The April Selection: 3 Artists We Love
BONNY LEIBOWITZ
Bonny Leibowitz’s work explores the inner workings of consciousness, the transitory nature of thought and the qualities and origin of their deeper essence. She utilizes a variety of materials, both natural and manufactured, in her work and installations including plaster, Latex, plastics, foam, wax, tree roots, bird wings, photography, mulberry bark, suspended paintings on paper and more. She has had solo exhibitions in Brooklyn, NY, Dallas, TX and Laguna Beach, CA. In 2019, her work was included in New American Paintings. Reviews and interviews of her work have been featured in Art Spiel, The Houston Review, Vassari21 and Maake Magazine.
“I’m interested in questioning the concept of stability and creating works and environments which might propose alternative realities. I’m making hybrid objects which can feel like detached parts, pieces of nature newly contextualized - somehow familiar, somehow unknown. I find working with a vast array of materials particularly engaging and challenging; realizing new connections and associations and new ways of exploring and seeing life. With the inability to exhibit my work due to Covid this past year, I started a new side project called The Visitation Project where artists can submit photos of spaces which I then photoshop my work into. It’s been a wonderful way to connect and everyone’s been sending great locations. You can see the work on my site in The Visitation project portfolio. Now that things are finally being rescheduled, a solo exhibition for my most recent body of work; “A Tear in the Universe” is slated for October 2021 at M. David and Co. in Brooklyn, NY. My on-going vision, is for the work to be realized in various locations; a beautiful gallery space, an industrial warehouse, a historic old building, an abandoned mansion, a castle or perhaps, as dreaming goes; alongside, and in response to, some Medieval work of art. I’m intrigued with the potential. I’d like to offer viewers a shift in experience, with each new setting.”
PAMELA J. BLACK
Pamela J. Black is an abstract painter who lives and works in a rural town outside of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. She received her BFA from Kutztown University of Pennsylvania and holds her Masters in Education, which she obtained while teaching art for five years. Black is currently represented by The Millworks in Harrisburg, which is a local and sustainable restaurant, brewery and art gallery with 17 artist studios. She spends her days with her two young children, while painting from her in-home studio during their nap time.
“I’ve always been inspired by and fascinated with color. The way one color can completely change when placed next to another really intrigues me. I’m interested in the way colors may appear to others and how they might symbolize something to one person and mean something completely different to another. However, my children are at the base of my inspiration through their sense of curiosity. They show me how to be carefree, spontaneous and how to be open to new experiences. Every time I start a new painting, I try to approach my canvas in a very intuitive way, which is greatly influenced by my children.”
LEE NOWELL-WILSON
Lee Nowell-Wilson (b. Easton, MD 1989) is an American figurative artist who builds autobiographical drawings that investigate the emotional and ambivalent undertones within birth, domestic labor and human relationship. She is currently living and working in Baltimore, MD, and earned her BFA in Painting from the Maryland Institute College of Art in 2011. Nowell-Wilson has participated in artist residencies with Stay Home Gallery in Paris, TN, Creative Paradox in Annapolis, MD, and the Street Art School in Lyon, France. Her work has exhibited nationally and internationally, most notably New York City and Scotland, and she has also completed urban art pieces in Norway, France, Northern Ireland and Chile. In 2019, she founded MILKED, an arts publication that features artwork by female artists investigating the maternal figure and form. Within the last year, her own work has featured in the second issue of Our Rhythms Our Blues online zine, Stay Home Gallery’s first publication and “Home-works”, a printed zine by Spilt Milk Gallery about artist-mothers in Quarantine. Other notable achievements include speaking on an artist panel hosted by Hamiltonian Gallery, D.C, about the “Maternal Creative Instinct”, being interviewed on the Artist/Mother Podcast, and receiving a Creativity Grant from the Maryland State Arts Council.
“My main inspiration, and why I do what I do, is my family and community. I constantly learn a new level of curiosity from my children, a new level of sacrifice and self-giving love from my husband, and a broader knowledge from my community that pushes me out of my own perspective. Relationship as a concept is deeply thought-provoking, inspirational and a source of fascination for me. For example, the way certain objects can only be understood through their relationship to another object, or how the true depth of a person’s labor is heightened when viewed through how it affects another person. Therefore, I’m extremely intune with the relationships in my life, and many of my actions, dreams or goals revolve around asking myself, “if I move this way, how will it affect the people surrounding me?” Within my art, that all manifests itself through fundamental elements of design, figurative composition and the objects my figures interact with. A goal within my work is to broaden the scope of detail, the number of figures in each piece and the depth of narrative. A personal goal for the next year is to sharpen my awareness of life’s bigger picture (not getting so much tunnel vision on one day, one project, one situation, etc). One dream is to connect with more established galleries and create massively large scale work for exhibitions! But then, to also remember to be patient within that timing and have the endurance to do the steady hard work.”
