Arcmanoro Niles

Last updated
Arcmanoro Niles
Arcmanoro Niles.png
Arcmanoro Niles in his exhibition at Rachel Uffner Gallery
Born1989
Washington, D.C.
Education Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture; New York Academy of Art; Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts; School of Art and Design at Montgomery Community College; Washington Studio School; Duke Ellington School of the Arts;
Style Figurative painting
Website http://www.arcmanoro.com/

Arcmanoro Niles (born 1989 Washington, D.C.) is an American visual artist working in painting. Niles is known for his life-sized portraits in gem-toned hues that focus on African-American contemporary narratives, often depicting individuals in states of psychological negotiation. Niles was born in Washington, D.C., in 1989, and currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. [1] He graduated high school from Duke Ellington School of the Arts in 2008, while also attending night classes at Washington Studio School. He later graduated from the School of Art and Design at Montgomery Community College, Silver Spring (2010), Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Philadelphia (BFA, 2013), and the New York Academy of Art, New York (MFA, 2015). Niles was also an artist in residence at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2018. [2]

Contents

Biography

Niles is known for his life-sized portraits in gem-toned hues that focus on African-American contemporary narratives. His paintings explore everyday events that appear banal, but in fact represent introspective moments in which the subjects are undergoing a shift in consciousness, or significant life changes. [3] Niles explains, "at the end of the day, I am a painter who is interested in color and stories that talk about who we are. Little moments that give us a glimpse into what life feels like." [4] He uses family photographs, as well as his own photographs and memories as references. [5] Friends, family members, and the artist himself often appear in Niles’ paintings. [6]

Niles is a traditionally trained painter. In his works, he references classical portraits while also calling the history of painting into question by using highly saturated color palettes over orange and blue grounds. [7] This creates his distinctive saturated palette which demonstrates complex and luminous, gold-like skin tones. His interest in creating vividly-colored was "a response to his frustration at not being able to achieve the depth of tonality he saw in the skin tones of his family and friends." [8] Niles explains, “I was always interested in color... always trying to pull together all these colors that I saw, or thought I saw, in my darker flesh: bright reds, deep purples and golden tones.” [9] His use of glitter, often on the body hair of his subjects, emphasizes the complexity of color and the identities of the subjects. Niles removed neutral colors from his artistic palette, including blacks, whites, and browns around 2013, which gave way to his interest in a more colorful palette. [10]

In his portraits, Niles often includes what he calls “seekers”, which are small amorphous figures or stick figures that appear along the edges of the paintings. Niles developed the idea of the seekers after visiting the Brooklyn Museum in 2015 and drawing an Egyptian fertility sculpture from the collection. [11] He began including this image in his paintings, which eventually morphed into an inclusion of entities in the form of seekers. [12] These seekers represent the external and internal forces that influence his subjects. They are often depicted using violent, self-destructive, and sexual gestures, that counter the stillness and contemplative nature of the main subjects. [13] “Seekers,” says Niles, “are more impulsive, chasing whatever they think will make them happy in that moment, with no fear of consequence, while the human subjects are more vulnerable and open with their feelings.” [14] The seekers disrupt the compositions, creating otherworldly elements to the painting. [15]

Solo exhibitions

Public collections

Awards

Publications

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mickalene Thomas</span> American painter

Mickalene Thomas is a contemporary African-American visual artist best known as a painter of complex works using rhinestones, acrylic, and enamel. Thomas's collage work is inspired from popular art histories and movements, including Impressionism, Cubism, Dada, the Harlem Renaissance, and selected works by the Afro-British painter Chris Ofili. Her work draws from Western art history, pop art, and visual culture to examine ideas around femininity, beauty, race, sexuality, and gender.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Reuben Tam</span> American painter

Reuben Tam was an American landscape painter, educator, poet and graphic artist.

Susanna J. Coffey is an American artist and educator. She is the F. H. Sellers Professor in Painting at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and lives and works in New York City. She was elected a member the National Academy of Design in 1999.

Tim Rollins was an American artist who together with the art collaborative K.O.S. formed the art-group Tim Rollins and K.O.S.

Squeak Carnwath is a contemporary American painter and arts educator. She is a Professor Emerita of Art at University of California, Berkeley.

Adriana Varejão is a Brazilian artist. She works in various disciplines including painting, drawing, sculpture, installation and photography. She was an artist-in-resident at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in 2004. Varejão lives and works in Rio de Janeiro.

Nari Ward is an American artist based in New York City. He is a distinguished professor and head of studio art at Hunter College. His work is often composed of found objects from his neighborhood, and "address issues related to consumer culture, poverty, and race". His awards include the Vilcek Prize in Fine Arts in 2017, and the Rome Prize in 2012.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Katherine Bradford</span> American artist

Katherine Bradford, née Houston, is an American artist based in New York City, known for figurative paintings, particularly of swimmers, that critics describe as simultaneously representational, abstract and metaphorical. She began her art career relatively late and has received her widest recognition in her seventies. Critic John Yau characterizes her work as independent of canon or genre dictates, open-ended in terms of process, and quirky in its humor and interior logic.

