TUESDAY, December 1, 2015

WEDNESDAY, December 2, 2015

Directions to Compass

COMPASS Community Center

Address: 201 N Dixie Hwy, Lake Worth, FL 33460

Phone:(561) 533-9699

Exhibition Essay by Steve Ellman

A Day With(out) Art Revisited

It was an age of exploration, the '70s, in our lives and in our art. Idols lay shattered in the wake of Vietnam and Watergate, and flowers bloomed in the rubble. In our innocence, sex seemed like a gift without price, and maybe it was, for a time. Inevitably, artists, whose job it is to “make it new,” drank deep of those pleasures. And in the '80s, when the plague arrived, artists swelled the ranks of the doomed.

The art world’s fallen include just a few major names, for AIDs was a disease of the young and one of its peculiar cruelties was to cut careers short. What riches might have been will never be known, but the works of the virus’s best-known prey point to a lost bounty of beauty and innovation.

Maybe the most emblematic of those darkened stars were Robert Mapplethorpe and Keith Haring, fixtures of the age’s night life — the clubs, the drugs, the erotomania — which energy fueled their visions: Mapplethorpe with photography of severe and unflinching grace, Haring with a language of uniquely radiant hieroglyphs.

Others gone too soon were less well-known but of signal aesthetic importance. Photographer Peter Hujar left indelible portraits of art world comrades and luminaries like Susan Sontag and Diana Vreeland; Hujar’s lover, David Wojnarowicz, brought a blazing surrealism to film and other media, often in the cause of AIDS activism; Félix González-Torres was similarly driven, building on the methods of Minimalism and Conceptual Art to create sculpture and installations around themes of love and death. In Canada, the collective known as General Idea found subversive beauty and humor in pieces drawn on the materials of mass culture and, toward the end, the images and objects of medical treatment itself.

There are others, of course, too many to describe here, the greater part of that lost generation well-catalogued at the visual AIDS artist registry at visualaids.org. AIDS is, by some accounts, now conquered, though to the extent that is so, it was not without a mighty struggle not just against a virus, but against ignorance and fear. As we mourn our losses, and the art that might have been, let us honor the dead with continued resistance to those evils of the spirit.

-Steve Ellman

In Today's New Times:

Curator, Rolando Chang Barrero, will be working with Compass Community Center this year on the A Day With(out) art Revisited Exhibition. The exhibit will run concurrently during the yearly presentation of the NAMES Project Quilt Installation. Each year, Compass Community Center hosts the largest display of rotating panels from the NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt in honor of World AIDS Day in South Florida. The AIDS Memorial Quilt is the largest folk art exhibit in the world.

This year, we invite you to join us in honoring World AIDS Day during our two week celebration beginning December 1st, with A Day Without Art, the International Day of Mourning and Action in response to the AIDS crisis. Arts organizations, museums, and galleries participate in this international movement by shrouding pieces of art and replacing them with information about HIV prevention and local resources. For more information about this campaign and the origins of Day With(out) Art, please visit www.visuala ids.org.

World AIDS Day serves as a platform to increase awareness of the AIDS pandemic and to inspire positive action through education, testing, and standing in solidarity with those affected by the virus. HIV/AIDS has had a major impact locally and globally: 35 Million people worldwide are currently living with HIV/AIDS Over 1.2 Million people in the U .S. are living with HIV; almost 1 in 8 are unaware of their infection 8,197 people are currently living with HIV/AIDS in Palm Beach County 5,897 newly diagnosed HIV infections in Florida in 2014.

We look forward to collaborating with local artists, arts organizations, museums, galleries, art enthusiasts, and our community to commemorate World AIDS Day like never before.

Con't.....WORLD AIDS DAY

For complete details go to Compass World AIDS Day

Other press:

Artists Donate In Record Numbers

Aids Memorial Quilt Coming to Compass

Subscribe to our mailing list

Cultural Council of Palm Beach:

Call for Nominations for prestigious 2014 Muse Awards Due November 15th, 2013.

Please consider ActivistArtistA Gallery/ Rolando Chang Barrero for:
Outstanding Collaboration withThe City of Boynton Beach in the developement of the Boynton Beach Art District and contributuitions to the arts in Palm Beach County.

Outstanding Festival for KeroWACKED ART and MUSIC Festival 2013and The Boynton Beach Art District Art Walk (awarded Best Art Walk 2013), both of which were recognized by the press and the public, as new refreshing and vibrant.
.
http://activistartista.blogspot.com/2013/10/cultural-council-of-palm-beach-call-for.html

NEW TIMES REVIEW:

Arts & Culture

Dwelling Projects, a Wandering Artists Collective, Descends on Boynton Beach

By Fire Ant Fri., Oct. 4 2013 at 11:15 AM

Write Comment

Categories: Arts & Culture

The artist and arts impresario Rolando Chang Barrero hosts another interesting diversion this weekend at his Boynton Beach exhibition space, ActivistArtistA Gallery, with the opening of (Un)Common Traces, a fresh effort from the Dade County-based artists' collective Dwelling Projects. Four of the group's core members have come to Barrero's venue to reflect on their recent visit to Ecuador, where they spent 4 weeks immersed the Andean nation's artisanship and culture.

Spread throughout three bays of Barrero's compound -- a collection of what were formerly industrial storage and workspaces -- the works are in media including photography, video, pen-and-ink, charcoal, found objects assemblage, and fiber.

The bay labeled "Ephemera" offers the most direct documentation of the four artists' Ecuadorean experience, with a totem of travelers' gear -- shoes, backpacks, blankets -- delicate drawings by Sofia Bastidas, and two walls of photography. Some photos are from their time at La Factoria, an ecologically aware craft and design center on the Pacific coast, where they absorbed and played on the methods of local crafts. Others are from their stay at a private home in the highlands.

A second bay, unnamed, contains individual pieces by two others of the group. Andres Ramirez shows a flair for abstraction from nature in a video and more photography. Eddy Peñafiel's mixed media work of video, floorboards, and feathers is a very clever play on the "hunt-and-peck" method of typewriting.

A full other bay is taken up by Nathalie Alfonso's untitled installation piece in which immense spools of burlap are draped from the space's ceiling and uncoiled across the floor, with a long stretch of charcoal markings on paper along three walls of the room. The implications are deeply political, the burlap referencing the bags of commodities on which so much of the Ecuadorian economy relies. The charcoal markings mimic the housecleaning work Alfonso does to support herself as an emerging artist. It's a thoughtful, imposing, provocative piece.

The four artists in the show are just a small cohort from the Dwelling Spaces group, which grew out of the arts program at Florida International University. The group's membership is floating and elastic, up to two dozen individuals at one point, all from Latin American backgrounds. Just two years along, the group's early shows were held in private homes and other unorthodox spaces. Their improvisatory, socially conscious spirit is a fine match for Barrero's wild and wooly enterprise.

(Un)Common Traces, 7 p.m., Friday, October 4th thru the 25th, at ActivistArtistA Gallery/Studio, 422 West Industrial Ave., Boynton Beach.

Fire Ant -- an invasive species, tinged bright red, with an annoying, sometimes-fatal sting -- covers Palm Beach County. Got feedback or a tip? Contact Fire.Ant@BrowardPalmBeach.com.

More photos....