#Athena LaTocha

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Above are two of the works from Athena LaTocha’s The Remains of Winter (Battle Hill, East), 2022, currently at Greenwood Cemetery in Brooklyn.

From the cemetery’s website about the work-

Athena LaTocha creates large-scale works inspired by her close observations of the natural world, from the deserts and mountains of the Southwest to the Great Plains. She often incorporates elements of these environments, including soil, sand, bark, and rocks. Recently, she has been particularly drawn to trees, considering them as record keepers that bear the markings of time.

Inspired by Green-Wood’s centuries-old trees and its legacy as a place of remembrance, LaTocha has created The Remains of Winter. She cloaked the remains of two massive European beeches on Battle Hill in thin sheets of lead, a material that has been used for centuries in coffins to slow the decomposition of the body. By hand-forming this malleable metal onto the trees, LaTocha captures the unique details of their shapes and forms, even as they slowly degrade beneath the lead.

All around these sculptures, the Cemetery is in a continuous cycle of transformation. Felled trees are turned into mulch for new plantings, earth is removed then replaced for each new burial, and even the stone monuments themselves slowly erode. Through The Remains of Winter, LaTocha memorializes these shifts and changes while also raising profound questions about what we choose to commemorate and mourn—whether it is what we can witness before us or that which, like the movement of continents and land masses, unfolds over lifetimes.

The sculptures will remain on view through September 2023.

[cronenburger]

Athena LaTocha, Burning, Sulphuric, Violent, 2020. And detail.

Shellac ink and World Trade Center building sand on paper.

VMFA.

[sbowen]

Athena LaTocha

like Jacquelyn is in Art on Paper 2023: The 47th Exhibition. More #athenalatocha

[chainsawpunk]

Athena LaTocha, Winterkill, 2018-19, ink and earth on paper, steel, lead, wood, 90 x 101 1/2 x 58 inches

[sheusedtobesassier]

[cordspaghetti]

what artists inspire your work?

hey! this is such a fun question. idk if you’re talking about fan art or stuff i do for school so i’ll just list the artists i can think of for both by medium lol. here goes, under the thing...

drawing:

faraz shanyar

katsuhiro otomo a bit

flesh.png on ig

mike mignola recently

pretty much anyone who has worked on a gerard way comic, especially:

leo romero

becky cloonan

gabriel bá

painting:

mark tennant

emilio villalba

james jean (esp his sketchbook pages)

alice neel

sigmar polke

j.c. leyendecker <3

blake neubert

athena latocha

print & collage:

robert rauschenberG

paul rentler

mimmo rotella

justin moll

odilon redon

putting gerard here bc his hesitant alien zine altered my dna

Other:

Doreen Garner (epic sculptor)

Dora Garcia (conceptual & web artist)

Nate Piekos (letterer!!!)

stewart uoo (sculptor)

anyone who makes mcr fan art <3

i know i'm forgetting a ton of people haha but yeah

[lafamamusic]

Su arte lee la tierra en el tiempo profundo

Su arte lee la tierra en el tiempo profundo

Recientemente, en una brillante mañana en el centro de Brooklyn, la artista Athena LaTocha se paró junto a un sitio de construcción donde los martinetes y las máquinas de movimiento de tierra estaban excavando los cimientos de un nuevo rascacielos, y examinó la escena con una especie de reconocimiento creativo. “Este equipo es una extensión de nosotros, ¿verdad? Es una extensión del brazo del…

[westernconnecticut]

The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum Launches Care Box

The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum Launches Care Box

Aldrich Care Box is a year-long traveling exhibition unbound to a physical space. A unique collaboration between The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum’s Curatorial and Education Departments, Director of Education Namulen Bayarsaihan and Senior Curator Amy Smith-Stewart, has commissioned five artists—Ilana Harris-Babou, Clarity Haynes, Athena LaTocha, Curtis Talwst Santiago, and James Allister…

[cnvisualart]

ID: Formations of The Self, a Group Show at BMCC Shirley Fiterman Art Center

I am pleased to announce that I will be exhibiting works from Unpacking Sameness, in a group show entitled, “ID: Formations of The Self” at the Borough of Manhattan Community College (BMCC) Shirley Fiterman Art Center. Show runs September 16, 2020 - January 15, 2020. 

Like so many art, culture, and educational institutions, the Shirley Fiterman Art Center has remained closed due to the current pandemic. This separation from art and social activity has created for many an acute longing to physically connect with people, artwork, and tangible experiences in real-time and space. In an effort to bridge this gap and, at the same time, offer a safe experience, the Fiterman Art Center is mounting an exhibition fully visible from the exterior of Fiterman Hall through large street-front windows on Barclay Street, Park Place, and West Broadway. The exhibition and exhibition brochure, as well as related video content, will also all be fully available online. ID: Formations of the Self focuses on the work of eight artists who work in a broad range of mediums. All, in varying modes, investigate aspects of identity and the ways in which individuals are shaped. Through explorations of place, gender, race, sexuality, the body, cultural traditions, and social and personal histories, each artist offers insight into how these elements inform and constitute our individual selves. Their works reveal the multiple overlapping facets and complex intersections that constitute our identities. The participating artists are LaKela Brown, Rachelle Dang, Jesse Harrod, Athena LaTocha, Emily Velez Nelms, Christie Neptune, Anna Plesset, and Joan Semmel.

