Practice & Process Exhibition Catalog

Ketcham Inn Foundation Cultural Arts & Education Center at

Jamie Forbes Gallery SunStorm Arts presents

Practice and Process Celebrating the Careers & Accomplishments of Long Island Artists

LOIS DiCOSOLA

DAVID MARTINE

KURT HARDCASTLE DAVID MARTINE Be our guests at the Opening Reception June 3rd 4-6 PM Exhibition continues through July 1st

90 Montauk Highway Center Moriches, NY 11934

LOIS DiCOSOLA

(South side of Montauk Hwy, Across from Ketcham Inn)

Steve Bellone,County Executive

KURT HARDCASTLE

KURT HARDCASTLE Hampton Bays resident Kurt Hardcastle has hardly

lived what anyone would characterize as a dull life. The 60-year-old Bellmore native, who almost died in a motocross race at age 23, came a long way from starting out as an art prodigy to owning and operating a furniture repair business tucked away in Southampton Village on North Main Street. At his business, Hardcastle repairs antique furniture and educates his clients on the history and, in many cases, worth of their items.

On any given day, walk into the shop and Hardcastle, a self-described history buff, will be happy to tell you the history and age of any artifact in the shop, from a nearly 400-year-old Queen Anne’s Secretary — a sort of chest and desk in one — to a 300-year-old lady’s fan made from handpainted material, bone and ivory. Think of him as Southampton’s very own Antiques Roadshow specialist.

Growing up in Nassau County, the future seemed to hold quite a different outcome. The son of a British army officer and a German woman who met in Germany following World War II, Hardcastle was discovered to be a talented artist early on in his schooling. He began studying under commercial artist Robert Harnett and, at age 16, he start-

ed attending trade school at BOCES whilst in highschool.

“I was excused because I was an artist,” he said. After a few years, he was hired as an art teacher’s assistant at Hampton Bays, before being laid off several years later because New administrations cut school cost. It was then he began racing motorcycles and formed the Peconic Sports Club, which raced at a private track in Manorville.

Then, in 1978, his life changed. During a race, Hardcastle lost control of his motorcycle and suffered a horrible crash, landing head first in the dirt. Looking back on it, he said he had a funny feeling that something would happen that year. “I always felt that at 23, I would be killed,” he said. After that accident, he was left bruised and bloodied, and suffered major head trauma despite having worn a helmet. He was revived by some of his fellow riders and spent the next three weeks in the hospital.

Full recovery took close to two years.

Soon after the injury, Hardcastle had a falling out with his parents and decided to move to Hampton Bays, where he began working as a carpenter.

From there, it wasn’t too much of a leap to begin repairing furniture, especially antique furniture. Noticing that it was a niche in the Hamptons that had yet to be filled

effectively, he dove headlong into his new career and began working with Chris Mead. Despite his new career he never lost touch of his passion for painting and continued producing artwork.

After a few years, he and Mead went their separate ways.

These days, Hardcastle is one of just a handful of people in the Hamptons who can accurately identify and assess antiques. He is also able to repair and restore many of these items if not to their original condition, then close to it.

What’s most satisfying about his job, he said, is being able to impress people with the quality of his work, and in particular working on very old pieces.

“What I like are the really, really old ones,” he said. “A lot of times, people just don’t know what they have.”

Kurt’s true love is creating paintings with a meaning, subject, and beauty. Upon looking at the variety of subjects in the artwork, their is a bonus of interest within the fabric of the painting. Hidden scenarios can be found within the piece of art, such as figures having to do with the subject in the art cleverly disguised within. Kurt has been producing www.kurthardcastle.com

Lois DiCosola and Willem de Kooning at Guild Hall Museum, Easthampton, NY, 1963.

Painting: ‘Swing Things’, oil on canvas, 1961.

Photograph from DiCosola’s file in the Archives of American Art

A young artist at the midpoint of the 20th Century, the ’50s in New York, was the time when Abstract Expressionism was a beginning movement – a new experiment in painting. I remember having felt the pulse of the time, when in 1951 I made a series of paintings called Emergence, that reflected the sensibility of the era for me. I feel that a lifetime of being a painter has given me an ever-deepening receptivity to my own inner resources, and through it all there is my ongoing love for painting and drawing that is about discovering pieces of the magic in the world we live in but know so little about.

