new york

‘Fuzzy Puzzle’ by Pablo Melchor

“We are not Complicated People. We Don’t Care if we are Behind the Camera or in Front of the Projector”

Pablo Melchor and “Fuzzy Puzzle”:  A Profile – by Jo Rose

Paris born, Manchester bred artist Pablo Melchor’s projection piece, “Fuzzy Puzzle”, marks the NYC closing ceremony of Manchester-based collective Alexandra Art’s third year of the Pankhurst in the Park Festival. It illuminated the walls of the Mothership in Brooklyn’s Greenpoint on September 21st.  Melchor describes “Fuzzy Puzzle” as ‘a prism vision. A Fuzzy collection of memories’ which aims to be ‘subjective and colourful’. As such, the piece holds a strange place for Pablo as an author since it is, as he himself insists, an extension and acknowledgement of his involvement with Alexandra Arts and its branching out beyond Manchester’s frontiers, especially to New York, and Manchester’s cultural scene over more than a half-decade. It embraces its own inherent fragmentation and displacement.
— Jo Rose

This article is now live over at Art 511 Magazine. This piece was commissioned by us for the centenary for UK women’s suffrage [funded by ARTS COUNCIL ENGLAND] during the Pankhurst in the Park 2018 season. See Pablo Melchor’s projection piece in full below.

Author’s Bio

 Jo Rose is a writer, musician, promoter, and English Literature Postgraduate based in Manchester, England. He currently works closely with the Alexandra Arts collective, most notably with the Pankhurst in the Park Festival and with the teacher training initiative the “Art as Activism Toolkit”. His principle academic focus has been in ‘modernist’ and ‘late modernist’ literature (most prominently the works of Samuel Beckett and animals in literary works). He has released several records, and has toured extensively throughout the UK and Europe for over a decade, working alone and collaborating with a multitude of other artists. He co-habits with a miserly ex-racing greyhound, Harpo, a relationship he likens to having a deer as a pet.

The Merry Wagtail Jades, The Breeches They Do Carry

Pankhurst in the Park 2018 artist Anna FC Smith has done a write up about the work she created for our NYC adventure EMINENT DOMAIN, read about it here

The Merry Wagtail Jades, The Breeches They Do Carry: Impudent women and cuckold’s horns.

BY ANNA FC SMITH

The title of the work I exhibited at Eminent Domain derives from the broadside ballad ‘A new summons to all the merry wagtail jades that attend at horn fair.’ Printed and sold by J. Pitts in England in 1802 and 1819, it reads: “Come all you wagtail jades, Who love to play the game: And whilst your husbands are abroad, To have some of the same”… “The breeches they do carry, And swear they will them wear, And have their sparks when they please, Though husbands jealous are.”

I exhibited three sculptural banners capped with cuckold’s horns “tipt (sic) with silver” as the broadside ballad describes. The banners themselves were Edwardian bloomers made from a fabric printed with colourful splattered eggs. Their accompanying film echoes with the dissonant sound of crashing and banging pans as the spirit of the impudent women of the past blows through the bloomers.

I was commissioned by Alexandra Arts as part of their Pankhurst In The Park centenary celebrations to explore the history of the Suffragettes and their relevance to contemporary radical feminism. I decided to explore older forms of female carnivalesque, unruly behaviour to draw comparisons with the actions of the Suffragettes and how they were perceived. My work aims to highlight a chain of symbolism in the raucous practices of dissent. My research began with the actions of spitting, pelting and egg throwing undertaken by and against the Suffragettes and led me to rough music and the phenomenon of the Horn Fair.
— Anna FC Smith @ art511mag.com

Below is the video artist portrait that we commissioned of Anna FC Smith for the Pankhurst in the Park 2018 season

Amy Clancy in conversation with Helen Wewiora

Helen Wewiora became the Director of the Castlefield Gallery in central Manchester at the end of 2016. Here she speaks to Amy Clancy about Manchester’s place in the art world, addressing challenges and a new artistic exchange program.

This interview is now live over at Art 511 Magazine! This piece was commissioned by Alexandra Arts  and first published in the special print edition of Art 511 Mag celebrating International Women’s Day and the centenary for UK women’s suffrage [funded by ARTS COUNCIL ENGLAND] during the Pankhurst in the Park 2018 season. You can download the digital version of the full mag here

Hannah Leighton Boyce. Studio view, work in progress

Banner image - Hannah Leighton-Boyce, More energy than object, more force than form, 2018 [detail] Courtesy ® Drew Forsyth

Feminism is For EVERYONE

EMINENT DOMAIN OVERTAKES CHELSEA

The EMINENT DOMAIN recap article is now live over at our Pankhurst in the Park 2018 partner ART511 Magazine website

Photo: Elena Kendall-Aranda, site-specific performance, “Quests from the Virtual Age.” Courtesy the Artist

EMINENT DOMAIN evolved out of Art 511 Mag’s recent partnership with the Manchester, UK-based Alexandra Arts, when this past Spring, we teamed up to produce a limited edition, 74-page full-color print commission celebrating International Women’s Day and the centenary for UK women’s suffrage (funded by ARTS COUNCIL ENGLAND). The edition, available as a free download online here, was made available for purchase during the reception, and features critical essays, interviews and artworks by Marilyn Minter, Narcissister, Melanie Bonajo, Samantha Conlon (Bunny Collective), Go! Push Pops and Anna FC Smith among others. Artists included in the EMINENT DOMAIN show were mostly selected by a competitive open call submission process organized by head curator Katie Cercone.
— Art 511 Mag

