Tea Tasting at Cavin-Morris with Tea Dealers, Inc.
Tea Tasting Event
Cavin-Morris Gallery is honored to present a special tea tasting event in conjunction with Tea Dealers Inc.
Please join us on Saturday, May 27th at the gallery between 1-4pm.
RSVP at info@cavinmorris.com
More about Tea Dealers, Inc.:
Tea Dealers, Inc.
Stefen Ramirez
Owner / Tea Specialist
www.tea-dealers.com
https://www.instagram.com/teadealers
Stefen Ramirez created Tea Dealers with the aim to introduce the highest quality pure, non-blended teas to America. Our tea catalog is a distinctive selection of exceptional teas that focus on cultivation, the artistry of the producer, and the cultural heritage of each origin. We import teas from Japan, Korea, India, China, and Taiwan and source them directly from the farmers. All of the selections use traditional agriculture methods that do not use pesticides and only natural fertilizers when needed.
Stefen earned his Tea Specialist certification from of one of Japan’s largest tea companies in 2003. He is also a Japanese Tea Master studying traditional tea ceremony since 2007 and in 2010, was awarded a cultural scholarship to study tea at the four-hundred-year-old Urasenke tea school in Kyoto, Japan.
Stefen also manages educational programs focusing on the preparation and taste of tea and the integration of tea into the arts. He has been a part of installations involving tea service at the Guggenheim, Noguchi, Cavin-Morris Gallery, etc. Additionally, we have contributed to tea programs such as high tea at the Williamsburg Hotel, tastings for the Ministry of Agriculture of Japan and tea with meditation at Nike Lab. By supporting these unique settings we hope to communicate the inspiration and warmth the experience of drinking tea has given us in our everyday lives.
Tea presentations, lectures, and tastings performed:
Guggenheim Museum
United Nations NY
James Beard Foundation
Official Residence of the Japanese Ambassador
Japan Society
Hosho-an Tea Room at ICC Kyoto
The Wonder 500 NYC
Red Antler
Us Two
Nike Lab
District Vision
Our tea can be found at:
1OR8 Brooklyn
Shuya Cafe Du Ramen
Treatment By Lanshin
Ni Japanese Deli
Rouge Tomate Chelsea
Akashi
The Twenty Bar
N'eat
Patisserie Tomoko
The Four Horsemen
Bunker
Supercrown Coffee Roasters
Hartland On Hudson
Ortzi at the Luma Hotel
Hemlock
Noguchi Museum
The William Vale Hotel
Snowdays
La Duree USA
The Williamsburg Hotel
BODIES ELECTRIC: Luboš Plný & Anna Zemánková
BODIES ELECTRIC: Luboš Plný & Anna Zemánková
(June 1 - August 5, 2017)
Opening reception: Thursday, June 1st, 6-8pm
Cavin-Morris Gallery is honored to present the work of two masterful Czech artists, Luboš Plný (b. 1961) and Anna Zemánková (1908-1986). Sixteen of Zemánková’s drawings were included in the Venice Biennale of 2013 under the curatorship of Massimiliano Gioni, and eight of Plný’s collaged drawings are included in the current Venice Biennale organized by Christine Macel. Both artists have received major world recognition in the last ten years. Cavin-Morris Gallery has been fortunate enough to have worked with Plný since 2005, and with Zemánková since 1991.
In Walt Whitman’s powerful poem, “I Sing The Body Electric,” he equates the physical body with the human soul. No matter how microscopically we examine the human body, even down to basic DNA, there remains ultimately a mystery. That mystery is the repository for the soul. Plný and Zemánková follow this intuition with similar intentionality, but with very different processes and results. Plný works as a master of physical dissection, creating complex physical beauty; Zemánková approaches her work almost as an animist, infusing corporeal realities with essential manifestations of the soul.
Plný was in the military when he was diagnosed with schizophrenia simplex, a non-hallucinatory manifestation of the disease. He was withdrawn and did not desire social intercourse. On his own he began to study psychiatric and medical texts as a way of coming to terms with his condition. Plný processed this information in the form of intricate collaged drawings, where he took himself (and those around him) apart layer by layer to observe the workings of the body and mind. The amount of detail in these large drawings coupled with their beautiful strangeness, soon catapulted him into public appreciation. In this exhibition we are pleased to present a number of new works by Plný including a large triptych, which is a form of his that has not previously been shown in the United States.
