Of all colors catalog, with essay by Julie Lasky, is available for purchase online

Of all colors catalog, with essay by Julie Lasky, is available for purchase at SECRIST | BEACH.

installation view - Of all colors at SECRIST | BEACH, photography by Nathan Kaey

Large public art commission just announced for the Des Moines International Airport

Des Moines, Iowa (July 2024): The Greater Des Moines Public Art Foundation and the Des Moines Airport Authority are pleased to announce the artists chosen for five large-scale, sitespecific art installations throughout the new airport terminal, slated to open in late 2026. To support the artist selection and installation process, the Greater Des Moines Public Art Foundation initiated a $4 million fundraising effort in late 2023 which, to date, has reached just over 80% of the fundraising goal. This includes a $1 million contribution from the Ruan Family Foundation and support from over 60 donors. Fundraising will continue through 2025.

Adam Frank, Alteronce Gumby, Gordon Huether, and Anne Lindberg were chosen from an international pool of artists for four interior sites throughout the terminal. Through an open call to artists living and working in Iowa, Matt Niebuhr / RDG Art Studio’s proposal was chosen for a multi-faceted exterior site. The highly visible spaces in the new terminal provide the opportunity for expansive and engaging installations by these artists. All finalists were selected by a committee of representatives from the Greater Des Moines Public Art Foundation, the Des Moines Airport Authority, and community stakeholders. Artists will have the artworks in place when the new terminal opens. Owned by the Greater Des Moines Public Art Foundation, they will be on permanent loan to the Des Moines Airport Authority who will also be responsible for maintaining the art.

Iowa-born artist Anne Lindberg will be featured in a site that consists of the wall above the check-in counter and both terminal end walls adjacent to the check-in. The artwork will be visible from the exterior approach, creating a sense of place upon arrival. Lindberg’s subtle and sophisticated use of material and color will complement the terminal’s elegant architecture. Lindberg is a Joan Mitchell Foundation grantee whose work is in collections worldwide, including that of NYU Langone Health located in the Citicorp Building in New York and the Richard Bolling Federal Building in Kansas City, MO. To read more about Lindberg’s commissions and exhibitions, visit annelindberg.com.

The second site is comprised of the east and west glass panel walls of the new terminal’s elevator enclosure. Visible from the first and second stories of the terminal, this work by New York artist Adam Frank consists of both static images and moving projections. Frank’s installation will engage visitors from all angles by bringing the natural world into the terminal. Frank’s selected commissions include STREAM at the San Antonio River Authority and SUNLIGHT, located at the Denver Department of Cultural Affairs. Read more about Frank and view images at adamfrank.com.

A suspended artwork by Gordon Huether of California will grace the third site, located on the terminal’s second floor. This artwork will hover over the meeter-greeter space where friends and relatives gather to welcome passengers or see them off on their journey. Huether’s installation for this space will pay homage to Iowa’s rivers. Huether is completing several site-specific artworks for the Salt Lake City International Airport this year. His commissions are in over 70 public collections across the country. Find additional artist information and images at gordonhuether.com.

The fourth site consists of an expansive wall adjacent to the meeter-greeter space. Alteronce Gumby’s “tonal paintings” created from locally sourced calcite, moss agate, pearls and chalcedony will provide a counterpoint to Huether’s airy installation. Gumby’s works are in the collections of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York and Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, MA. Gumby recently completed his first documentary, COLOR, with John Campbell, and is currently preparing for his next solo exhibition at Nicola Vassell Gallery in November 2024. Reach more about the New York City artist’s international exhibition and award history at alteroncegumby.com.

The final site encompasses the exterior approach to the terminal and a series of adjacent bus shelters. Niebuhr / RDG’s design will incorporate boldly colored “sentinels” along the approach that allude to the region’s native plants. Bus shelter imagery will echo this celebration of indigenous vegetation. Niebuhr / RDG were awarded the Design Excellence: Citation Award for Small Projects, AIA Central States Region, 2023 and the Public Spaces Merit Award, CODAworx, 2018. Additional information on the Studio’s public art projects can be viewed at rdgusa.com/work/markets/public-art.

About the Greater Des Moines Public Art Foundation
Established in 2004, The Greater Des Moines Public Art Foundation is a non-profit organization, which recognizes that art belongs not just in galleries and museums, but also in streetscapes, parks, buildings and infrastructures of a thriving community. Dedicated to envisioning, developing, advancing and promoting public art projects, the Greater Des Moines Public Art Foundation collaborates with local entities and artists to engage, inspire and enrich the lives of residents and visitors to the community. Further information about the Des Moines International Airport Public Art Project, including a list of donors to-date and details about how to contribute to the Project, can be found here. For more information about the Foundation visit: https://dsmpublicartfoundation.org, or socialize with us on Facebook at: https://www.facebook.com/dsmpublicartfoundation and Instagram at @DSMPublicArt.

About the Des Moines Airport Authority
The Des Moines Airport Authority is an independent entity that oversees the operations and maintenance of the Des Moines International Airport. The Airport Authority ensures the safety of the Airport and works to improve the quality of air service making air travel to and from Des Moines more convenient and pleasurable. For more information, visit www.flydsm.com and follow @dsmairport on Twitter and DSM International Airport on Facebook.

The airport’s $445 million terminal will increase gate capacity by fifty percent, boosting central Iowa’s economic development. The current terminal, built in 1948, is still in use today and hosts over 3 million travelers a year as the gateway to Iowa, America’s Heartland. Through this new terminal project, the Des Moines International Airport will be poised to increase air service and accommodations enhancing the travel experience for all.

Between (in snow) video is released - temporary installation, February 2024

I am pleased to release a video of Between, 2024. This temporary 15-day installation was also featured in Upstate Diary, No. 19 Fall / Winter with an article by Laura van Straaten and photographs by Carlton Davis.

All images in this video are by Derek Porter. The video was edited by Michael Sacca.

Upstate Diary No. 9 Fall / Winter 2024 - Anne Lindberg draws space, by Laura van Straaten

PDF link to article

Of all colors opens at Secrist | Beach in Chicago, Friday September 20

ANNE LINDBERG
Of all colors

20 September - 16 November 2024

“Of all colors, blue and green have the greatest emotional range…. Blue is therefore most suitable as the color of interior life. Whether slick light sharp high bright thin quick sour new and cool or low deep sweet dark soft slow smooth heavy old and warm: blue moves easily among them all, and all profoundly qualify our states of feeling.” - William Gass

We are pleased to announce Anne Lindberg: Of all colors taking place at SECRIST | BEACH this fall. Of all colors marks New York-based artist Anne Lindberg’s fourth solo show with SECRIST | BEACH and will be presented concurrently with MANIFEST, a survey of artworks and inspired studies/drawings by artists and architects exploring themes of light, color and space.

