#charmaine-ayoku

#charmaine-ayoku

Pictoplasma is the world's leading conference on contemporary character-driven creativity, focusing on storytelling and how characters shape emotion, identity, and meaning.

David Bellion spent over a decade in top-flight football, playing for clubs like Manchester United and Sunderland, before becoming Red Star FC's creative director, focusing on brand development and cultural connections.

I create sculptural hairstyles using my natural hair as a material. I add some extensions, and shape it with thread and wire. A sculpture can take me from 30 minutes to more than six hours.

Upon entry, Kent's "IF" (1965) lures the eye upward. The serigraph-a silkscreen print in fine art parlance-hangs high on the wall with a subtle vulnerability. Two orange letters hover toward the composition's top edge, as if pushing to transcend the picture plane. A feeling of possibility emerges through the conjunction and its visual form.

The show features pieces by participants in JASA's programs. The organization, which serves more than 40,000 older adults every year, offers art classes and creative workshops designed to bring people together while encouraging self-expression. The results will be on full display here, from paintings and textile work to other handmade pieces that reflect the artists' personal stories and styles.

Laura Berger continues her explorations of communion in a suite of staggering paintings that place her signature minimal figures in intimate fellowship with one another and the earth.

"These works are an exploration of the human body's elasticity and capacity to metamorphose. Informed by my own experience of pregnancy and the birth of my first child last year, these paintings are a meditation on physiological transformation and the body's underlying animalistic and mammalian nature."

"These paintings merge the landscape and the intimacy of windows through the framing of the car, bridging the two realms I've typically explored separately. The car becomes a meditation on transition, on existing simultaneously here and elsewhere."

These water-women are beings of transformation, embodying sensuality, cosmic energy, and the transmission of matrilineal knowledge.

Wang was on the edge of 17 when she arrived at Nashville International Airport with her entire life packed into three suitcases and a carry-on. She had traveled all the way from Zhejiang, China, chasing a dream that would ultimately shape her future: studying music business at Belmont University. Now 26, Wang is an Artist Development Manager at Sony Music Entertainment.

In illustrator Chiara Xie 's work, everything is in motion. Rooted in a deep reverence for vitality, Chiara is fascinated by "the rhythm that flows through a scene", lingering like a suspended breath, and other times "surging as a vibrant, agile current of motion". It's not hard to know what she means: every illustration is filled with motion, arcs of light and air bouncing off every corner.

Ong's work contains a deep reverence for the otherworldly, combining the remnants of ancestral knowledge with speculative visions to form a kind of personal myth-making. The title of their latest series, "Always Were", is intentionally fragmentary suggesting a temporal and grammatical ambiguity that points to the liminal nature of Ong's figures and the time and place they inhabit.

Dealers like artists with established sales records because it lowers their already considerable financial exposure. Renting a gallery space in Tribeca costs anywhere between $8,000-30,000 a month on top of staff, marketing, and daily operations. With that kind of overhead, very few business owners can afford to take on the financial risk of untested artists.

On Franklin Street in Brooklyn's Greenpoint neighborhood, one non-commercial gallery fosters 'a small, stubbornly human space for friction.' Friction—the ubiquitous buzzword that captures the simultaneous delight and discomfort of doing things the slow way—is at the heart of artists Pap Souleye Fall and Char Jeré's current show at Subtitled NYC. It also reflects the overall spirit of this little exhibition space and of a burgeoning movement to reject our culture of optimization in favor of a bumpier, more intimate, less alienating experience.

What began as a passion for collecting became a responsibility. She not only believes in the artistic genius of women, but she wants society in general to hold men and women artists in equal esteem-and to place the same monetary value on their work.

Since she graduated in the late 1980s, amid the Aids crisis, Opie has made portraits of her community, friends and family, adopting unflinching realism, saturated colours, and dramatic tonal contrasts from the 16th-century portrait painters. Many of Opie's most famous portraits included in her new exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery use these devices deliberately, a declaration that these people deserve, as the title of the show underlines, to be seen.

As if demolishing the East Wing, gutting arts agencies, and slapping his name and face on several federal buildings weren't enough, the US president now wants to do away with a DC building known as the "Sistine Chapel of New Deal art." This week, we reported on a burgeoning campaign to save the Wilbur J. Cohen Federal Building, which houses murals by Ben Shahn, Philip Guston, Seymour Fogel, and other major American artists. We will continue to follow this story.