National Juried Exhibition June 25 - July 18, 2015

Strange Paradise

First Street Gallery presents "Strange Paradise", juried and curated by Steven Harvey, from Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects in the Lower East Side. Harvey adapts the model of the juried show towards an encyclopedic approach which will include 144 artists, culled from over 500 applicants, working in photography, painting and sculpture, abstraction and representation. 

Exhibition View

Michele Liebler Interviews Steven Harvey

Michele Liebler: Was it difficult to pick the pieces for the show? Did you have a certain criteria?

Steven Harvey: It was hard to look through the original images by 500 artists. We did that twice. Criteria was skill, interest and originality of vision.

ML: What inspires you most about curating an exhibition like this? 

SH: I don’t think there are any exhibitions like this one which takes a sampling from a large number of artists and organizes it via themes.

ML: What have you learned being in the art world for 25 years?

SH: There is as much interest in art now as anytime I’ve ever seen.

ML: What advice would you give an emerging artist/mid career artist who can’t find a gallery to show their work?

SH: Start you own spaces. But make sure to show other people that interest you rather than just your own work. Develop a grass roots network with other like minded artists. Show each other's work. The artist’s coops go back to the Jane Street Gallery in the early 50s. Right now artist run venues are in vogue. It’s a good time for artists to do it for them selves.

ML: Artists always want to know what is the best way to get a curators attention? Should you send them a package?

SH: Personally I don’t like paper. I ask people to send me links.

ML: How did you get interested in being an art dealer, curator, writer, and art advisor?

SH: I have been a painter for all of my life until 2007. Everything I do comes from my practice and experience as a painter.

ML: What is the most interesting show you ever curated?

SH:There have been a number of shows for me that stood out. In 1984 I organized a show with 2 other artists, Richard Morrison and Bill Rice that took place in Bill's decrepit studio space in the East Village. There were approximately 50 artists hung salon style on peeling walls. A number of the artists are well known now. There was a great sense of what is possible when one approaches a project in an open and uncompromising manner. In 1989 I curated a show called James Lee Byars: Old & New Works at Vrej Baghoomian's gallery. We painted the entire 5000 sq. ft. space black. There were objects borrowed from the Guggenheim and the Modern, new works created site specifically for the show and a myriad of little miracles from the artist’s entire career. I learned from Byars that if you ask 125% of people you may get 98%. Finally in 2003 I curated a show of the eccentric 19th/early 20th century NYC painter Louis Michel Eilshemius at The National Academy. It was an extraordinary experience to be able to gather many of Eilshemius's greatest paintings in the gorgeous second floor rooms of National Academy.

ML: How do you measure success?

SH: I think success should be self-evident in the visual reality created and the conversation engendered.

ABOUT THE JUROR

Steven Harvey is the owner of steven harvey fine art projects. Initially based on the Upper East Side, the gallery relocated to Forsyth Street, in the Lower East Side in September of 2011 and now utilizes two spaces around the corner from each other. SHFAP specializes in art from the 20th and 21st centuries and regularly produces scholarly exhibition catalogs. It recently published it’s twentieth number, on Sandro Chia. Gallery exhibitions have been reviewed in the New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Brooklyn Rail and Hyperallergic, among others. Steven Harvey has previously been a gallerist, curator, art advisor, writer and artist. As an independent curator, he organized exhibitions at galleries and museums of diverse artists including James Lee Byars, Louis Michel Eilshemius, Louisa Matthíasdóttir, and the Guerilla Art Action Group.

    

Photos from Saturday’s opening Strange Paradise

                 

www.firststreetgallery.net

Richard Serra

Richard Serra is one of my favorite minimalist artists. My first encounter, strangely enough, was a rather offensive steel structure at the Tate Modern and I remember distinctly thinking how dangerous and difficult it must have been to get that particular mass and weight up to the fourth floor. I was unnerved by the prospect of the process alone. Also I was very hesitant to go near it looking as unstable as it does.  
 

Trip Hammer, 1988, photo courtesy of http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/richard-serra-1923

  

The second time was Inside Out, 2013, Weatherproof steel, at the 21^st Street Gagosian. I was changed by walking through that installation sculpture. Again I thought about logistics at first, but there was a guard having a panic attack from standing at the center of the warped space and I could feel the manipulation of my own personal, comfortable space waxing and waning.   It was incredible.  Beautiful.  Indescribably intelligent.   As a painter, “manipulating the viewer” became a really important concept to how I viewed and made art.  Like all natural wonders, Inside Out made me feel insignificant. 

Image courtesy of Hyperallergic, http://hyperallergic.com/92340/mr-big-stuff-richard-serra-piles-it-on/

Richard Serra’s drawings, Vertical and Horizontal Reversals, at David Zwirner were just as incredible.  The black pigment spread thick like an exotic butter on raw whitepaper had my painting sensibilities enraptured. 

Photo courtesy of David Zwirner, http://www.davidzwirner.com/exhibition/richard-serra-vertical-and-horizontal-reversals-2/

Richard Serra: Equal at David Zwirner was just as incredible to me.  Like childhood blocks, stacked high only to be knocked down in a powerful swoop, giving the player confidence and building the ego, these blocks are stacked but reverse the power lesson.   These blocks cannot easily be knocked down.  They are massive, weigh tons, and impress the viewer with the wonder of those ideas.  Like natural wonders, the blocks effectively reduce the viewer to insignificance in the greater universe.

I do believe that Jerry Saltz put it best in his three sentence review.

Photo: Richard Serra: Equal, David Zwirner, New York, 2015 Photo by Tim Nighswander/IMAGING4ART, Courtesy of David Zwirner, New York/London Artwork ? 2015 Richard Serra/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Richard Serra: "Equal"
David Zwirner
537 W. 20th St., through July 24

“By now it's not unusual when confronting one of Richard Serra's gigantic, metrically menacing, magnetically mighty curving steel sculptures, which are simultaneously architectonic and geological, to walk all around its meandering curves, maybe spot lovers kissing in the center of one, look at it in utter awe, yawn, and say, "Great!" This new show consists of four huge stacks of two cubic slabs, one atop another, and find Serra's mastery of material, mass, gravity, density, and an almost uncanny not-thereness now joined by ideas of the empty spaces between these shapes of steel and the tremendous forces acting upon them — but nevertheless being empty presences, interstices that you can look into and know in your body. This is his best show in more than 15 years of great shows, and it resounds with a complexity and cosmic instability not seen in solitary objects since Giorgio Morandi's miraculous vibrating arrangements.” - Jerry Saltz

Richard Serra is at David Swirner until July 24 but if you’re like me, don’t just go once!

For more information go to: http://www.davidzwirner.com/exhibition/richard-serra-vertical-and-horizontal-reversals-2/