For Of all colors, Anne Lindberg will create a sweeping horizontal sculpture made with thousands of lengths of fine cotton thread pulled taut from wall to wall under the gallery’s bow truss skylights. With a gap at the artist’s eye level, the form will deepen in dark blue hues and gradually fade to white or almost white. Flashes of hot color will appear to float within the gradient of blue. In addition, 13 new drawings made with graphite and colored pencil on mat board will pick up elements compositionally and chromatically from within the thread installation. Ranging in scale and number of panels, Lindberg’s drawings explore the luminous possibilities of hue. Intermittent bold bands of contrasting color shift imply a layered space while referencing changes in light that come with time of day, viewpoint and atmosphere.

Lindberg has long activated architecture with her site-responsive thread installations. Her work is first experienced by the body, with intellect and analysis coming later. For Lindberg, space is a vital material, and just as important and rich with possibilities as thread, paper and pencils. Creating her architecturally scaled sculptures with thread is akin to working in the air, with the air and of the air to build a constantly changing experience. As she “stitches” the architecture, the airborne mass of delicate threads become filters for chromatic light, striking a voluminous pose with visceral results.

Blue, and the concept of blue, has a beguiling history, cultural significance, phenomenological radiance and scientific profundity. From artists to philosophers, scientists and astronauts, blue is by unequal measures intangible, mysterious and indeterminate. Scarce in nature, blue eludes perception emotionally and physically but is also everywhere - making it a symbol for the ideal - verging on the utopian. Whatever this color evokes in an individual, one of the most powerful elements is its ability to create meaning-making which, by definition, designates the way in which people interpret the world around them.

 Anne Lindberg has been exploring the color blue for much of her artistic career. As a young artist, she traveled to Kyoto several times to work with traditional indigo dyers where she became fascinated with indigo’s unique ability to generate beautiful slow gradations from deep blues to hints of the lightest blues. It was Lindberg’s early experience watching cloth being lifted out of an indigo dye pot and its exposure to oxygen changing the yellow-ish green color of the fermented liquid dye into deeper and deeper shades of blue with each successive dip that formed the underpinnings of her lifelong interest in color. In recent years, Lindberg has been considering the semiotics of color, or how color can be used as a signifier for meanings associated with socio-emotional, cultural, environmental and political significance.

 Searching for ways to visualize the mysteries of visual and spatial experience is a compelling way of working especially in times of social, environmental, and economic change. Color, particularly blue, has an inherent intrigue in human vision; it exists beyond our grasp as it holds constant conversation with adjacent colors in both time and space. Imagining a world without color, and particularly blue, underlines its significance in the whole of human experience.

Anne Lindberg, altostratus, 2024, graphite and colored pencil on mat board, 45 x 96 inches in two panels

Prendre le Soleil (Taking the Sun) opens at Hangar Y in Paris - December 16, 2024 - April 17, 2024

Prendre le Soleil (Taking the Sun)
December 16, 2023 - April 21, 2024

From Tacita Dean's green ray, to the multiple digital suns collected on Flickr by Penelope Umbrico, through the photographs of sunspots by astronomer Jules Janssen, the new exhibition at Hangar Y offers a luminous and sensitive journey through the works of modern and contemporary artists and scientific and vernacular images.

Our sun is so familiar and everyday that we sometimes forget it. Moreover, it is no longer just its light that punctuates and invades our lives, as certain artists point out, but rather the electric light of lamps and screens. Falsely associated with global warming, the Sun is sometimes unloved and feared. Its heat reminds us of the sublime mystery of its burning consistency. The sun's burns, its blows, its traces and its effects activate the imagination of artists, just like its ambivalences, without which life on Earth would not exist: the sun heats but sets on fire; it illuminates while dazzling…

This contradiction inherent in this star recalls the famous maxim of François de La Rochefoucauld: “The sun nor death cannot look at each other fixedly”. The abstract and vibrant photographs of a whole young generation of photographers, fascinated by the effect of the sun's rays on sensitive surfaces, “draw” with the star and reconnect with the experiments of the inventors of photography and cinema. A sensitive exploration of the sun through the eyes of artists.

It is with humor that some artists seize the motif of the sunset which they divert while others observe with delight the sublime moment of eternity when the moon “rises” and the sun disappears. Night falls slowly, and the darkness grows. Plunged into darkness, the sun is still there, but not exactly here. At the origin of numerous cults, the divine and mystical power of the Sun is a rich source of inspiration for artists who question our need for transcendence.

The works of nearly 40 artists, French and international, are presented in the exhibition:

Guillaume Aubry
Mustapha Azeroual
Abdelkader Benchamma
Jean Claracq
Caroline Corbasson
Rapha.l Dallaporta
Tacita Dean
Disnovation.org
Rachel Duckhouse
Samuel Fosso
Léon Foucault
Fragmentin
Erwan Frotin
Marina Gadonneix
Noémie Goudal
Laurent Grasso
Jules Janssen
Anne Lindberg
Colectivo Los Ingrad.vos
Thomas Mailaender
Massao Mascaro
Peter Miller
Desire Moheb-Zandi
Morris
Martin Parr
Joan Rabascall
Sébastien Reuzé
Simon Roberts
Dagoberto Rodriguez
Charles Ross
Camille Sauvageot
SMITH
Stéphanie Solinas
Sun Ra & his Arkestra
Clara de Tezanos
Laure Tiberghien
Étienne Léopold Trouvelot
Penelope Umbrico
Gwenola Wagon

imaginary i opens at Madison Museum of Contemporary Art - November 10, 2023 - April 7, 2024

imaginary i
November 10, 2023 - April 7, 2024
Madison Museum of Contemporary Art
Madison, WI

imaginary i compares how artists and mathematicians utilize constructs of the imaginary, or complex numbers, to envision the future and reclaim, retrace, and reveal past patterns. When examining MMoCA’s collecting patterns, there emerges a history of acquisitions that dovetails with explorations of science and math.

Together, art, math, and science explore and seek out unknown worlds and concepts projecting future and undiscovered realities. Artists utilizing mathematical iterative processes, such as Charles Gaines, those exploring modeling the infinite, such as Bruce Conner, and Erika Blumenfeld, who reflects the scientific realm, reveal new ways of looking that open dialogues on potentialities.

Pairing works from the MMoCA collection with contemporary artists engaged in similar pursuits, the exhibition postulates that science, technology, engineering, arts, and mathematics (STEAM), have coalesced within the collection for the last half-century. Further research into the history of donors and the relationship with the University of Wisconsin-Madison infers an inherent interest in seeking out the mathematical and scientific in art. For example, renowned mathematician and professor at UW-Madison Rudolph Langer provided the founding gift of artwork that established MMoCA’s collection.

Complemented by humanities-based programming, collaboration with K-12 educators, and onsite activities for families in the Learning and Activity Centers, the exhibition will utilize data visualization techniques to develop conversations around the vital role of the arts and humanities in conjunction with science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM).

