Arlene Rush | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Nationality | American |
| Alma mater | Queens College |
| Website | www |
Arlene Rush is a New York City-based multidisciplinary artist. Initially, she created abstract metal sculptures, [1] with her practice evolving to incorporate more conceptual work. Her current work addresses themes of gender, identity, socioeconomics, and politics, examining issues that impact the contemporary world. [2]
Rush grew up in the Parkchester section of The Bronx. She has a twin brother. [3] As a child, Rush's creativity was encouraged by her parents. She began studying sculpture in High School, and continued her artistic education at Queens College where she received a Bachelor of Arts in 1978, with a strong focus in sculpture. [4] Her career began in the Chelsea district of Manhattan. [5] Her early welded steel abstract sculptures were influenced by Anthony Caro. [6] In 1991, Rush’s practice was stirred by Buddhism, which led to an incorporation of philosophical ideas in her artwork. Since 2005, she has practiced the modern New Kadampa Buddhist tradition. [7]
Rush has previously worked in the architectural and design furnishing industry doing sales, design, project management, and architectural restoration. She has taught art to women with cancer through The Creative Center, a New York based nonprofit organization that brings creative arts to people with cancer and chronic illnesses. [4] As of 2022 Rush sits on The Creative Center's Advisory Council. [8]
In 1997, Rush developed a series of works commenting on gender roles and societal norms. [3]
As Rush began archiving her career in 2015, she started making work addressing the effects of the art market, gentrification, class warfare, gender bias, and other kinds of discrimination. This is portrayed in her series Evidence of Being (2014–present), which questions what constitutes success and what she describes as the importance and nature of being an artist working in the face of bias. [9] [10] A participatory element of Evidence of Being took place at a phone booth on 14th Street and 7th Avenue during Art in Odd Places ' 2019 festival: INVISIBLE. For the public art event, Rush created an installation using rejection letters from her career and from an open call on social media inviting people to bring their own rejection letters. [11]
Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic she created masks (resembling the PPE worn to mitigate the virus) with imagery honoring Harriet Tubman, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and the Black Lives Matter movement. [12] In 2021, Rush started to develop NFTs that reflect her longstanding themes of social justice and identity. [4]
Rush has exhibited her work in galleries and museums throughout the United States, Europe, and Asia. She supports gender, health, and social issues, through participating in Visual AIDS’ "Postcards from the Edge" annually since 1998. [13]
The Center for Emerging Visual Artists granted Rush a residency in Barcelona, Spain in 1988. In 2011, she was awarded the Pat Hearn & Colin De Land Foundation Grant. [14]
In 2020, Rush was exhibited in Silvermine Art Center's 70th A•ONE, curated by Barbara O'Brien, and was awarded the Carole Eisner Award For Sculpture. [15]
Rush's first minted NFT, I’m Still Here, was exhibited at the Every Woman Biennial on June 24, 2021. [4]
Rush is in numerous public and private collections including Mount Sinai Cancer Center; Pavel Zoubok, Pavel Zoubok Gallery, New York, NY; MOMA, Wales, UK; MUBE, São Paulo, Brazil; Mark Golden, GOLDEN Artist Paint, Berlin, NY; Robert H. Chaney, Houston, TX; ARCO Chemical, Newton Square, PA; The Center for Emerging Visual Artists, Philadelphia, PA; Library of Congress, Great Hall, Thomas Jefferson Bldg., Washington, DC; [16] Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York, NY; Sara M. Vance Waddell Collection , Cincinnati, OH; [17] Joe Baio Collection , New York, NY [18]
Hannah Wilke was an American painter, sculptor, photographer, video artist and performance artist. Wilke's work is known for exploring issues of feminism, sexuality and femininity.
The feminist art movement in the United States began in the early 1970s and sought to promote the study, creation, understanding and promotion of women's art. First-generation feminist artists include Judy Chicago, Miriam Schapiro, Suzanne Lacy, Judith Bernstein, Sheila de Bretteville, Mary Beth Edelson, Carolee Schneeman, Rachel Rosenthal, and many other women. They were part of the Feminist art movement in the United States in the early 1970s to develop feminist writing and art. The movement spread quickly through museum protests in both New York and Los Angeles, via an early network called W.E.B. that disseminated news of feminist art activities from 1971 to 1973 in a nationally circulated newsletter, and at conferences such as the West Coast Women's Artists Conference held at California Institute of the Arts and the Conference of Women in the Visual Arts, at the Corcoran School of Art in Washington, D.C..
Ruth Aiko Asawa was an American modernist artist known primarily for her abstract looped-wire sculptures inspired by natural and organic forms. In addition to her three-dimensional work, Asawa created an extensive body of works on paper, including abstract and figurative drawings and prints influenced by nature, particularly flowers and plants, and her immediate surroundings.
