Tracie Fracasso – “Artworks”

August 3 - September 14, 2014.

In an age of digital media, Tracie Fracasso’s artworks demand to be seen in person – a flat screen cannot do them justice. Her works are multilayered, two-dimensional images carefully arranged in a three-dimensional space within a glass-fronted frame. She calls it, half-joking, “two-and-a-half D art,” or “3D collage.”

Neither term quite describes her unique artworks, which are similar to the box assemblages of Joseph Cornell and Betye Saar, except that Fracasso’s boxes incorporate drawings, oil paint and prints on cut paper as opposed to found objects. A selection of her recent creations, “Artworks by Tracie Fracasso,” went on display Aug. 3 – Sept. 14, 2014 in the Hoboken Historical Museum’s Upper Gallery.

Fracasso’s approach to creating her layered compositions traces its origins to her college days. In pursuing a BFA in Studio Art at Rutgers University and an MFA in Fine Arts at Montclair State University, she studied both painting and sculpture, and she continues to combine both in her work. A college course in photomontage inspired her interest in layered juxtapositions of images, while her love of Renaissance and church art led her to develop her painting skills under the tutelage of a professor she admired at Montclair.

Each piece can take months to complete, from working out the concept, to gathering material and research, to the execution stage, when Fracasso meticulously works and reworks the composition until she’s satisfied with the relationship among the separate elements. That’s what she finds so engrossing about her chosen medium: the dynamic tension between the elements, both spatially and stylistically, as well as the tension between her contemporary themes and classical references.

“In a formal sense, my work is about the deconstruction of the illusion of space and linear perspective,” Fracasso says. “I think if I had to stick to just painting, I’d get bored.” Like Cézanne and other modern artists, she enjoys breaking the conventional rules of linear perspective, playing with the tension between creating or denying the illusion of space.

Conceptually, her work raises questions about contemporary issues, but viewed within a historical perspective. In the work “Slaying of Isaac” (2008), she draws a connection between a modern tragedy, the shooting of the three students in Newark, and the iconic Old Testament story. In the work “Naïve: Mother I Am not Eve” (2012), which depicts a classically painted female figure strolling through a Renaissance-style garden, but surrounded by contemporary children fighting and pitching tantrums – evoking modern feminist issues. “Temptations” was inspired by the news of the Arab Spring uprisings, and shows an oil refinery in the background, while in the foreground, a man in blue jeans juggles the planets in a park-like setting next to a Christ figure.

Other works, such as the fancifully named “Long Neck on the Garden State Parkway Coming Back from LaDu’s” (2011), are inspired by her own experience, sights that are familiar to this Jersey City-born, Bayonne-raised Hoboken resident, who has spent many hours on the Garden State Parkway. Fracasso moved to Hoboken 20 years ago, where she lives and maintains an art studio. She loves Hoboken for its sense of community, where a stroll down Washington Street to enjoy its restaurants or bars always involves running into someone you know. When she’s not making art, she teaches art as an adjunct professor at Kean University. Learn more about her work at traciefracasso.com.

The exhibit was supported by a block grant from the State/County Partnership program for the Arts, administered by the Hudson County Division of Cultural and Heritage Affairs.

Click here to see a virtual gallery of the exhibit.

Adam Rodriguez – “Clubhouse Requiem”

July 14 - August 18, 2013.

You’ve probably seen Adam Rodriguez’s art, without knowing it. As a professional artist with the New York-based graphic design firm Success Apparel, he’s created designs for some of the most recognizable brands in the world, including John Deere Apparel, Dickies and Yo Gabba Gabba.

In his own freelance business, Adam is also the artist behind the iconic t-shirt designs sported by the Hoboken Motorcycle Club, whose members also sell them at city festivals. The t-shirts commemorate the group’s legendary parties. If you’ve been privileged to attend an HMC party at the clubhouse, located just south of Hoboken, he painted three of the interior walls with bright orange flames in a muscular style (also seen on the cover of hMAG last year in a feature on the HMC).

