ALL ARTS
How art changed painter Lydia Maria Pfeffer
December 18, 2024
I truly believe that art not so much changed but entirely shaped me. I grew up in a very Catholic, tiny mountain village in Austria. The church and its traditions were a big part of my upbringing. Some of the first works of art I saw and lived with were the church’s paintings and sculptures [and] its stained-glass windows and adorned cups and crosses. The longing look of suffering saints still finds its way into my paintings and drawings today. Read full article>
Artnet News
Lydia Pettit Channels Female Rage Into Surreal, Haunting Self-Portraiture
September 6, 2024
Black blood spurts from the blueish body of an unreal woman—an effigy, a dummy with a waxy pallor. Straddling the dummy, and stabbing it furiously with a knife, is a real woman, naked, with shortly cut blond hair. Her pale flesh, her breasts, move with the momentum of her plunging thrusts. Each lunge sends bursts of black blood into the air. The woman pauses at moments, exhausted from the exertion of violence, her breath heavy, only to resume her attack in bursts. And here’s the most distressing detail: the woman and the effigy are mirror images. Read full article>
Polyester
Artists Lydia Pettit and Olivia Sterling in Conversation: On Self Portraiture, The Void and Bitches In Heat
July 23, 2024
From their first discovery of one another’s work at the Royal College of Art in 2020, Lydia Pettit and Olivia Sterling felt destined to show their work together. Both (mainly) painters who explore the body in their work - although inarguably, very different ways - it’s taken four years to pull together their joint show Bitches In Heat. As well as working together on the dog themed exhibition, Sterling and Pettit have had stacked schedules this year, with Sterling currently participating in the A Feast For The Eyes group show Guts Gallery and Pettit’s short film, The Body which will be shown at The Amory Show in September, has been making waves for its mastery of horror to explore complex themed of corporality and trauma. The two artists joined us in our studio to discuss their different takes on horror, fat representation and dog metaphors. Read full article>
Sugarcane
Where The Waters Go Finds Agency for Black Woman Archetypes in Stillness
June 13, 2024
About a block West of Eighth Ave and West 22nd St, Adrienne Elise Tarver’s fourth solo exhibit, Where The Waters Go, is nested in Dinner Gallery. The unassuming gallery is charming for how it juxtaposes the city’s noise and the gallery’s still tranquility. The setting fits Where The Waters Go as the exhibit calls on the duality between dream and reality in the context of white privilege and begs Black audiences to consider if their dreams rest in the idea of their physical destruction. The exhibit will remain on view until June 29, 2024. Through dreams, Tarver’s series calls on historical and popular film archetypes to explore the complexity of Black female identities. By centering on the domestic, public, and private aspirations of Black women’s personas, Tarver explores how agency and visibility overlap. Read full article>
ALL ART
How Art Changed Interdisciplinary Artist Adrienne Elise Tarver
June 13, 2024
Making art helps me organize my thoughts, explore issues relevant to me and contribute to the conversations I want to be a part of in the world, but it changed my life before I even knew how it would function for me as a practicing artist. My brother passed away when I was in high school. He had just turned 20 and was away at school in New York. I was about to turn 17 and just ending my junior year of high school. It completely changed my understanding of the world. Nothing mattered at that point. It was a profound loss at a formative time in my life. I was always a really good student, but I didn’t care about anything for a while after that. I only wanted to make art and during the school day, [and] I would escape to the art room or to a mural I was painting in the hallway. Read full article>
Art Matters: The Podcast for Artists
#33 with Langdon Graves
June 7, 2024
On today’s episode I speak with NYC-based artist, Langdon Graves! Together we sit down in her Bushwick studio and speak about building objects, combining mediums, Trompe-l'oil, different kinds of drawing, efficiency, the lead-up to an exhibition, different kinds of flow-states, preciousness, physical fatigue after long studio sessions, teaching, mentorship and community, a few ideas about contemporary art education, relief printmaking, variations, reading, and multi-tasking. Listen Here>
WNYC Radio - All Of It
Artist Adrienne Elise Tarver Explores Her Identity in New Chelsea Gallery Show
May 21, 2024
Adrienne Elise Tarver is a Brooklyn-based interdisciplinary artist who's currently showing new work at Dinner Gallery in Chelsea. In the show, called Where the Waters Go, Tarver examines her own identity as a black woman through painting, using a character she invented named Vera Otis as inspiration, as well as old Ebony magazines. Tarver discusses her work, which is on view now through June 29. Listen Here>
LIGHT WORK
Everything Is Connected
Adrienne Elise Tarver
May 10, 2024
On this episode I'm joined by, Adrienne Elise Tarver. Adrienne Elise Tarver is an interdisciplinary artist based in Brooklyn, NY with a practice that spans painting, sculpture, installation, photography, textiles, and video. Her work addresses the complexity and invisibility of Black female identity including the history within domestic spaces, the fantasy of the tropical seductress, and the archetype of the all-knowing spiritual matriarch. Adrienne is a week away from opening her latest solo show and her fourth with Dinner gallery when we sit down to talk about her work and practice. Listen Here>
The Wall Street Journal
Esther, Future Fair and NADA New York Reviews: Gem Hunting
May 3, 2024
While Frieze might be the centerpiece of New York Art Week, numerous other gallery openings, talks, performances and alternative fairs offer art lovers plenty of chances to find something to connect with. Unfortunately, the easiest way to sum up this year’s fairs is: inert. It’s not that the work on view is bad, just that much of it fails to thrill. Nevertheless, with so much work on view across the city, there is still excitement to be discovered, even if it takes a little searching. Read full article>
The Art Newspaper
The New Art Dealers Alliance fair returns to New York’s Chelsea with off-the-wall works
May 2, 2024
The New Art Dealers Alliance (Nada) has returned to Chelsea with no shortage of sibilation for the 2024 edition during New York’s Frieze week. To mark its tenth anniversary, the member-driven fair is featuring 92 galleries on four jam-packed floors at 548 West 22nd Street. Read full article>
Artnet News
‘The Sculpture Is a Physical Mirror for Me’: Artist Langdon Graves Constructs Visual Riddles
February 8, 2024
Brooklyn-based artist Langdon Graves transports viewers into a domestic fever dream in “Time is A Fire” the artist’s new solo exhibition at New York’s Dinner Gallery. Bringing together recent hand-built sculptures and Graves’s meticulous drawings, the exhibition transforms the mundane into the uncanny, while asking questions of time, mortality, familial legacy, artifice, and nature. Read full article>