Wednesday, September 7, 2011

Inner-City Arts hosts the Imagine Awards Gala and Auction, including Dennis Hopper, Alison Van Pelt, Allen Ginsberg, Kenny Scharf, Tierney Gearon



How You Can Help - Art Auction & Sale


Every year, Inner-City Arts hosts the Imagine Awards Gala and Auction, honoring the contributions of outstanding supporters while raising much-needed funds to continue providing arts education for thousands of children.
Over time, the art portion of the fundraising auction has grown in scope and depth to include an Art Auction & Sale. This year the Art Auction Preview and Sale is on
Sunday, September 25, 2011.
Here is a partial list of artists whose work will be auctioned of in support of our programs:

Eve Arnold
Charles Arnoldi
Bob Bates
Carolyn Blackwood
Barry Brukoff
Laurent De Brunhoff
Brigitte Carnochan
L. Chan
Dean Chamberlain
Grey Crawford
Laddie John Dill
Allen Ginsburg
Jill Greenberg
Tierney Gearon
Joel Grey


Jeanne Hahn
Jim Hahn
Dennis Hopper
Erica Lennard
KAWS
Marialuisa Morando
Ed Moses
Alison Van Pelt
Richard Phillips
Alxis Ratkevich
Marilyn Sanders
Kenny Scharf
Julius Shulman
Larry Vogel
Dennis Williams

Artwork not sold at the Preview will be available for further bidding online and at the  Imagine Awards Gala on October 27, 2011 at the Beverly Hilton Hotel.

For more information about the Art Auction & Sale or any other questions regarding the Imagine Awards Gala, please contact Karin Volpp-Gardela at (213) 627-9621 or karin@inner-cityarts.org.

“Interview in Alison Van Pelt’s Studio, New York” by Michael K. Komanecky Published in Alison Van Pelt: The Women. The Dayton Art Institute

“Interview in Alison Van Pelt’s Studio, New York”
by Michael K. Komanecky
Published in Alison Van Pelt: The Women. Ed. Michael K. Komanecky. Dayton, OH: The Dayton Art Institute