Read the full article here

OPEN CALL FOR INTERSECTIONAL FEMINIST ART

EMINENT DOMAIN: A Flash Art Exhibition in the former Robert Miller space in West Chelsea is a curated selection of radical feminist art by female artists, eco-femmes, ghetto brujas, elders, queer/trans artists and other magical gender nomads reclaiming their rightful space in the Art World. We can unpack Feminism here and define it, as critical theorist and activist bell hooks does - “a movement to end sexism, sexist exploitation and oppression” - at the roots of which is gender stereotypes and narratives perpetuated by heteronormative white male capitalist patriarchy, not men themselves. Based on the logic that the white male western canon has always revolved around a discourse drawing from, exploiting, misrepresenting and objectifying female bodies and the racial/sexual Other, EMINENT DOMAIN seizes a white box space in the heart of the commercial art world for a militantly utopic “flash flood” of new media, live performance action and artworks of every size and stripe that explode the old derogative archetypes and tell another story about Art, ritual, community and the divine feminine mysteries. Intersectional, post-colonial, queer, social-justice oriented and community-minded works of Art from folks that defy the status quo and get knee-deep in the paradigm shift will overwhelm the space and stake ground for new dialogue, new ideals and new marketplace tactics. Visionary video, installation, new and mixed media as well as painting and sculptural objects will snake through the gallery space animated by the din of performance, music, spoken word and new genre time-based pieces.  A handful of the contemporary art world’s key non-profit organizations will join us to present what they do and how you can get involved.

EMINENT DOMAIN was an impulse seeded by Art 511 Mag’s recent partnership with the Manchester, UK-based Alexandra Arts collective. This Spring, Art 511 Mag and Alexandra Arts teamed up to produce a limited edition 74 page full-color print commission celebrating International Women’s Day and the centenary for UK women's suffrage (funded by ARTS COUNCIL ENGLAND) for the 2018 Pankhurst in the Park season. The edition, available as a free download online here, features critical essays, interviews and artworks by notoriously brilliant siren radicals such as Marilyn Minter, Narcissister, Melanie Bonajo, Samantha Conlon (Bunny Collective), Go! Push Pops and Ekua Bayunu among others. Included in this curated selection is film stills from the infamous performance artist Narcissister’s first original feature film Organ Player, which reflects on the personal impact of her mother’s illness and death, also a 2018 selection at the Sundance Film Festival. Marilyn Minter’s bush painting gracing the back cover is part of a series partially inspired by a set of photos which were the result of a 2014 photography commission Minter attempted to complete for Playboy magazine. Minter’s editorial was rejected by Playboy for its depiction of women’s pubic hair au natural, and later became a book and subject of the paintings included in our special women’s issue. Meanwhile a narrative photo essay by Bunny Collective director Samantha Conlon explores the relationship between illness, the medical industrial complex and women’s agency.

As Alexandra Arts director Lotte Karlsen and Amy Clancy outline in the forward: “The art world still bows to a model created by white European men. The top three museums in the world, the British Museum, the Louvre, and The Metropolitan Museum of Art have never had female directors. Female artists earn less on average than their male counterparts and make up a fraction of the work in permanent exhibitions and auction market. It’s not enough to be good at their game or even the best; it’s rigged. So, it’s time to devise our own, not just for and by women, but in collaboration with all those whose voices, opportunities and rights are stifled.” In this spirit, EMINENT DOMAIN is a guerrilla exhibition mounted in the global art epicenter of the world which boldly carries the torch for alternative models promoting the power, equality, magic, pleasure, creative self-expression and financial freedom of women, people of color, and gender non-conformers. 

EMINENT DOMAIN opens July 12th in Chelsea followed by a Women In the Arts Panel comprised of a diverse cross-section of female thought leaders in the International Art World playing the fluid roles of curator, organizer/activist, gallerist, artist and arts administrator.

Download full ART 511 Alexandra Arts Commission here

SUBMIT work for the exhibition here

Women Hold Up Half the Sky: A Look at British Artist Ekua Bayunu

Today, April 14th, 2018, marks the launch of the 8-week interdisciplinary, community-oriented project “Women Hold up Half the Sky” led by Ekua Bayunu, this year’s Artist in Residence (AIR) for Alexandra Arts’ “Pankhurst in the Park”. In connection with the launch our partner Art511 Magazine have published on their site an article about Ekua's life and work by NYC based artist Katie Cercone. Alexandra Arts commissioned this for the Pankhurst in the Park centenary edition of Art511 Mag, which is available at our events and as a free download here

Ekua Bayunu just finished mounting her first solo exhibition at Manchester’s Chuck Gallery. Aptly titled Re:Birth, her show centers around a body of sculptural work reflecting women’s power and draws on aesthetic motifs of her African cultural heritage. After receiving a few rave reviews of her show, she was selected in February to be artist-in-residence in Alexandra Park for the final season of Alexandra Arts’ Pankhurst in the Park Program. Recently, I had the opportunity to connect with the artist personally and dive more deeply into her background and the motivations behind her trans-disciplinary, social-justice oriented creative practice - Katie Cercone 

Read the whole article here