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SLate and Bone

440 Gallery, 440 6th Ave, Brooklyn NY

March 18 - April 19, 2020

Opening Reception postponed til further notice

The title of Nancy Lunsford’s seventh solo show at 440 Gallery “Slate and Bone” takes its name from several small drawings on broken slates. These pieces were  created over 20 years ago and relate to the American history of slavery and the African diaspora. The exhibit includes other more recent work, some with social commentary and others simply honoring the practice of art.

A group of figure drawings on paper are included as a tribute to the founding of 440 Gallery fifteen years ago when Lunsford and Shanee Epstein organized a pop-up exhibit with artists who had been meeting for a weekly sketch group in her studio. The current show is a mix of old and new, with subjects serious and light-hearted. Lunsford says of her work: “Art has always been a way for me to express the inexplicable, to escape the inescapable. Like life, it is both a struggle and a joy, provocative and healing.”

Lunsford has exhibited her work extensively over the last 30 years. Before founding 440 Gallery, Lunsford ran Wisteria Artspace, a gallery in Carroll Gardens. In addition to exhibitions, She also produced shadow theater and other performances at Wisteria, including a collaboration with Jill Reinier and Flying Bridge Community Arts. Lunsford began her career as a portrait artist and illustrator and did courtroom sketching for CBS. During ten years abroad, she studied the indigenous art of shadow theater in Indonesia and exhibited with Urart Gallery in Ankara Turkey. She wrote art criticism for the Turkish Daily News and developed a contemporary shadow theater production, performed at SanArt International Arts Symposium in Ankara. As she steps down from an active role at 440 Gallery after fifteen years,  Lunsford looks forward to exploring new creative challenges.

 Mending

440 Gallery, 440 6th Ave, Brooklyn NY

February 15 - March 18, 2018

Opening Reception Thursday, February 15, 6 -8 pm

 

Brooklyn, NY - 440 Gallery presents Mending an installation of work by Nancy Lunsford and JoAnne McFarland on view during Black History Month and Women’s History Month.

The title refers to both the mending of the political fissures of the civil rights and feminist movements, and the mending that follows trauma. “Mending” also echoes the constitutional amendments that granted freedom, citizenship and voting rights to former slaves and women. The title further refers to the current cultural climate in which racism and misogyny are once again dominant strains.

Lunsford's work consists primarily of small, meticulous portraits of women drawn from American History. Some of the subjects are familiar, while others are less known. Lunsford burns the portraits by hand onto wood, or draws them in black and white on black slate, mirroring the historical context of personal struggle and adversity women endure. The subjects are primarily teachers, doctors, abolitionists, and early feminists –  Ida B. Wells, Mary Bethune, the Grimké Sisters and others.

McFarland's work is elegiac: restrained and quiet. Her Stilled-Life paintings are of a single object: a split pomegranate, an artichoke, a few spools of bright thread. They are diminutive vignettes, classically rendered with a deft touch. Draw closer, and one sees a faint, stenciled name on the surface that triggers a memory. Beside each miniature oil, stenciled directly onto the wall, the second part of the name completes the memory: Freddie Gray, Tamir Rice, Sandra Bland, Amadou Diallo. These pieces bear the reflective, honorific experience of a memorial, allowing us to remember the lost lives through the protective lens of beauty.

McFarland’s large oil of a reclining figure, Woman of Color, also draws us in with its beauty, but by leaving selective blue underpainting and scored lines, the sunbather’s smiling face and open, vulnerable sexuality appear marked and targeted. 

Lunsford is a co-founder of 440 Gallery, this is her fifth exhibition at the gallery. Her work is in collections in the US, Europe and Turkey.

JoAnne McFarland, artist, poet, and curator, is the former Exhibitions Director of A.I.R. Gallery. Her work is in the permanent collections of the Library of Congress, the Columbus Museum of Art, and the Dept. of State, among many others. For more information, visit her website: joannemcfarland.com.