A Shoe Story
... and more about art around the borough and beyond ...
Hope you all had a great summer.
This edition begins with a brief tale about an aspect of my own work. But several art happening highlights appear right after that.
Blue Door Art Center in downtown Yonkers currently has a show called “Small Works,” which includes a couple of my pieces, including this one, which is one of the first pieces of artwork I had ever done, a couple of years after my brain cancer surgery in 2012.
And BDAC has an upcoming show called “Zapatos: The Stories That Shoes Tell.” Though submissions (due Oct. 1) do not require shoes or shoe images to be a part of the art, the theme is rather relevant to what I’ve been up to over the past five years. I began using shoe inserts — those cardboard items shoved in new shoes at shoe stores — in 2017 when I was taking a mixed media class at the Art Students League in Manhattan. I mixed some red and orange acrylics and painted a shoe insert to see what it would look like. I placed it on the side of my work table while I was focusing on doing something completely else. When my instructor came over to discuss my work, she pointed to the painted item and said: “What’s that?” When I explained it, she said something like: “Keep at that.” That’s all I needed to hear. Here’s the first piece I created with that material.
I wasn’t really satisfied with a good few pieces of my work that came after this. So, in the last 18 months or so I’ve been tearing off and ripping up a lot of what I did in class and have been making work like this, which was in a Blue Door exhibit a few months ago.
OK, enough about my “shoe” work :-) Here are some current and near-future Bronx exhibits I look forward to checking out:
I’ve heard great things about “Michael Richards: Are You Down?” at the Bronx Museum of the Arts.
This Tuesday, Sept. 19 at 6:30 p.m. the Bronx Documentary Center will have its Films Fellows Screening with Q&A.
You might remember Buunni Cafe in Riverdale, which unfortunately closed during COVID. But they are still active on Broadway in Inwood and host a variety of concerts, readings, etc. And there’s 2 cool events — one music and one theatre — coming up on Sept. 29 and 30.
On Oct. 4 there will be an opening for a Mexican culture exhibit at the Longwood Art Gallery at Hostos Community College. They have some incredible shows there.
A great exhibit I saw inside and out a few weeks ago — “Things Come to Thrive … In the Shedding … In the Molting …” — by Ebony G. Patterson, throughout The New York Botanical Garden in the Bronx through Oct. 22. Times review here.
I haven’t been to the Lehman College Art Gallery in ages, mostly because of COVID restrictions, but this group show for graduates from 2021-2022 is a good chance to get back at it. Check it out.
A new exhibit at Derfner Judaica Museum in Riverdale.
Gallery 505’s current solo exhibit by Annette Back goes through Sept. 29.
If you’ve seen or heard some great creative stuff in the Bronx that’s not mentioned here, please let me know and I’ll try to include it in the next issue. Thanks, and have a great weekend!
P.S. Many of my photos and artwork are on IG @jordanmossbx.