Cindy Bernard

Location Proposal Iris Print Ed. 12 Hand Signed Cyclone Racer (Coney Island, NY)

1997

Cindy Bernard’s career spans nearly three decades and she is best known for photographs and projections that explore the relationship between cinema, memory, and landscape including ...

Cindy Bernard’s career spans nearly three decades and she is best known for photographs and projections that explore the relationship between cinema, memory, and landscape including the widely exhibited series Ask the Dust (1988-92), now in the collections of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (21 part set), the Pompidou, MOMA and the Whitney Museum of American Art. She is a recipient of grants and fellowships from the J. Paul Getty Trust Fund for the Visual Arts, California Arts Council, Creative Capital, Anonymous Was a Woman, the Harpo Foundation, California Community Foundation, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and the MacDowell Colony. Her work has been exhibited in museums and galleries in the US, Canada, Mexico, Europe, and Japan, and was included in the Whitney and Lyon Biennials. In addition to her visual practice, Bernard takes an active interest in the spaces and production of social exchange. She was a director and advisor to Foundation for Art Resources from 1985 to 1990, a founding director of the Coalition for Freedom of Expression, and co-founder of MOCA Mobilization. Bernard is also the founder and director of The Society for the Activation of Social Space through Art and Sound (SASSAS), an organization she began in response to the need for a flexible and sustainable association dedicated to experimental music in Los Angeles. She has curated and produced more than 50 concerts for SASSAS including Welcome Inn Time Machine for Pacific Standard Time in 2012. Her interest in sound has spurred several projects including a series of photographs of municipal band shells which Bernard sees as an architecture of public exchange and The Inquisitive Musician, an adaptation of a 17th century German satire, Musicus Curiosus, or Battalus, the Inquisitive Musician; the Struggle for Precedence between the Kunst Pfeifer and the Common Players. The Inquisitive Musician pits itinerant “beer fiddlers” against the city sanctioned “Kunstpfeifer” in an argument over who has the right to perform and be compensated. Presented as a staged reading incorporating video and live music, The Inquisitive Musician has been performed in New York, in Los Angeles at the LA County Museum of Art, and most recently at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam in June 2013. Current projects include Vinland, a meditation on the complex and continually shifting relationships between spaces, social and economic structures, and personal and collective histories and, more recently, an “episodic” series based on the history of social nudism: Your Personal View of (Social) Nudism. Bernard is a Adjunct Professor of Graduate Fine Art at Art Center College of Art and Design and was appointed the inaugural Ruffin Distinguished Artist-In-Residence at the University of Virginia for the academic year 2013/2014. She was a 2016 National Endowment for the Arts Fellow at the MacDowell Colony and will be in residence at the UCross Foundation in 2017. Muse X Editions. An (now defunct) LA based innovative publisher of limited-edition prints, Muse X has launched its first group of prints and is just beginning to make itself known to artists, curators, dealers and collectors. Among works just off the press are otherworldly landscapes by Barbara Kasten and Oliver Wasow, a sizzling sunset by Peter Alexander, abstract compositions by Pauline Stella Sanchez and Jennifer Steinkamp, text and photo combinations by Bill Barminski and Nancy Dwyer...

Simka Simkhovitch (Russian/American 1893 - 1949) signed lithograph. Pencil signed and dated "S. Simkhovitch 1933" lower center. Title "Island Beach,"...

