Aspen Mays

Last updated

Aspen Mays (born 1980) is an American artist. [1]

Early life and education

Aspen Mays was born in Asheville, North Carolina, and raised in Charleston, South Carolina. Mays received her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. [1]

Contents

She also studied photography in Cape Town, South Africa while volunteering in a clinic for bead working artisans living with HIV. [2]

Career

Mays's solo exhibitions include Every leaf on a tree at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; [3] From the Offices of Scientists at the Hyde Park Art Center, [4] Chicago; Concentrate and Ask Again at Golden Gallery, [5] Chicago. Mays was a 2009–2010 Fulbright Fellow in Santiago, Chile, where she worked with astronomers who are using the world's most advanced telescopes to look at the sky. [6]

During her time at the observatory, she was given access to the institutional archive of rejected prints, negatives, and other ephemera. [7] This resulted in her body of work, "Sun Ruins," which functions as an umbrella for two distinct yet related bodies of work. [7] In 2006, she was awarded a Rotary Ambassadorial Scholarship for study in Cape Town, South Africa. [7] More recently, honors include a Fulbright Fellowship at the University of Chile, Santiago. She currently lives and works in Los Angeles. [7]

The Atlanta-based Art Papers describes her work as standing "in deft opposition to the technology we have come to rely on for answers, putting faith not in complex databases and rapidly evolving technology, but rather in the ability of everyday objects and materials to spark our imagination." [8] In doing so, she "re-imagines the world around us, finding new possibilities in the commonplace." [9]

Mays is currently an associate professor in Graduate Fine Arts and Undergraduate Photography at California College of the Arts [10]

Solo exhibitions

Publications

Awards

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago</span> Art museum in Chicago, Illinois

The Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) Chicago is a contemporary art museum near Water Tower Place in downtown Chicago in Cook County, Illinois, United States. The museum, which was established in 1967, is one of the world's largest contemporary art venues. The museum's collection is composed of thousands of objects of Post-World War II visual art. The museum is run gallery-style, with individually curated exhibitions throughout the year. Each exhibition may be composed of temporary loans, pieces from their permanent collection, or a combination of the two.

Deb Sokolow is an American visual artist who lives and works in Chicago. Sokolow's work uses both image and text to conjure connections among historical events, celebrities, politicians, and her own personal history in order to spur new consideration of alternate possible realities. Her work has been exhibited widely and is part of a number of permanent collections, including the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Chicago's Museum of Contemporary Art, the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, and the Spertus Museum.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art</span>

The Block Museum of Art is a free public art museum located on the campus of Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. The Block Museum was established in 1980 when Chicago art collectors Mary and Leigh B. Block donated funds to Northwestern University for the construction of an art exhibition venue. In recognition of their gift, the university named the changing exhibition space the Mary and Leigh Block Gallery. The original conception of the museum was modeled on the German kunsthalle tradition, with no permanent collection, and a series of changing temporary exhibits. However, the Block Museum soon began to acquire a permanent collection as the university transferred many of its art pieces to the museum. In recognition of its growing collection and its expanding programming, the Gallery became the American Alliance of Museums accredited Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art in 1998. The Block embarked on a major reconstruction project in 1999 and reopened in a new facility in September 2000.

Amanda Ross-Ho is an artist based in Los Angeles that works in painting, drawing, sculpture, installation, photography and uses found objects. She participated in the 2008 Whitney Biennial.

Visual arts of Chicago refers to paintings, prints, illustrations, textile art, sculpture, ceramics and other visual artworks produced in Chicago or by people with a connection to Chicago. Since World War II, Chicago visual art has had a strong individualistic streak, little influenced by outside fashions. "One of the unique characteristics of Chicago," said Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts curator Bob Cozzolino, "is there's always been a very pronounced effort to not be derivative, to not follow the status quo." The Chicago art world has been described as having "a stubborn sense ... of tolerant pluralism." However, Chicago's art scene is "critically neglected." Critic Andrew Patner has said, "Chicago's commitment to figurative painting, dating back to the post-War period, has often put it at odds with New York critics and dealers." It is argued that Chicago art is rarely found in Chicago museums; some of the most remarkable Chicago artworks are found in other cities.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Anne Wilson (artist)</span> American visual artist (born 1949)