Artists
Alice Aycock
Maxime Banks
Erika Blumenfeld
John Cage
Bruce Conner
Richard Diebenkorn
William Dole
Olafur Eliasson
Charles Gaines
Michelle Grabner
Mary Heilmann
Al Held
Dame Barbara Hepworth
John Hughes
Richard Hunt
Rockne Krebs
Annette Lawrence
Anne Lindberg
Truman Lowe
Alan J. Shields
Eric Staller

Of Waves opens at SEPTEMBER gallery - October 28 - December 17, 2023

 Jane Bustin
 Anne Lindberg
Of Waves
SEPTEMBER gallery
4 Hudson Street #3
Kinderhook, NY 12106
Jane Bustin and Anne Lindberg
October 28 - December 17, 2023

Here are things we can hold in our hands - a book, a page, a pencil - and things we cannot hold - a moment, a memory, a breath. We can gather the things themselves, touch them, see their evidence of time in salt stains and lost threads. We can hold an image of a sunset between thin lines and bright blues. Sometimes though it’s the spaces between absence and articulation - a lighter touch, an unmarked surface, a soft reflection - that opens us outwards. We can catch, sort and place, but it’s the thing we can’t contain, the spilling over, that leads us to a kind of surrender. And this is when we finally hush, and just float here.

We are thrilled to present a two person exhibition, Of Waves, with London based Jane Bustin, and Hudson Valley based Anne Lindberg. Each artist will have a room of their own, Bustin in the South gallery and Lindberg in the North gallery, with their works meeting in the center.

Both artists are working with the parameters of their own bodies, that is, Bustin works in parts that are scaled to hand-held proportions, while Lindberg works in a size that is an extension of arms reach. Light plays an important role, either suggesting an internal glow or literally reflecting from a surface. Both pull from written language, and specifically for this show, they draw inspiration from Virginia Woolf. Thinking about her novel, The Waves, Lindberg and Bustin make choices of palette, line and material. Their practices mirror the contemplative interiority of a poet, here finding form through a tenderly woven visual language.

Lindberg works with pencil, beginning with graphite and methodically layering with varying pressure of line. Her process contains instructions: draw straight lines side to side with the support of a ruler, graphite first, color on top. However, her process is also searching as she makes choices, changes pencils and colors or adjusts pressure along the way. For this body of work, Lindberg draws with a horizontal gesture, suggesting an expanse with orbs that hover, perhaps the rising sun or ripples of cloth, perhaps an apparition in fog. Along with her works on paper, Lindberg is presenting an installation made with blue, gray and white thread that itself becomes a horizon as the viewer gazes over the hovering form stretching between two walls.

Bustin is working with a carefully selected combination of materials - aluminum, copper, cloth and paper, each its own panel, positioned together in a grid of four. The cut sail cloth has been stained and worn by the English sea, creating indigo edges and loose threads. The paper has been culled from old books, their edges stained by time and sun, each page dipped in tea. The copper and aluminum reflect light, the context of a room, passing subjects. For this series of works, Bustin has spent hours at the British Library pouring through letters written between Virginia Woolf and her friends and lovers. Each grouping of four panels has been created as a poetic embodiment of their exchange, their relationship as conveyed through private letters, linked sentiments.

The repetition of line, materials, and form in both artists' works speak to one another, sharing language, forming overlap and connection. Ephemerality and temporality are reverberating throughlines. The constant here, like Woolf’s belief in the movement of language, is change.

Jane Bustin, born 1964, London, studied at Portsmouth University and lives and works in London, her practice spans three decades of single works in painting and ceramic as well as installation, text, film and performance. The paintings are made as sequential, monochrome abstract works, executed in a variety of mediums and surfaces. They explore the metaphysical potential for painting to 'make visual' philosophical concepts found primarily in modernist literature, feminism, theology as well as music and dance. The work is usually project based and can incorporate paintings, ceramic objects, text and live performance. The works influences come from 14th century frescos, 17th century painting, Belle epoque iconography, modernist literature, Nineteenth century poetry, women artists, 70’s feminist movement, Japanese ceramics, fabrics, books, hardware stores , neon signs, cosmetics, sweet wrappers...Bustin’s work has been exhibited widely nationally including Kettles Yard Cambridge, Southampton Gallery, Ferens Museum Hull, Camden Arts Centre London, Whitechapel Gallery London, Walker Gallery Manchester, Jerwood space London, Drawing Room London, Mostyn Gallery Llandudno, Djanogly and internationally with solo shows in Berlin, Latvia, New York, Paris, Sydney and Auckland. Bustin has work in public collections, including: The Rothko Museum, Victoria & Albert Museum, Ferens Museum and Yale Centre. She is represented by Copperfield, London, Jane lombard New York and Fox Jensen Sydney and FoxJensen McCory Auckland.

Anne Lindberg born 1962, Iowa City, IA, is multi-disciplinary artist who works within broad definitions of drawing and textile in two and three dimensions. Lindberg’s project passage is currently on view at the newly renovated and expanded Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts until 2026. Her immersive architecturally scaled project, Anne Lindberg: what is the color of divine light?, at The Textile Museum at George Washington University Museums (until late December 2023) examines unnamed, unseen, and indeterminate definitions of the divine through color with a broad 55-foot wide installation made with fine chromatic thread. In mid-November 2023, Lindberg will build a site-specific work at the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art in Madison, WI for a group exhibition that looks at the relationship between art and mathematics called imaginary i, curated by Christina Brungardt. At Hangar Y in Paris, France in December 2023, Anne will present a luminous installation for a group exhibition called Seizing the Sun, up thru April 2024. Fourteen of Lindberg’s of the river drawings were recently purchased by the US Department of State for the U.S. Consulate in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia. A five-story glass wall, commissioned for the new women’s health center at NYU Langone Health in New York, NY was completed in 2023. Lindberg’s first monograph was released in late 2022 by Durer Editions (Dublin, Ireland). Lindberg’s work is held in the collections of the Nevada Museum of Art, Everson Museum of Art, Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts, Detroit Institute of Art, Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Daum Museum of Contemporary Art, The Rachofsky Collection, Collection of Christy and Bill Gautreaux, Spencer Museum of Art, NYSE Chicago, Federal Reserve Bank Kansas City, Niwako Kimono Company, GSA Richard Bolling Federal Building, among many others. Lindberg is recipient of awards including a 2011 Painters & Sculptors Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant, Charlotte Street Foundation Fellowship, two ArtsKC Fund Inspiration Grants, a Lighton International Artists Exchange grant, the Art Omi International Artists Residency, an American Institute of Architects Allied Arts and Crafts award, and a Mid-America National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. She holds a BFA from Miami University and an MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art. Her studio is in Ancramdale, New York.

