Richard Hennessy

Untitled

1972

Jay Milder (born 1934) is an American artist and a figurative expressionist painter of the second generation New York School. Old Testament themes such as Jacob's Ladder and Noah’s Ark, and the Jewish mystical beliefs of the Kabbalah, are recurring themes in Milder’s paintings which are presented as archetypal images that recur in the basic karma, make-up and need of human nature. Internationally exhibited, Milder is included in the collections of many national and international museums. He has been the subject of two, recent retrospectives in Brazil in 2007 at the National Museum Brasilia and, in 2006, at the Museum of Modern Art, in Rio de Janeiro. He is renowned in Sao Paulo, one of the major international centers for street and public art, as a seminal influence on graffiti artists. Jay Milder was born in Omaha, Nebraska, in 1934. His grandparents, who came from the Ukraine, were descendants of the Hasidic mystic, Rabbi Nachman. As he listened to family stories his interest in spiritualism and mysticism increased, and became an important influence on his philosophy of life and art. Later, when he arrived in New York, he was drawn to the Theosophical Society and the teaching of Helena Blavatsky. In 1954 Milder visited Europe where he studied painting with André L’Hote, and sculpture with Ossip Zadkine. He spent much time studying at the Louvre Museum, and at the studio of Stanley Hayter. During his Paris years the paintings of the Jewish painter Chaim Soutine, primarily influenced him. Milder returned to the United States in 1956, and he began studying painting at the Chicago Art Institute. He exhibited with the Momentum Group, an alliance of artists who were particularly dedicated to the progression of figurative art and its global origins. In 1957, Milder spent the summer in Mexico for a summer where he exhibited in Puebla. That year he received the Mexican Government’s Honor Award for artists. In the summer of 1958, Milder studied with Hans Hofmann in Provincetown, Massachusetts. He exhibited his work at the Sun Gallery, with his contemporaries, including Mary Frank, Red Grooms, Bob Thompson, Lester Johnson, Emilio Cruz and Alex Katz, among others. During this period his painting began to incorporate iconography of birds, animals, humans and animal/human hybrids. In 1958, Milder, Bob Thompson and Red Grooms, founded the City Gallery in the Chelsea section of New York City. The gallery moved downtown and became the Delancey Street Museum and an early site for ‘Happenings’,which Milder participated in. He showed his first major series called Subway Runners in 1960 at the Martha Jackson Gallery in New York City. Milder began a group of smaller paintings, entitled “Messiah Series”, in the late 1960s. These were fully expressionistic earth toned pictures, and he completed around 250 paintings in the series, based on biblical themes from the Old Testament. When 40 of these paintings were shown in a traveling exhibition premiering at the Richard Green Gallery in New York City, in 1987, art critic Donald Kuspit wrote in ArtForum Magazine: “after Nolde’s biblical pictures, these are the best and most integral group of biblical pictures in the 20th century.” During the 1970s, Milder co-founded a collective group called Rhino Horn with Peter Passuntino, Peter Dean, Benny Andrews, Nicholas Sperakis, Michael Fauerbach, Ken Bowman, Leonel Gongora, and Bill Barrell...