Show link: https://www.bmcc.cuny.edu/sfac/id-formations-of-the-self-page/

Show runs September 16, 2020 - January 15, 2020.

Shirley Fiterman Art Center 81 Barclay Street New York, NY 10007

[micaramel]

Artists: Pena Bonita, Demian DinéYazhi´ (with Natalie Diaz and Sonia Guiñansaca), G. Peter Jemison, Adam and Zack Khalil (with Jackson Polys, Jim Fletcher, Kite), Alan Michelson, Native Art Department International (Maria Hupfield, Jason Lujan) and Christopher Green, Laura Ortman (with Jennifer Kreisberg), Jolene Rickard, Kay WalkingStick, Judith Barry and Ken Saylor, Kathleen Ash-Milby, Diane Fraher, Athena LaTocha, David Martine and Jaune Quick–to–See Smith, Candice Hopkins, Shanna Ketchum-Heap of Birds, Zoya Kocur and Valerie Smith

Venue: Artists Space, New York

Exhibition Title: Unholding

Date: November 19, 2017 – January 21, 2018

Note: A publication associated with the exhibition is available for download here, and a schedule of programs is available for download here.

Click here to view slideshow

Full gallery of images, press release and link available after the jump.

Images:

Images courtesy of the artists and Artists Space, New York. Photos by Daniel Peréz.

Press Release:

This has become mine, this unholding. Whereas, with or without the setup, I can see the dish being served. Whereas let us bow our heads in prayer now, just enough to eat; – Layli Long Soldier, WHEREAS (Graywolf Press, 2017)

Artists of Indigenous heritage have, for many decades in New York City, developed their practices in self-initiated contexts while endeavoring to extend the reach and visibility of their work to broader publics. Even as progressive art discourse celebrated an emergent multicultural outlook in the late 1980s, narratives around Native American art, culture, and experience remained simplified. Inspired by curator and artist Lloyd Oxendine’s American Art Gallery, founded in SoHo in the early 1970s, institutions such as the American Indian Community House (AICH) and American Indian Artists Inc. (AMERINDA) opened urban spaces for Indigenous representation which thrived outside of conventional value systems. Cultural and operational experimentation abounded and the roles of artist, curator, historian and activist were regularly blurred: G. Peter Jemison, whose early paintings were exhibited by Oxendine, served as the first gallery director of the AICH, while Jolene Rickard, whose photographs complicate separations between Native and American iconographies, is an acclaimed curator and a leading scholar in Indigenous visual history.

Two exhibitions organized by Jean Fisher and Jimmie Durham in the 1980s notably brought this work into dialogue with institutional and academic contexts: Ni’Go Tlunh A Doh Ka (We Are Always Turning Around on Purpose) at SUNY Old Westbury’s Amelie A. Wallace Gallery in 1986, and We the People at Artists Space in 1987. These exhibitions presented a generation of artists to a wide audience and scrutinized the hegemonic white American gaze by addressing questions of inclusion, framing, containment, and viewership. Artworks such as Pena Bonita’s photomontage series of a car stalled on a reservation road pierced the buoyant postmodern image with a wry political realism. Kay WalkingStick initiated the powerful double visions of her diptychs to complicate how iconography and materiality commingle in landscape painting. Curator and writer Candice Hopkins has noted that, “foregrounding Native artists’ voices rescued their aesthetic legacy from the clutches of modernism, rife as it was with misinterpretation, unequal power relations, and exoticism, and firmly positioned them within the contemporary.” So too, these artists questioned some of the implicit settler colonial assumptions in the contemporary, such as in Alan Michelson’s interrogations of linear temporality and the naturalization of economic growth, and carved critical spaces of aesthetic sovereignty.

Unholding is accompanied by a print publication that includes commissioned texts by Candice Hopkins and Christopher Green, alongside a reprint of an essay by Jean Fisher. Judith Barry and Ken Saylor have contributed a graphic that revisits their collaboration with Jean Fisher on the design for the exhibition We the People.

Constructing ties between this history and the present, recently produced works such as poet Layli Long Soldier’s WHEREAS (Graywolf Press, 2017) and Adam and Zack Khalil’s INAATE/SE/ [it shines a certain way. to a certain place./it ies. falls./] (2016) offer profound reckonings with cultural mythology and treaty while deeply experimenting with artistic form. For younger artists such as these, a sense of dexterous porosity and shapeshifting often propels their work, and many are active outside the traditional mediums of visual art, working in film, sound, performance, and text. Self-organization may take the form of applied corporate entities (Native Art Department International), vehement collaboration (Laura Ortman), and close engagement with one’s own artistic networks (Demian DinéYazhi’ and others). In each case, the Indigenous voice is more than foregrounded, but defines the context and conditions of its presence.

