Chellis Baird's Meditative Motions at the Louise Nevelson Chapel.

On Saturday, February 1st, the Society for Domestic Museology visited the recently renovated Louise Nevelson Chapel at St. Peter’s Church on 54th and Lexington for a walk-through of the current exhibition, Meditative Motions, by Chellis Baird.

We started our visit by gathering in the chapel to learn a little more about Nevelson’s biography and career. Born in Ukraine in 1899, her family emigrated to the United States in 1906 and settled in Maine, where her father worked as a woodcutter and also owned a junkyard. When she was 21, she married Charles Nevelson and moved to New York City. While the marriage didn’t last long, her relationship to New York endured. She enrolled at the Art Student’s League and traveled to Europe in the early 1930’s to study painting with Hans Hoffman. When she returned to New York, she worked as an assistant to Diego Rivera on his Rockefeller Center Mural, Man at the Crossroads, which was later destroyed (a replica is now on view at the Whitney Museum for the exhibition, Vida Americana, which opened on February 17th).

Nevelson’s signature style of using found objects and a monochrome palette emerged in the 1940’s and 50’s, but it wasn’t until the 1960’s (when she herself was in her sixties) that she began to receive recognition for her work. In 1959, her installation Dawn’s Wedding Feast, was included in the MoMA exhibition, 16 Americans, where she was the only woman artist included in the show.

In 1975, Nevelson was commissioned to design The Chapel of the Good Shephard at St. Peter’s Church. In a departure from her practice of using found objects, the sculptural wooden elements in the chapel were all deliberately designed and constructed by Nevelson for the space. As a Jewish artist creating a chapel in a Christian Church, she said this about the work:

“Abstraction allows me to transcend Christian imagery to the essential point where all religions meet. Each element forms a whole in itself a deliberate expression of joy, of human warmth. For me, for my work, this chapel is a statement of purity and truth”

St. Peter’s Church has a long tradition of supporting the arts and Elaine de Kooning was their first curator over fifty years ago. Their thriving curatorial program invites contemporary artists to exhibit in their two galleries: one in the Narthex and the other in the social hall. Chellis Baird’s solo exhibition, Meditative Motions, opened in November 2019 in both galleries. Using the chapel as a source of inspiration, Baird created a series of eight sculptural paintings in white that hang in the narthex along with a number of other large-scale works that welcome you into the the space.

The labor-intensive process that Baird uses to create her paintings is inspired both by the world of textiles and the movement of dance. Trained as a painter, she started to to experiment with the core elements of painting: the wooden stretcher, the canvas, and paint, to work in a more sculptural way. She starts by dying the fabric elements individually, Some are so compelling on their own that they make there way into some of her 2-D collage work, but most are wrapped into cords that are then woven onto the frame. Working this way adds elements of movement and tension to each piece that reference the stretching and movement of a dancer’s body.

During our visit, Chellis walked us through her exhibition, talking about how she developed her process and how participating in this exhibition program has impacted her work. Photographer, Anna Usacheva, documented our event and created this lovely video of Chellis in her own words:

Now that I know about the Nevelson Chapel, I am certain I will be back. And while I am eager to see what is next in St. Peter’s curatorial program, it is hard to imagine the space without Chellis’s powerful works welcoming you in.



Studio Visit: Sara Klar

Sara Klar is a multi-media artist based in Bed-Stuy, New York, whose work occupies the space between formal abstraction and the conceptual. When we first discussed the possibility of collaborating on a Domestic Museology exhibition, I visited her home and studio where it became immediately apparent that the scale and sheer volume of her work wouldn’t be well represented under the low ceilings of our apartment. Because of that—and the fact that she had set up her labyrinthine home/studio/gallery as the apotheosis of Domestic Museology—we agreed it would be best to bring a group to her. And so we did, on a mild Sunday afternoon in November.

Sara was born into a Fundamentalist Orthodox Jewish family and grew up in Far Rockaway, Queens, insulated from the secular world. She left her community of origin in her early 20s to pursue a life in art and much of her work grapples with issues around identity and received systems of belief. While she has painted for more than two decades, it is only recently that her work has overtly focused on her relationship to the Judaism of her upbringing. Through her massive collage paintings, drawing practice, photography, and sculptural work, she simultaneously explores the universal language of abstraction alongside a more personal and existential inquiry into the formation of identity both within a community and in opposition to it.

Sara’s massive canvases are a collage of paint, paper, and objects. To build up these densely layered works, she paints multiple paintings, one on top of the next, and then works back into the canvas using a knife to cut away some of the layers, excavating the painting’s own history. She also adds other materials, often Jewish ritual objects, such as a piece of tefillin (a small leather box containing Hebrew text and worn by men during prayer) or fragments from the Talmud, sometimes so obscured by the paint itself that they become almost unrecognizable. In these works, the process is performative and labor-intensive, often taking years with the finished canvas a chronicle of the many layers and paintings that have existed before the piece is done. In her words, “the present, in its immediacy is formed by the shadowed past”.

