James Esber | |
---|---|
Born | 1961 (age 62–63) Cleveland, Ohio |
Education | Cleveland Institute of Art, Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Temple University in Rome |
Style | neo-pop |
Spouse | Jane Fine |
James Esber is an artist based in Brooklyn, New York. He is known for paintings that utilize a wide range of materials, including Plasticine, to distort and reconstruct images of American pop culture. [1] [2]
Along with his wife, the artist Jane Fine, he creates collaborative drawings under the pseudonym "J. Fiber". [3] [4]
Esber moved to New York in 1986 and quickly settled in the nascent art community of Williamsburg. [5] He came to prominence as one of only ten artists from New York, including Lisa Yuskavage and John Currin, who were chosen for the Art Under 30: FIAR International Prize, curated by Dan Cameron. [6]
In the early 1990s, Esber completed a series of works called Hate Images, begun while a fellow at the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center. [7] These paintings transformed images of recognizable stereotypes by distorting them beyond easy recognition, and were similar to the works shown at his first solo exhibition at Pierogi 2000 in Williamsburg. [8] Distortion and plasticity continue to inform Esber's practice, which, described by the artist and critic Drew Lowenstein can be characterized by "grotesque, trippy amalgams on canvas and in plasticine wall adhesions". [9]
Another aspect of this Esber's practice concerns the transformation of presidents Abraham Lincoln and Richard Nixon, which David Geers referred to as a type of historical portraiture in BOMB. [10] Tricky Dick (1997-1998), a flattened and warped cartoon of Richard Nixon, was included in the Pop Surrealism exhibition from 1998 curated by Richard Klein, Dominique Nahas, Harry Philbrick, and Ingrid Schaffner for the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art. [11]
Esber is also known for works that involve participatory art practice, including This Is Not a Portrait (2009-2011), in which over a hundred people were tasked with making an ink drawing of Osama bin Laden during the War in Afghanistan. [12]
Esber's work has been exhibited nationally and internationally. A retrospective exhibition of his work was held at the Clifford Gallery at Colgate University, where he showed four decades of work. [13] Solo exhibitions have been held at museums and galleries including the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, PPOW, and the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art. [14] [15] [16] Group exhibitions include My Reality: Contemporary Art and the Culture of Japanese Animation at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, Now What? at the Norton Museum of Art, and SITE Santa Fe’s Fifth International Biennial: Disparities and Deformations: Our Grotesque, curated by Robert Storr. [17] [18]
Jessica Jackson Hutchins is an American artist from Chicago, Illinois who is based in Portland, Oregon. Her practice consists of large scale ceramics, multi-media installations, assemblage, and paintings all of which utilize found objects such as old furniture, ceramics, worn out clothes, and newspaper clippings. She is most recognizable for her sloppy craft assemblages of furniture and ceramics. Her work was selected for the 2010: Whitney Biennial, featured in major art collections, and has been exhibited throughout the United States and internationally, in Iceland, the UK, and Germany.
Ronnie Landfield is an American abstract painter. During his early career from the mid-1960s through the 1970s his paintings were associated with Lyrical Abstraction, and he was represented by the David Whitney Gallery and the André Emmerich Gallery.
Phong H. Bui is an artist, writer, independent curator, and Co-Founder and Artistic Director of The Brooklyn Rail, a free monthly arts, culture, and politics journal. Bui was named one of the "100 Most Influential People in Brooklyn Culture" by Brooklyn Magazine in 2014. In 2015, The New York Observer called him a "ringmaster" of the "Kings County art world." Bui was the recipient of the 2021 American Academy of Arts and Letters Award for Distinguished Service to the Arts. He lives in Greenpoint, Brooklyn.
Lane Jay Twitchell is a mixed media artist of visionary images. His intricately patterned abstract and semi-representational mixed media works are unmistakable. Twitchell mainly works in paint media, paper cutting, and collage. Cherie K. Woodworth wrote, “What Twitchell does is reinterpret the Western landscape— landscape as kaleidoscope, as a quilt made of paper, as a wide open world refracted in a giant, man-made snowflake. It is the landscape and the heart of the West—its natural grandeur, its history, its modern-day suburbs. Twitchell’s landscape is a labyrinthine desert rose blossoming in the midst of Manhattan.”