screenprint printed in color ink on wove paper. New York City subway station interior. Anthony Velonis (1911 – 1997) was an American painter and designer born in New York City who helped introduce the public to silkscreen printing in the early 20th century. While employed under the federal Works Progress Administration, WPA during the Great Depression, Velonis brought the use of silkscreen printing as a fine art form, referred to as the "serigraph," into the mainstream. By his own request, he was not publicly credited for coining the term. He experimented and mastered techniques to print on a wide variety of materials, such as glass, plastics, and metal, thereby expanding the field. In the mid to late 20th century, the silkscreen technique became popular among other artists such as Robert Rauschenberg and Andy Warhol. Velonis was born into a relatively poor background of a Greek immigrant family and grew up in the tenements of New York City. Early on, he took creative inspiration from figures in his life such as his grandfather, an immigrant from the mountains in Greece, who was "an ecclesiastical painter, on Byzantine style." Velonis attended James Monroe High School in The Bronx, where he took on minor artistic roles such as the illustration of his high school yearbook. He eventually received a scholarship to the NYU College of Fine Arts, into which he was both surprised and ecstatic to have been admitted. Around this time he took to painting, watercolor, and sculpture, as well as various other art forms, hoping to find a niche that fit. He attended NYU until 1929, when the Great Depression started in the United States after the stock market crash. Around the year 1932, Velonis became interested in silk screen, together with fellow artist Fritz Brosius, and decided to investigate the practice. Working in his brother's sign shop, Velonis was able to master the silkscreen process. He reminisced in an interview three decades later that doing so was "plenty of fun," and that a lot of technology can be discovered through hard work, more so if it is worked on "little by little." Velonis was hired by Mayor LaGuardia in 1934 to promote the work of New York's city government via posters publicizing city projects. One such project required him to go on a commercial fishing trip to locations including New Bedford and Nantucket for a fortnight, where he primarily took photographs and notes, and made sketches. Afterward, for a period of roughly six months, he was occupied with creating paintings from these records. During this trip, Velonis developed true respect and affinity for the fishermen with whom he traveled, "the relatively uneducated person," in his words. Following this, Velonis began work with the Public Works of Art Project (PWAP), an offshoot of the Civil Works Administration (CWA), where he was assigned to serve the different city departments of New York. After the formation of the federal Works Progress Administration, which hired artists and sponsored projects in the arts, he also worked in theater. Velonis began working for the federal WPA in 1935. He kept this position until 1936 or 1938, at which point he began working in the graphic art division of the Federal Art Project, which he ultimately led. Under various elements of the WPA program, many young artists, writers and actors gained employment that helped them survive during the Depression, as well as contributing works that created an artistic legacy for the country. When interviewed in December 1994 by the Library of Congress about his time in the WPA, Velonis reflected that he had greatly enjoyed that period, saying that he liked the "excitement" and "meeting all the other artists with different points of view." He also said in a later interview that "the contact and the dialogue with all those artists and the work that took place was just invaluable." Among the young artists he hired was Edmond Casarella, who later developed an innovative technique using layered cardboard for woodcuts. Velonis introduced silkscreen printing to the Poster Division of the WPA. As he recalled in a 1965 interview: "I suggested that the Poster division would be a lot more productive and useful if they had an auxiliary screen printing project that worked along with them. And apparently this was very favorably received..." As a member of the Federal Art Project, a subdivision of the WPA, Velonis later approached the Public Use of Arts Committee (PUAC) for help in "propagandizing for art in the parks, in the subways, et cetera." Since the Federal Art Project could not be "self-promoting," an outside organization was required to advertise their art more extensively. During his employment with the Federal Art Project, Velonis created nine silkscreen posters for the federal government. Around 1937-1939 Velonis wrote a pamphlet titled "Technical Problems of the Artist: Technique of the Silkscreen Process," which was distributed to art centers run by the WPA around the country. It was considered very influential in encouraging artists to try this relatively inexpensive technique and stimulated printmaking across the country. In 1939, Velonis founded the Creative Printmakers Group, along with three others, including Hyman Warsager. They printed both their own works and those of other artists in their facility. This was considered the most important silkscreen shop of the period. The next year, Velonis founded the National Serigraph Society. It started out with relatively small commercial projects, such as "rather fancy" Christmas cards that were sold to many of the upscale Fifth Avenue shops...

Guardians of the Spire; Amiens Cathedral Number 2 New York: 1937. Etching and drypoint on watermarked F.J. Head cream-colored, antique laid paper, 6 3/4 ...