Jane Bustin, 2023, 8. Virginia daughter wife writer, paper, crushed oyster shell, watercolour 38 x 48 cm

StirWorld publishes "Line and colour transcend language" by Dilpreet Bhullar, Feb 19, 2023

Line and Colour Transcend Language
by Dilpreet Bhullar

The rows of well-defined lines in the artwork are an invitation to take a look closer at them to gauge the intensity of luminosity and deftly crafted density. In this fashion, the viewers are initiated to play along with the field of light assembled in front of them. The seamless connection between colour, form, intensity and direction of a line, as a way to reorient the trained eye towards what is often overlooked, occupies the art practice of New York-based = multimedia artist Anne Lindberg. The line(s) as a geometrical shape, central to her works, is formed in drawings as well as textile installations. Practice as a response to the two and three dimensions, conceptualized to question the flow of time, opens a possibility to anchor an experiential effect for the viewers.

To pause and reflect on silence, movement and distance around the site-responsive installations, against the strident need to distort the perception of what is given in the works of Lindberg, are achieved subtly. Playing with perception allows the viewers of her work to create their environments to have personal experiences with the drawings. In an interview with STIR, she cites a few works to support this observation, “One drawing, Apparition Eclipse, is a vertically oriented 8.5-foot-tall by 5-foot-wide drawing. From a distance, it is subtle in effect but as you approach and stand just a few feet away it becomes encompassing to what I hope is an emotional and physiological level. Towering above the viewer, the graphite and coloured pencil generate one subtle emotion after another, again and again with the repetition of vertical lines. Colour, the density/non-density of the lines and their simple proximity to each other create a unique context for each viewer.”

The pursuit to have an interaction with the space is not limited to the artworks but it is an extension of Lindberg’s daily engagement in a studio, and conversation with peers and community. Moreover, the long walks, undertaken by the artist, offer her the time to consume herself in the period of contemplation around transformation and adaptability. In doing so Lindberg perpetuates a ritual: diligently performed by writers including William Wordsworth, Helen Mirra, Rebecca Solnit, and Virginia Woolf. The quotidian exercise pinned by the delicate human condition informs the creative practice of the visual artist. In other words, each line or colour in the art is a physical answer to these tactile moments. The abstract nature of the work for Lindberg at a base level is a synonym for intangibility. The only way to pull meaning from looking at something that appears abstract is to bring your own oneness to bear. “An immersive experience is a tool that I can provide to help shape the possibility for context. I hope that a visceral moment can, through immersion, provide a moment that is tangible enough to provide a kind of clarification,” elucidates Lindberg.

In her recent exhibition Afterimage along with Chicago-based painter Olivia Schreiner at Carrie Secrist Gallery, Chicago, she is showcasing a series Afterimage. It is an image that appears in the eyes after a period of time of being exposed to another image. Following her artistic oeuvre, this physical response is the manifestation of a visceral reaction. She mentions, “What I am exploring is the use of colour, and combinations of colour, to ask how what we perceive through placing certain colours together alters our understanding of what the eye and the mind “see”. For example, putting the colours blue and yellow together creates what is called a “simultaneous contrast” which alters our perception of what colour is. The relationship between colours is more than composition, it can be a deeply felt experience.”

A curious mind is keen to know how she makes a selection of colours for her works. She has been studying the writings of Emily Noyes Vanderpoel and Mary Gartside and the experiments of Joseph Albers for her current presentation at the exhibition. Through this, an underlying theory called “colour complementariness” has emerged. Elaborating this Lindberg says, “This essentially means that colours can imply a shift in time and space through their relationship with each other. The colours chosen for the drawings in this exhibition can mean many things on an abstract level but it’s their essence that most interests me. Each colour’s characteristic is its own, but in tandem or, in relation to another, can mean many more things. What exactly that is I can only imply.”

When witnessed within the framework of art history, the combination of lines and colours has been the ardent subject of the painters of the early twentieth century. In the time tormented by the World War, the questions around the imperious power of the divine were evoked. Casting the dark shadows over everything under the sun, the artists played with the ideal form of line – a metaphor for light – concurrently talked about concerns around spirituality. The book Concerning the Spiritual in Art by the Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky was published with a similar intent. Another upcoming immersive installation by Lindberg What Colors is Divine light presses upon the notion of interrelation between individual and community, at large. By having “light” integral to the work, the American artist attempts to draw upon the presence of divine light in every sectarian philosophy.

Lindberg is optimistic that the viewers would find themselves with a sense of exploration, and a wider and deeper understanding of how colour can create an emotional and non-verbal state of being. Nevertheless, she remains careful to indicate, “This does not have to mean to be emotionally sad or harmonious; it can also bring about a feeling of turbulence, wonder or urgency. One of the questions I asked myself recently is ‘Why is colour so powerful?’ It transcends language and slows time and, more importantly, asks nothing of us.”  

Anne Lindberg, apparition eclipse, 2021, graphite and colored pencil on mat board, 104 x 59 inches

Anne Lindberg, spectrum, 2022, graphite and colored pencil on mat board, 40 x 50 inches

Anne Lindberg, roots of how we measure 13, 2022, graphite and colored pencil on mat board, 40 x 50 inches

passage opens at newly re-imagined Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts, April 22, 2023

Anne Lindberg: passage

Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts, Little Rock, AR
April 22, 2023 - Spring 2026

A luminous cloud of color floats above Museum visitors, creating an unexpected art experience as they walk through the galleries. This exhibition is a newly commissioned work by Anne Lindberg, an artist based in upstate New York.

Lindberg makes site-specific installations—sculptures that respond directly to the architecture of the surrounding space. Her work, which is created for AMFA, will draw visitors’ attention to the thoughtful details of the new Studio Gang-designed building. Exhibiting art in an unusual location—a corridor—will activate the space for visitors. With the help of assistants, Lindberg pulls colorful cotton thread taut between walls and staples it into place, repeating the process over and over.

“The piece begins as a whisper and gains mass as time goes on,” she explains. “It’s performative.” Although her installations are volumetric, Lindberg considers them to be drawings—they create lines in space. One wall will feature a large vertical drawing on mat board with dozens of brightly colored, thin, horizontal lines created by the artist with the help of a parallel bar. The drawing, grene, has been acquired for the AMFA Foundation Collection.

AMFA selected Lindberg as an inaugural installation artist because of her unique attention to architecture and relationship to drawing, a strength of the AMFA Foundation Collection.

The artist designed this installation specifically for the narrow corridor gallery. Lindberg notes, “passage is a narrow-compressed form that floats overhead and is located within a slender pinch point between large exhibition spaces in the Museum. The overall form shifts direction mid-way along its horizontal length to create a gap or pause, a peek through its vertical depth.” The work is also unusual in that visitors will walk below it, creating an immersive experience.

In addition to drawing, Lindberg’s practice is rooted in fiber art. With the artist’s time-intensive handiwork, choice of thread as a medium, and focus on material qualities, she continues to expand upon a centuries-old tradition. Lindberg earned an MFA from the Cranbrook Academy of Art, which boasts a fiber program that challenges the divisions between art, craft, and design. Before earning her graduate degree, she worked as a curatorial assistant at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History, making diagrams and counting threads of textiles from West Africa.