Anne Wilson is a Chicago-based visual artist. Wilson creates sculpture, drawings, Internet projects, photography, performance, and DVD stop motion animations employing table linens, bed sheets, human hair, lace, thread and wire. Her work extends the traditional processes of fiber art to other media. Wilson is a professor in the Department of Fiber and Material Studies at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ben Russell (filmmaker)</span> American artist and experimental filmmaker

Ben Russell is an American artist and experimental filmmaker. Russell developed his reputation over the numerous shorts he made throughout the 2000s, many as part of his "Trypps" series, and as the curator of the Magic Lantern Cinema in Providence, Rhode Island. In 2009, he made his acclaimed feature debut, Let Each One Go Where He May, shot in Suriname in a series of 13 long takes accomplished with a Steadicam. Both a Guggenheim Fellow and participating artist in documenta 14, Russell's work has been described as drawing on elements of ethnography, psychedelia and Surrealism.

David Benjamin Sherry is an American artist. Sherry's work consists primarily of large format film photography, focusing on landscape and portraiture, as well as photograms and painting, and has been exhibited in New York, Los Angeles, London, Berlin, Aspen and Moscow. He is based in Los Angeles.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle</span> American conceptual artist

Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle is an American conceptual artist known for multidisciplinary, socially oriented sculpture, video and installations and urban community-based projects of the 1990s. His work often explores a dialectical relationships involving minimalist aesthetics, the utopian ambitions of modernism and science, and the resulting—often negative—social, geopolitical and ecological consequences of such ideologies. New York Times critic Holland Cotter wrote that Manglano-Ovalle was adept in "distilling complex ideas into inviting visual metaphors," while Jody Zellen described his work as "infused with a formal elegance and sociopolitical content." Manglano-Ovalle has been featured in solo exhibitions at the Art Institute of Chicago, MASS MoCA, Museo Tamayo Arte Contemporaneo and Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (MCA), and participated in Documenta 12, the Venice Biennale, Whitney Biennial, and Bienal de São Paulo. He has been recognized with MacArthur Foundation, Guggenheim, and National Endowment for the Arts fellowships and his work belongs to the collections of forty major institutions. He has been a professor at Northwestern University since 2012 and lives and works in Chicago.

Sanford Biggers is a Harlem-based interdisciplinary artist who works in film/video, installation, sculpture, music, and performance. An L.A. native, he has lived and worked in New York City since 1999.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Eleanor Spiess-Ferris</span> American painter

Eleanor Spiess-Ferris is an American symbolist painter cited as a significant surrealist, narrative figurative and feminist artist. Her numerous visual works display powerful influences of the Spanish and Native American cultures of Northern New Mexico, where she grew up. They often reference Penitentes, retablos, Kachinas and Native American fetishes and frequently incorporate themes of feminist spirituality, Indo-European mythology and personal memory.

Industry of the Ordinary (IOTO) is a two-person conceptual art collaborative, made up of Chicago-based artists and educators Adam Brooks and Mathew Wilson. Their work is usually performative or sculptural, often incorporating audience participation and interaction with the artists.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Phyllis Bramson</span> American artist

Phyllis Bramson is an American artist, based in Chicago and known for "richly ornamental, excessive and decadent" paintings described as walking a tightrope between "edginess and eroticism." She combines eclectic influences, such as kitsch culture, Rococo art and Orientalism, in juxtapositions of fantastical figures, decorative patterns and objects, and pastoral landscapes that affirm the pleasures and follies of romantic desire, imagination and looking. Bramson shares tendencies with the Chicago Imagists and broader Chicago tradition of surreal representation in her use of expressionist figuration, vernacular culture, bright color, and sexual imagery. Curator Lynne Warren wrote of her 30-year retrospective at the Chicago Cultural Center, "Bramson passionately paints from her center, so uniquely shaped in her formative years […] her lovely colors, fluttery, vignette compositions, and flowery and cartoony imagery create works that are really like no one else's. Writer Miranda McClintic said that Bramson's works "incorporate the passionate complexity of eastern mythology, the sexual innuendos of soap operas and sometimes the happy endings of cartoons."

Michiko Itatani is an American artist, based in Chicago, who was born in Osaka, Japan. After she received her BFA (1974) and MFA (1976) at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1974 and 1976 respectively, she returned to her alma mater in 1979 to teach in the Painting and Drawing department. Through her work, Itatani explores identity, continuation, and finding one's way in the modern world. Her work depicts nude figures in an expressionist style. Itatani has received the Illinois Arts Council Artist's Fellowship, the National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship. Her work is collected in many museums, including the Art Institute of Chicago; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Olympic Museum, Switzerland; Villa Haiss Museum, Germany; Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, Canada; Museu D'art Contemporani (MACBA), Spain; and the National Museum of Contemporary Art, South Korea.