– Lois DiCosola

“The art of Lois DiCosola becomes a unique window through which can be seen the magical visual poetry present in our environment. Each of her perceptions is a personal thumbprint, bringing biology and biography to our awareness- it is nature, properly seen, written with abstract configurations. A mind rich in sensitivity, highly original and intelligent, she is always sophisticated in her aesthetic decisions, use of color, dynamic brushwork, superb draftsmanship, and inventive handling of textural surfaces. Her ongoing series of self portraits, and portraits of others, while being expert in their physiognomic accuracy, are also remarkable for their projection of the unique temperaments of the personalities depicted. All this, together with a rare capacity for subtle and economic design, moves the artist to continue reinventing elegant pictorial forms.”

– Saul Levine, from “The Art of Lois DiCosola” -SunStorm Arts Magazine, 1981

Monoprint from the Emergence series, 1951

LOIS DiCOSOLA Abstract Expressionist Painter Visiting the Brooklyn Museum’s extraordinar y collections became an important part of the early art education of Lois Bock, then a young art student attending the fine art studio program at Prospect Heights, just across the street from the museum. Classes included life drawing, painting, graphic arts and book production in an environment where, together with traditional art school techniques, freedom of imagination was encouraged. In 1951 she also attended art classes at the Museum of Modern Art on a scholarship. This exceptional early learning experience also prepared her to work in the field of art publishing in which she won the Seventeen magazine 1952 “It’s All Yours” international award for her illustration, which the art editor, Art Kane selected for publication in the June 1953 issue of Seventeen magazine.

The same artwork went on to win the Art Directors Club award for Editorial Art in the Annual of Editorial Art and Design in 1954. She also received the Carnegie Fine Art Institute award in printmaking, and the Augustus Saint Gaudens Medal for fine draftsmanship. Graduating with a Fine Art diploma in January of 1953, Lois began a

professional artistic career at that interesting moment in the history of American art.

She also holds a Bachelor of Professional Studies degree.

Painting, while at the same time drawing from the model, one can see an understanding of the figure (often as arresting as the drawings of the Renaissance masters) as shown through the use of a variety of materials. Early on, the artist produced a fine body of work, including the tempera, wax and ink abstraction, Emergence, created in 1951. This was actually at the pivotal moment when Harold Rosenberg coined the term “Action Painting.”

In the fall of 1959, she attended Richard Pousette-Dart’s painting workshop at the New School where she began to paint on larger canvases. Plum, Pink Rain, Tan, Swingthings, Windows, Vineyard, Matador, Tokaido, and the paintings for the Dutch Masters series are some of her early abstract paintings. Swingthings, Matador and Tokaido were shown at Guild Hall Museum in East Hampton in 1963, and selected for an award by Harold Rosenberg, Adolph Gottlieb and Larry Rivers. Three

of the Paintings for the Dutch Masters were shown the following year at Guild Hall in the award exhibition and from that show James Brooks invited her to be his chosen artist for “Artists Select” at Finch College Museum. Curators from the Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum, and Guggenheim Museum, among others, have selected Lois DiCosola’s work for various exhibitions.

In the mid 1960s DiCosola traveled cross country and into Mexico where she began a series of geometric designs which resulted in the Aquarius combine paintings.

She worked on these as a guest artist at the University of California at Berkeley. Three of these paintings, Aquarius, Yellowjack and Apollo were installed in the pioneer feminist art exhibition, X12, in Manhattan, in January of 1970.

From her Chelsea Hotel studio and Studio X on 14th Street, also in 1970, DiCosola began the artist’s book Notes from the Hotel Chelsea, combining Xerography with mixed media together with her poetry, a combination of media not yet seen. The book demonstrates DiCosola’s gift for placement and for finding meaning through the juxtaposition of images. The Museum Drawings made while traveling in Europe and to American museums are mindful of the artist’s early light-hearted sketches. The Artist and Herself, In Line, Beautiful Free Women, Mountain Woman, Asian Women, Hands, Cielo e Mar and Self Portraits are some of her other books that are filled with wonderful drawings, collages and poetry. Several of her etchings and stone and plate lithographs were made at Pratt Graphics Center on Broadway, downtown in the early 1970s, and the Moonlight aquatint etchings with master printer, Donn Steward between 1977 and 1979. A print from this series was shown in curator, Judith Wolfe’s Prints from the Permanent Collection exhibition at Guild Hall Museum in 1980.

Photography has always been an important part of her work. In 1971 she made a very perceptive series of photographic film portraits. Her recent series of beautifully colored photographs is called, Life, Actually. Another picture, taken in the Museum of Modern Art garden, is written over with poetry, expressing feelings about 9/11 was exhibited in the Museum of Modern Art’s Life of the City exhibition in 2002.

