Fall 2019 - Closings, Openings and Beth's Public Lectures

Amy Sherald, Sometimes the king is a woman, 2019

It's been a spectacular fall weather-wise and art-wise: The Museum of Modern Art reopened on Monday, October 21st, the Felix Vallotton will open this Monday, October 29th at the Met (closing January 26, 2020) and the elegant TEFAF  art fair will fill the Park Avenue Armory November 1st - 5th.

This weekend two exciting exhibitions will close:

Saturday, October 26th, Amy Sherald the heart of the matter, Hauser & Wirth, 548 West 22nd. St. 

(Ms. Sherald is best known for her portrait of Michelle Obama in the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC.) 

Alicja Kwade, Parapivot, 2019

Sunday, October 27th, Alicja Kwade, Parapivot, Metropolitan Museum of Art, roof installation

Also - IFPDA Fine Art Print Fair is still on at Jacob Javits Center, closing Sunday, October 27th.

Please join us at Beth's Public Lectures and Panels this fall:

Amadeo Modigliani, Portrait of Max Jacob, 1916

Monday, October 28th - "When Modern Art was 'Jewish': The Anti-Semitic Campaign Against Cubism and the School of Paris," Shames JCC, Tarrytown, 10 - 11:30 am.

 Ann Cefola   

   Ann Launger         

Beth Gersh-Nesic

Translation for Writers - Workshops

Saturday, November 2nd - "Translation for Writers," with poets Ann Cefola, Ann Lauinger and art historian Beth Gersh-Nesic at Desmond-Fish Library, Garrison, NY, 1:30-3 pm. 

Sunday, November 10th - Sunday Afternoon with George: "Translation for Writers," with poets Ann Cefola and Ann Lauinger and art historian Beth Gersh-Nesic at Shames JCC in Tarrytown, NY, 1:30 - 3:30 pm.

Georgia O'Keeffe, Blue and Green Music, 1919

Monday, November 4th - "American Women Artists," late 19th-20th century, Learning in Retirement, Temple Beth El, Stamford, CT, 1 - 3 pm.

Monday, November 11th - "20th Century European Women Artists," Learning in Retirement, Temple Beth El, Stamford, CT, 1 - 3 pm

Monday, December 9th - "Was André Salmon a Feminist?,"  André Salmon Colloquium, University of Turin, Turin, Italy.

More News:  The Launch of Za Mir Press

Our first publication is Professor Jacqueline Gojard's book Pablo Picasso and André Salmon: The Painter, the Poet and the Portraits (Za Mir Press, 2019), available on Amazon. 

As for  teaching art history, some of you know that I retired from Purchase College and joined the faculty of the College of New Rochelle last fall as an adjunct.  CNR closed in August and Mercy College, which took over CNR, hired me back.  I taught at Mercy on and off from 1994-2013.

Please keep in touch and let us know if you have exciting exhibitions, books or other events that you would like to announce through the New York Arts Exchange.  Write to Beth at nyarts.exchange@verizon.net

Happy Halloween!  Shanah Tovah!  

Hoping to see you this fall -

Beth 

Beth Gersh-Nesic, Ph.D.

Director and owner

New York Arts Exchange

"Translation for Writers" with poets Ann Cefola and Ann Lauinger, and art historian Beth Gersh-Nesic, Sunday, February 24th at 4 pm, Bronx River Books

Translation for Writers

at

Bronx River Books

37 Spencer Place, Scarsdale, NY 10583

Sunday, February 24^th at 4 pm.

info@bronxriverbooks.com

Did you take a second language in school but never had much use for it? Even if you know a minimum of another language, you can enrich your own writing and publishing credits through literary translation. Learn about the many opportunities in the growing field of global literature. We share it all: the Good, the Bad, and the Transcendent.   Come join us!

Ann Cefola – Poet and author of Free Ferry (Upper Hand Press, 2017) and Face Painting in the Dark (Dos Madres, 2014); translator of The Hero (Chax Press, 2018) and Hence This Cradle (Seismicity Editions, 2007); recipient of the Robert Penn Warren Award.