Margaret Wharton (1943-2014) was an American artist, known for her sculptures of deconstructed chairs. She deconstructed, reconstructed and reimagined everyday objects to make works of art that could be whimsical, witty or simply thought-provoking in reflecting her vision of the world.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Paul Lamantia</span> American visual artist (born 1938)

Paul Christopher Lamantia is an American visual artist, known for paintings and drawings that explore dark psychosexual imagery. He studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and emerged in the 1960s and 1970s as part of the larger group of artists known as the Chicago Imagists.

Maria Gaspar is an American interdisciplinary artist and educator.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Frank Piatek</span> American artist

Frank Piatek is an American artist, known for abstract, illusionistic paintings of tubular forms and three-dimensional works exploring spirituality, cultural memory and the creative process. Piatek emerged in the mid-1960s, among a group of Chicago artists exploring various types of organic abstraction that shared qualities with the Chicago Imagists; his work, however relies more on suggestion than expressionistic representation. In Art in Chicago 1945-1995, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (MCA) described Piatek as playing “a crucial role in the development and refinement of abstract painting in Chicago" with carefully rendered, biomorphic compositions that illustrate the dialectical relationship between Chicago's idiosyncratic abstract and figurative styles. Piatek's work has been exhibited at institutions including the Whitney Museum, Art Institute of Chicago, MCA Chicago, National Museum, Szczecin in Poland, and Terra Museum of American Art; it belongs to the public art collections of the Art Institute of Chicago and MCA Chicago, among others. Curator Lynne Warren describes Piatek as "the quintessential Chicago artist—a highly individualistic, introspective outsider" who has developed a "unique and deeply felt world view from an artistically isolated vantage point." Piatek lives and works in Chicago with his wife, painter and SAIC professor Judith Geichman, and has taught at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago since 1974.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Eliza Myrie</span> American visual artist

Eliza Myrie is a visual artist who lives and works in Chicago, IL. Myrie works in a variety of media including sculpture, participatory installation art, public art, and printmaking.

Lynne Warren an American curator and writer who worked from 1977 to 2020 at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA), Chicago. She is a scholar of the Chicago Imagists, conceptual photography, Alexander Calder, and Chicago art from the mid-twenty-first century to the present. Sixty Inches from Center called her a "true pioneer in the field of contemporary art" in 2017.

References

  1. 1 2 "CONTINUUM: ASPEN MAYS + DIONNE LEE". Silver Eye. Archived from the original on 2020-03-02. Retrieved March 2, 2020.
  2. https://www.aspenmays.com.{{cite web}}: Missing or empty |title= (help)
  3. "UBS 12 x 12: New Artists/New Work: Aspen Mays". MCA. Retrieved 2020-03-02.
  4. "Aspen Mays: From the Offices of Scientists – Hyde Park Art Center" . Retrieved 2020-03-02.
  5. "Concentrate and Ask Again". 23 September 2009. Retrieved 2020-03-02.
  6. "Aspen Mays". Light Work. Retrieved 2017-03-06.
  7. 1 2 3 4 "Review Santa Fe: Aspen Mays". LENSCRATCH. 2012-10-13. Retrieved 2017-03-06.
  8. Eler, Alicia (September 2009). "Aspen Mays" (PDF). Art Papers. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2011-07-07.
  9. Yood, James (November 2009). "Aspen Mays" (PDF). Artforum. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2011-07-07.
  10. "CCA Faculty Page". Archived from the original on 2020-10-21. Retrieved 2 April 2020.
  11. "Aspen Mays". Higher Pictures. Archived from the original on 2020-08-09. Retrieved 2 April 2020.
  12. "Aspen Mays, Newspaper Rock". Lightwork. Archived from the original on 2013-10-31. Retrieved 2 April 2020.
  13. "Aspen Mays". COR&P. Archived from the original on 2013-10-26. Retrieved 2 April 2020.
  14. "UBS 12 x 12: New Artists/New Work:Aspen Mays". MCA Chicago. Archived from the original on 2015-12-21. Retrieved 2 April 2020.