MKK: How did you become interested in painting this group of portraits?
AVP: I love painting faces. These women have such great faces to paint. It was interesting to me that they themselves could be the subjects of my paintings when it was their paintings that influenced me. I’ve always been especially interested in painting Georgia O’Keeffe. I first painted her in 1978. I remember having O’Keeffe Museum posters in the house as a child.
MKK: When did you want to be an artist?
AVP: When I was a kid I never really thought about it. I always drew and painted. My mother painted, her mother painted. My parents encouraged me to paint. I took violin lessons for a brief period – they encouraged that less. Throughout grade school and high school I continued to paint. I was enrolled in art classes and did a lot of drawing on my own. I was pretty driven scholastically and was headed more in the direction of law or medicine. When I was twenty-one I was really lost. It was a difficult time for me. I realized that I could have given up everything – except painting. It became the most important thing to me. I guess I was always an artist, and it became clear to me at that point.
MKK: This group of portraits, with the exception of those artists who died at a young age, Frida Kahlo and Eva Hesse, are of mature, older women who are also highly accomplished artists.
AVP: As a society, we are presented with a narrow scope of beauty, exalting nubile women. I wanted to paint the faces of these women and explore their physical beauty, a result of their experience.
MKK: Why these artists?
AVP: I was interested in them as artists, but also as exceptional women. They were mavericks at a time when women were marginalized from the mainstream art world. I like what Grace Hartigan said, “If you are an exceptionally gifted woman, then the doors are open to you. What women are fighting for is to be as mediocre as men.” These women are extraordinary and stand out to me. Not only where they good, they were determined, original, unorthodox, and persistent. They seem to have been driven by an individual internal mechanism at a time when success, in market terms, was not a factor. The motivation seems to have been more about one’s potential, or even, as Louise Nevelson said, “…fulfilling one’s destiny.”
MKK: It is a fascinating group of women spanning almost three generations. Käthe Kollwitz is the only one whose career really began in the nineteenth century. How did you choose her as one of the women you wanted to portray?
AVP: While in Germany, I went to see Kollwitz’s self portraits at the eponymous Museum in Cologne. She was a survivor. I could see that in her face. I responded to that.
MKK: Frida Kahlo is another artist of this earlier generation, younger than Kollwitz but of an older generation than all the reset. She is something of a cult figure in our world and time. Why her?
AVP: This is more personal choice than a comment on history. Clearly, though, another survivor.
MKK: Kahlo is one of those artists who is seen largely in that context, a powerful personality and important as an artist almost as much for that personality as the work itself. Yet it is hard in some ways to think about her apart from her torturous relationship with Diego Rivera, one that seems at times undeniably destructive.
AVP: Many of these women had relationships that were destructive, perhaps not as abusive as Kahlo’s, but in many ways they subjugated themselves in their relationships with men.
MKK: And Georgia O’Keeffe?
AVP: It was an issue. She had to get out of the shadow of Stieglitz. The same goes for Krasner and Pollock. They were independent at a time when society didn’t encourage women to pursue careers and personal goals.
MKK: When I think of Georgia O’Keeffe, I think both of her powerful work and the striking photographs of her by Stieglitz that capture both her physical beauty and her strong independence.
AVP: You get a sense of her strength from those images.
MKK: Each of these portraits was done on an enormous scale and most focus solely on the face. How did these issues of scale and focus evolve?
AVP: I painted these women on a grand scale, somewhat as a form of idolatry. I admire them now and have looked up to most of them since I was young. In terms of framing the face there is subtle variation. I am trying to capture character, with some I went close in on the face like Helen Frankenthaler – while with others like Frida Kahlo, I pan out slightly, depending upon what I find to be essential. Kahlo’s hair, ribbons, and the line of her neck were all a part of her character as were her facial features.
MKK: You worked in large scale in previous series, the Flight and Fight paintings, but all of your current portraits are of uniform scale and even larger. How did that decision come about?
AVP: I wanted paint them in large scale format and 9’ x 7’ was the biggest stretched canvas I could get through the studio door.
MKK: Did you conceive this group of pictures as a series or did it just happen?
AVP: It began with a general preconception, the sequence unfolding as I worked. Lee Krasner and Georgia O’Keeffe were first and I finished with Eva Hesse and Frida Kahlo.
MKK: Were you interested in Frida Kahlo more as a figure of what an artist could be, Eva Hesse more for the body of work?
AVP: Whatever difficulties Frida Kahlo faced, she had the capacity to express herself without editing her work. My attraction to her revolves around her independence from approval. This engenders confidence, without which, life as an artist is much more difficult. For Eva Hesse self-confidence was more of a struggle. But she emerged with a powerful, original voice.
MKK: Is that something you identify with?
AVP: Somewhat; I have issues with approval, but I think I have the tenacity to work them through.
MKK: Were there some women artists whose portraits you thought about painting but rejected?
AVP: No. There are so many from Artemesia Gentileschi to Mary Cassatt and Berthe Morisot, Natalia Gonchorova, Rosa Bonheur, Romaine Brooks, Nikki de Saint Phalle, Malvina Hoffman, and more. While I was working within the parameters of a group of artists building careers just before the women’s movement, this is not a historical commentary. These fourteen women were prominent in my mind, the decision being based on an emotional and personal response.
MKK: Are these artists you became familiar with in your own training as an artist?
AVP: Some I was introduced to in childhood under my mother’s influence, some I learned about later.
MKK: You said from an early age you wanted to be an artist, or would be.
AVP: I knew that I was.
MKK: Which is a different thing?
AVP: It was always an avocation. I didn’t know it would be a vocation.
MKK: Was there any hesitation in going to art school and pursuing art as a profession?
AVP: No. Once the decision was made to study as an artist I was completely focused.
