EventsThe New Social Environment#64

The Life and Work of Ronald Bladen

Featuring Torkwase Dyson, Ursula Von Rydingsvard, Dr. Robert S. Mattison, and William Corwin

Friday, June 12, 2020 1 p.m. Eastern / 10 a.m. Pacific

These free events are produced by The Brooklyn Rail.

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Artists Torkwase Dyson and Ursula Von Rydingsvard and art historian Dr. Robert S. Mattison join Rail Architecture Editor William Corwin for a conversation. We conclude with a poetry reading by Simone White.

Torkwase Dyson

A photo of Torkwase Dyson on The Brooklyn Rail's New Social Environment
Torkwase Dyson
A painter whose compositions address the continuity of movement, climate change, infrastructure, and architecture, Torkwase Dyson grapples with ways space is perceived and negotiated by black and brown bodies. These subjects produce abstractions that explore the history and future of black spatial liberation strategies and environmental racism. Explorations of how the body unifies, balances, and arranges itself to move through environments become expressive and discursive structures within her work. Dyson builds the paintings slowly, accumulating washes and configuring geometric elements through improvisation and reflection. The subtle use of atmospheric color, lines, and scale in the paintings invites the eye to consider the conceptual and corporeal knowledge of space in real time.

Ursula von Rydingsvard

A photo of Ursula von Rydingsvard on The Brooklyn Rail's New Social Environment
Photo credit: Zack Garlitos
Ursula Von Rydingsvard has lived and worked in New York City for over 40 years. Over a remarkable four-decade-long career, Ursula has become one of the most influential sculptors working today. She is known for creating large-scale, often monumental sculpture from cedar beams, which she painstakingly cuts, assembles, and laminates before finally rubbing a graphite patina into the work’s textured, faceted surfaces. Her signature abstract shapes refer to things in the real world — vessels, bowls, tools, and other objects — each revealing the mark of the human hand while also summoning natural forms and forces. In recent years, von Rydingsvard has explored other mediums in depth, such as bronze, paper, and resin, continuing to expand upon her unique artistic vocabulary.

    Robert S. Mattison

    Dr. Robert S. Mattison, Marshall R. Metzgar Professor of Art History at Lafayette College, is the author of numerous books, articles, and exhibition catalogues, including Franz Kline: Coal and Steel, Robert Rauschenberg: Breaking Boundaries, Arshile Gorky: Works, and Robert Motherwell: The Formative Years. Dr. Mattison’s book titled Ronald Bladen is published by Abeville Press.

      William Corwin

      A photo of William Corwin on The Brooklyn Rail's New Social Environment
      Sculptor and journalist William Corwin is from New York. He has exhibited at galleries in New York, London, Hamburg, Beijing and Taipei. He has written regularly for The Brooklyn Rail, Artpapers, Bomb, Artcritical, Raintaxi and Canvas. Most recently he curated and wrote the catalog for Postwar Women at The Art Students League in New York, an exhibition of the school’s alumnae active between 1945-65, and 9th Street Club, and exhibitions of Perle Fine, Helen Frankenthaler, Mercedes Matter, Grace Hartigan, Lee Krasner and Elaine Dekooning at Gazelli Art House in Mayfair. He is the editor of Formalism; Collected Essays of Saul Ostrow, (2020).

      The Rail has a tradition of ending our conversations with a poetry reading, and we're fortunate to have Dao Strom reading.

      Dao Strom

      A photo of Dao Strom on The Brooklyn Rail's New Social Environment
      Artist Dao Strom works with three “voices”—written, sung, visual—to explore hybridity and the intersection of personal and collective histories. She is the author of Instrument (Fonograf Editions, 2020) and its musical companion Traveler’s Ode (Antiquated Future Records, 2020); a bilingual poetry-art book, You Will Always Be Someone From Somewhere Else (AJAR Press); a memoir, We Were Meant To Be a Gentle People, and song cycle, East/West; and two books of fiction, The Gentle Order of Girls and Boys and Grass Roof, Tin Roof. Born in Vietnam, Strom grew up in the Sierra Nevada foothills of California and lives in Portland, Oregon. She is co-founder of two collective art projects, She Who Has No Master(s), and De-Canon.

      We’d like to thank The Marion Boulton Kippy Stroud Foundation and Teiger Foundation for making these conversations possible, and for their support of our growing archive 🌈✨

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