Lindberg chose her color palette for passage with AMFA’s grounds and MacArthur Park location in mind. “I selected green, green blue (with some yellow) for the primary chromatic dynamic to suggest a connection to the landscape surrounding the Museum,” the artist explained. “The outside comes inside, a kind of inversion into the very center of the Museum.”

She is interested in the way that colors affect viewers’ bodies and minds, how they can create physiological responses of calm or relaxation. “Green is a color that symbolizes nature, good health, growth, renewal, and a call to action – all positive associations that hopefully give the work an uplifting character.” As light streams through the thread in passage, it will bathe viewers in a green and yellow glow.

Anne Lindberg: passage is presented by Terri and Chuck Erwin with additional support from the Lenore G. Tawney Foundation. Theresa Bembnister is the curator of the project.

A Fine Thread, by Kelsey Bogdan in Selvedge magazine April 2023

The Washington Post, "At the Textile Museum, the divine takes many forms" by Vanessa Larson, March 28, 2023

Installation view of “Prayer and Transcendence” at the George Washington University Museum and Textile Museum. (Cara Taylor / George Washington University)

“Oriental rugs,” as they are often called, have been appreciated for centuries for their beauty and artistry. Some serve a purpose that’s more than mere decoration for a floor or wall, however. “Prayer and Transcendence,” an exhibition at the George Washington University Museum and Textile Museum, focuses on Islamic prayer carpets, showing how they share specific iconography that forms a common visual language across Muslim cultures, while also allowing for a diversity of styles and interpretations.

“[Carpets] are beautiful objects, but they have meanings,” says curator Sumru Belger Krody. “And if you’re not from that culture or religion, it’s harder to read them. This exhibition tells you how to read that meaning.”

The exhibition is a feast for the eyes, showcasing 20 carpets dating from the 16th to 19th centuries and spanning lands from modern-day Turkey and Iran through the Caucasus and Central Asia and into the Indian subcontinent. More than half are Textile Museum holdings, with the remainder on loan from four other collections.

The central element of Islamic prayer carpets is their directionality: Each features an archway around which the rest of the design is composed. When laid on the ground with the arch oriented in the direction of Mecca, the textile physically delineates an area for prayer. The rugs may also be hung on walls to denote a space for worship.

Torah ark curtain (early 17th century) from the Ottoman Empire in Cairo. (George Washington University Museum and Textile Museum/Acquired by George Hewitt Myers in 1915)

A prayer carpet (1890-1910) from the Caucasus. (Harvard Art Museums/Arthur M. Sackler Museum/Gift of Elizabeth Gowing, Harborne W. Stuart, Peggy Coolidge, and the estate of W.I. Stuart in memory of Mr. and Mrs. Willoughby H. Stuart Jr.)

Among the most gorgeous works on display are those with imagery of gardens, representing paradise. A stunning piece from 18th-century Kashmir is a riot of colors and patterns, featuring a scalloped, curved archway flanked by cypress trees with a millefleurs field of assorted flowers in the center, all surrounded by a more stylized floral border pattern. It was also made with especially rich materials: a combination of silk, cotton, and pashmina wool.

“In the Quran, paradise is described in several sections as this big, luscious garden with flowers, greenery, waters. … If you live a pious life, you can enter,” Krody says. “These carpets kind of in miniature give you a glimpse of what [the afterlife] may be if you do the right thing.”

On the walls, lines from the Quran and photos of mosques in countries from which the rugs originate help add religious and cultural context.

The carpets range from an exquisite piece dating to 16th-century Iran that was made with silk, wool and metallic-wrapped thread by weavers employed by the Safavid shah’s court to simpler rugs created by rural women for household use. One particularly vibrant example from the Caucasus has a pattern of stylized, almost hexagonal paisleys in an array of colors.

A late-18th-century saf (multi-arch prayer carpet) from Warangal in India’s Deccan Plateau. (George Washington University Museum and Textile Museum/Acquired by George Hewitt Myers in 1950)

“The designs are created for [court] use, but then kind of go down the echelons and reach the masses, being imitated in various different ways,” Krody explains. Although styles reflect local preferences, they were also influenced by available materials: Rural artisans usually worked with wool that wasn’t nearly as fine as the silk often used by court weavers, leading to designs that were more geometric and considerably less intricate.

Lamps, clearly modeled on the types of lights that traditionally hang in mosques, are another important motif, symbolizing divine light. Here the museum provides a fascinating counterpoint to the prayer rugs through the inclusion of two carpets woven in the Ottoman Empire and used, rather atypically, in synagogues as parochets, or Torah ark covers, showing the degree of mutual influence between the empire’s Muslim and Jewish communities.

One of the ark covers hangs next to an Ottoman prayer carpet with such similar design and iconography — a central archway with a lamp or flowers hanging from it; concentric patterned floral borders — that it would be easy to interchange them were it not for the Hebrew inscription at the top of the parochet.

Installation view of Anne Lindberg’s “What Color Is Divine Light?” (Derek Porter)

Just upstairs from the carpets, a site-specific installation by contemporary American artist Anne Lindberg, “What Color Is Divine Light?,” continues the theme.

Lindberg’s luminous work evokes a sense of wonder. At first glance, it seems like an illusion created from something intangible, such as beams of light. In fact, it was made with thousands of fine cotton threads on a color spectrum between yellow and blue, stretched tautly between two lavender walls and lit so that the work appears almost psychedelic, vibrating from close-up.

The installation aims to create what scientists call “impossible colors” — imperceptible to the eye and brain — between the hues of the threads. In grappling with the impossibility of depicting the divine in physical form, the artist is responding to an unanswerable question posed in an eponymous 1971 essay by art historian Patrik Reutersward.

“What Color Is Divine Light?” invites contemplation; the museum is also holding several interfaith and performance programs and encouraging quiet reflection in the space. On a recent Saturday, several Muslim women attending an Islamic calligraphy workshop held in conjunction with the carpet exhibition rolled out yoga mats that were on hand and performed afternoon prayers.

Not only visually stimulating, the juxtaposition of Lindberg’s installation with the Islamic prayer carpets, along with the Torah ark covers, makes a wonderful case for the idea that the divine can be found in many forms.

Installation view of Anne Lindberg’s “What Color Is Divine Light?” (Cara Taylor / George Washington University)

Installation view of Anne Lindberg’s “What Color Is Divine Light?” (Derek Porter)

What color is divine light? opens at The Textile Museum in Washington, DC February 4, 2023

What color is divine light?
The Textile Museum
701 21st St. NW
Washington, D.C. 20052

Museum Hours:
Tuesday thru Saturday: 10 a.m.-5 p.m.

February 4 - July 1, 2023

Contemporary artist Anne Lindberg’s immersive installation transforms light and thread into a site for contemplation and reflection on connections with ourselves, communities and individual conceptions of the divine. A series of programs within the gallery will bring community members together for shared experiences designed to foster understanding and transcendence.