Ion Birch is a contemporary American artist who graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1994.
Michael Tarbi is an American artist and painter currently living in New York.
Sanford Biggers is an American interdisciplinary artist who works in film and video, installation, sculpture, music, and performance. A Los Angeles native, he has lived and worked in New York City since 1999.
Harmony Hammond is an American artist, activist, curator, and writer. She was a prominent figure in the founding of the feminist art movement in 1970s New York.
Nina Kuo is an Asian American painter, photographer, sculptor, author, video artist and activist who lives and works in New York City. Her work examines the role of women, feminism and identity in Asian-American art. Kuo has worked in partnership with the artist Lorin Roser. Kuo has been described as being a pioneer of AAPI and Chinese American art and culture.
Phyllis Baldino is an American visual artist whose art engages in a conceptual practice that merges performance art, video art, sculpture, and installation in an exploration of human perception. Her single-channel videos are distributed by Electronic Arts Intermix in New York, NY. She currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.
Ursula Meyer (1915–2003) was a German-born American artist and a professor of sculpture.
Dawn Clements (1958–2018) was an American contemporary artist and educator. She was known for her large scale, panoramic drawings of interiors that were created with many different materials in a collage-style. Her primary mediums were sumi ink and ballpoint pen on small to large scale paper panels. In order to complete a drawing she cut and pasted paper, editing and expanding the composition to achieve the desired scale. Her completed drawings reveal her working process through the wrinkles and folds evident in the paper. She described her work as "a kind of visual diary of what [she] see[s], touch[es], and desire[s]. As I move between the mundane empirical spaces of my apartment and studio, and the glamorous fictions of movies, apparently seamless environments are disturbed through ever-shifting points of view."
Regina Bogat is an American abstract artist currently living and working in New Jersey. Married to artist Alfred Jensen, her own artwork was often overlooked in favor of her husband's, although her work has experienced renewed interest from the art world during the past decade. She is best known for the abstract paintings she made in the 1960s and 1970s using cords, wooden strips, and colorful threads.
Paula Wilson is an African American "mixed media" artist creating works examining women's identities through a lens of cultural history. She uses sculpture, collage, painting, installation, and printmaking methods such as silkscreen, lithography, and woodblock. In 2007 Wilson moved from Brooklyn, New York, to Carrizozo, New Mexico, where she currently lives and works with her woodworking partner Mike Lagg.
Grace DeGennaro is an American artist. She is best known for watercolors and paintings that explore “ritual, geometry, and growth through repeated forms, serial patterns, and iconic forms like circles and diamonds.”
Jeanine Oleson is an American interdisciplinary artist working with images, materials and language that she forms into complex and humorous objects, performance, film, video, sound, and installation. Oleson's work explores themes including audience, language, land/site, music, and late Capitalist alienation
Caitlin Cherry is an African-American painter, sculptor, and educator.
Lucia Hierro is a Dominican American multimedia artist known for soft-assemblage, painting, sculpture, and digital media collages that represent the intersectionality between Dominican American identity, capitalism, and community through a culturally relevant lens. Her most notable works infuse "bodega aesthetics" with pop art, minimalism and Dutch still life styles. She has a studio in South Bronx.
James Little is an American painter and curator. He is known for his works of geometric abstraction which are often imbued with exuberant color. He has been based in New York City.
Jane Fine is an American visual artist. She has been an active participant in Williamsburg, Brooklyn's art scene since the 1980s. Her work has been associated with graffiti and the work of Philip Guston, who she met at Harvard University. She collaborates with her husband, the painter James Esber, under the pseudonym "J. Fiber".
{{cite book}}
: CS1 maint: date and year (link){{cite web}}
: CS1 maint: unfit URL (link)