Hayley Ferber

Artist Q&A with Hayley Ferber

Hayley Ferber is an artist, educator, curator, and contemporary arts leader living in Brooklyn, New York. In her personal artistic practice, Ferber creates artist’s books with suminagashi paper marbling, watercolor painting, embroidery and printmaking exploring nautical themes. With a BS from New York University in Studio Art, an MAT from the Rhode Island School of Design in Art & Design Education and over 10 years of teaching experience, Ferber’s professional mission is to facilitate and support creative opportunities in the arts. As Deputy Director of Chashama, a non-profit that repurposes unused real estate into artist studios and exhibition spaces, she supports a creative community of multidisciplinary artists.

“Chase”, mixed media, 4 x 6 to 4 x 24 in | 10 x 15 to 10 x 61 cm, 2021

Who is your favorite artist of all time?

My favorite artist of all time is Kiki Smith. I’m amazed by all the different mediums she works with from printmaking to photography to textiles to sculpture and appreciate the universality of her content exploring the human condition.

How did you become a professional artist?

I studied painting and drawing at NYU as an undergrad and found my way to book and print making about 10 years later. I teach and curate and feel that all of these practices are closely linked. I also work as Deputy Director of Chashama, a non-profit where I support a multidisciplinary group of artists with free presentation space and subsidized studio rentals.

What are the influences and inspirations in your work?

I am greatly inspired by the sea. There is something about the mystery and adventure that lies beneath the waves, this whole other universe full of beauty. As Henry B. Culliver describes in The Book of Old Ships, “… the ship, combines all the elements of aesthetic fundamentals; … Click here to read more

Peju Alatise

Nigerian-born artist and architect Peju Alatise on her back-to-back Venice Biennales, Yoruba influences, and giving back to Africa

We recently sat down with Nigerian-born artist and architect Peju Alatise at her new Glasgow studio to find out more about her back-to-back Venice Biennales, how she juxtaposes being a contemporary architect and fine artist, and how Yoruba culture has helped her work stand out in today’s global art world.

“You need a little bit of luck, as we know arduous work isn’t everything. Do what you do because you love it, and because you can’t live without it.”

– Peju Alatise

“Alagemo” sculpture, part of “Alasiri” installation at the Arsenale of the Venice Biennale of Architecture 2021. Photo credit: Adeyemo Shokunbi

Alatise is an interdisciplinary artist, architect, and author of two novels. She started her professional career as an architect while running a private art studio. These days, she is a leading voice in contemporary art on the African continent. Her practice is relentlessly experimental and labor-intensive. She produces works across a variety of mediums, techniques, and materials, including but not limited to paintings, film, installations, sculptures. Her work is also pointedly political, often asking damning questions, and provoking reflections about the times, the state of affairs at home and abroad. The artist’s work has, in the past, explored exploitative labor practices in Nigeria, child rights with a focus on young girls, state-sanctioned violence against citizens, migration and the policies that ensure that many die at sea, seeking a better life. Alatise now produces through the lens of spirituality and Yoruba cosmology, leaning into ancient storytelling traditions and crafting alternative social imageries.

When asked about some of her favorite artists, Alatise hesitated for a moment, and eventually offered the answer that it changes from season to season. Right now, she is looking at Mexican sculptor Javier Marín and continues to be impressed Chiharu Shiota whose work she first discovered at the Venice Biennale in 2015. Marin’s … Click here to read more

“Nocturnal Whispers of Pan”

A Resource of Imagination

In the collaborative exhibition titled “Nocturnal Whispers of Pan” presented at WhiteBox Harlem, Thomas Rose and Lo Ch’ing have teamed up once again to offer the public an exciting new exhibition open from June 12th through July 17th, 2020.

On February 8^thpreceding the official announcement of the Coronavirus pandemic affecting New York City, WhiteBox Harlem opened “Trapped in Wuhan“, premiering the first known video work by Wuhan based artist Ke Ming offering an in depth, in-situ arresting graphic examination of the novel virus’s destructive plague-like effects in his human environment occurring as early as mid-January. In the tradition of WhiteBox programming responding to the tenor of the times, the next two exhibitions under COVID-19 confinement preceding the present, meta-poetic show “Nocturnal Whispers of Pan”, were dedicated to the exodus experienced by Chinese and Mexican èmigrè artists in New York City, both shows celebrated those artists’ positive contributions to its unparalleled art scene as whimsical immigrants, showcased in the present day and age of Trump’s antagonistic policies.

“Nocturnal Whispers of Pan” meets this criteria acting as an ‘analgesic’ to counter today’s xenophobic times while doubling up as celebration of East-West artistic and cultural ties lost in the ether of either the political or the economic Sino-American unending confrontations.

Succinctly elaborated by two aesthetic masters in deep conversation, Minneapolis based sculptor Thomas Rose sculptor, and Taiwanese poet-painter scholar Lo Ch’ing, the exhibition presents two main opus, Nocturnal and Secrets, laid out in a format akin to the great ‘Illustrated Medieval Books’ where the visitor is solicited to enter the collaborative pages as if in a ‘stage’ where exquisite dual visual and literary narratives appear to invite the viewer to, in a Duchampian way, finish the works.

The literary-visual narrative in Nocturnal Whispers of Pan befits … Click here to read more