“A few hours after the towers fell at the World Trade Center on September 11th, 2001, I began the Towers and Variations paintings, brush drawings and photographs that represent the emotions I felt at this very dark time,” she recalls. Art historian and

curator Simon Taylor reacted very favorably to these works. The artist says,that the Dialogues, the Pasqua series of heads and the Ancestors Portraits came out of a kind of tribal memory. About her portraits, Helen Harrison, the New York Times art critic, has said that they are, “reminiscent of the mysterious studies of Redon.”

The Poem Paintings, a series of calligraphic works are ongoing. These are paintings on paper, using bits from her own and other poets work. The collection called Vessels, the artist notes, “is a series of imagined pottery from prehistory to now, and from every culture, honoring this ancient art form.” Mysteries-Woman is a series of watercolor and ink figure paintings on rice paper painted during the 1980s. The Origins drawings are abstract works also made in the mid 1980s, as were the Cherry Tree ink paintings and the Vessels series.

Most of her paintings and drawings have been made in her studio – the Waters and River drawings, March, May, October, Wildflowers, Birthday Roses, Florida Palm, Nature Studies, the Botanica drawings, Though some of the watercolor landscapes and oil pastels, like the very early Brooklyn Botanical Gardens watercolors of 1951, the Louse Point, Easthampton watercolors of 1966, and the Inisfada watercolors, as well as the Planting Fields oil pastels and Old Westbury watercolors were done outdoors.

Cold Spring Harbor, Rosso, Winter Plum, Blues, Jade, Ashes, Beaches, Bay, Violetta, Sound, Breeze, Goldrush, August, Fall Blue, Threads, December, the Cantolena drawings and paintings, the Arctica paintings,

Midnight Blues, Geologia, Evergreen, Natura, the Love and War drawings and the All Things Considered sketchbook drawings are works created in her studios in New York and on Long Island..

Lois DiCosola’s biography is listed in Feminists Who Changed America 1963-1975, the Who’s Who publications, the Smithsonian Institution Archives of American Art, the Sophia Smith collection at Smith College, the Schlesinger library at Harvard, the Museum of Modern Art, the National Museum of Women in the Arts Clara archives in Washington DC, the Guild Hall Museum permanent print collection in Easthampton, New York, the Italo Calvino Memorial Library archives in Torino, Italy, Saint Johns University Artists Books collection, among others. An artist of the early Abstract Expressionist period, her works are included in many public and private collections internationally.

Online Portfolios: h t t p : / / w w w. f l i c k r. c o m / groups/1048608@N22/pool/{Abstract Expressionism-The New York School} h t t p : / / w w w. a b s o l u t e a r t s . c o m / portfolios/l/loisd/ h t t p : / / w w w. f l i c k r. c o m / photos/11326913@N07/ Facebook- Lois Bock DiCosola- see photo albums. loisdicosola@yahoo.com

Cherry Tree, brush drawing

DAVID MARTINE Setting the Record Straight On the Values & Contributions Of Native American Artists David Martine is an artist, writer and educator living and working on the east end of Long Island, New York and raised on the Shinnecock Indian Reservation in Southampton. While at the University of Oklahoma he studied fine arts – painting, printmaking and sculpture in the 1970’s.

At the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico he studied further the fine arts especially sculpture while also being trained in museum exhibition techniques, curatorial work and collections management. He concluded his arts training at the University of Central Oklahoma studying educational psychology and teacher training in fine arts. Museum curatorial work and education has formed a large portion of his career to the present.

His work, primarily painting in oil, has been centered mainly around historical narrative realism based on Native American genre scenes, commissioned portraiture as well has large scale historical murals and multi-media sculpture throughout the 1980-90’s. While utilizing more traditional media throughout his career rather than digital technology and prints, Martine has created a body of work that has contributed to a revival and strengthening of cultural knowledge of his ethnic heritage, that of the Shinnecock Indian historical renaissance in material culture and accuracy which has contributed to accurate rendering in traditional arts and indigenous technologies.

Examples of these arts would be the practice of traditional basket-making, traditional domestic living quarters and water-craft construction, varying native weaving methodologies as well as graphic depictions of historical activities such as whaling, farming, fishing, and fabricating ceramic ware and cultivating various foods. All of these activities have been thoroughly documented in his artwork and mural scenes in his own work as well as in museum permanent exhibition installations.