MKK: You studied first in the U.S. and then went to Italy.
AVP: I went to UCLA, Art Center Pasadena, and Otis College of Art and Design. Italy was much later. I went back to school in Florence at the Academy of Art.
MKK: How was that different from the training you had up to that point?
AVP: The training was very specific. We drew from life casts, made paint using raw pigment. Our practice was informed by the schools of Renaissance masters. There was strict adherence to that tradition, to building a strong foundation. I still feel like a student of painting and I think I always will.
MKK: Drawing has played an important role for you as an artist, first as a young child and right up to your time in Italy. Drawing certainly informs much of what you do.
AVP: Drawing is the bones, the armature. Drawing is the foundation of my work. When the drawing is tight, I have more freedom to be loose in my painting.
MKK: Being more a student of old master than contemporary painting, it has always puzzled me in a way knowing that Rubens or Rembrandt would make a drawing on canvas or panel and then paint it over. It seems such a destructive act.
AVP: Much of great painting is destructive. It’s a lesson in non-attachment. You have to be willing to allow a painting to change and evolve. Look at Francis Bacon, Willem de Kooning. Einstein said, “Matter is neither created nor destroyed – simply rearranged.” Much of my process is the rearrangement of the paint – for me, that’s what makes it exciting.
MKK: A photograph has been the source of each of these paintings.
AVP: Sometimes several photographs.
MKK: And then you go about making a drawing?
AVP: I do drawings until I am happy with one that will translate into a painting. This becomes the basis of the painting.
MKK: Then comes the destruction of the drawing.
AVP: There is the destruction of the painting as well. A very detailed painted image is broken down.
MKK: Do you do color studies?
AVP: I like to experiment with an image using variations in color, size and surface texture. I do image studies on wood, paper, canvas…
MKK: It seems evident that some artists seem to know exactly what they want to get before they start. Although some alterations, accidents, and discoveries take place in the process of painting, the near total conception has to be there.
AVP: I can plan, visualize, and make an exact drawing, but with these paintings I have to give up a certain amount of control. I think it’s the accident that is really so beautiful and interesting. Francis Bacon said, “I move the paint around until it takes on a life of its own.” That’s what’s happening in these paintings. At a certain point I am moving the paint and just watching what it does.
MKK: The remarkable quality of these paintings is that from a certain distance one can feel the presence of the people you have portrayed, and yet as one gets closer and closer to the pictures they have a different existence, as paint on canvas. It is striking to me how you can keep both things working at the same time, particularly when you talk about the intensity of the process, having this limited window of time.
AVP: The paint itself is the most interesting thing to me. The process of painting is foremost. The subject is a vehicle to create an image, and that’s always changing, but the technique is constant. The fact that the texture of the paint contains the disintegration of the image is the most exciting part to me.
MKK: Do you feel a sense of control over this while doing the painting?
AVP: Not entirely. I like to feel surprised by what the paint does – to an extent. Each time I feel total control, I like to push a little into the realm of chance.
MKK: Working on such a large scale is a special kind of challenge and it has been for centuries. Again, referring to artists of earlier eras, working on canvases so big required building a scaffold just to do it.
AVP: It’s a very physical endeavor to do the larger paintings.
MKK: Let’s talk about color. There is color in each of these pictures, but they are each relatively monochromatic. What was the role of color in each?
AVP: I worked in black and white for years. I was interested in form, light and shadow, creating images in light and dark. Color is relatively new for me. These portraits seemed to have demanded it.
MKK: Frida Kahlo is an example that comes to mind, there is a striking range of reds.
AVP: Yes. There is a deep crimson, orange, black, a fiery red, a hot pink.
MKK: In your recent series it is interesting to see that in Flight it is an action that you have captured and frozen. In Fight, you have again frozen action, but only in a few instances can one actually recognize the images in those paintings. In this most recent group the subjects are different. They are immediately identifiable, they have been chosen because of their identity.
AVP: Sometimes my objective is to convey motion, to get a sense of movement, a captured instant, usually movement across the canvas. But with a portrait or still object, my concern with movement is a recession from the surface. I want the blurring of the image to create depth. As the image moves deeper into the painting it can begin to breathe and vibrate. The blur obliterates pieces of information and can leave space for the viewer’s imagination. But most importantly, especially with portraits, the blurring is a way to get to the essential, to break down and unify. To blur the image, removing the distraction of surface details, allows the essence of the thing to be revealed. The essence of that person or thing becomes the subject.
MKK: It seems you have come to a new point n doing these pictures. Is there something that is starting to form as to what will be next?
AVP: I’m working on a new group of paintings in the direction of the Agnes Martin piece, white-on-white, working with a perceived minimal surface that reveals a complex, unexpected image.
MKK: Do you work on only one picture at a time?
AVP: Not always. It depends on scale and the amount of attention needed for a particular painting.
MKK: How long does it take you to complete a work from the initial drawing to the completed painting?
AVP: It varies including preparation and recovery.
MKK: What happens when you finish a painting?
AVP: I pray no bugs fly into it and hopefully I can sleep.
MKK: How long is it before you begin the next?
AVP: I get on a roll. Once I’m working on a series I stay focused on it. I need to keep the momentum going. It’s easier to keep going than to stop and start. But between projects sometimes it’s good to just live a little – to have a life to bring to the work.
___________________________________________________________________________________
“Introduction.”
by Jim Dicke II and Alex Nyerges
Published in Alison Van Pelt: The Women. Ed. Michael K. Komanecky. Dayton, OH: The Dayton Art Institute
2004