Nancy Grossman is an American artist. Grossman is best known for her wood and leather sculptures of heads.
Cleo Hartwig was an American sculptor who worked in stone, wood, terra cotta, plaster, paper, woodcut, and ceramic. She won a number of awards, including national awards, and her work is exhibited across the northeast U.S. She is regarded as a member of The New York School.
Martine Fougeron is a French-American photographer based in New York City. Her work has been exhibited and published extensively, and collected by numerous major museums including the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Bronx Museum of the Arts. Fougeron has published one monograph to date: Nicolas et Adrien – A World with Two Sons, published by Steidl in 2019.
Elaine Lustig Cohen was an American graphic designer, artist and archivist. She is best known for her work as a graphic designer during the 1950s and 60s, having created over 150 designs for book covers and museum catalogs. Her work has played a significant role in the evolution of American modernist graphic design, integrating European avant-garde with experimentation to create a distinct visual vocabulary. Cohen later continued her career as a fine artist working in a variety of media. In 2011, she was named an AIGA Medalist for her achievements in graphic design.
Amy Jenkins is an American artist from Peterborough, New Hampshire who is recognized for her work in video installation and experimental film.
Gillie and Marc Schattner are an Australian collaborative artist couple. Gillie and Marc are known for their animal, human-animal hybrid and abstract sculptures, which have been exhibited as public works of art around the world. They also create paintings, street art and statues of people.
Arlene Shechet is an American sculptor known for her inventive, gravity-defying arrangements and experimental use of diverse materials. Critics describe her work as both technical and intuitive, hybrid and polymorphous, freely mixing surfaces, finishes, styles and references to create visual paradoxes. Her abstract-figurative forms often function as metaphors for bodily experience and the human condition, touching upon imperfection and uncertainty with humor and pathos. New York Times critic Holland Cotter wrote that her career "has encompassed both more or less traditional ceramic pots and wildly experimental abstract forms: amoebalike, intestinal, spiky, sexual, historically referential and often displayed on fantastically inventive pedestals … this is some of the most imaginative American sculpture of the past 20 years."
Anicka Yi is a conceptual artist whose work lies at the intersection of fragrance, cuisine, and science. She is known for installations that engage the senses, especially the sense of smell; and, for her collaborations with biologists and chemists. Yi lives and works in New York City.
Tova Beck-Friedman is an American artist, sculptor, writer and filmmaker based in New York City. Her work has been exhibited in the United States, Australia, Israel, Europe, and Japan. Her work is in the collection of Grounds For Sculpture, Yeshiva University Museum, Newark Museum, Sculpture Garden, the Shoah Film Collection and the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington DC.
vanessa german is an American sculptor, painter, writer, activist, performer, and poet based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
Matt Magee is an American contemporary artist who is best known for his minimal abstract geometric paintings, sculptures, prints, assemblages, murals and photographs. He was born in Paris, France in 1961 and moved from there to Tripoli, Libya and then to London. He moved to Brooklyn in 1984 to attend Pratt Institute for an MFA after completing a BA in Art History at Trinity University in San Antonio, TX. He maintained a studio on New York City until 2012 and currently lives in Phoenix, AZ.
Statues for Equality is an initiative to improve the gender parity in public monuments worldwide. Creators Gillie and Marc noted that up to 2019, only five of New York City's 150 monuments commemorated nonfictional women.
Gloria Kisch (1941–2014) was an American artist and sculptor known especially for her early post-Minimalist paintings and wall sculptures, and her later large-scale work in metal.
Fabiola Jean-Louis is a Haitian artist working in photography, paper textile design, and sculpture. Her work examines the intersectionality of the Black experience, particularly that of women, to address the absence and imbalance of historical representation of African American and Afro-Caribbean people. Jean-Louis has earned residencies at the Museum of Art and Design (MAD), New York City, the Lux Art Institute, San Diego, and the Andrew Freedman Home in The Bronx. In 2021, Jean-Louis became the first Haitian woman artist to exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Fabiola lives and works in New York City.
Nyeema Morgan is an American interdisciplinary and conceptual artist. Working in drawing, sculpture and print media, her works focus on how meaning is constructed and communicated given complex socio-political systems. Born in Philadelphia, she earned her BFA from the Cooper Union School of Art and her MFA from the California College of the Arts. She has held artist residencies at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and Smack Mellon. Morgan's works are in the permanent collections of the Bowdoin College Museum of Art and the Menil Collection.
Arlene Slavin is a painter, sculptor, and a print-maker whose practice also includes large-scale public art commissions. Slavin is a 1977 National Endowment for the Arts Grant recipient.
Gloria Garfinkel is an American visual artist based in New York.