Previewing upcoming art exhibitions from coast to coast, American Art Collector is a unique monthly magazine specially designed to bring living representational artists, galleries and active art collectors together in one place.
In the last few issues, I have been discussing the importance of brick and mortar galleries and the experience that comes from buying art from these physical locations. Lately, I have moderated several panel discussions on this process, panels made up of collectors, art dealers, auction professionals and museum curators. What everyone seems to agree on is that buying art is a personal experience that is made better when a collector has someone like a gallery owner or art dealer to offer advice, find new artists and show collectors how to support an artist throughout the duration of their art careers. Collectors are passionate people who care deeply about the art they buy and add to their own personal collections. Most collectors choose the art they buy via deep emotional…
Robert Lange recently finished a painting eight years in the making that was inspired by the heirloom vegetable tattoo of friend and James Beard award-winning chef Sean Brock. In Arm to Table Brock places a single turnip atop a colorful mound of vegetables meticulously arranged by Lange. “Sean is the pioneer of the farm to table movement that has occurred in Charleston. When he first took over the executive chef position at McCrady’s, he convinced the restaurant to purchase a farm and grow their own produce,” says Lange. “He then made the servers at the restaurant work a couple of shifts a week on the farm to truly understand where the food they were serving came from.” Arm to Table will be on view in RECIPE at the Vendue hotel.…
Respect: Hip-Hop Style & Wisdom On view at Oakland Museum of California is the spring exhibition Respect: Hip-Hop Style & Wisdom, which explores the cultural and social movement of hip-hop. The exhibit uses six sections to dive into how hip-hop changed the world in a time span of 50 years and provides a platform for self-expression in today’s youth. It will remain on view through to August 12. Punk Graphics Too Fast to Live, Too Young to Die: Punk Graphics, 1976-1986 opens June 16 at the Cranbrook Art Museum, displaying various visual design strategies and the influences of fiction, horror and comics on punk graphics. Punk graphics are not limited to the monochromatic palettes, but expand in color and new wave graphic techniques covering punk and post-punk bands and fashion.…
Nicholas Procaccini recalls his father being very creative, making beautiful patterns in the plaster ceilings of their tenement apartment. He was also a talented pianist, playing with the Jimmy Smith Trio until he realized he couldn’t make a living as a musician and turned to tool making. Procaccini served in the Army in Vietnam. He joined as a private and was sent to officer school and served in the infantry. “It was the most significant experience for me. It gave me the opportunity to go to school and to develop a sense of responsibility and discipline,” he says. “One of the things I noticed on R&R in Australia was the presence of U.S. industry. I wanted to be part of that.” He received his MBA in international finance at George…
The real world has an endless supply of subject matter, from the most crowded Manhattan street corner to the most desolate Himalayan peak, where the nearest human is not only far from view, but beyond the curvature of the earth. Subjects can be people in an artist’s life, fruit from their local grocery store, or the store itself, its fluorescent aisles lined with stacked food items. They can be abstract ideas rendered into blocks of color, or hyper-detailed photorealism, in which paint is applied with almost microscopic accuracy. The one constant, though, is reality—subjects are drawn from the real world, an observable place governed by fixed systems that answer to biology, chemistry, physics, gravity and other aspects of the physical world. But reality has its limitations. Its borders don’t just…
Greg “Craola” Simkins holds on to a “jar full” of childhood memories to draw from whenever he feels the pressures and realities of daily life closing in on him or dragging him down. These memories serve to help rediscover some of his childhood innocence long enough to create a new painting, come up with a character or devise a narrative for his works to follow. Simkins believes so strongly in these moments that he has named his new exhibition The Escape Artist in order to only further connect with these remembrances of times past. “The older I get the more affected I am by the responsibilities that my age requires and holding onto that youthful spark is like chasing too few fireflies without a net,” says Simkins. “I am lucky…
