exhibition space designed by starchitect Richard Meier (who has a collection of his building models at Mana).

Installation view of less than half of the exhibition All The Best Artists Are My Friends, Part 1.

Also at Mana, but on another day, I saw a quirky new play by E. J. C. Calvert called "COMMIT," (it ended June 7th). I loved the dark humor and absurd situations that yielded insight into human interactions.  The play was expertly presented by Art House Productions, Jersey City's dynamic and energetic visual and performing arts nonprofit – I love them. More on them next.

"COMMIT" directed by Mason Beggs and staring Evie Freeman, Eleanor Handley, Terence MacSweeny, David Riley, and Kit Vogelsang (photo from The Hudson Reporter).

***

Friday Art House Productions organized one of their quarterly day-long series of events (I counted 47 of them this time) called JC Fridays. They were spread out all over Jersey City, but I could only make it to a few of them in Downtown Jersey City. There were many excellent shows, but the highlight for me was the opening of the Village West Gallery.

Opening reception of the Village West Gallery, 331 Newark Avenue, Jersey City.

This inaugural exhibition had an impressive group of artists: Jill Alexander, Joe Chirchirillo, Jessica Dalrymple, Robinson Holloway, Valeri Larko, Chris Manis, and Pamela Talese. And they served the best guacamole and chips I ever ate – certainly a good sign for the future of the gallery!

Many bars and restaurants had Pop music, but the only venue I was able to go to was Groove on Grove, a popular series of outdoor concerts in the Grove PATH Plaza that is supported by the Historic Downtown Special Improvement District. It was moved to Friday from its usual Wednesday to be part of JC Fridays.

The Shayfer James Band playing at Groove on Grove.

Oh, earlier in the day there was one other JC Fridays highlight:

The Powerhouse Arts District, Jersey City. This was NOT photoshopped! 

***

Saturday night was a grand production of selections from three Mozart operas presented by Liberty State Opera, a new opera company.

Two standing ovations for the Magic of Mozart.

The four singers (tenor, Aaron Blankfield; baritone, Kevin Miller; and sopranos, Marie Putko and Molly Dunn, who also directed it) and the pianist (Peihard Chen) were all in authentic period dress (provided by James Crochet). I expected the singing to be good (and it was even better than that), but the staging, acting and costumes far exceeded my wildest expectations. And it was thrilling to see a first-rate opera production in such an intimate setting – the lobby of the Majestic, an old movie palace sadly left to ruin and now everything but the lobby demolished.

***

Also under the heading of great music in an intimate setting, last night (Sunday) Con Vivo, a Jersey City based chamber music group, presented their fifth annual Bach concert in the Barrow Mansion. The evening- length concert was performed by: Amelia Hollander Ames, viola and violin; Jing Li, cello; Dan Lippel, guitar; and Zach Herchen, saxophone – all experienced professional musicians. Guitar and saxophone might be odd instruments for Bach, but it worked beautifully.

Con Vivo's 2014 Bach concert, Barrow Mansion. 

***

Finally this afternoon I experienced what might be the ultimate in intimate art: a pas de deux in front of a local cafe. This was the first of a series of such dances, called Table for Two, that will be presented by Meagan Woods & Company. 

Meagan Woods and Kyle Marshal dancing in front of Choc O Pain, 530 Jersey Avenue in Downtown Jersey City.

They'll do it once more tomorrow (June 10th) between noon and 1pm, and Thursday, at the Warehouse Cafe, 140 Bay Street, also from noon to 1pm. Try to see them – it's a sweet and charming dance.

Phew, what a week!

Bushwick Open Studios, 2014 – Day Two of Two

By Charles Kessler

The highlights of day two – Sunday. I went to more spaces than I did on Saturday, but I often got so wrapped up in conversations that I forgot to take pictures again. Sorry.

Gili Levy, 119 Ingraham Street.

Gili Levy told me a well-known painter advised her to stop working on the blue/green painting because it was finished. Artists usually hate that, but in this case Levy was open to it, and I think it was for the best. The blue areas left on the outer part of the painting push the images forward and allow the painting to breathe more.

Bushwick Daily's sage advice columnist and artist (she recently had a sharp-witted exhibition at Auxiliary Projects), Dr. Lisa Levy SP (self-proclaimed), sat in front of 56 Bogart acknowledging people for whatever they wanted recognition for. Last year she posed as a granny sitting in a rocking chair and offered to let people sit in her lap and be comforted; I tried it, and, to my surprise, I felt comforted! Sorry no photo.

Real on Rock Street, Rock Street between Bogart Street and Morgan Avenue. The colorful styrene foam sculpture in front is Half a Dozen Macaroons, 2013, by Daisuke Kiyamiya.

Real on Rock Street, a twelve-artist sculpture exhibition, was installed on a one-block private street owned by Frank Brunckhorst Company, a Boar's Head distributor. Last year and this they opened the street to the public for a sculpture exhibition curated by Bushwick artist/gallerist Deborah Brown (Storefront Ten Eyck) and LES gallerist Lesley Heller.

