Hansel and Gretel Picture Garden Pocket Utopia was a contemporary art enterprise in New York City. [1] [2] The Hansel and Gretel Picture Garden merged with Pocket Utopia to become one gallery, Hansel and Gretel Picture Garden Pocket Utopia. [3]
Hansel and Gretel Picture Garden Pocket Utopia was a contemporary art enterprise in New York City. [1] [2] The Hansel and Gretel Picture Garden merged with Pocket Utopia to become one gallery, Hansel and Gretel Picture Garden Pocket Utopia. [3]
Hansel and Gretel Picture Garden was created in 2011 by artists Jason Vartikar and Sarah Christian. The pair met at Harvard. The gallery began as an activist project space founded in a former horse and buggy stall on West 20th Street, aiming to merge silos of craft and fine art and to "deconstruct blue chip galleries" in Chelsea. [4] [5] [6] [7] In 2013, Hansel and Gretel Picture Garden moved to West 22nd Street, opening a larger space in a former Japanese tea house. [8]
Pocket Utopia, founded in 2007 by artist Austin Thomas, began as an alternative artists' space "in an old storefront on Flushing Avenue." [9] After hosting exhibitions, salon discussions and other events for two years, Pocket Utopia reopened on Henry Street in Manhattan [10] and represented five artists: Sharon Butler (publisher of Two Coats of Paint [11] ), Paul D'Agostino, [12] Kris Graves, Ellen Letcher (Co-founder of the now-closed gallery Famous Accountants [13] ), and Matthew Miller. The merger with Hansel and Gretel Picture Garden came after a three-month collaboration between the two galleries beginning with Austin Thomas’ presentation of her drawing practice, "Utopian." [14] According to the art critic Roberta Smith, Pocket Utopia became "one of the more singular bright spots in the Lower East Side firmament." [15]
Hansel and Gretel Picture Garden Pocket Utopia's kunsthalle-like program has included alternative exhibitions from the unveiling of a single painting, to an anonymous show, to work curated from Etsy.com. A collaboration with Polly Apfelbaum and D'Amelio Gallery [16] resulted in 'Flatland: Color Revolt,' an exhibition of hundreds of piles of loose glitter poured onto soft pancake-like bases. [17] [18] [19] A collaboration with C. G. Boerner and Richard Tuttle produced "The Thrill of the Ideal" a selection of 18th century Romantic prints curated and framed by Tuttle.
Hansel and Gretel Picture Garden Pocket Utopia’s collaborations with local, international, and institutional venues are some of its "happenings." Examples include the gallery's public conversations with MoMA, and the launch of 'The Glimmering Room,' one of poet Cynthia Cruz's collections of poetry. [20] In 2012, along with the artist Rachel Libeskind, the gallery was awarded a residency at Robert Wilson's Watermill Center. The result of the residency was the performance-installation "Nacht/Macht." [21] As part of its happenings, the gallery brewed its own micro brew, a malty beer called “Hoptopia”.
Artists on the roster included director Austin Thomas, Dax van Aalten (the American folk artist), [22] Sarah Rapson, [23] [24] Bell May (Mexican-American sculptor), Tatiana Berg (sometimes regarded as a 'New Casualist'), [25] [26] [27] Rachel Libeskind, [28] Ellen Letcher, and Matthew Miller. [29]
Daniel Libeskind is a Polish–American architect, artist, professor and set designer. Libeskind founded Studio Daniel Libeskind in 1989 with his wife, Nina, and is its principal design architect.
"Hansel and Gretel" is a German fairy tale collected by the Brothers Grimm and published in 1812 as part of Grimm's Fairy Tales. It is also known as Little Step Brother and Little Step Sister.
Matthew "Mat" Collishaw Hon. FRPS is an English artist based in London.
Rachel Harrison is an American visual artist known for her sculpture, photography, and drawing. Her work often combines handmade forms with found objects or photographs, bringing art history, politics, and pop culture into dialogue with one another. She has been included in numerous exhibitions in Europe and the US, including the Venice Biennale, the Whitney Biennial and the Tate Triennial (2009). Her work is in the collections of major museums such as The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; and Tate Modern, London; among others. She lives and works in New York.
Ingrid Schaffner is a curator, writer, and educator specializing in contemporary art since the mid-1980s. Schaffner work often coalesces around themes of archiving and collecting, photography, feminism, and alternate modernisms—especially Surrealism. She has curated important exhibitions that have helped studio craft to gain acceptance as fine arts, such as Dirt on Delight: Impulses That Form Clay with Jenelle Porter at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia in 2009.
Basil Twist is a New York City-based puppeteer who is known for his underwater puppet show, "Symphonie Fantastique". He was named a MacArthur Fellowship recipient on September 29, 2015.