An image of Frida Kahlo stares back at the viewer through a murky haze of time. The extraordinarily large canvas, measuring nine by seven feet, captures the late painter in a moment of pause, a hesitant moment of thought and introspection. This canvas and those of the other women artists in this exhibition ALISON VAN PELT: THE WOMEN illustrate the grace, power and beauty of these exceptional women and reflect the powerful imagination and talent of their creator, Alison Van Pelt.
The series is comprised of a veritable “who’s who” among women painters and sculptors of the twentieth century. Not meant to be comprehensive in any sense since they reflect the emotional and personal responses of Alison Van Pelt, they are quite impressive both individually and in the collective form. Van Pelt means to impress us. She painted these works on a grand scale “somewhat as a form of idolatry.” And it works. Her large canvases were limited only by the size of her studio doorway through which they entered and departed. The finished works are much larger in the psychological sense than a mere illustration in a catalogue can portray. These are works that need to be experienced – the value of the viewer’s personal interaction is as important as the interaction between the painter and the canvas at the point of creation. They are a wonderful homage to a group of women who, in Van Pelt’s own words, were “mavericks at a time when women were marginalized from the mainstream art world.”
Life is made of moments that pass as quickly as they arrive. Van Pelt’s images are based in photography but then are translated into a thin surface of paint. They capture those fractions of time for the viewer to ponder and contemplate.
We quickly recognized that it was important to exhibit and document this series before the inevitable occurred – these women would be separated and find homes in disparate points across the country and possibly the globe. This exhibition allows us to view the series of portraits in their entirety at the point in time closest to their creation. This is a rare and precious moment. And like that frozen slice of time in which we see Frida Kahlo’s inquisitive gaze, this exhibit and publication will stand as silent sentinels upon which we can reflect and contemplate.