Henry Sanchez, English Kills Project, Chico's Laundromat, 996 Flushing Avenue. 

For the second year, former (and sorely missed) Jersey City artist Henry Sanchez screened his videos in this laundromat. This year the work was particularly relevant to Bushwick – and poignant. The video is a semi-documentary about English Kills, a hidden (by high fences and buildings) and very polluted waterway in the northwestern part of the BOS tour area (part of English Kills is across the street from 195 Morgan). The refreshingly well-made video shows the beauty and heartbreaking contamination of English Kills in all seasons. You can see the 12 minute video here.

Secret Project Robot, 389 Melrose Avenue.

Over the past few years I've tried visiting Secret Project Robot about six times, and they've always been closed when they were supposed to be open. But they were open for BOS, and I'm glad I finally got to see their sprawling space and their large, high-fenced garden that they decked out like a Renaissance Faire for BOS.

Site-specific installation by Leeza Meksin, Airplane Gallery, 70 Jefferson Street.

Airplane's basement gallery was bisected by layers of gorgeous fabrics, many of them nets, that viewers were encouraged to touch. I've seen a lot of art related to clothing over the years, but the sensitive arrangement of contrasting materials, the beauty of the colors and the tactility of the fabrics made this show different, more dramatic.

Sculpture by Brent Owens and paintings by Ben Coode-Adams, Wayfarers Gallery, 1109 Dekalb Avenue.

Brent Owens's trompe-l'oeil wood sculptures and reliefs were a hit when he showed them on Beat Nite at the English Kills Gallery, and this work, at the Wayfarers Gallery, was equally convincing.

Meryl Meisler, A Tale of Two Cities: Disco Era Bushwick, Black Box Gallery, 12 Jefferson Street. 

Ahh, the bad old days! Meryl Meisler captures seventies and early eighties Bushwick and Manhattan in this exhibition and in the accompanying book (which I bought – it was also a book launch). Meisler is justly admired and beloved by artists in Bushwick in good part because she's been there photographing the scene since 1981 – that is, since before many of them were born.

Vincent Romaniello, 513 Johnson Avenue.

I saw one of Vincent Romaniello's paintings at Centotto Gallery Saturday and was so impressed by the economy of means and casual rawness of his painting that I went by his studio. Romaniello's work is deceptively offhand and simple. It takes masterful painting ability to turn lines in space, activate the negative space, create a sense of light and airiness, and fill a contour with energy, as the outside shape of his paintings do so well. AND the work is joyously playful.

I also saw excellent shows at Microscope and Outlet Galleries. I forgot to take photos, but you can see some on their websites. Microscope, 4 Charles Place, had Soap, a 16 mm film by Bushwick artist Matt Town about the building of a soapbox car and test-driving it through Town's neighborhood. It doesn't sound like much, but there was something about the roof-top filming and other shots that made the film compelling throughout. The show also had an installation that included the soapbox car, transformed into a projection booth that played the film.

I'm really sorry I didn't get a photo of Alan Kleinberg's photography show, Out All Night at Outlet Gallery because it went so well with Meryl Meisler's work. Both photographers document the seventies New York downtown scene, Kleinberg's a bit heavier on the art scene. BTW, on June 6th, Outlet, in collaboration with Norte Maar, is opening what promises to be a impressive show: Arshile Gorky and a selection of contemporary drawings.

So that's it. I'm sure I left out plenty of shows I liked – and of course I missed a lot. To finish in the proper spirit, I'll leave you with this:

Jason Andrew at his annual "Maps-N-Mimosa" kickoff party, Norte Maar Gallery, 83 Wyckoff Avenue.

Bushwick Open Studios – Day One of Two

By Charles Kessler

This will be a chronological, mainly photographic, record of my highlights – I saw so much that it would take weeks to write about it in any detail. I sometimes got so wrapped up in conversation, or so involved with the art, that I forgot to take photos. In those cases, I'll provide a link if one is available.

This was a big tour. About 600 artists were included, and, in addition to the open studios, there were group exhibitions, performances, installations, panel discussions and, for R&R, a plethora of new good inexpensive bars and restaurants spread out over the area. And, of course, there were scores of parties before, after and during the tour. My one quibble is the BOS 2014 iPhone app didn't provide a way to select out and save the places you wanted to go to, that is, create a favorites list – but the printed guide was particularly impressive this year.

Jason Andrew at his annual "Maps-N-Mimosa" kickoff party, Norte Maar Gallery, 83 Wyckoff Avenue.

Jason Andrew is the main reason Bushwick is such a collegial art scene – and every one of the many Bushwick people I proposed this to agreed. He is gifted at bringing people together, supportive of their efforts, and his energy is infectious. He is an impresario in the best sense. He curates major exhibitions, produces dances (including the upcoming Dance at Socrates); and he organizes lectures, poetry readings and the Beat Nite tour of galleries.

