News – Your Art Here

New Billboard and Virtual Artist Talk: “Holy” by Donna Ferrato

Posted on October 16, 2020 - 3:42 PM by Mia Beach

About HOLY – Holy is forged from one woman’s outrage against a woman-hating world. May it anger you. Donna Ferrato’s radical photographs show what women are capable of surviving. More than survive, Holy depicts women who prevail. Holy is an invitation to understand how it feels being held down by the patriarchy-what we are fighting for, what we are up against–and how we manage to maintain a sense of desire and appetite. Fighting for equality in the bedroom and the boardroom, Ferrato’s journey follows the sexual revolution of the ’60s through the #metoo era of today.

Holy is a showcase of power. Donna’s images reveal women’s bodies in all their monstrous glory-even her own. May these photographs mobilize you, whether you are cis or trans, young or old, butch or femme. Human survival depends on women. Embrace your instincts, desires, brainpower, and strength. Embrace each other.

About the Artist – Donna Ferrato is an internationally-known documentary photographer. Her gifts for exploration, illumination, and documentation coupled with a commitment to revealing the darker sides of humanity, have made her a giant in the medium. She has participated in over 500 one-woman shows and has received awards such as the Robert F. Kennedy Award for Humanistic Photography (1987), the Missouri Honor Medal for Distinguished Service in Journalism (2003), and the Gender Fairness Award from the New York State Supreme Court Judges (2009). She founded a non-profit called Domestic Abuse Awareness for over a decade. In November 2016, TIME magazine announced her photograph of a woman being hit by her husband (1982) as one of the “100 Most Influential Photographs of All Time.” Currently, Ferrato is documenting her rapidly-changing New York neighborhood of Tribeca for a new book.

The Center for Integrative Photographic Studies and Your Art Here collaborated to unveil a billboard of Donna’s design with funding through the IU Public Arts Grant and the city of Bloomington.

Donna will present a virtual Artist Talk with funding support from OVPR and Your Art Here. You can register here.

Spring and Summer 2020 Billboard- “To Our Friends” by Dianna Settles

Posted on October 16, 2020 - 3:24 PM by Mia Beach

This week, we said goodbye to our billboard by Dianna Settles, an Atlanta-based painter and printmaker. This billboard was only intended to stay up a month, but when the coronavirus hit, we decided to leave it up for many reasons. It served as a reminder of the warm days of friendship and intimacy that will return intensified, and of the shared power we build through friendship that is the best guarantee of care during crisis.

Settles says this about her work:

In 2014, I traveled to my father’s home country of Vietnam, where, for the first time, I witnessed room after room of artwork featuring figures I could relate to and see myself in. This began my indeterminate synthesis of traditional Vietnamese painting and the colonial influences of European art. The presence of marginalized bodies in my work is historically important, and permeates my translation of conflicting, alienated feelings through bodies, colors, and objects rendered into sources of power and reclamation. Along with meandering on this line between European and Vietnamese artistic lineages, I also collapse the space between the portrait and still life forms – my work often functions as still lifes of faces, while simultaneously as portraits of objects.

My paintings materialize ephemeral experiences of joy, potentiality, and friendship in order to reflect on, revisit, and remember them in all their ecstasies and agonies. These images are ways of processing my identities, and celebrating the beauty and uniqueness of the worlds my friends and I construct and inhabit. Inspired equally by actual occurrences and potential arrangements, and combining disparate objects, people, places, and actions from my life, my compositions are collages of moments that take on a richness gesturing beyond the individual emotional and historical resonances of their components – towards all possible arrangements of a life worth living.

Whether portraying grand adventures or the oft-overlooked, banal moments of the everyday, I aspire to celebrate the desire to fully participate in communal life, and inspire joy in the struggle to do so, even in a society so inhospitable to this desire. Many of my paintings illustrate joyful collective experiences, exalting in such moments and exploring ways to further elaborate forms of life that precipitate them. At other times, my subjects are caught in moments of isolation, raising questions around the structures and obstacles keeping us from such meaningful and pleasurable lives. My vibrant colors, poetic compositions, and detailed, playful mark-making help me refine and reveal shared experience, and elevate this beyond individual dreams and memories.

This billboard is based on a mural that Settles painted in Paris:

You can see more of her work at: http://diannasettles.squarespace.com/

New Billboard by Claire Fontaine

Posted on January 12, 2019 - 12:37 AM by Mia Beach

Winter/Spring 2018/2019 Billboard- *Refugees Welcome* by Claire Fontaine

We’re excited to showcase the work of the French art collective Claire Fontaine on this winter’s billboard.

The billboard, “Refugees Welcome” is a timely message given the current U.S. political climate, and we at Your Art Here find it interesting that, given the opportunity, this is the design Claire Fontaine created for a small Midwestern city.

You can see more of Claire Fontaine’s work through the years at: http://clairefontaine.ws/

http://clairefontaine.ws/