FUSING THE ARTS continued from page 1
Surrounding the readers at Fusion Arts were artworks by Shalom. Some of the larger works could be described as kinetic robot sculptures. Humanoid in form and gigantic in scale, these pieces bowed and waved when they were turned on. I think they would have been particularly engaging for a child, especially if the child could flip the switch to make the robots go on and off. In all of Shalom’s works, there is a primary element of play. In one series, a group of basrelief “faces” recite short works spoken by the Unbearables. The recitations are triggered by motion, so that the voice begins when a viewer walks by. The features of the faces are exaggerated, but, oddly, they fit in some instinctive way the voice that speaks through them. Some of the writers—including Steve Dalachinsky, Gabriel Don, Feast, Bonny Finberg, Anthony Haden-Guest, Bob Holman, Kolm, Tsaurah Litzky, Yuko Otomo, Jill Rapaport, Tom Savage, Carl Watson, Carol Wierzbicki, and myself—have said that they recognize themselves in these artworks. On one occasion, I was able to exhibit one of my works in a group show at Fusion Arts. The show probably had a theme, forgotten now, but I tried to make sure my work had some portion of “fusionism” in it. I showed a small, fourteen-by-eleven-inch collage of the building across the street from a former apartment of mine. The image was of a brick facade, over which a network of leafless sycamore branches lay. I used colored paper, graphite pencil, and Crayola crayons as my materials. That was as “fusionistic” as I could get.
A couple of years ago, Shalom moved his operations away from Fusion Arts and his studio in a Brooklyn garage to new quarters in Easton, Pa. In the summer of 2017, a pared-down group of Unbearables—Dalachinsky, Lee Klein, Kolm, Otomo, Watson, and I—went to visit the new digs and read in the Allentown Art Museum, which has a collection of early works by Franz Kline, who was born in Wilkes-Barre. Most of us traveled in Shalom’s “Artmobile,” a car with a painted canopy and colorful body striping. The car was relatively small, so one of us had to ride in the open trunk space behind the back seat. On the way to Easton, I drove and Shalom rode in the back. For the return trip, Shalom and I switched places. We stayed in a former beauty school that Shalom plans to turn into an art school, offering residencies for various “fellows.” We were given new sheets and pillows in packages that had never been opened, and we slept on inflated mattresses in gallery rooms, next to those giant kinetic robots. In the morning, we made some recordings of our works, perhaps for future use in the “faces” series. After the hard work was done, Shalom took us to breakfast. We couldn’t (at least, I couldn’t) ask for more.
At left: Facade of FusionArts Museum with Shalom Neuman’s art car, 2009 Top Right: l.-r. Unbearables Ron Kolm, Thad Rutkowski, Steve Dalachinsky, Yuko Otomo and Carl Watson, 2017 Bottom Right: Artist Taisuke Morishita’s exhibit at FusionArts Museum, 2006
ABOUT SHALOM NEUMAN Shalom Tomas Neuman was born in Prague, Czechoslovakia in the aftermath of WW II. He is the last surviving male of a large Jewish family, most of whom perished in Nazi Germany’s Holocaust. His family escaped from Prague’s Communist regime in 1948 after his father’s name was placed on a Communist death list. They immigrated to Haifa, Israel where he spent his childhood. When he was 12, Shalom, his sister and his parents immigrated to Pittsburgh, PA. He has lived, worked and maintained a studio on the East Coast of the United States since 1980.
stitute of Technology and has been a visiting lecturer at The School of Visual Arts, Yale, Academy of Fine Arts in Prague, Beer Sheva College and Ra’anana Cultural Center in Israel.
He has been exhibited extensively in galleries and museums in the United States, Europe, South America, Asia and Israel. His work is in the collections of the National Shalom received a BFA and MFA in the dual disciplines of painting and sculpture from Gallery of Prague (Czech Republic), Museum Kampa Carnegie-Mellon University in 1970 and 1972, respectively. He won the Damrosch (Czech Republic), Kafka Museum (Czech Republic), ElScholarship to study in France where he received The Beaux Arts painting prize. Sha- lis Island Museum (New York), Museum of Modern Art lom did his post graduate fellowship in painting and sculpture at Indiana University. (Carnegie Institute, Pittsburgh, PA), Museum of Modern Art (Nice, France), Museu Da Image E Dom Som Shalom is the recipient of the Premio Galileo 2000 Award for Art XV Edition, pre- (Sao Paolo, Brazil) and the private collections of Elaine sented at Teatro della Pergola, Florence, Italy on September 23, 2013. DeKooning (East Hampton, New York), Enrico and Roberta Baj (Milano, Italy), Rosa Easman (UBU Gallery, Shalom spends part of the year working in Prague where he also maintains a home New York), Chemical Bank (New York), Paolo Martini and studio. He has taught at The Cooper Union, Parsons School of Design, Pratt In- (Rome, Italy), Miguel Cardia (Portugal), and Ivan Karp (O.K. Harris Gallery, New York) amongst others.
4 The Irregular
September 2019
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