222 Shelby Street at SOFA West

SOFA West

222 Shelby Street will feature works by

Jeffrey Gibson, Mary Lee Bendolph, Nino Caruso and more.

Booth #305

Art Fair Dates: August 4 - 7, 2011
Opening Night Preview: Wednesday, August 3, 2011

at the Santa Fe Convention Center
222.shelbystreet.com

222 Shelby Street Gallery will feature three artist at the SOFA West art fair this coming August 4-7 at the Santa Fe Convention Center. The three featured artists; Nino Caruso, Mary Lee Bendolph and Jeffrey Gibson bring very distinctive and original voices to contemporary modern art. Each in their own way steps across boundaries and categories with a very individual visual language.

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NINO CARUSO is a classic European modernist. His roots go to post-war Europe as an early voice of modernism. His iron sculptures of the late 50’s and early 60’s place him as a peer to David Smith and Henry Moore. The circle of Italian artists among whom he traveled included such important modernist as Lucio Fontana and architect Geo Ponti. Nino Caruso’s chosen medium is and was clay and in that medium he is an acknowledged master. That choice of medium placed him outside of the boundaries of the 50’s and 60’s art world and into the world of master craftsman even though his ceramic work of the early 60’s (a series of vessels titled “Vaso Antropomorfo”) was closer in form to Henry Moore or Jean Arp than to traditional Italian ceramics. The work that 222 Shelby Street exhibits at SOFA West marks a full circle (some 50 years later) to Caruso’s early ceramic work.

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MARY LEE BENDOLPH is an important American modernist although her path to modernism travels through her African heritage on an entirely different route than the trajectory posited for European modernism. Mary Lee Bendolph works in a tradition of African-American quilters that reaches back through slavery and the African diaspora to the African traditions that emphasize virtuosity and improvisation (like jazz and blues). Due to a quirky horseshoe bend in the Alabama River called Gee’s Bend the African American community in this bend has been more isolated and more autonomous than mainland Alabama. This isolation has caused untold trouble and hardship but it has also preserved the purity of expression of an African improvisational style that is distinctive to Gee’s Bend. This is what makes the Gee’s Bend Quilters so important. What sets Mary Lee, as an individual artist and recognized master, apart from the collective, is her unmatched virtuosity and improvisational skill.

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JEFFREY GIBSON is an artist of Choctaw/Cherokee heritage who studied art at the Chicago Art Institute and The Royal College of Art London. Describing his work, Gibson says “…the paintings themselves are made up of many references to multiple painting histories, including hard edge geometric abstraction, Op, AbEx, Futurism, Pattern and Decoration, plus street graffiti. Other sources that I look to include Native American textile and basketry weaving, geometric beadwork, and parfleche container painting. Being Native American, I have grown up aware of these objects and am always considering their relationship to modernist ideas of abstraction.”