My master’s thesis research on abstract painter Agnes Martin was supported by a travel grant from the History of Art Department, University of York. The outcomes of this grant and my thesis included an exhibition review, two conference presentations, and a roundtable discussion.
Author: Bea Huff Hunter
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Research Preparation Award, Arts and Humanities Research Council
My master’s degree in the history of art was fully supported by a Research Preparation Award from the Arts and Humanities Research Council.
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Tiona Nekkia McClodden: Af·fixing Ceremony: Four Movements for Essex (Institute of Contemporary Art)
Philadelphia-based artist Tiona McClodden presented a new online project for Day With(out) Art, commemorating celebrated African-American poet Essex Hemphill on the twentieth anniversary of his death from AIDS complications in Philadelphia, where he was a crucial member of the city’s creative community.
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Pathography
Pathography is a winding path of a word.
There’s a growing body of work on
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The Everybody Ekphrastic Audio Tour (Vox Populi)
3-Part Writing and Audio Workshop by Levi Bentley, Bea Huff Hunter and Matt Kalasky
Presented as part of Just In Time: 30 Years of Collective PracticeWorkshop Schedule
Sunday, May 5, 2019 | 2-4 PM | Public writing workshop
Sunday, May 12, 2019 | 2-4 PM | Public writing workshop
Sunday, May 19, 2019 | 2-4 PM | Public writing workshop
Friday, June 7, 2019 | First Friday Opening | Debut of Audio TourContribute your experience, words, and voice to create a community-generated audio tour for Just In Time: 30 Years of Collective Practice.
Drop in to the gallery for a writing workshop facilitated by poet Levi Bentley, critic Bea Huff Hunter, and artist Matt Kalasky who will guide you to write, think, and feel your way through the art on view with activities that use movement and conversation to break down barriers around feelings of access and prioritize your experience and connection with the work. You’ll write a personal response or poem to an artwork that speaks to you, and (if you choose) record a reading of your piece that will be made into an audio tour accompanying the exhibition.
No special knowledge of art is required, just openness and curiosity. The self-guided audio tour debuts June 7 at our First Friday event, and will be kick-offed with a special live walking audio tour event, featuring readings from workshop participants. The audio tour will remain open to the public till the exhibition ends on June 23.
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From writer to artist: my journey through illness into creativity and hope
A British-American artist, I trained at top art schools in London and New York. I worked for art magazines, galleries, and museums until a long-term illness interrupted my career in communications. In convalescence, learning macrame and weaving offered joy. Now, I share this meditative, healing, and deeply human practice with you through my handcrafted pieces.
My story
After earning a degree in fine art at Chelsea College of Arts, London (which has a beautiful courtyard opposite the Tate Gallery), I focused for more than a decade on arts writing: working for international art magazines, museums, and galleries. And I supported professional artists’ careers through communications and grant-writing.
Yet, that longing to live a more creative life never left me—and I continued to hone my craft through studio classes at the Royal Drawing School, London; the Cooper Union, New York; and the Weitzman School of Design at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia.
A year ago, my doctor diagnosed me with a complex long-term illness. It unraveled my world. I used to run, but now I shuffle. A professional communicator, now I can’t always “follow the threads” of my own thoughts or “string together” words into sentences. With tough new physical and cognitive disabilities, I had to re-imagine my future.
Fiber art saved me. It’s slow, meditative, and joyful. Weaving and knotting with soft, strong (sustainably sourced) cotton cords, my hands follow and fold, tie and smooth, as I make deeply human, tactile artworks that invite contemplation.
Now, you’re invited to share in this hopeful story: to follow the threads and discover a work of art that can help you slow down and create a meditative space in your home. I’d love to hear from you if you need help deciding, or to create a bespoke piece.
Warmly,
Bea -
“Brighter Later,” Rebekah Callaghan, Gross McCleaf, Philadelphia (Two Coats of Paint)
“I think I’ve been making the same painting for a long time and it just keeps ending in a different place at a different point,” Rebekah Callaghan told painter Aubrey Levinthal in a 2015 interview in Title Magazine. The conversation focused on Callaghan’s process of working from her immediate surroundings – her home studio and the garden of potted plants that she tends there. Now, four years later, she continues to cultivate and expand upon this familiar material to make layered, luminous botanical paintings that invite sustained looking. Walking from one deft, concise painting to the next in her current exhibition “Brighter Later,” at Gross McCleaf in Philadelphia, the groupings of new works constitute a coherent series exploring variations of light, color, shape, and texture on a single theme.
Installed in a row, the modestly sized paintings Silver Mound (2018), Sandy Bottom (2018), and Little Jewel (2019) are each built of layers of paint, many of them semi-transparent – dark brown organic blobs and black outlines under glowing lilac glaze, for instance. This creates the impression of an ever-shifting surface, mimicking the natural play of light and shadow on a windowsill or the subtle movement of foliage over the course of a day. A limited oil palette of highly saturated blues, purples, reds, and yellows that appear to have been applied directly from the tube recurs across many works, connecting them as if multiple renderings of the same encounter.
The exhibition’s title points not only to Callaghan’s formal concerns – light and color – but also to questions of time and change. The paintings’ layered structures prompt us to visually retrace her decision-making process as she gradually altered each composition, eventually leading if not to completion then to a tremulous pause in which reanimation might occur at any moment. While not entirely repetitious and certainly not mechanical, the paintings in “Brighter Later” embrace a kind of seriality in which strategy is as important as subject matter, and in which individual works contribute to the artist’s solving and then re-scrambling a tricky problem in order to return to it from another angle. As Callaghan put it in her conversation with Levinthal: “I’ll keep painting to a place where the end might look like the beginning, and then I get to try again.”
Published in Two Coats of Paint.
Related: Quicktime, Rosenwald Wolf Gallery, Philadelphia.