Andrew is also one of the directors of Outlet Gallery, and he co-founded (with choreographer Julia K. Gleich, another supportive person) the non-profit Norte Maar, the oldest apartment gallery in Bushwick. Norte Maar's "Maps-N-Mimosa" was a perfect place to meet my friends, pick up copies of the BOS 2014 guide, and start the tour off right with mimosas, coffee and pastries.

On view at Norte Maar was Jason Andrew's private collection of work by Bushwick artists (see what I mean by supportive) including Paul D'Agostino, Kevin Curran, Ryan Michael Ford, Ben Godward, Cooper Holoweski, Andrew Hurst, Ellen Lechter, Amy Lincoln, Kristen Jensen, Brooke Moyse, Rico Gatson and new work by Norman Jabaut.

Patricia Satterlee, 117 Grattan Street.

Patricia Satterlee's studio was the first studio I went to. I figured it was a good place to begin since I've liked her work in the past. As it happened, her newest painting turned out to be my favorite work in all of BOS 2014. (I'm not counting Joyce Robins's ceramics, which I wrote about here, because they're at the THEODORE:Art Gallery and so not technically in BOS.) This is the first painting Satterlee made after recovering from shoulder surgery, and it seems like all those months of bottled up energy, and all those ideas were just poured into it. This is the kind of masterful painting that looks simple, but it's done with a large body of hard-earned painting knowledge.

Björn Meyer-Ebrecht's Communal Table, 1182 Flushing Avenue.

Sculptor Björn Meyer-Ebrecht brought together the work of a dozen other sculptors and sensitively arranged them in his studio on this exquisite table that he made (it looks like a colorful floor in the photo, but it's raised a few feet off the ground).

Rob Zeller, 117 Grattan Street.

Zeller's past paintings were beautiful, but fairly academic portraits. He's stretching a bit in this new work, and I think he may be on to something.

Jersey City based Shua Group does installations and movement-oriented performance. I recently wrote about one of their installations here. They had two beautiful and profound installations on Grattan Street, around the corner from 56 Bogart where the biggest BOS crowds were. Black Igloo (below) was dark inside, but a small hole on top created a bright beam of light; if someone else entered, more light would flicker in. People entering on their hands and knees would bump into other people until their eyes adjusted to the dark, and they would grope their way toward the back where there was a block of ice in a pool of water that surprised and delighted them. The environment felt like a place for holy rituals; there was something of the primitive and archetypal about it.

Shua Group, Black Igloo, on the street across from the Pine Box Rock Shop, 12 Grattan Street.

In apparent reference to ecological excess, co-director (with Joshua Bisset) Laura Quattrocchi was buried in plastic bottles (see below).

Shua Group, Poolastic, on the street across from the Pine Box Rock Shop, 12 Grattan Street.

When the pool was full, Quattrocchi "swam" to the surface, and other members of the Shua Group cannonballed in creating a great splash of plastic bottles and a lot of excitement from the crowd. The public was encouraged to jump in and "swim" around.

Shua Group, Poolastic, on the street across from the Pine Box Rock Shop, 12 Grattan Street.

Legend Anew, a group show at Centotto Gallery, 250 Moore Street. 

Centotto is an apartment gallery run by another supportive Bushwick impresario – Paul D'Agostino, Ph.D. He is a brilliant artist/curator/writer/poet/translator/athlete (did I miss anything?). This exhibition included work from about forty artists mainly from Bushwick. The dark horizontal painting in the middle is an early work by Fred Valentine (who recently received a much deserved Guggenheim), and it's a real beauty.

Jeanne Tremel's installation in her studio, the Brooklyn Fire Proof building, 119 Ingraham Street.

I've admired the work of Jeanne Tremel (above) and her husband Eliot Markell (below), and I've been following it for several years. I wasn't disappointed at this studio visit. Both have pushed their art along, exploring new things and renewing old directions. In September, Jeanne Tremel, I'm pleased to say, will be doing an installation in Jersey City at the Drawing Rooms. 

Eliot Markell sculptures in his studio, the Brooklyn Fire Proof building, 119 Ingraham Street.

I didn't stay for all of Being Bushwick, the BOS performance art showcase, but what I saw, except for the dancer in the photo above, who's name wasn't available, I was disappointed in. I found it amateurish, frankly. 

Being Bushwick, Performance Art Showcase, 195 Morgan Avenue. 

195 Morgan, the former 3rd Ward space, had an enormous exhibition, Do It Yourself, actually ten separate exhibitions with a total of more than 60 artists, that was curated by different people from across the country. I'm sorry to say that by this time I was fried, and my eyes felt like they were floating in my head. I scanned the shows unable to appreciate anything, and I took no photos. Sorry.

BUT Brooklyn Brewery provided beer, and a restaurant in the building, Fitzcarraldo (see photo below) provided free barbecued chicken. I was able to have a much needed R&R before I headed home.