Imagine Awards Gala & Auction: Bill Viola, Kira Perov, Alison Van Pelt, KAWS, Jill Greenberg, Ed Moses, etc...

Imagine Awards Gala & Auction

Art Auction & Sale

Every year, Inner-City Arts hosts the Imagine Awards Gala and Auction,
honoring the contributions of outstanding supporters while raising
much-needed funds to continue providing arts education for thousands
of children.

Over time, the art portion of the fundraising auction has grown in
scope and depth to include an Art Auction & Sale. This year the Art
Auction Preview and Sale is on
Sunday, September 25, 2011.

Here is a partial list of artists whose work will be auctioned of in
support of our programs:

Bill Viola
& Kira Perov
Alison Van Pelt
KAWS
Allen Ginsburg
Kenny Scharf
Eve Arnold
Laurent De Brunhoff
Julius Shulman
Jill Greenberg
Ed Moses
Charles Arnoldi
Laddie John Dill
Dennis Hopper
Tierney Gearon
Richard Phillips


Sunday, September 4, 2011

artwork by brice marden, nan goldin, francesco clemente, alison van pelt, yoko ono, dennis hopper, george condo, louise bourgeois, claes oldenburg, & richard serra

AH ALLEN

allen ginsberg

arthur miller

robert creeley

gregory corso

jack kerouac

william s. burroughs

this huge tribute volume to allen ginsberg was produced to benefit the jack kerouac school of disembodied poetics. LETTERPRESS TYPOGRAPHY BY THE GRENFELL PRESS. INCLUDES RELIEF PRINTS, LITHOGRAPHS, SILKSCREENS, C-PRINTS, DUOTONES, SILVER PRINTS. OUTSTANDING QUALITY. contains works by and is signed by: brice marden, john giorno, nan goldin, robert frank, arthur miller, antoni tapies, anne waldman, francesco clemente, yoko ono, sebastian guinness, donald baechler, elizabeth murray, bob holman, dennis hopper, joe strummer, terry winters, alison van pelt, gary snyder, bernard picasso, robert wilson, sandro chia, eileen myles, philip taaffe, robert creeley, gregory corso, george condo, philip glass, john mcnaughton, louise bourgeois, peter orlovsky, gus van sant, robert lavigne, mark dagley, czeslaw milosz, rolf sachs, claes oldenburg, eugene brooks, richard serra, quincy troupe, and gordon ball. signatures of william s. burroughs, louis ginsberg and jack kerouac are stamped. nam june paik and amiri baraka did not sign.===============================================# # 53 OF ONLY 200 COPIES . SIGNED BY 41 outstanding ARTISTS POETS AND WRITERS. MAGNIFICENTLY BOUND AND SLIPCASED BY MASTER-BINDER CLAUDIA COHEN

William Burroughs and the Arts: Ports of Entry book cover, LACMA, cover image by Alison Van Pelt, William Burroughs, 1992, Oil on canvas.

photo

william burroughs ports of entry

William Burroughs and the Arts: Ports of Entry book cover.
"Nothing is True - Everything is Permitted - - Last words, Hassan I Sabbah", Nova Express.
published by Los Angeles County Museum of Art, distributed by Thames & Hudson.
(c) 1996 by Museum Associates LA County Museum of Art.
Cover image by Alison Van Pelt, William Burroughs, 1992, Oil on canvas.
alisonvanpelt.com/

Alison Van Pelt: Portraits, by Christopher Monger, Published by Pharmaka, Los Angeles, CA

Alison Van Pelt: Portraits
by Christopher Monger
Published by Pharmaka, Los Angeles, CA


Alison Van Pelt’s latest series of paintings are pulled from the American landscape of popular culture. She addresses her subject as an iconographic symbol that hovers like a black and white dream. These newsprint style images are instantly recognizable portraits of people that are now considered public domain, like the portraits of Tom Cruise and Britney Spears.
Alison meticulously renders the portrait using a brush with oil (not airbrushed) and from a distance the face looks like it was cut out from a newspaper and blown up. When you get close you see there are no pixels and the brush strokes are so refined that we are instantly seduced into believing we are looking at a large photograph that has somehow gone through a filtering process, thus making the image seem soft and slightly blurred.
Alison’s portraits are not directly linked to the mechanics of photography like Chuck Close’s oversized photorealist portraits of the 1970s. Those paintings engaged in a direct dialogue with photography by replicating how the camera lens was mechanically able to focus on one area of a subject, while the rest became blurred. Instead, Alison’s images are preexisting and lifted from out media-driven world and placed in a contrasting environment – the same way a Ruscha word is lifted out of a conversation and thrown into a foreign context.
The area that surrounds Alison’s portraits are painted in acrylic, creating a flat and stark, almost hostile contrast to the illusionary face. This collision of two surfaces pushes the image forward into the viewer’s space. There is a visual confrontation: We either reject or project our personal identity onto the image of the celebrity. The celebrity persona has been so well crafted – mythologized into the Pantheon of Gods.
Alison paints celebrity portraits as they appear to us through the machinery of the media, having been removed countless times from the interaction that occurs between the artist and the sitter. They stare out at us in their all too familiar way, but the color field that surrounds them is what is real. A flat, bright color that refers to nothing else but itself in the tradition of the color field painters of the 1960s and 1970s. The Ellsworth Kelly fields of brushless strokes are ruptured by the fading image of the person. Without the talking heads of the entertainment or news shows to give background noise to these images, these portraits radiate a deafening silence – almost a death knell.

