ODETTA Mixed Media

canvas, collage, pastel, acrylic, photo transfers, 2016 Bifurcated sheets of canvas with torn edges suggest the beautiful open vistas now inaccessible to the residents of the Mott Haven and Port Morris areas of the South Bronx, abandoned and dominated by de-teriorating remains, rotting remnants of piers, New York State-owned power stations and City Waste transfer stations. The unusual materials and torn canvas edges convey with tactile sensibility the contradiction documented with photo-transferred images, layered with acrylic and pastel. Materials and image fuse revealing a broken South Bronx history, an urban renewal tragedy, an area once the retreat of choice for fresh air, heath and greenery. The shards of information and vistas evoke the former Port Morris harbor named after Governor Morris a signatory of the constitution. There barges once docked and youth once swam off a pier in the East River. Cunningham’s work centers upon time, transience and contradictions shown through images of the shifting urban present. Compelling environmental concerns juxtaposed against industry, ur-ban blight and the loss of the natural environment as well as her concern for her Bronx home area faced with gentrification drive her work. Linda Cunningham is a Bronx based artist with a long New York and international exhibition career. ODETTA, Bushwick, Brooklyn featured her work in a November two person exhibition and in the Harlem FLUX Art Fair, in 2015 and 2016. Her 2013 installation in No Longer Empty’s “This Side of Paradise,”at the Andrew Freedman House was installed at the Bronx Museum, 2014 in an exhibition sponsored by the Bronx Arts Alliance. The Bronx Museum displayed her sculptural installation ”Urban Regeneration” on its terrace, 2009/10. Exhibitions in Germany began with a Fulbright Senior Research Fellowship in Berlin and her monumental public sculptural installations & alternative memorials are permanently sited in Cologne, Kassel, Bad Hersfeld and Cornberg, Germany, Grounds for Sculpture, Hamilton, New Jersey and City of Sculpture, Hamilton, Ohio. Alternative memorials were sited at the CUNY Graduate Center across from Bryant Park, 1989-1995, in Tribeca and at UN Plaza, New York 1997-1998. Recent temporary public sculpture installations were at Westchester Sq., Bronx. NY, 2014 and Marcus Garvey...