Across many religions, light is used as a symbol of divine presence on Earth. Inspired by an eponymous 1971 essay, Anne Lindberg is transforming the museum’s third-floor gallery into a site-specific installation that will explore the question, “What color is divine light?”

Scientists have determined that between complementary colors exist colors the eye and brain cannot perceive, called “impossible” colors. “It’s the intangible, the imaginary, the mysterious, unnamed space between… although our eyes/brains can’t actually see the colors between, we feel them, we sense them,” states Lindberg. “The divine, like these colors, is unnamable, untouchable, intangible.”

Set against lavender walls, what color is divine light? will contain thousands of fine chromatic threads in complementary yellow and blue colors – creating a cloud of color that evokes light itself. Lindberg’s installation invites visitors to gather and reflect: If divinity could be experienced as a physical presence, what might it look like? Sound like? Feel like? What color is divine light?

Anne Lindberg: what color is divine light? is accompanied by a gallery guide.

About the Artist
Anne Lindberg (American, b. 1962) is a multimedia artist whose work centers on immersive installations and drawings that tap a non-verbal physiological landscape of body and space, provoking emotional, visceral and perceptual responses. Lindberg is the recipient of multiple awards, fellowships and grants, including a Painters & Sculptors Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant and a Charlotte Street Foundation Fellowship. Her work has been exhibited widely and is held in collections across the United States. Lindberg received a B.F.A. from Miami University and a M.F.A. from Cranbrook Academy of Art.

Acknowledgements
Support for this exhibition and related programming is provided by the Fund for Contemporary Textile Art, the Cynthia and Alton Boyer Fund for Education, the Estate of Jack Lenor Larson and the Contemporary Textiles Endowment.

Afterimage at Carrie Secrist Gallery, Chicago, IL - January 6 - February 25, 2023

Carrie Secrist Gallery is happy to announce the second project in our series “CSG BTWXT” at our temporary gallery space, located at 1637 W. Chicago Ave in Chicago’s West Town neighborhood. BTWXT II will feature work by New York-based gallery artist Anne Lindberg.

Anne Lindberg’s presentation, titled Afterimage, explores the visceral elements of color as it relates theory, abstraction, and the proximity of the viewer’s experience. With a binding interest in color theory, Lindberg looks to the writings of Emily Noyes Vanderpoel, Mary Gartside and the experiments of Joseph Albers to investigate color complementariness, which, in concept, implies a shift in time and space. In her abstract line drawings, the smashing together of colors such as blue and yellow creates a “simultaneous contrast” which alters our perception of what color is (what is yellow and what is blue?).

Exploring the ideas of color as an “intangible essence” interplays with the material resonance of the colored pencil and graphite. Several of the works utilize multiple panels in composite to activate the play of space and color adjacencies. Lindberg’s interest in the emotional and visual powers of color generates arresting compositions of urgency and turbulence, quietude and harmony. The drawings collapse divisions between complementary colors, bringing forth a mysterious indeterminate state of individual and blended colors.

Afterimage opens alongside the release of Anne Lindberg’s new book with Dürer Editions (Dublin, Ireland). The publication includes work from the last ten years, interweaving images of immersive site-specific installations with drawings and four essays.

Books will be available for purchase at the gallery. A Collector’s Edition (edition of 12) with an original drawing and slipcase with the book is also available, as are a limited number of signed copies of the book. Please contact the gallery if you would like to pre-order.

Anne Lindberg, roots of how we measure 13, graphite and colored pencil on mat board, 40 x 50 inches

Anne Lindberg book with DÜRER EDITIONS released!

For more than thirty years, Anne Lindberg has exhibited her visually arresting drawings and immersive thread installations in venues across the United States and internationally, including Museum of Fine Arts Boston, The Drawing Center, U.S. Consulate General Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, SESCA Bom Retiro Sao Paulo, The Rachofsky Collection, and Contemporary Art Center Cincinnati, among numerous others.

In her new book, she asks ‘Why is color so powerful?’ For her the answer begins with the body. In works that range from site-specific ‘drawings in space’ made from fine chromatic thread to large-scale drawings of graphite and colored pencil, Lindberg generates experiences that transcend language, slow time, and tap into something at the core of us, with the belief that a kind of alchemy can exist in everyday life.

As Jeffrey Kastner, writer and Senior Editor of Cabinet magazine, writes in his essay entitled Linear Perspectives, ‘That in the works’ shifts from 2D to 3D, we are not being shown two things, no matter how related they might be, but are instead being guided by the artist to resituate ourselves in order to fully understand the one thing we’re looking at—nothing less than energetic exchange between matter and space that shapes our experience in and of the natural world.’

Essays by Theresa Bembnister, Jeffrey Kastner, Caroline Kipp and Kevin Moore.

Anne Lindberg is published by Dürer Editions, 2022

Designed by John Power
 & Simon Watson
Publisher Richard Power
Published by Dürer Editions, 2022
Printed by Artes Gráficas Palermo, Madrid
Hardback, 112 pages, 240mm x 310mm
ISBN: 978-1-8383143-5-4

First Edition - $50 / €50

Collectors’ Edition - $2,000 / €2,000
Signed, numbered w/ slipcase. Signed original work. Edition of 12

Spectrum, exhibition and book release event opens at Haw Contemporary December 10

Spectrum, an exhibition of richly colored drawings from 2021-22 by Anne Lindberg, opens alongside the release of her new book with Dürer Editions (Dublin, Ireland). The exhibition includes drawings from two recent series called roots of how we measure and rising temperatures, each with flashes of brilliant color shot through gradient passages of graphite. Lindberg continues her interest in the emotional and visual powers of color, oftentimes breaking rules of color theory to create arresting compositions of urgency and turbulence, quietude and harmony.

Lindberg’s new publication includes work from the recent ten years, interweaving images of immersive site-specific installations with drawings and four essays. The writers are Theresa Bembnister (curator at the Arkansas Museum of Arts), Jeffrey Kastner (writer, critic for Art Forum and Senior Editor of Cabinet magazine), Caroline Kipp (Curator of Contemporary Art at The Textile Museum), and Kevin Moore (independent curator, writer, owner of Liberal Arts Roxbury and Creative Director for FotoFocus). Rather than following a time narrative or specific theme, the book introduces a fresh and thoughtful sequence of images of work to bring one closer to the reality of being with Lindberg’s work in person.

On the first pages of the book, Lindberg asks “Why is color so powerful?” For her the answer begins with the body. In works that range from site-specific “drawings in space” made from fine chromatic thread to large-scale drawings of graphite and colored pencil, Lindberg generates experiences that transcend language, slow time, and tap into something at the core of us, with the belief that a kind of alchemy can exist in everyday life.

As Kastner writes in his essay in the book entitled Linear Perspectives, “That in the works’ shifts from 2D to 3D, we are not being shown two things, no matter how related they might be, but are instead being guided by the artist to resituate ourselves in order to fully understand the one thing we’re looking at—nothing less than energetic exchange between matter and space that shapes our experience in and of the natural world.”