Zemánková made her deeply pigmented and visionary drawings in a self-imposed solitude in the early hours of the morning. It was a way to combat a deepening and almost crippling depression brought on by the dissolution of her marriage, simultaneous with her children leaving home when they came of age. All her repressed sensuality and fierce need to nurture came out in these fantastic forms of reinvented Nature. For this exhibition we have chosen earlier works made before her first public exhibition, well before she began signing her name to her creations. Anna Zemánková will be presented at the Collection de l'art Brut, Lausanne June 9 – November 26, 2017, in a large solo exhibition that will also feature a catalog in multiple languages.
Both artists sing the intense razor’s edge of exaltation and sheer physicality. Both work to shape the mundane miraculous. Both of these artists lived and live intense lives through their art making, and both artists consciously and obsessively sing the Body Electric.
For further information please call 212.226.3768, or write info@cavinmorris.com.
On Love and Barley: Art From Japan
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
ON LOVE AND BARLEY: ART FROM JAPAN
April 13 - May 27, 2017
Cavin-Morris Gallery is pleased to present an eclectic exhibition of artworks from Japan including Noh and shrine masks, folk textiles, folk sculptures, contemporary works by Margaret Yuko Kimura and Yohei Nishimura, and contemporary ceramics from sake-ware and chawan (tea bowls) to non-utilitarian sculpture. We called this exhibition On Love and Barley because we feel the entire world is in between those two words: barley, the essence of survival and sustenance, and love, the ephemeral world of compassion and human contact. We dedicate this exhibition to the spirit of the poet Basho.
We will also be showing works of Japanese Art Brut including, M’onma, Yuichi Saito, Syunji Yamagiwa, Hirotaka Moriya, and Yoshiyasu Hirano. The art world is only just now becoming familiar with the wide range of sculpture, paintings and drawings by artists not working in the mainstream, yet producing works of deep power and insight. Cavin-Morris is proud to be part of the vanguard specializing in this growing aspect of international Art Brut.
The ceramists we will show include Shigemasa Higashida, Yukiya Izumita, Katsumi Kako, Aki Katayama, Mami Kato, Kentaro Kawabata, Touri Maruyama, Hideo Matsumoto, Shozo Michikawa, Akihiro Nikaido, Ryoji Koie, Toshio Ohi, Akira Sataki, Kato Takahiko, Yoh Tanimoto, Shiro Tsujimura, Koichi Uchida, Hiroyuki Wakimoto, and others.
Cavin-Morris Gallery has always been greatly influenced by the Japanese aesthetics from historic to contemporary, secular to spiritual. We celebrate work that is timeless, rooted in the natural world, and always deeply evocative.
For further information please call 212 226 3768, or write info@cavinmorris.com.
IMMORTAL MENAGERIE
IMMORTAL MENAGERIE
(March 2 - April 8, 2017)
Cavin-Morris Gallery is pleased to present a special group exhibition: Immortal Menagerie, independently curated by Cavin-Morris staff members Marissa Levien and Caroline Casey.
Immortal Menagerie is an international mythological zoological display mixing self-taught artists, contemporary artists, and ethnographic works. Depictions of animals have many spiritual and cultural connotations for both artist and observer. For this exhibition, we focused on works that evoke a sense of the artists’ cultural background, and most importantly, their spirituality. Even when the artists are unknown, as is the case with the international selection of masks, we focused on pieces that possess mythic symbology relating back to their cultures of origin. The creatures displayed are both literal or imaginary— sometimes they are deities, sometimes demons, sometimes harbingers, and sometimes escorts shepherding us to another plane.
Thai contemporary artist Kriangkrai Kongkhanun conjures beasts that depict a Buddhist version of Hell. He allows this Buddhist form of the spirit world to be complicated by the Western artistic styles and spiritual philosophies he absorbed while studying in Florence. Indonesian artist Angkaspura also allows folklore and religion to seep into his mind as he draws with a sort of cultural free association. His daily prayers are distilled into these drawings of otherwordly beings, pulling influence from Balinese illustrations, Javanese scrolls, Papuan imagery, and the daily sensory barrage of Jakarta.
For artists like Amalia, the recently deceased Seri storyteller and shamaness, animal depictions are a proud, surviving custom of her people, a tribe living in Sonoran Mexico. The tradition of the Seri is to carve shapes of animals out of wood— Amalia was the first to also draw these holy creatures on paper. Aboriginal artist Bobby Ngainmijra also hews closely to the customs of his people, and shares Amalia’s humility towards the natural world— in his drawings he allows animals’ souls to intermingle on equal footing with human souls. His work observes the brutal, cyclical force of nature, with various spirits dominating and eating one another in turn.