 

Ann Lauinger – Professor of Literature, Sarah Lawrence College; poet and author of Persuasions of Fall (The University of Utah Press, 2004) and Against Butterflies (Little Red Tree Publishing, 2013); translator of Pierre Ronsard and Filippo Naitana; and recipient of Agha Shahid Ali Poetry and Ernest J Poetry Prizes. Beth Gersh-Nešić – Director of the New York Arts Exchange, art historian, author with the poet Jean-Luc Pouliquen of Transatlantic Conversation About Poetry and Art (CreateSpace, 2018), translator of André Salmon on French Art (Cambridge University Press, 2005), and contributing writer to BonjourParis.com and Smarthistory.  She teaches art history at the College of New Rochelle. Looking forward to seeing you there, Beth New York aka Beth S. Gersh-Nesic, Ph.D. Director and owner New York Arts Exchange www.nyarts-exchange.com

Fall is Here! And so is 5779 too! Closings and Openings to Ring in the New Year

Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination

Metropolitan Museum of Art through October 8th

At The Cloisters (above) and on Fifth Avenue

Fall is finally here and the crisp, clean winds are blowing away the heavy rain Hurricane Florence dumped on our region.  Ah - what a relief!  Our hearts and prayers to out to North Carolina, South Carolina and Virginia, which sustained enormous damage and lost so many lives due to the storm.

Therefore, we must be thankful for one challenging day in New York and be grateful for all our bounty, especially the exciting exhibitions on view this past summer.  I hope you were able to see Giacometti at the Guggenheim and Chaim Soutine: Flesh at the Jewish Museum before these exhibition closed earlier this month.  My July newsletter listed the shows ending during the summer.

Please note that the Met Museum decided to keep their Costume Institute exhibition  Heavenly Bodies on view through October 8th.  The Cloisters has a fabulous portion of Heavenly Bodies on view, as you can see in the photo selected our blog post today.  At the Met Breuer, Obsession: Nudes by Klimt, Picasso and Shiele will close on October 7th.

 

Ann Cefola and I will join George Kraus, poet Filippo Naitana, and his translator Ann Lauinger for Poetry in Translation, Sunday, September 30, 1:30 - 3:30 PM, at Shames JCC on Hudson, 371 South Broadway, Tarrytown, NY.  Free for members of the JCC; $10 for non-members.  Ann will read from her translations of  Hélène Sanguinetti's poetry (including her most recent publications) and I will read excerpts from André Salmon's long poem Peindre (Painting), 1921. 

Other New York Arts Exchange opportunities down the pike:

• The Scarsdale Woman's Club, Wednesday, September 26, 2 pm: "Art after WWI: Surrealism."
• Learning in Retirement, Temple Beth El, Stamford,  Wednesday, October 4, 1 pm: "Andy Warhol and Alex Katz at the Neuberger Museum."
• Learning in Retirement, Wednesday, October 10, 1 pm-2 pm; 2 pm-3 pm: Tours of the Neuberger Museum.
• Alliance Française de Greenwich and Byram Shubert Library, at BSL, Tuesday, October 9, 5:15 pm: "Delacroix in Context" (preparing for the exhibition at the Met).

As usual, New York has an extraordinary amount of excellent exhibitions this fall.

A full list of recommendations will be in the next blog post.

Best wishes for Fall Art Season 2018 -

Beth New York

aka Beth S. Gersh-Nesic, Ph.D.

Director and Owner

New York Arts Exchange, LLC

www.nyarts-exchange.com 

Ann Cefola Shares Her Book with Friends at the Hudson River Museum on April 26th

Please join me on Sunday, April 26th to celebrate Ann Cefola's new book of poetry Face Painting in the Dark (Dos Madres, 2014)  at the Hudson River Museum.
Event begins at 3:30 pm.

I look forward to seeing you there!