Fight: Alison Van Pelt by Robert A. Sobieszek, senior curator at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art


Fight: Alison Van Pelt
by Robert A. Sobieszek, senior curator at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art


To plunge beneath in order to arrive at a surface, to ground one’s vision on the palpable where there is none, and to assault the apparent because too much is still hidden – these thoughts may be useful in approaching the paintings of Alison Van Pelt. She was trained in modern painting at Art Center in Pasadena and Otis Parsons in Los Angeles, and then was classically retrained at the Florence Academy of Art. Much of the art taught at both Southern California schools centered around conceptualism, appropriation, word/text synergy, and postmodern theory. Florence presented her with something more ancient: beautiful form, the love of looking, and techniques of painting, of laying succulent colors in oil onto a canvas, of forming images that have still to be plumbed for some fugitive essence.
Contemporary painting, especially representational and figural painting, is fraught with a love/hate relationship with the photographic image. When patently obvious the symbiosis is taken for granted, when visually redacted as a critique of our culture of images the praxis is applauded, and even when the source is obscured its presence can be felt. The photos behind Gerhard Richter’s figures and still lives are exquisitely and magically transformed into paint. The photos that act as models for Chuck Close’s portraits are critical to the scaffolding of his painted enlargements. Richard Phillips takes the faces of young modes in advertisements and monumentalizes them. The photographic covers of popular magazines of the 60s and 70s are rather melancholically vested in the teenage reminiscences of Elizabeth Peyton’s paintings.
Alison Van Pelt’s relationship to photographic images is quite direct and unapologetic, as well. Carefully choosing images that interest her, she manually copies them, simply painting what she sees, and often manipulating and enlarging their scale. So far, there is little by way of innovation; earlier painters did this as a matter of procedure. In traditional representational painting, the image on the surface of the canvas was a mere analog to the image on the surface of the photographic emulsion, only the painting was done by hand, as if that gave it an edge of superiority. Modern artists had a choice; accept the surface of the image as it had been since Alberti – as a window onto the world – or challenge that surface for what it was: a fraud, a simulacrum, a fiction. Neither realist paintings nor photographs are “windows to the world” or “portals of perception.” They are simply surfaces which someone has played with, regardless of their chemicals or techniques.
Interrupt that surface, alter it, transform it, however, and something deeper may be gotten to Man Ray knew that in the 20s when he solarized his photographs, making us look more deeply upon their surfaces. Lucas Samaras knew it in the 70s when he physically disturbed his Polaroids’ emulsions before they dried. Van Pelt also knows this, and here, she breaks from slavish appropriation of the photographic image. While her faithful rendition of her source is still wet, its oils not yet set in their ways, she takes a dry brush to subtly blend, striate, blur, and dematerialize her forms until, as it were, they become mere Platonic shadows or suggestions or hints of themselves. Hidden within the surface of the paint and not atop the canvas, her subjects take on an essential quality of becoming, of yet to be finished, of possibilities rather than definitions, Caught in some viscous primal ooze, embryonic, dreamlike as in a dense fog, her images appear more within our vision than without, or as if they were projected from us outwardly upon the external retinal field from some deep recess of memory.
Van Pelt’s latest series, Fight, grows out of her last two series which also began with the same letter: Flight and Figures. Not the dynamics of startled birds imaged in mid-flight, nor the elegiac voluptuousness of barely emergent female torsos, Fight goes right to the matter of male aggression at one of its extremes, the heavyweight boxing match. Selected stills from videotaped classic fights are the primary source for the images: Sugar Ray Robinson vs. Randy Turpin, 1951; Cassius Clay vs. Sonny Lisson, 1964; Muhammad Ali vs. George Foreman, 1975; etc. The artist has discovered an extreme range of emotions in these stills, from animal violence to physical grace, from the exuberance of the victor to the despondency of the vanquished, from violence to tenderness. She also finds the beautifully dramatic and harsh overhead lighting of these old fights utterly irresistible.
Aside from portraits of celebrities or friends, this series is Van Pelt’s first foray into representing the male body, its masculine forms, its muscular physique, its martial singularity. In her series on the female form, her Venus-like Figures were pictured as strictly iconic, reverential, totemic, and purely in offering; here, in Fight, the male figures are in diametric opposition to both the earlier series and to themselves: they are portrayed as narrative, transactional, removed, and ultimately in action. Yet, while her female figures rose to the surface towards us in remote suspension, her male boxers remain just as remote, out there in some other depth, some other conflict. Van Pelt’s subjects are basic: primal mothers in iconic verticality and feral warriors in narrative horizontality.
Across this horizon, the fighters feign, jab, block, slug, recoil, clinch, and fall – fundamental steps in a complex metaphor of life, perhaps. Joyce Carol Oates may have called boxing the “drama of life in the flesh” and “America’s tragic theater,” yet many of the boxing images Van Pelt chooses to render anew show us the visual poetry of this sport, its masculine choreography, its athletic balance, its atavistic prowess. It really does matter which of the heavyweight champions or contenders was captured on film or videotape; the simple primitive nature of this complicitous and immemorial dance performed by males is sufficient for Van Pelt. The poetic essence of this dance, however, is not to be found in any specificity or particular details, but beyond them; not in the factualness of historical films, but in the thickness of the image’s transparency; not on the surface of the painting, but beneath it; not in pigments but in dreams. And dreams are never the surface of things.