Waiting from the Kent Bicentennial Portfolio Will Barnet, American (1911–2012) Date: 1975 Offset Lithograph (unsigned as issued) Image Size: 11.25 x 11 inches Size: 17 x 14 in. (43.1...

Palazzo dell'Angelo 1931 Etching and drypoint on cream-colored, handmade laid paper with deckle edges, 7 1/4 x 6 3/4 inches (185 x 171 mm), edition of 100, full margins. Signed, dated and numbered "Ed. 100" in pencil, lower margin, second state (of three). Printed by Henry Carling, New York. Extremely minor mat tone and some inky residue in the top right corner, all unobtrusive and well outside of image area. An exquisite impression of this intricate image, with astonishing detail, and all the fine lines printing clearly. The image represents the first print which Arms printed on his own handmade paper. Framed handsomely with archival materials and museum grade glass in a wood gilt frame with a flower and garland motif. Illustrated: Dorothy Noyes Arms, Hill Towns and Cities of Northern Italy, p. 180; Anderson, American Etchers Abroad 1880-1930; Eric Denker, Reflections & Undercurrents: Ernest Roth and Printmaking in Venice, 1900-1940, p. 116. [Fletcher 233] Born in 1887 in Washington DC, John Taylor Arms studied at Princeton University, and ultimately earned a degree in architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1912. With the outbreak of W.W.I, Arms served as an officer in the United States Navy, and it was during this time that he turned his focus to printmaking, having published his first etching in 1919. His first subjects were the Brooklyn Bridge, near the Navy Yard, and it was during his wartime travel that Arms created a series of extraordinarily detailed etchings based on Gothic cathedrals and churches he visited in France and Italy. He used what was available to him, namely sewing needles and a magnifying glass, to create the incredibly rich and fine detail that his etchings are known for. Upon his return to New York after the war, Arms enjoyed a successful career as a graphic artist, created a series of etchings of American cities, and published Handbook of Print Making and Print Makers (Macmillan, 1934). He served as President of the Society of American Graphic Artists, and in 1933, was made a full member of the National Academy of Design. In its most modern incarnation, Palazzo dell'Angelo was constructed in or around 1570. The building, which has a rich and storied history, was erected upon the ruins of an earlier structure which predates the Gothic period. Some remnants of the earliest features of the residence were most certainly still visible when Arms visited, as they are today. Having a background in architecture, there's no question that Arms was moved by the beauty, history and ingenuity represented in the physical structure. One thing specifically gives away Arms's passion for the architecture, and that is the fact that he focused on the building's Moorish entranceway, balustrade, and two mullioned windows, and not on the curious Gothic era bas-relief of an angel nestled into the facade of the building, after which the structure is named. The sculpture itself doesn't appear in Arms's composition at all, despite the fact that it is the feature of the building that is most famous in its folklore. Arms instead focuses on the oldest portion of the architecture, even documenting some of the remnants of a fresco, and a funerary stele for the freedman Tito Mestrio Logismo, and his wife Mestria Sperata (visible above the water level, to the left of the door, behind the gondola), which was first described in 1436. Among the many notable bits of history regarding the Palazzo, it has been documented that Tintoretto painted frescos of battle scenes on the facade of the building. The paintings have been lost to time and the elements, but not entirely to history. The empty frame...

(New York: John Taylor Arms, 1930) Etching on antique cream laid paper with a fancy "G" watermark, 7 1/8 x 16 1/2 inches (182 x 442 mm), full margins. Signed, dated and inscribed "Ed. 70" in pencil, lower margin. From a total edirion of 81 plus 5 trial proofs. Printed by Henry E. Carling. Number 18 from the Italian Series. A superb impression of this scarce print, with all of the subtleties and details of the reflections in the water printing clearly. [Fletcher 232] [Illustrated: Page 192, Arms, Dorothy Noyes, "Hilltowns and Cities of Northern Italy"]. Along with his constant companion and wife, Dorothy Noyes, Arms spent decades exploring and documenting gothic structures throughout Europe. Noyes, an accomplished travel writer, had gifted Arms an etching set...