This kind of cultural work led to working at the National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian Institution as a collections technician. It also led to his work as Director and Curator of the Shinnecock Nation Cultural Center and Museum from the 1990’s to the 2000’s. This kind of institutional work allows the application of educational practices, exhibition design and art, as well as multi-media object

fabrication and three-dimensional fabrication of installations as well as two and three dimensional art pieces. It has also informed his research and application of such knowledge in his personal work and visual art pieces. Applying the museum training, Martine was again engaged in working with Native American traditional arts and objects from hundreds of tribes across the Western Hemisphere. This experience hands on with historical objects of great value and cultural purpose, further informed his work with the Native American genre of history as well as his work as an educator, sharing culture and historical traditions with thousands of school children, adults and teachers who at the museum where he worked.

Work as an educator and artist in the museum field concentrating on Native American and historical research has informed Martine’s writing and essays.

Through collaborations with a former Professor of American and Native American history from Long Island University, Dr. John Strong, Martine has developed an interest in non-fiction writing, historical interpretation, and art criticism as well as book illustration. Martine was engaged in several book illustration projects during the 1990’s to 2000’s before he seriously engaged in his own writing projects. This eventually led Martine to self-publish a 450 page family oral history book which is available through lulu.com. This book the culmination of years of oral history research and recorded interviews is a history entitled: “Time and Memories: Histories and Stories of a Shinnecock, Apache, and Hungarian Family”. The book contains dozens of photographs and recorded verbatim interviews of family members with stories going back to the early 19th century, including stories of his grandfather, Charles Martine, Jr. who was an Apache Indian held as a prisoner-of-war with Geronimo at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, from Sept. 1886 until 1913.

Work with AMERINDA, American Indian Artists, Inc. and as Director and Curator at the Shinnecock Nation Cultural

Rauschenberg portrait

Center and Museum has enabled Martine to develop curatorial projects and interests in Native American art criticism as well as develop his writing skills, mainly in grant writing and essays. AMERINDA, American Indian Artist’s, Inc. of New York City, the only Native American, multi-arts services organization of its kind in the United States has been the largest exponent of the continued vitality of the New York Native American Contemporary Art Movement since the drastic downsizing of the American Indian Community House (AICH). In the visual arts area AMERINDA serves as a catalyst for the continued vitality of the New York Contemporary Native American Arts Movement which begin in the 1920’s and consists of visual and performing arts in all fields. Created in 1987, American Indian Artists Inc. AMERINDA works to empower Native Americans, break down barriers, and foster intercultural understanding and appreciation for Native American culture. Through a variety of arts programs and services to artists, AMERINDA supports Native artists who embody the traditional practices and values that define Indian culture. We also promote the indigenous perspective in the arts to a broad audience through the creation of new work in contemporary art forms – visual, performing, literary and media arts.

David Martine was one of those artists whose participation in some of the visual arts exhibitions in an art collective called Rider with No Horse. The title of this group meant that the opportunities for Native American contemporary artists in New York City were severely limited because of stereotyping and misunderstanding by gallery owners and critics as to what is Native American Art – traditional “folk” arts or contemporary non-objective, visual

“Bob’s Fish House, Interior, Captiva Island, Fl.” Robert Rauschenberg Residency, 2015 Acrylic on canvas

art. The exhibitions curated by movement founding curator, Lloyd R. Oxendine (Lumbee), began to define on a national basis the current degrees of acceptance and recognition of Native American contemporary artists that had not seen popularity since the late 1960’s – 1970’s.

Older generations of artists formed the New York Movement in Contemporary Native Arts from the 1930’s to the present..

Martine received the Andy Warhol Foundation Fellowship for Research, 2012, for the first major exhibition to describe the basis behind the existence of the New York Movement of Contemporary Native American arts as well as promote that work to a higher level of recognition to a general audience. This vital Movement was finally recognized and strengthened by the mounting of the first major exhibition to demonstrate the existence of the movement.

“The Old Becomes the New: New York Contemporary Native American Art Movement and the New York School curated by Martine was held at the Wilmer Jennings Gallery at Kenkeleba, New York City, on April 3 – June 2, 2013. Martine wrote the exhibition catalogue for that

exhibition. The theme of this exhibition was to recognize the cross-fertilization between contemporary Native American visual artists and some members of the New York School of Abstract Expressionists and Pop-artists and vise-a-versa; as well as to show some members of the New York Native American veteran artists on the same wall as members of the New York School to show their mutual connections and affinities. Martine also received two Joan Mitchell Awards for the mounting of the exhibitions.