For more than thirty years, Lindberg has exhibited her visually complex drawings and immersive thread installations in venues across the United States and internationally, including Museum of Fine Arts Boston, The Drawing Center, U.S. Consulate General (Dhahran, Saudi Arabia), SESCA Bom Retiro (Sao Paulo, Brazil), Tegneforbundet (Oslo, Norway), The Rachofsky Collection, Galerie Herbert Winter (Vienna), Akron Art Museum, Nevada Museum of Art, Atlanta Contemporary Art Center, Cranbrook Art Museum, Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Museum of Arts and Design (NYC), Contemporary Art Museum Raleigh, Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, and Contemporary Art Center Cincinnati, among numerous others. Lindberg has upcoming solo exhibitions in 2023 at The Textile Museum at George Washington University Museums, Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts, September Gallery, and Carrie Secrist Gallery.

Books will be available at the event in Gallery 6 and Lindberg will be there from 1-4pm on Saturday, December 10. Otherwise, books will be available for purchase at the gallery. A Collector’s Edition (edition of 12) with an original drawing and slipcase with the book is also available.

www.durereditions.com
ISBN: 978-1-8383143-5-4
112 pages, full color, hardbound cloth cover

Anne Lindberg, roots of how we measure 14, 2022, graphite and colored pencil on mat board, 40 x 50 inches

Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts, grand opening April 2023

Anne Lindberg: passage

April 22, 2023 - Spring 2026

A luminous cloud of color floats above Museum visitors, creating an unexpected art experience as they walk through the galleries. This exhibition is a newly commissioned work by Anne Lindberg, an artist based in upstate New York.

Lindberg makes site-specific installations—sculptures that respond directly to the architecture of the surrounding space. Her work, which is created for AMFA, will draw visitors’ attention to the thoughtful details of the new Studio Gang-designed building. Exhibiting art in an unusual location—a corridor—will activate the space for visitors. With the help of assistants, Lindberg pulls colorful cotton thread taut between walls and staples it into place, repeating the process over and over.

“The piece begins as a whisper and gains mass as time goes on,” she explains. “It’s performative.” Although her installations are volumetric, Lindberg considers them to be drawings—they create lines in space. One wall will feature a large vertical drawing on mat board with dozens of brightly colored, thin, horizontal lines created by the artist with the help of a parallel bar. The drawing, grene, has been acquired for the AMFA Foundation Collection.

AMFA selected Lindberg as an inaugural installation artist because of her unique attention to architecture and relationship to drawing, a strength of the AMFA Foundation Collection.

The artist designed this installation specifically for the narrow corridor gallery. Lindberg notes, “passage is a narrow-compressed form that floats overhead and is located within a slender pinch point between large exhibition spaces in the Museum. The overall form shifts direction mid-way along its horizontal length to create a gap or pause, a peek through its vertical depth.” The work is also unusual in that visitors will walk below it, creating an immersive experience.

In addition to drawing, Lindberg’s practice is rooted in fiber art. With the artist’s time-intensive handiwork, choice of thread as a medium, and focus on material qualities, she continues to expand upon a centuries-old tradition. Lindberg earned an MFA from the Cranbrook Academy of Art, which boasts a fiber program that challenges the divisions between art, craft, and design. Before earning her graduate degree, she worked as a curatorial assistant at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History, making diagrams and counting threads in textiles from West Africa.

Lindberg chose her color palette for passage with AMFA’s grounds and MacArthur Park location in mind. “I selected green, green blue (with some yellow) for the primary chromatic dynamic to suggest a connection to the landscape surrounding the Museum,” the artist explained. “The outside comes inside, a kind of inversion into the very center of the Museum.”

She is interested in the way that colors affect viewers’ bodies and minds, how they can create physiological responses of calm or relaxation. “Green is a color that symbolizes nature, good health, growth, renewal, and a call to action – all positive associations that hopefully give the work an uplifting character.” As light streams through the thread in passage, it will bathe viewers in a green and yellow glow.

About Anne Lindberg

Anne Lindberg’s recent exhibitions include Everson Museum of Art, Figge Art Museum, Museum of Arts and Design, Thomas Cole Historic Site, John Michael Kohler Art Center, Manitoga The Russel Wright Design Center, Josee Bienvenu Gallery, SEPTEMBER Gallery, University of Minnesota Regis Center for the Arts, River Valley Arts Collective at the Thornwillow Press, Nancy Littlejohn Fine Art, The Landing, Haw Contemporary, Pamela Salisbury Gallery and Carrie Secrist Gallery among others.

Her work has also been in solo and group exhibitions at such places as The Drawing Center, New York; Tegnerforbundet, Norway; SESC Bom Retiro, Sao Paulo; Mattress Factory; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Museum of Arts and Design, New York; Contemporary Art Museum of Raleigh; U.S. Embassy Yangon Myanmar; Atlanta Contemporary Art Center; Bemis Center for Contemporary Art; Akron Art Museum; Cranbrook Art Museum; Atlanta Contemporary Art Center; Contemporary Art Center, Cincinnati; Laumeier Sculpture Park; The Warehouse Dallas; Galerie Hubert Winter, Vienna; September Gallery; Josee Bienvenu Gallery and the Omi International Art Center, among others.

Her work is held in the collections of the Nevada Museum of Art, Everson Museum of Art, Detroit Institute of Art, Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Daum Museum of Contemporary Art, The Rachofsky Collection, Collection of Christy and Bill Gautreaux, Spencer Museum of Art, Federal Reserve Bank Kansas City, Niwako Kimono Company, GSA Richard Bolling Federal Building, among many others. She recently completed a five-story glass wall drawing commission at NYU Langone Health in New York, and 14 of her drawings are now in the collection of the U.S. Consulate General in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia.

Lindberg is recipient of awards including a 2011 Painters & Sculptors Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant, a Charlotte Street Foundation Fellowship, two ArtsKC Fund Inspiration Grants, a Lighton International Artists Exchange grant, the Art Omi International Artists Residency, an American Institute of Architects Allied Arts and Crafts award, and a Mid-America National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. She holds a BFA from Miami University and an MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art. Her studio is in Ancramdale, New York.

Anne Lindberg, grene, 2022, graphite and colored pencil on mat board, 104 x 59 inches, photography by the artist, Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts Foundation Collection

Anne Lindberg: think like the river with poet Ginny Threefoot at Figge Art Museum, thru September 4, 2022

Anne Lindberg: think like the river with poet Ginny Threefoot

Figge Art Museum
225 West Second Street
Davenport, Iowa
11 June - September 4, 2022

Though traditionally defined as works on paper, in recent decades drawing has become a field that uses a broad spectrum of formats. Anne Lindberg’s work embraces this freedom. While she does make drawings on paper, she also works three-dimensionally and understands her room-scaled installations as immersive drawings in space. This summer she will create an ephemeral tonal landscape of color and light by casting thousands of threads across the span of the Figge’s fourth floor gallery. She has invited poet Ginny Threefoot to collaborate on this conceptually rich project centered on the subject of water, conceived with an awareness of the museum’s location along the Mississippi River. 