In more irreverent ways, the Fante people of West Africa hew closely to traditional symbols from their proverbs and stitch them into the flags they proudly display. The asafo companies constantly reshape the monsters and creatures of local stories to their own ends, turning them into taunts and insults for rival military clans, and creating a new, ever-changing folkloric lexicon in the process.
Animals can serve as orisons of memory in addition to myth. Franck Lundangi immigrated from Africa to France when he was 32 and the works he paints now, he says, are dreams of the Africa he left behind, possibly one that never existed at all. Christine Sefolosha lived in South Africa and worked with animals for a significant period of her life before returning to her native Switzerland. The animals of Africa, and the haunting aura and energy the place still flows through her work oneirically, even now. Instead of dreams or memories, there’s a nightmare to the life of Czech artist Karel Havlíček that speaks of imagination unfulfilled. The beings in his drawings have absorbed the spirit of a man whose defiant work was subdued and devoured by totalitarian government.
Through such beings, these artists encapsulate the strength and harshness of the natural world, and of a more interior, intangible world. Each mammal, insect, fish, bird, and imaginary beast can be seen as a fragmentary cultural collage; they are pieced together with religion, folklore, memory, body, and spirit.
For further information please contact Cavin-Morris Gallery at info@cavinmorris.com, or phone: 212-226-3768.
"resist"
Extended through February 25th, 2017.
"resist"
(January 12 – February 18, 2017)
they resist time
they resist exploiters
they resist definitions
they resist pigeonholing
they resist history written by the victors
they resist auction houses
they resist artspeak
they resist racism
they resist totalitarianism
they resist revisionist art history
they resist time
they resist art world gentrification
they resist art dealers
they resist curators
they resist critics
they resist being stereotyped
they resist being profiled
they resist political correctness (the real bad kind)
they resist art world politics
they resist art world sexism
they resist bad governments
they resist time
'resist' will feature Herman Bossert, Kashinath Chawan, Sylvain Corentin, Guillaume Couffignal, Caroline Demangel, Éric Derochette, John Devlin, Franklin, Victor Huaman Gutierrez, Joseph Hofer, M'onma, Izabella Ortiz, Solange Knopf, Davood Koochaki, Ilya Natarevich, Tony Pedemonte, Christine Sefolosha, Sandra Sheehy, Ghyslaine and Sylvain Staëlens, Gregory Van Maanen, Anna Zemánková, and others.
Intuit announcement
"resist" January 12 - February 18, 2017
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
January 12 – February 18, 2017
"resist"
they resist time
they resist exploiters
they resist definitions
they resist pigeonholing
they resist history written by the victors
they resist auction houses
they resist artspeak
they resist racism
they resist totalitarianism
they resist revisionist art history
they resist time
they resist art world gentrification
they resist art dealers
they resist curators
they resist critics
they resist being stereotyped
they resist being profiled
they resist political correctness (the real bad kind)
they resist art world politics
they resist art world sexism
they resist bad governments
they resist time
'resist' will feature Herman Bossert, Kashinath Chawan, Sylvain Corentin, Guillaume Couffignal, Caroline Demangel, Éric Derochette, John Devlin, Franklin, Joseph Hofer, M'onma, Izabella Ortiz, Solange Knopf, Davood Koochaki, Ilya Natarevich, Tony Pedemonte, Christine Sefolosha, Sandra Sheehy, Ghyslaine and Sylvain Staëlens, Gregory Van Maanen, Anna Zemánková, and others.
YAMINISM
Winter Spotlight: Visionary Edge
Click here to view the online catalog for Earth Skin
YAMINISM: Abelam Masks of Sustenance and Spirit
For Immediate Release:
YAMINISM: Abelam Masks of Sustenance and Spirit
(December 1, 2016 – February 18, 2017)
Cavin-Morris Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of masks from the East Sepik province in Papua, New Guinea called YAMINISM: Abelam Masks of Sustenance and Spirit.
The Dioscorea alata, or long yam, is a vital and fundamental part of Abelam culture. Social mores, economics, social standing, etc. are all elements of the animistic yam culture. Over centuries the long, straight branch-like yams have come to represent objects of reverence for ancestral spirits. They are treated with utmost care and formality. The wooden masks in this exhibition represent those ancestral spirits.