In another series, Sara takes her daily drawing and writing practice and makes it the subject of her photography, giving her personal and ephemeral sketches a heightened sense of narrative meaning. In this and in other bodies of her work, Sara uses mark-making as a way of mapping the evolution of self-hood. Asking the perennial, existential question: When is the moment when we elect to live by our own authority? How do we know who we truly are? While the vocabulary of her work is deeply personal, the throughlines of identity, feminism, and agency connect her work to a larger, communal conversation.

Sara Klar. Swimming to Enlightenment, 2019.

In the past few years, Sara has been working with Footsteps, an organization that supports people who chose to leave their Ultra-Orthodox communities by providing educational, vocational, and social support in the wake of what is often a wrenching personal choice. Some people come to Footsteps in possession of symbolic and ritual objects that relate to their former life: a wedding band or a shtreimel (the fur hats worn by some Haredi men), items that they can neither keep nor bring themselves to discard. Sara takes these charged objects and integrates them into her work as a way of transmuting their power and connecting her personal quest to a larger community.

Sara led nearly 14 guests through her apartment and studio, with works in every room (including the hallway!). The conversation was wide-ranging, from her delight in color, the artists who inspire her and the often very intense themes in her work. A consummate hostess, Sara provided a beautiful spread of food and drink and guests stayed well into the evening talking about art and life. When we started the Society for Domestic Museology almost 6 years ago, my goal was to bring people together in conversation around art in a way that was both intimate and accessible and I’m grateful to have had the opportunity to do this in Sara’s inspiring home studio.

Domestic Museology visits the Key Club

By pure luck, I came across an Instagram post about artist Robin Winters’ latest project, the Key Club. Winters has lived and worked in the same Soho loft since the early 1970’s and has produced a large body of work over the course of his career. Much of his conceptual art is collaborative and in this current incarnation he is opening his home to show emerging artists. It’s called the Key Club because Winters gives each artist the key to his loft and they are free to do whatever they please in the living room. We were fortunate to see the closing of his first exhibition, an immersive installation by Dakin Platt which included a large-scale mural, ceramic and steel-cut paintings.

It was fascinating to hear Winters talk about the history of his space and his plans to collaborate with and support emerging artists with this new project. Dakin’s immersive mural, ceramics and steel-cut paintings speak for themselves, but it was great to have him walk us through his process. Though he works in multiple media at once, the underlying themes are constant: the tension between the built environment and the natural world and the impulse to try and articulate feeling through image. This won’t be the last visit to the Key Club and I can’t wait to see who Winters’ shows next!

Big Daisy Textile Space at Russell Janis Projects

Russell Janis Projects is a kind of magical home/studio/gallery run by Russell Steinert and Janis Stemmermann and on Thursday, July 25th the Society for Domestic Museology was lucky to visit their latest installation: Big Daisy Textile Space a collaboration with artist and designer, Annie Coggan.

It was fascinating to hear Annie and Janis talk about how their collaboration came about: Annie having seen one of Janis's large-scale textile installations, was compelled to think about how it might read as an interior and created a doll-house sized version that I first saw in March when we visited Annie’s studio. The two of them then worked together to create an immersive installation. The joyous nature of the room belies the meticulous thought to each detail: the exact size of the daisies, the precise attention to color, the scale of the loveseat in the room, the smocking on the ceiling. I'm so grateful to Janis for inviting us into her home and workspace and for both Annie and Janis for sharing their process with us. Really, nothing is better than sitting in a room full of daisies with interesting people, sipping rosé and talking about art, right?

Domestic Museology in Minneapolis: Sadie Halie Projects & All Star Fine and Recorded Arts

I love visiting my home state of Minnesota in the summer. Most of those visits are spent lakeside in suburbia, but occasionally we break free from the extended family to see what’s happening in the Twin Cities. This year, we were able to visit two “domestic” galleries in Southeast Minneapolis. Sadie Halie Projects is a small alternative space for contemporary art that began in an apartment in Sunset Park, Brooklyn in 2012 and relocated to Minneapolis, MN in 2016 where they re-purposed their garage into a gallery. Run by artists, Patrick Gantert and Jennie Ekstrand, their mission is to work with international artists in this unconventional venue that operates outside the confines of the traditional gallery or museum. They mount monthly exhibitions between May and October (when the Minnesota weather is conducive) and we happened to be there for the opening of “Weight of a Wave” featuring the work of Sophia Flood and Matthew Yeager. It was one of those magical midwestern evenings where the light is perfect and the sun doesn’t set until nearly 10 p.m. Like many Minneapolis neighborhoods, detached garages sit behind houses and are accessible by alleyways that make them feel like their own little villages. Most of the doors were down, but Sadie Halie’s was up with a crowd mingling in and out of the space. I loved the community feel of this opening and envy their garage!