Cordy Ryman, an artist based in New York City. Ryman earned his BFA with Honors in Fine Arts and Art Education from The School of Visual Arts in New York in 1997. He is the son of artist Robert Ryman (1930-2019). Cordy Ryman is represented by Zürcher Gallery, New York, NY.
Paul Thek was an American painter, sculptor and installation artist. Thek was active in both the United States and Europe, exhibiting several installations and sculptural works over the course of his life. Posthumously, he has been widely exhibited throughout the United States and Europe, and his work is held in numerous collections including the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, DC, the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, and Kolumba, the Art Museum of the Archdiocese of Cologne.
Walter Martin & Paloma Muñoz, also known as Martin & Muñoz are artists who collaborate to create dystopian sculptures and large photographic works often based on dioramas.
Famous Accountants is a contemporary art gallery located in Ridgewood, in the New York City borough of Queens, near the border with the Bushwick, Brooklyn. It was founded in October 2009 by artists Kevin Regan and Ellen Letcher, who opened the space to carry on the community spirit of Austin Thomas's closed Pocket Utopia gallery. The gallery is located in the basement of a building on Gates Avenue that was owned for nearly 15 years by performance artist Genesis P-Orridge., and her late partner, Lady Jaye Breyer P-Orridge. Lady Jaye used the same space as her studio for many years, the only remnant being the number 23, used as the title of Famous Accountants' first exhibition, 23, 2009.
Drew Beattie is an American painter and sculptor whose earlier work is part of the collaborative team Beattie & Davidson, and later work is characterized by post-kitsch material choices. Since 2013, Beattie has collaborated with the artist Ben Shepard on paintings, works on paper and sculpture.
Polly E. Apfelbaum is an American contemporary visual artist, who is primarily known for her colorful drawings, sculptures, and fabric floor pieces, which she refers to as "fallen paintings". She currently lives and works in New York City, New York.
Rebecca Morris is an abstract painter who is known for quirky, casualist compositions using grid-like structures. In 1994 she wrote Manifesto: For Abstractionists and Friends of the Non-Objective, a tongue-in-cheek but sincere response to contemporary criticism of abstract painting. She is currently a professor of painting and drawing at UCLA. Prior to that, she lectured at numerous colleges including Columbia University, Bard College, Pasadena City College, USC's School of Fine Arts, and the University of Chicago.
The Watermill Center is a center for the arts and humanities in Water Mill, New York, founded in 1992 by artist and theater director Robert Wilson.
Tony Feher was an American sculptor. He was born in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and was raised in Corpus Christi, Texas. He received a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Texas at Austin, in 1978. He began exhibiting fine art in 1980 and had his first solo show at Wooster Gardens in 1994, and shortly thereafter was reviewed favorably by Roberta Smith in a short article titled "Three Artists Who Favor Chaos:" "Tony Feher's chaos is actually rather well-organized and instinctively archival and devotional." Since then, notable solo exhibitions of his work have taken place at Diverseworks in Houston; Sikkema Jenkins & Co., Pace Gallery, and D’Amelio Terras in New York; ACME in Los Angeles; Anthony Meier Fine Arts in San Francisco; and The Suburban in Oak Park, Illinois.
Kay Turner is an artist and scholar working across disciplines including performance, writing, music, exhibition curation, and public and academic folklore. She is noted for her feminist writings and performances on subjects such as women’s home altars, fairy tale witches, and historical goddess figures. She co-founded “Girls in the Nose,” a lesbian feminist rock punk band that anticipated riot grrl.
Keltie Ferris is an American abstract painter who currently lives in Brooklyn, New York. He earned a BFA from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design and an MFA from the Yale School of Art (2006).
Rachel Owens is an American artist. She is best known for her multi-media sculptures and installations, which often incorporate a social component. Many of her works are made from crushed glass. She lives and works in New York, NY, and is an assistant professor of art and design at Purchase College, SUNY.
Kris Graves is an American photographer who primarily works in portraiture and landscape photography. He is based in New York and London, and his work has been published and exhibited internationally. Graves's photographs evoke the sense of time, change, and memories as well as address social issues to raise awareness. Graves founded and directs Kris Graves Projects, a publisher of art books.
Karina Aguilera Skvirsky is a multidisciplinary artist based in New York, New York. Her work is held in the permanent collections of the Brooklyn Museum, the New York Public Library, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Whitney Museum, among others. Working across video, performance, and photography, Aguilera Skvirsky addresses themes of migration, colonization, Latin American identity, and family history. Aguilera Skvirsky is best known for her performance video The Perilous Journey of María Rosa Palacios (2019).