The jewel-like masks made for the yam ceremony by the Abelam, Arapesh and Boiken people, are becoming increasingly scarce. The masks, while made for a single purpose, rarely if ever repeat in form, and are highly valued among those who use them. They are under-collected and under-appreciated in the West, particularly in the United States, probably because the woven, coiled, and plaited fibers are seen as more ephemeral. The traditional collecting preference has always been for larger masks with heavily patinated wood.
This carefully assembled collection of masks were selected by a contemporary artist with an adventuresome and eclectic eye who also valued the ethnographic authenticity and original intentionality of the work. For this reason he purchased masks from a variety of old and new collections, including the Jolika Collection, John and Marcia Friede, Michael Hamson, Bruce Frank, Galerie Meyer and others of equal quality.
We present this exhibition, as we have previously presented Faceshifting (world masks) and Vodun, Vodou, Conjure: The Animistic Arts of the African Diaspora, as an area of cultural arts that deserves more appreciation by the public. In 2015 Michael Hamson published a catalog titled “Art of the Abelam” which illuminated the fascinating creative freedom of these important works. This is the first time such a large concentration of these masks has been shown in one place.
For further information please contact Cavin-Morris Gallery at info@cavinmorris.com, or phone: 212-226-3768.
Winter Spotlight: Visionary Edge
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
WINTER SPOTLIGHT: VISIONARY EDGE
December 1, 2016 – January 7, 2016
Cavin-Morris Gallery is pleased to present our Winter Spotlight: Visionary Edge featuring six artists we represent: Angkasapura from Java, Bessie Harvey from Tennessee, Kevin Sampson from New Jersey, Christine Sefolosha from Switzerland, Solange Knopf from Belgium, and Sylvain and Ghyslaine Staëlens from France. There is fierce grassroots spirituality in this group illustrating the central interests of the gallery: a strong visionary edge and a hardcore way of manifesting it.
Angkasapura draws animistic figures with a lush, obsessive complexity stemming from the densities of his native folkways as well as from his perceptions of street and Javanese urban culture. His work has recently been accepted by Musee de L’Art Brut in Lausanne, Switzerland, and will be included in an upcoming exhibition of new artists.
Bessie Harvey is one of the grand, old masters of vernacular African American art. Her work was first shown in the mid 80’s at Cavin-Morris Gallery. She works in the tradition of root sculpture portraying the spirits implicit in the old Conjure religion. She was included in the 1994 Whitney Biennial organized by curator Klaus Kertess. We have been fortunate enough to find some wonderful unexhibited works for this presentation.
Kevin Sampson has been with Cavin-Morris Gallery since the early 1990’s. His work continues to incorporate African American local histories, social awareness, and spirit yard imagery in a style inimitably his own. He has recently returned from a Joan Mitchell residency in New Orleans.
Christine Sefolosha is a painter of oneiric universes. The figures in her paintings move in mysterious narratives that seem to merge the mythical spaces of various cultures and epochs. Her work is immediately recognizable, and she is one of the few painters in the field working in small to large formats.
Solange Knopf also draws from the realms of dream, encapsulating a wide range of magic, decadence, spirits, pleasure and pain, and enlightenment. Knopf presents her work like Sefolosha, it has no time frame, it moves through history and lore in a personalized way making her particularly unique in the field.
Sylvain and Ghyslaine Staëlens make brooding sculptures that connect spiritual guardians with figures from witchlore, gypsylore, and traces of the medieval Black Virgin. All their sculptures are conceived and born with the materials they find in the Nature around their farmlands, forests, and volcanic mountains of rural France. Like all the other artists in this exhibition their work resounds in a timeless place.
For further information please contact Cavin-Morris Gallery at info@cavinmorris.com, or phone: 212-226-3768.
Check out this great article at Hyperallergic about our current exhibition:
THE BUSH HAVE EARS: LEONARD DALEY & RAS DIZZY (October 13 - November 23, 2016)
THE BUSH HAVE EARS: RAS DIZZY & LEONARD DALEY
(October 13 – November 23, 2016)
Ras Dizzy (1932- 2008) and Leonard Daley (1930- 2006) are two of the most important painters to emerge from the second generation of self-taught Jamaican artists born from 1930 to 1949, including Albert Zion, Evadney Cruickshank, Kingsley Thomas, Albert Artwell, and others.