Just a few blocks away is All Star Fine and Recorded Arts, the home gallery of artist and archivist, Matthew Bakkom. We caught the last day of a beautiful exhibition of paintings by Syed Hosain paired with ephemera from Matt’s extensive archival collection and met Dutch artist, Annabel Kanaar, who had just arrived to install her exhibition which ran from July 6 - 31st. It’s days like this that make me wish I spent more time in the Twin Cities.

Rebecca Allan: Landscape Medicine

On June 20th, at the tail end of a rainstorm, we gathered in East Harlem at the David Richard Gallery for to see the exhibition, Landscape Medicine: Rebecca Allan and Dean Fleming. This two person exhibition draws on each artists shared dedication to revealing the majesty of landscape and the power of the natural world to open us to deeper levels of perception and attentiveness to our surroundings. David Eichholtz gave us an introduction to the gallery, which specializes in Post-War abstraction in the U.S. with an emphasis on nurturing emerging artists. Rebecca spoke about her deep connection to the natural world and how her work as a gardener and plants record manager has informed this recent body of work. It was worth braving the rain for a lively discussion about how landscape, place, gardening tools and a close observation of the natural world all weave into Rebecca’s vibrant abstract paintings.

To learn more about Rebecca Allan’s work, visit: rebeccaallan.com

Red Hook Studio Tour

Tucked away on the 3rd floor of that red-white-and-blue self-storage building you can see from the BQE, is Ti (Treasure Island), a warren of over 180 artist studios.  On an uncharacteristically sunny day at the end of March, Domestic Museology members gathered for a private visit to the studios of Spring Hofeldt, Katherine Keltner, Jon Bunge, Annie Coggan, and ended with a tour of Elise Putman's exhibition, "White Woman, White Lady, White Girl". I love these small group studio visits and am always grateful to artists who invite us into their workspace to share work in progress and to talk about the ebb and flow of their daily creative practice.

We started in the shared sun-filled studio space of Spring Hofeldt and Katherine Keltner. Each of them address the minutiae of daily life, but through a different lens. Spring’s work centers on the sublime in the domestic: the quirky serendipty that occurs when your child takes two random things and puts them together. Staging objects of everyday life into symbolic tableaux, she meticulously paints these still lives to create a world at once photo-real and surreal, funny and poignant. Each painting is labor intensive and she then reproduces them in limited edition photographic prints.

Katherine’s work is both abstract and autobiographical. Her spray paintings highlight the negative space around the local weeds she collects in Red Hook, and her limited palette and grid-like structure evoke cyanotypes, and botanical specimens. It was fascinating to hear about her process and the way her work functions as a kind of cartography of personal history and place, while focusing on finding beauty in the mundane.

Annie Coggan is a designer, writer and teacher who is actively engaged in historical research as a foundation on which she bases much of her work. Her colorful studio is brimming with material studies of embroidery, smocking, interiors and furniture - all tangible manifestations of her design thinking process.  Working on multiple projects at once, each seems to be in conversation with the other and it was intriguing to learn about her approach to her work. I left with a whole new understanding of chairs and a hankering to take one of her classes.

A visit to Jon Bunge’s studio is like stepping into an indoor forest, smelling of pine needles. Jon’s early work was based in two dimensional, abstract collage, but a sculpture class in graduate school pushed him to consider using wood as a collage material eventually exploring -  and then limiting himself to - branches. His kinetic, often hanging, sculptures magnify the essence of the branches he is using, while also creating a very present negative space. Meant to be hung in installations and lit so they produce shadows, they create an atmosphere of reverence. His materials are organized by species and characteristic, creating a “branch library” (no pun intended) from which he selects his components, allowing the natural forms guide the sculptural forms.

To conclude our tour, we were fortunate to see Elise Putnam’s installation of drawings and sculpture entitled, “White Woman, White Lady, White Girl” at Ti’s Sweet Lorraine Gallery and to hear her talk about her work. Taking on the murky and uncomfortable intersection of race and feminism against the backdrop of art history, Elise uses her own body as a subject to disrupt unconscious and accepted assumptions about whiteness.  These complex, large-scale works are rendered in crayon, fabric collage, and embroidery - media associated with women and children and many depict fairy tale archetypes: Goldilocks, Little Red Riding Hood, The Tooth Fairy. Yet, through gesture and expression, Putnam exposes and then subverts our expectations of beauty and race. She referred to her abstract sculpture as “White Anxiety” a tangible manifestation of what feels so culturally relevant right now. Her work is so honest and thoughtful about what is necessary for white people to address about our own history and privilege if we are to truly join racial justice conversation.

Gowanus Studio Tour

For our first Domestic Museology Field Trip to Gowanus, we visited the studios of four artists: Karen Mainenti, Rachel Selekman, Natale Adgnot and Keun Young Park, to learn about their process and what inspires their work. We covered topics as wide-ranging as the absurdity of beauty products, the creative economy of using what you have, the practice of daily drawing, and the fragmented space between life and everything else. These small group conversations really are the perfect way to spend a rainy weekend afternoon. Stay tuned for more in 2019!