Titled: Calabash Hand signed, dated and titled. Sheila Elias (born in Chicago, Illinois) is an American artist. Her work is Neo Expressionist, Feminist Pop Art. Her works have been featured in exhibitions across North America and at the Liberty show at the Louvre Museum in Paris. Elias graduated from the Art Institute of Chicago, lives and works in Miami, Florida and in New York City. As an artist and art historian, Elias works with the layers of life and art history, seeking in it a connection between art aesthetics and social consciousness. She has exhibited with diverse artists, Larry Rivers, Bob Stanley, Ford Crull, Sol LeWitt, Mark Tobey, Walter Darby Bannard, Clyde Butcher. Her work spans the disciplines of painting, digital mixed media, sculpture, installation and performance. Her inspiration to be an artist began with the work that Matisse created (La Cirque) in the library of the Art Institute of Chicago. Paul Wieghardt (from the Bauhaus School in Germany), was her art teacher at SAIC. She was influenced by the Marisol, Claes Oldenburg and Jean Dubuffet. Her sculptures also reveal the influence of Andy Warhol and Robert Rauschenberg. We also have a work from her Pompidou Series (1979-1981) built around the X in the raw, exposed architecture of the Centre Georges Pompidou in the center of Paris designed by Richard Rodgers and Renzo Piano. Select Exhibitions: Museo Vault in Wynwood Art District, Miami Coral Springs Museum of Art, Sheila Elias: Somewhere-Anywhere, Coral Springs, Fla. Lila G. Martinez Gallery, Cambridge, Mass. “Painted Pixels” Lowe Art Museum, University of Miami, FL (Solo Exhibition) “Salon Series” The Sagamore Hotel, Miami Beach, FL (Group Exhibition) “The Invisible Woman” Concrete Space, Doral, FL (Group Exhibition) “eye-Pad” Silvana Facchini Gallery, Wynwood, Miami, FL “Jewels” Buccellati, Bal Harbour, FL “Chai Contemporary” Jewish Museum, Miami Beach, FL “Tribute to Africa” Silvana Facchini Gallery, Wynwood, Miami, FL The Bakehouse Art Complex, Wynwood, Miami, FL Apple Store “iPaint on my iPad,” Chicago, IL The Multicultural Arts Center, Cambridge, Mass. The Napoleon Grand Salon at The Deauville Hotel, Miami Beach, Fla. Bass Museum, "I Wanna Be Loved by You: Photographs of Marilyn Monroe," Miami Beach, Fla. Boca Raton Museum of Art Norton Museum of Art Bass Museum, Miami Beach, Fla. Jewish Museum of Florida Kim Foster Gallery, "Beyond the Camera...," New York, NY Silvana Facchini Gallery, "Living in Miami," Miami, Fla. South Florida / Art Center, "Reconnect," Miami Beach, Fla. Maryland Federation of Art, "Art on Paper 2001" Corcoran Gallery, Annapolis, MD, juror David C. Levy Veneto Gallery, Miami, Fla. Margulies Taplin Gallery, Bay Harbour, Fla. "Secret Gardens," Travelling Exhibition, Lowe Art Museum, Miami, Fla. Public Art Program, City of Orlando, Fla. Lowe Museum, University of Miami, Fla. Art and Culture Center of Hollywood, Hollywood, Fla. Bernard Biderman Gallery, New York, NY Metro Dade Cultural Resource Center, Miami, Fla. Huntsville Museum of Art New England Center for Contemporary Art San Diego Art Institute, CA Anne Jaffe Gallery, Bay Harbour, Fla. Ratner Gallery, Chicago, IL Santa Monica Heritage Museum, Los Angeles, Calif. Paula Allan Gallery, New York, NY. Otis Parsons School of Design, "Hollywood: Portrait of the Stars" California Louvre, Institute des Decoratifs, "Liberty: the Official Exhibitions Centenary of the Statue of Liberty", Louvre Institut des Decoratifs, Paris, France New York Public Library, New York, NY Gallery Q, Tokyo, Japan University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC New York University, Loeb Gallery, New York, NY Riverside Art Museum, Riverside, Calif. Danville Museum of Fine Arts, Danville, Virginia Alex Rosenberg Gallery, New York, NY New York University, New York, NY Stella Polaris Gallery, Los Angeles, Calif. University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC Pictogram Gallery, East Village, NY California State University,Northridge, Calif. Institute for Contemporary Arts, Korea Focus International, "American Woman in Art", Nairobi, Kenya Laguna Beach Museum of Art, OCCA, Long Beach, Calif. Gallery One, Fort Worth, Texas, juror: Dr. William Otton...