Angel Otero was born 1981. He is a contemporary visual artist specializing in painting.

Ellen Lesperance is an American artist and educator, known for her paintings. Her works are typically gouache paintings that pattern the full-body garments of female activists engaged in Direct Action protests. She is based in Portland, Oregon and has three children.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Alex Prager</span> American photographer and filmmaker

Alex Prager is an American photographer and filmmaker, based in Los Angeles. She makes staged color photographs.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Cecilia Vicuña</span> Chilean poet, artist and filmmaker

Cecilia Vicuña is a Chilean poet and artist based in New York and Santiago, Chile.

Helen Pashgian is an American visual artist who lives and works in Pasadena, California. She is a primary member of the Light and Space art movement of the 1960s, but her role has been historically under-recognized.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Molly Zuckerman-Hartung</span> American painter

Molly Zuckerman-Hartung is an American painter from Olympia, Washington. Since 2015 she has been faculty in Painting and Printmaking at the Yale School of Art.

Brenda Goodman is an artist and painter currently living and working in Pine Hill, New York. Her artistic practice includes paintings, works on paper, and sculptures.

Hayal Pozanti is a Turkish-American artist, based in the United States. Pozanti became internationally known in the early 2010s for her bright abstract paintings of geometric forms, based on a hieroglyphic alphabet which Pozanti invented to reflect on the relationship between human behaviour, artificial intelligence and technology.

Clarity Haynes is a queer feminist American artist and writer. She currently lives and works in New York, NY. Haynes is best known for her unconventional painted portraits of torsos, focusing on queer, trans, cis female and nonbinary bodies. She is a former member of the tART Collective and the Corpus VI Collective.

The year 2021 in art involves various significant events.

Esteban Ramón Pérez is an American artist who produces multi-media paintings and sculptures. His sociopolitical artwork often emphasizes subjective memory, spirituality, and fragmented history. Pérez earned a BFA from the California Institute of the Arts in 2017 and an MFA in painting and printmaking from the Yale School of Art, New Haven, Connecticut, in 2019. Pérez’s work has been exhibited in numerous group exhibitions, including shows at Artspace, New Haven, Connecticut; Eastern Connecticut State University Art Gallery, Windham, Connecticut; Transmitter Gallery, Brooklyn; James Cohan Gallery, New York; Gamma Galería, Guadalajara, Mexico; Calderón, New York; the Arlington Arts Center, Virginia; Charles Moffett, New York; and Lehmann Maupin, New York. Solo exhibitions include Staniar Gallery, Lexington, Virginia. Pérez was selected for the NXTHVN Fellowship Program and is a 2022 recipient of the Artadia Award. He lives and works in Los Angeles, California.

References

  1. ↑ "Arcmanoro Niles". Joan Mitchell Foundation. Retrieved 2022-02-05.
  2. ↑ "Artist Statement". ARCMANORO NILES. Retrieved 2022-01-22.
  3. ↑ "Arcmanoro Niles - Hey Tomorrow, Do You Have Some Room For Me: Failure Is A Part Of Being Alive - Exhibitions - Lehmann Maupin". www.lehmannmaupin.com. Retrieved 2022-01-25.
  4. ↑ Cassell, Dessane Lopez (2020-09-21). "Meet the NYC Art Community: Arcmanoro Niles Is Reveling in Uncertainty". Hyperallergic. Retrieved 2022-02-05.
  5. ↑ Cassell, Dessane Lopez (2020-09-21). "Meet the NYC Art Community: Arcmanoro Niles Is Reveling in Uncertainty". Hyperallergic. Retrieved 2022-02-05.
  6. ↑ Ologundudu, Folasade (2021-07-26). "In Gem-like Hues, Arcmanoro Niles Renders the Mundane Electric". Hyperallergic. Retrieved 2022-01-22.
  7. ↑ "Arcmanoro Niles - Exhibitions - Rachel Uffner Gallery". www.racheluffnergallery.com. Retrieved 2022-01-22.
  8. ↑ "Arcmanoro Niles - Artists - Lehmann Maupin". www.lehmannmaupin.com. Retrieved 2022-02-05.
  9. ↑ "Glitter and Ghosts in the Paintings of Arcmanoro Niles". ELEPHANT. 2021-05-28. Retrieved 2022-01-24.
  10. ↑ "Arcmanoro Niles - Exhibitions - Rachel Uffner Gallery". www.racheluffnergallery.com. Retrieved 2022-01-24.
  11. ↑ "Arcmanoro Niles Paints Our Internal Lives". www.culturedmag.com. Retrieved 2022-01-24.
  12. ↑ "Paper Heart: Arcmanoro Niles discusses his work with Virginia Wagner". artcritical. 2019-05-29. Retrieved 2022-01-24.
  13. ↑ "Arcmanoro Niles - Exhibitions - Rachel Uffner Gallery". www.racheluffnergallery.com. Retrieved 2022-01-22.
  14. ↑ "Arcmanoro Niles - Artists - Lehmann Maupin". www.lehmannmaupin.com. Retrieved 2022-01-22.
  15. ↑ "2019–2020". ARCMANORO NILES. Retrieved 2022-01-25.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.