Link: “Unholding” at Artists Space

Contemporary Art Daily is produced by Contemporary Art Group, a not-for-profit organization. We rely on our audience to help fund the publication of exhibitions that show up in this RSS feed. Please consider supporting us by making a donation today.

from Contemporary Art Daily http://bit.ly/2Dv0dHn

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Athena LaTocha: Curated by Jaune Quick-to-See Smith November 7 — December 19, 2015 EXTENDED THROUGH January 14, 2016 Opening reception: Saturday, November 7th,  6-8pm

Featuring work by Curator-Mentor, Jaune Quick-to-See Smith in the Project Space ARTIST STATEMENT By reducing the palette, I center the imagery on dynamic gesture and atmosphere that recall the powerful forces of nature and the human impact upon the world. My images begin with my memory of Alaska—specifically the irony between vast magnitudes of raw nature and the impact of industrial development upon nature.I work rigorously between large and small scale. Incessant questioning and doubt play a large role in how I work in a repetitive, serial mode. Working aerially with my images on the floor, I am interested in being inside the image rather than the outside as an easel painter. I use intuitive processes and chance operations to tear down and rebuild landscape iconographies, turning to unwieldy and unorthodox tools to assist with this approach. Tools such as cracked rocks, concrete bricks, and reclaimed automobile tire shred—which I pick up off the sides of highways—are favored over traditional painting and drawing tools. The steel radial from the tire shred literally cuts and bites through the medium and into the support, while it conceptually cuts into the metaphorical landscapes.Athena LaTocha, born in Anchorage, Alaska in 1969, lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. She received her BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago; and MFA from Stony Brook University, NY in 2007. After completing her studies, she apprenticed in bronze finishing at the Beacon Fine Art Foundry in Beacon, New York and furthered her work in printmaking at the Art Students League of New York from 2008 to 2013. In 2013, LaTocha was the recipient of the prestigious Robert Rauschenberg Foundation Residency in Captiva, Florida. She was also awarded a fellowship and residency at the Vermont Studio Center, and is currently artist-in-residence at chashama, Inc. in Brooklyn, New York.Her work has been collected and exhibited by the Center for American Indian Research and Native Studies, South Dakota; Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, NY; Alaska Native Medical Center, Anchorage, Alaska; the Chicago Bulls, Chicago, Illinois. She has exhibited at St. Ann’s and the Holy Trinity, Brooklyn; Gallery SENSEI, New York; and Wilmer Jennings Gallery, New York.The artist gratefully acknowledges chashama for providing the space to create this new work.

CURATOR Jaune Quick-to-See Smith is one of most acclaimed American Indian artists of today.  Smith has had over 110 solo exhibits and offered more an 225 lectures in the past 40 years and has done printmaking projects nationwide.  Over that same time, she has organized and/or curated over 30 Native exhibitions, lectured at more than 200 universities, museums and conferences internationally, most recently at 5 universities in China. Smith has completed several collaborative public art works such as the floor design in the Great Hall of the new Denver Airport; an in-situ sculpture piece in Yerba Buena Park, San Francisco and a mile-long sidewalk history trail in West Seattle and recently, a new terrazzo floor design at the Denver Airport.

Smith uses humor and satire to examine myths, stereotypes and the paradox of American Indian life in contrast to the consumerism of American society. Her work is philosophically centered by her strong traditional beliefs and political activism. Smith is internationally known as an artist, curator, lecturer, print-maker and professor. She was born at St. Ignatius Mission on her Reservation and is an enrolled Salish member of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Nation of Montana. She holds 4 honorary doctorates from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Arts, the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, Mass College of Art and the University of New Mexico. Her work is in collections at the Whitney Museum, the Metropolitan Museum, the Brooklyn Museum, Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Walker, the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, Museum for World Cultures, Frankfurt, Germany and  Museum for Ethnology, Berlin. Recent awards include a grant from the Joan Mitchell Foundation to archive her work; the 2011 Art Table Artist Award; Moore College Visionary Woman Award for 2011; Induction into the National Academy of Art 2011; Living Artist of Distinction, Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, NM 2012; the Switzer Award 2012; Woodson Foundation, Lifetime Achievement Award, Santa Fe 2014; National Art Education Association, Ziegfeld Lecture Award 2014. In 2015 she received an honorary degree in Native American Studies from Salish Kootanai College, Pablo, MT. 

In addition to her role as Curator-Mentor for this exhibition, CUE Art Foundation is proud to honor Smith and her contribution the greater contemporary art world at the 2015 Gala & Benefit Auction.

[hyperallergic]

Exploring the Terrain of Contemporary Native American Art

[chainsawpunk]

Athena LaTocha, A Thing Not Past, 2021, shellac ink on paper, and lead, steel, 61.75 x 96 x 5.5 inches (overall)

[chainsawpunk]

Athena LaTocha, 17th Century, 2021, shellac ink on paper, and lead, steel, 59.25 x 93.25 x 5.5 inches (overall)