Inner-City Arts hosts the Imagine Awards Gala and Auction, including Dennis Hopper, Alison Van Pelt, Allen Ginsberg, Kenny Scharf, Tierney Gearon


How You Can Help - Art Auction & Sale


Every year, Inner-City Arts hosts the Imagine Awards Gala and Auction, honoring the contributions of outstanding supporters while raising much-needed funds to continue providing arts education for thousands of children.
Over time, the art portion of the fundraising auction has grown in scope and depth to include an Art Auction & Sale. This year the Art Auction Preview and Sale is on
Sunday, September 25, 2011.
Here is a partial list of artists whose work will be auctioned of in support of our programs: 

Eve Arnold
Charles Arnoldi
Bob Bates
Carolyn Blackwood
Barry Brukoff
Laurent De Brunhoff
Brigitte Carnochan
L. Chan
Dean Chamberlain
Grey Crawford
Laddie John Dill
Allen Ginsburg
Jill Greenberg
Tierney Gearon
Joel Grey


Jeanne Hahn
Jim Hahn
Dennis Hopper
Erica Lennard
KAWS
Marialuisa Morando
Ed Moses
Alison Van Pelt
Richard Phillips
Alxis Ratkevich
Marilyn Sanders
Kenny Scharf
Julius Shulman
Larry Vogel
Dennis Williams

Artwork not sold at the Preview will be available for further bidding online and at the  Imagine Awards Gala on October 27, 2011 at the Beverly Hilton Hotel.

For more information about the Art Auction & Sale or any other questions regarding the Imagine Awards Gala, please contact Karin Volpp-Gardela at (213) 627-9621 or karin@inner-cityarts.org.