David Bunn Martine successfully completed the first year of a two-year research fellowship (2012-13) from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts for research, associated travel, writing and the selection process in preparation for the publication: “No Reservation” New York Contemporary Native American Art Movement”, by David Bunn Martine, Edited by Jennifer Tromski, and Foreword

by Dore Ashton. This 259 page book is the follow up publication to the groundbreaking “No Reservation” art exhibition at Kenkeleba. The book contains interviews of the Movements founding curators and

writers, G. Peter Jemison, (Heron-Clan Seneca), Sara Sense (Chitimacha) and Kathleen Ash-Milby (Navajo), as well as Muriel Miguel, Founding Director of Spiderwoman Theater, and Film-maker, Diane Fraher (Osage) as well as biographies of most of the Movements visual artists and performing artists. Because of the nature of the development of the Native American contemporary art movement in New York and forces of opposition to such a movement, cultural and political forces are described which show how the visual and performing arts inspired and reinforced each other in their respective genres, cultural and political forces informed their similarities more than the design or plastic, aesthetic influences or characteristics.

Some of the artists that made up this movement were very well known and others less well known. In the performing arts Will Rogers (Cherokee) who performed at the Ziegfeld Follies in the 1920’s is one of the icons of the era as well as Maria Tallchief (Osage) American’s first Prima Ballerina.

Native American theater as well as visual arts began in New York. In the visual arts there is Leon Polk Smith (Cherokee) whose

“Writing Refuge, Robert Rauschenberg Residency, Captiva Island, Fl.” 2015 Acrylic on canvas.

work presaged the creation of Minimalism and also Jaune-Quick-to-See Smith who is a painter and Curator is one of the most well recognized Native American woman visual artists working today. Spiderwoman Theater, the world’s oldest Native American feminist theater began in the mid-1970’s and represents avant-garde theater at its best.

Martine organized a research process consisted of establishing an advisory board with the following members: Elizabeth W. Hutchinson, Assistant Professor of Art History-Barnard College, NY; Nancy Marie Mithlo(Chiricahua Apache), Assistant Professor of Art-University of Wisconsin, Madison WI; Distinguished art historian and critic, Dore Ashton, Professor of Art-Cooper Union, NY; G. Peter Jemison (Heron Clan-Seneca), Artist and Former Curator-American Indian Community House Gallery/Museum, NY and; Diane Fraher(Osage/Cherokee), Founder and Director of AMERINDA and participant in the New York Contemporary Native American Arts Movement. Research consisted of meetings and interviews with the advisory board and study of various publications regarding the intellectual basis for establishing a New York movement in contemporary Native Art. In addition to

G. Peter Jemison, interviews were held with most of former curators of the American Indian Community House Galler y/ Museum, NY including: Katherine AshMilby(Diné) and Sara Sense(Chitimacha/ Choctaw).

A m a n u s c r i p t f o r p u b l i c a t i on describing the New York Contemporary Native Art Movement and the New York School, how it relates to the other Native American art movements in the United States, post-modernism in Native American art and also further description of the theme of cross-influences from Native Artist to Non-Native Artist and vice-versa has been written. The manuscript includes information from personal interviews of people who knew the principles directly, as well as scholars who have analyzed this very subject, interviews with early artists of the movement and an analysis of the current artists working in New York as to their imagery and how it relates to Native American iconography, style, and working methods. “No Reservation: New York Contemporary Native American Art Movement” is published in 2017 and will be distributed by Artbooks.

One of the reasons for Martine’s interest in writing about art and especially Native

American contemporary art in New York City is because Native Americans and their art have not received genuine equitable and fair support for the New York Movement of Contemporary Native American Art which is the only major Native American arts movement outside of Santa Fe, New Mexico.

It is largely under-recognized. AMERINDA is publishing a book highlighting that history both from the visual and performing arts standpoint. From the visual arts standpoint we have veterans Leon Polk-Smith and Jaune Quick-to-see Smith have not been recognized with the same enthusiasm as have the icons of the abstract expressionist schools, even though many of these founders of the contemporary art movements were inspired by indigenous design esthetic.

Even if Native American influences were recognized, critics from outside the culture have defined Native American arts many times in a distorted or inaccurate manner. So many times the only recourse for the Native American artist is to perhaps have their work discussed or critiqued by a Native American curator, so that there can be a semblance of equitable appreciation and theoretical understanding of the work, so that the work can take its rightful place among the various canons of western art.