The chromatic thread installation will occupy the central open space of the gallery, rising and falling in its distance from the floor, thus encouraging visitors to walk around and under the work. It will be accompanied by a multi-panel 25-foot-wide drawing at one end of the gallery and Threefoot’s poetry on the other. The drawing and the text will guide and mirror each other as they converse across the space. 

References to water and the river became a focus for Lindberg when she read Threefoot’s poem “think like the river,” a piece that entertains a possibility of union with the natural world. Across cultures, the river is a metaphor for the constancy of change and uncertainty in both nature and the human condition. Ideas of water lines, currents, flow, and immersion provide points of departure for this dialogue between art and poetry. 

Anne Lindberg: think like the river will invite an interactive bodily experience for museum visitors as they traverse the gallery space. Lindberg’s use of tactile materials and indexical handmade marks have a visceral effect. The confluence of visual art and language will stimulate a fluid dialogue of ideas about the inner and outer worlds of mind and landscape.

temperatures at Nancy Littlejohn Fine Art, opens March 18 in Houston, TX

Anne Lindberg
temperatures
Nancy Littlejohn Fine Art
opens March 18 - May 7, 2022
www.nancylittlejohnfineart.com

At this time in our society, Anne Lindberg is drawn instinctively to intense fluorescent color. Relative saturation and unexpected adjacencies of color in her drawings have become vehicles for speaking about pressing realities. By placing passages of high chromatic color within an on-going flow of graphite, she is embedding her new work with code and using a set of visual ques to signify concern, alarm, and action.

When speaking about her work for temperatures in the Viewing Gallery, Lindberg says, “The weight of the moment is palpable. My father was an energy economist and geographer who, when I was young in the 1970s, often spoke about access to potable water as the future shortage of greatest magnitude. He studied and advocated for the economic viability of renewable energy sources. He and my mother, who was an artist, taught me and my brother the beauty and significance of history and helped us understand that the way we live in the present etches a path that deeply affects the future. It has become increasingly important for me to combine the science and art teachings of my parents with intention in my work.”

Her new drawings use the temperature of color expressively. Each drawing contains interruptions, disturbances, zips, and flashes of errant color -- striking reds, chartreuse, orange, lime green, brilliant blue, fuchsia. They are expressions of captivation and despair, at once rhythmic and jarring and oftentimes ethereal. 

These drawings are made by pulling thousands of lines across pliant cotton mat board with the full range of graphite pencils (21 choices from 10B to 10H), most often with a colored pencil layer atop the graphite. Lindberg varies the angle, pressure, speed, and proximity of marks to generate subtle gradients with an atmospheric light. Each color suggests the next to achieve a range of dissonance and harmony. Subtle changes in the pressure of her hand allow her to shift tone, alignment, and saturation in the fluid field of seemingly systemic marks. 

As an artist who uses delicate tools like the pencil and fine thread, Lindberg is interested to challenge long-held definitions of abstraction and to redress its legacy by unfolding new ideas for how abstraction can communicate with more inclusive approaches.

Cosmic Geometries at Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts Project Space in the NEW YORK TIMES

https://www.nytimes.com/article/new-york-art-galleries.html

February 11, 2022

“The Swedish artist Hilma af Klint was as much a pioneer of abstraction as a mystic. So, in 2020, when the artists Sharmistha Ray and Dannielle Tegeder formed a collective devoted to artwork by women, nonbinary, and trans people interested in spirituality, they named it after her.

Hilma’s Ghost’s first big project was creating a set of tarot cards. Now the duo has curated Cosmic Geometries, which expands on the deck, by continuing its exploration of connections between abstraction and mysticism. Aided by Sarah Potter, a witch, Ray and Tegeder used tarot as a guide for laying out the show. For each of the 25 artists, they pulled a card that’s displayed alongside the work.

Even if, like me, you don’t know much about tarot, you can appreciate its apparent curatorial powers. “March ’94” (1994), a bold and radiant canvas by Biren De, hangs next to Jackie Tileston’s   painting “14. Muon Seance Aftermath” (2021), which evokes unseen forces in a quieter, more hermetic way. With their playful dances of color and shape, Marilyn Lerner’s “Queen Bee” (2020) and Rico Gatson’s “Untitled (Double Sun/Sonhouse)” (2021) look like a ready-made pair. Barbara Takenaga’s transcendent painting “Floater (Revised)” (2013—15) is unique, yet I felt echoes of it in the vibratory rhinestones of Evie Falci’s “Thalia” (2016).

It’s exhilarating to see a knockout exhibition that celebrates abstraction’s spiritual searching. These works are rooted in culture and form, but reminders, too, that when it comes to art, we’re often seeking something deeper. “

by JILLIAN STEINHAUER

_______________________________________________________________________________________

https://www.projectspace-efanyc.org

EFA Project Space presents Cosmic Geometries, organized by Hilma’s Ghost, a feminist collective project by Sharmistha Ray and Dannielle Tegeder, and featuring a diverse, intergenerational group of artists, with work by: Natessa Amin, Yevgeniya Baras, Lisa Beck, Biren De, Grace DeGennaro, Evie Falci, Anoka Faruqee & David Driscoll, Rico Gatson, Diana Guerrero-Maciá, Xylor Jane, Valerie Jaudon, Laleh Khorramian, Julia Kunin, Marilyn Lerner, Anne Lindberg, Mahirwan Mamtani, Carrie Moyer, Stephen Mueller, Sky Pape, Dorothea Rockburne, A.V. Ryan, Laurel Sparks, Barbara Takenaga, Jackie Tileston and Johanna Unzueta. 

Cosmic Geometries is a group exhibition of intergenerational and intersectional artists that examines the spiritual and aesthetic functions of abstract painting and geometry in art. The artists deploy a range of painterly devices to create cosmic and transcendental visions that combine esoteric world traditions with the language of Modernism. Their motifs are inspired by sources as divergent as Islamic architecture, Buddhist mandalas, Hindu yantras, medieval Christian stained-glass windows, and quantum mechanics, rendering formal devices that range from tessellations, optical illusions, to elaborate ornamentation techniques. These artists primarily work with the language of painting, but also draw from languages and materials adapted from sculpture, installation, craft, textiles, and ceramics. Within these works lies a rich sensibility for color, shape, and compositional elements, which reveal the daring sensibilities that artists are bringing to the historically overlooked arena of the spiritual in art. These artists' practices build upon palimpsest legacies of alternative power structures that are constantly being erased.

LAND ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

This is Lenapehoking, the Lenape homeland and gathering place for many Indigenous nations and beings. When the unceded earth breathes again, there will be Indigenous lives here, as there are now and have always been. It will still be Lenapehoking. We learn from the bedrock and commit to uplifting, honoring, and listening to those who are seen and unseen, present and future.