Rastafarianism began to change Jamaican culture in 1930. Many artists were not actually Rastas, but they adopted many of the philosophical outlooks and the cultural resistance of the Rasta movement, similar to the way the counter-culture of the sixties affected lifestyles world-wide without everyone necessarily becoming hippies.
Jamaicans growing up in this time were enveloped in post-slavery and post-colonial issues and religions, such as Revival and Kumina (a Kongo-based religion begun in Jamaica by post-slavery indentured servants). Many Jamaicans emigrated to Panama and England to work, and and those who returned found less than desirable economic conditions. Despite outlawing Obeah (Jamaican hoodoo), the colonial powers in Jamaica were not as successful as the white Americans in suppressing African and pan-African spiritual impulses. Rastafarianism incorporated many Kumina customs in its tenets and lifestyles.
Neither Dizzy not Daley were anything but freewheeling in their spiritual outlooks. Dizzy was a poet before he became an itinerant artist. He wandered the island with his paintings under his arm to display and sell to people. Daley was a maverick philosopher, a cantankerous riddler who covered the walls of his house with what I call his ‘dub’ paintings. He was continually painting and repainting them at will so that they became a restless journal of his reasonings and questioning of social life. Dub is a form of reggae and post-reggae music in which the lyrics are removed and cut up to create a soundscape where rhythm becomes the narrative and the meaning is ambiguous and constantly changing. Daley is a master of powerful visual ambiguity in his thickly painted layers, not unlike work from some of the North American artists like William Hawkins and Thornton Dial.
Ras Dizzy is closer to a classic art brut artist but he never sacrifices his canny insights on both real and fantastical worlds. He works from his culture. He references a prophetic location called Sheffield as his visual home ground. There life is filled with deep color; reinvented palm trees, mysterious market women, cowboys, fantastical boats, extremely detailed horse races, Rastafarians, etc. But Sheffield is not always peaceful. Demonic beings he calls monopolys also live there. Each Dizzy painting is a rich pool of subtle and not so subtle color that resolves into meditative abstractions.
They were both obsessed with music from early American jazz to mento, reggae and dancehall. Their work is amuletic also, like much African American vernacular art. It serves as a marker of survival and a visual form of oral culture. The work of Ras Dizzy and Leonard Daley holds its magic close to its chest, but reveals great depth to those who open themselves to it.
For further information please contact Cavin-Morris Gallery at info@cavinmorris.com, or phone: 212-226-3768.
Check out this great review of The Eloquent Place
Current exhibition will be up through October 8th!
EARTH SKIN
EARTH SKIN
(September 8 - October 8, 2016)
We are pleased to present a ceramic exhibition in two parts called EARTH SKIN.
Clay is a mediation between the artistic impulses of the maker and a sense of Place and inner and outer landscapes. Its tactility once fired satisfies human needs in much the same way a natural landscape vista immerses us not only in a recognition of our place in the universe but also the immediate place we dwell in. Clay as a translator between artist, audience, and spirit. Evocation becomes manifestation.
In the sculptural part of the exhibition is the work of Melanie Ferguson, Rafa Perez, Phyllis K. Sullivan, Tim Rowan, Mike Weber, Mitch Iburg, Youngbin Lim, Eddie Curtis, Margaret Curtis, Tadashi Ito, Simcha Even-Chen, Rebecca Buck, Sarah Purvey, Shozo Michikawa, and Jane Wheeler.
The second part of the exhibition will be in our presentation room and will feature 25 chawan (tea bowls) presented as sculpture. Artists represented will be: Peter Callas, Eddie Curtis, Margaret Curtis, Robert Fornell, Lisa Hammond, Shigemasa Higashida, Mitch Iburg, Osamu Inayoshi, Aki Katayama, Ryoji Koie, Touri Maruyama, Hideo Matsumoto, Shozo Michikawa, Richard Milgrim, Akihiro Nikaido, Toshio Ohi, Takao Okazaki, Akira Satake, Steve Sauer, Jeff Shapiro, Wasaburo Takahashi, Takashi Tanaka, Yoh Tanimoto, Kai Tsujimura, Shiro Tsujimura, and Mike Weber.
The ceramists in this two-part exhibition are poets in their medium. They act as translators in the spaces they conjure and occupy with a sensual grace. Skin responds to the hand. It is that intimate. This work is part of that response.