Beth New York
aka Beth S. Gersh-Nesic, Ph.D.
Director
New York Arts Exchange
www.nyarts-exchange.com

Face Painting in the Dark: Poems by Ann Cefola

Ann Cefola paints with poems: still lifes, landscapes, self-portraits and other works of art.  She is a visual artist, as surely as those who delineate with brush or pencil.  She shapes, carves, digs in and reveals.  Peeling away layers of optical appearance, she mines for meaning, creating a personal iconography of circumstance.

In “Teint Pur Mat,” Cefola begins our reading of the poem with a French proverb: “Il fait dur d' être jolie (It's hard to be pretty).”

In white slip like lace, close to mirror, my mother fills 
eyebrows with Charles of the Ritz gold pen.

Chanel No. 5's scent glossy and brown as her mink stole, dabs
from a square bottle.  Touch & Glow, shaken hard in one hand.

And so the poet continues to describe the intimacy of a woman's toilette observed by her daughter, the room suffused with “pharmaceutical scents” sprinkled, sprayed and poured into use that become the heirlooms of experience: habits, products, gestures and olfactory associations.  These moments of watching and waiting transition into joining the female tribe by enacting rituals of beautification.

pale frosts of junior high.  How makeup marks my life;
Elbowing at the girls' room mirror, I draw

And contemplate: ruminating over this fashioning of the mask, this living inside and outside of the body:

help me get closer to my true snakeskin.
To swim toward grace, she knew what must be applied.

Along with these evocative images – the optical, the physical, the invisible and the remembered – which interact and overlap, simultaneously, like a Cubist's collage, there is sound: a voice that too sketches out the scenery, as in "Sugaring"

            At the pancake house, I say Blueberry, you say Cinnamon Sugar.                                                      

This poem makes my mouth crave maple syrup.

Thankfully, Cefola includes her masterpiece “Demoiselles 7,” which I have enjoyed for lo these seven years since we worked on our respective “Demoiselles” for the 100th anniversary of the painting's birth (mine was the catalog essay for an exhibition; Ann's her magnificent dialogue between the five prostitutes and art history):

To give and daily be discarded.
To live a heaviness in limb,
to feel  one's blood finely carbonated,

to sink back into empty pupils.

You blame Braque, Léger, Gris

They saw the world vibrate, could see the other side.

They heard the discordant violin, broken guitar.

They knew the danger of still life.

Picasso's ladies talk back, released from their stationary poses, to rant about the issues that still plague humankind:

We Demoiselles that changed the world,     and didn't.

As we travel from page to page, following the poet alight on urban and rural terrain, capturing the very essence of existence in all its vibrant or drab quotidian colors, we eventually face death itself in her poem “Road to Windsor,” dedicated to Susan Hall Anthony (1930-2009), co-founder of the New England Writers Association.

There she is, shimmer and light,

about to loose the body like an old nightgown.

I offer useless prayers.  Embrace her a second, last, time.

She holds on as if spirits speak in dialogue no one can hear.

This mural-like existence no less than two women, a portrait,

a Vermeer.  Love doesn't go away, I say.  She knows.

I put my hands at my heart in Namaste,

a gesture she returns.

And so the poet heads for home through the Vermont farms and Main Streets as we too take our leave from this journey through a virtual exhibition of Celofa's perceptive imagery:

Green hills home to sheep and dog, black-eyed Susans bright.
The envelope that folds in on itself,
daylilies that close at night.

Chuffed, we look forward to another Cefola collection.

Ann Cefola's Face Painting in the Dark was published by Dos Madres Press in 2014.   Her other collections of poems are St. Agnes, Pink-Slipped published by Kattywompus Press in 2011 and Sugaring published by Dancing Girl Press in 2007.  She also translated Hélène Sanguinetti's poem Hence this Cradle published by Seismicity Editions in 2007 (enjoying the Witter Bynner Poetry Translation Residency at Santa Fe Art Institute to prepare).  Cefola received the Robert Penn Warren Award, judged by John Ashbery.  She earned her MFA in Poetry Writing from Sarah Lawrence and still lives in New York.

Namaste,

Beth New York
aka Beth S. Gersh-Nesic
Director
New York Arts Exchange