Steve Singer

Steve Singer is a sculptor, painter and draftsman living in Jersey City. Schooled in London, at Dartmouth, the Art Students League and NY Studio School, Steve has shown his work throughout the NY Metropolitan area, as well as in London, and has participated in solo and group gallery exhibitions and in museums - Newark Museum, Zimmerli Museum and Delaware Art Museum. Steve has been written up in Art in America and the NY Times, and he has received a Pollock-Krasner Grant. Public sculpture commissions include "Longshoreman" on the Jersey City Waterfront.

In the Night & Day Exhibition, Steve showed plein-air watercolors done from life outside. According to Steve, he sets up his easel, studies his subject and gets as much as he can done within a one-and-one-half hour maximum window. If that's not enough and the work looks promising, he will return to the site in similar conditions at the same time - as many times as it takes to finish. Steve mostly paints locally. The larger works shown were painted outside in Jersey City and the bunker portraits were done in his old Third Street atelier.

Steve Singer, "Musicians" watercolor — with Steven Singer at DRAWING ROOMS.

Sandra DeSando

Sandra DeSando is a longtime Jersey City resident artist and curator, formerly of the 111 Building. Her impressive background includes a Pollock-Krasner grant, a residency in The Marie Walsh Sharpe Foundation Space Program and YADDO. Her work has been exhibited throughout the NY Metropolitan area and Washington DC, as well as Canada and London. At the Night & Day Exhibition, Sandra showed large graphite and ink works on paper. Sandra's imagery is inspired by water landscape which she reinterprets in a strikingly moody and ethereal way.

Sandro DeSando's "Day at the end of North First" — with Sandra Desando at DRAWING ROOMS.

Ross Bonn

From May 2 through June 23, 2013, Ross Bonn’s intriguing portraits were on exhibit in our Special Project Rooms. A life-long resident of Bayonne, NJ, Ross paints to discover and reveal identity, through the mask of the face. His paintings depict persona, the essence of personality, and he paints them as if engaged in a struggle to find out who these people are. Ross must push, pull, warp and distort the form, surface and nature of the face itself. He also creates amazing color combinations, pushing value, chroma and intensity variables to the extreme and yet he somehow creates readable, emotive portraits as a result. He watches and intuits for what is under the skin; the person below the surface looking out.

"Milo" — with Ross Bonn at DRAWING ROOMS.

Kay Kenny

We are pleased to have presented Kay Kenny's "Night in the Middle of Nowhere" photographs included in our "Night and Day" exhibition.

Kay is a photographer, painter and teacher of photography at New York University and the International Center of Photography, with her studio located in Jersey City. 

Kay received her BFA from Syracuse University, MA from Rutgers University and MFA from Syracuse University. She has since then received awards, including 2009 Honorable Mention in Fine Art Photography Lucie Awards, and exhibited in one-person shows in New York City, Lubbock, Texas, Medina, Colombia, and Taipei, Taiwan. Her work is included in the Brooklyn Museum Artist Books Collection, Milwaukee Art Museum, Wisconsin, Nantong Museum, China, Pfizer Corporation, New York, Bristol-Meyers Squibb, Lawrenceville, New Jersey, and Provident Bank, New Jersey. 

For over a decade, Kay has been photographing the rural night landscape, working with long exposures and the ambient light of the moon and stars. She has been capturing unexpected scenes, what she describes as “poetic tribute to wild imaginings: the nightmares and dreams inherent in the lonely darkened corners of the world.” Photographing familiar places, such as rural backyards, fields and roads, these places become unfamiliar in her night-time images with eerie lighting effects of shadows and innuendos, revealing another world.

"Fox and Blue Ball" — with Kay Kenny at DRAWING ROOMS.

Heidi Curko

Heidi Curko is a teaching artist active in Jersey City and Hoboken and we were really pleased she showed with us in our “Night and Day” exhibition.

Inspired by a set of prints engraved by the musician John Cage, Heidi created twenty drawings and one encaustic painting for the exhibition. Cage’s drypoints involve stones he had collected from around the world and he used principles from the I Ching Tables of Chance Operations to guide his images. Heidi instead chose not chance to determine her images, but relied on her life experiences to inform her stone tracings.

"Inanimate Objects" — with Heidi Curko at DRAWING ROOMS.

Margaret Weber

Margaret Weber is a Jersey City printmaker and collage artist. From 05/02/13 - 06/09/13, she will show her body of work called “Dark Passage” in the Special Project Rooms.

Margaret was an early pioneer to Jersey City, having arrived from New York City in the early 70's. She received her B.A. and M.A. from Jersey City State College and became an art teacher, teaching art in the public schools for 29 years while making art– first in a corner of a room, and eventually in a floor-through print shop and studio in the once neglected brownstone she owns and restored to its 1865 Italianate grandeur.

Margaret has shown her work throughout NY and NJ. She received a Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation Visual Artist/Teacher Award and Grant and her work is represented in the Permanent Collection of the Museum of Modern Art, Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic; Johnson and Johnson, Rutgers University Library and in private collections.

Margaret’s “Dark Passage” mixed-media narrative works are skillfully crafted and compelling. Using the same copper plate to create her series, and marked with a heavy gestural hand- many in swirls and spirals, she carefully chooses imagery and materials that pessimistically speak about the current state of human interaction with the natural world. Margaret believes we are in denial of climate change and the destruction of our natural habitat, and the world is awash in plastic. According to Margaret, "'The Dark Passage' series depicts a reversal of an expected hierarchy. A bird flies across an unnatural landscape in possession of a human skull." Margaret wonders if nature will carry on despite human destruction.

Perhaps for Margaret, the process of making these related works on paper is a metaphor for a potentially positive answer to this question. 

Margaret's art-making process begins with an image or thought which is allowed to take shape on a copper plate matrix and generate different solutions as it progresses. What results is a beautiful picture of an ugly reality. Her hope is that the image might move one to feel, think and/or act in a responsible way.