“I hope to finish the fourth wall someday,” Adam says, “but it’s behind the bar, which is pretty well-stocked. It would take a lot of work to clear that area for painting.”

A selection of his HMC t-shirt designs were on display July 14 – August 18, 2013 in the Upper Gallery at the Museum, around the centerpiece of the exhibit: “Clubhouse Requiem,” a large group portrait depicting about 40 HMC members—past and present.

“Clubhouse Requiem” is a modern take on Rembrandt’s “Night Watch,” which was commissioned in 1642 by a private Dutch militia to commemorate its band of brothers, full of symbols important to the members of the militia. Though Adam is quick to point out he’s not comparing his work with the Dutch master’s, the motivation for the mural is similar – to portray the collective and individual spirit of a close-knit group of men united by a mission.

The mural, roughly 20” x 30” wide, shows all the current members of the HMC standing in front of their respective bikes, with a representation of the club and notable landmarks of the Hoboken skyline in the background. Stylistically, Adam cites the painter Joe Coleman as his inspiration for the level of detail and vividness of his work.

He describes the project as an endeavor to “memorialize the current, and some past members, of the Hoboken Motorcycle Club.” He adds, “By virtue of their fierce individualism, motorcycle clubs are similar to the Northern European Crusaders of the Medieval period, having traded horses for motorcycles, mead for Michelob, and Renaissance fairs for Road Rallies.”

Adam is not a member of the club, but he admires the members’ rebel spirit and blue-collar roots. He’s a Northern New Jersey native, who visited Hoboken frequently as a boy. His father was also an artist, and ran a graphic design studio that did a lot of work for Madison Avenue advertising agencies. Adam worked there for a while, after earning a degree in illustration from the Rhode Island School of Design and taking academic courses at Brown University. He didn’t care for some aspects of the agency business, so he spent about a decade as a union carpenter and a teamster, working at heights on skyscrapers, and underground on the Lincoln and Holland Tunnel. Though he works in New York City, Rodriguez lives in Stroudsburg, PA, with his wife and five children.

This exhibition was made possible by a Block Grant from the State/County Partnership program for the Arts administered by the Hudson County Division of Cultural and Heritage Affairs/Tourism Development, Thomas A. DeGise, County Executive, and the Board of Chosen Freeholders.

Jennifer Place & Jodie Fink – “Local Motion”

May 18, 2014 - July 6, 2014.

Bowerbirds don’t merely “feather their nests” — they create elaborate art installations to impress prospective mates, using colorful materials collected from around their environment, such as cast-off bottle caps, buttons and trinkets. Jennifer Place identifies with the impulse to collect. The artist and her friend Jodie Fink have been making sculptures from detritus that attracts their eye from their walks around Hoboken for many years. They had a joint show, “Friends and Relations,” at the Museum three years ago.

Lately, Place has been thinking a lot about the bowerbirds, since she’s had to re-feather her own nest after superstorm Sandy swept through her lower Madison Street home and washed out many of her collected supplies—mostly the larger pieces—that were stored in her garden shed. Consequently, she’s working in a smaller format these days—with lots of rusty bits of hardware and small items picked up in the environment.

Superstorm Sandy also wiped out a lot of Fink’s supplies, inundating her basement storage space with five feet of water. She now looks at the storm philosophically, learning the truth of the saying that, sometimes, “less is more.” Her work is increasingly minimalist; one piece is simply an expressive piece of driftwood with a fishing bobber affixed for an eye, making it into a fish named “Henry.” The other trend in her recent work is incorporating an element of motion, with pieces that hang or parts that move.

The two artists are teaming up again for a show they’re calling “Local Motion: Mixed Media Sculptures by Jennifer Place and Jodie Fink.” The exhibit opens in the Museum’s Upper Gallery on Sunday, May 18, with a free reception from 2 – 5 p.m., and remains on view through July 6. Each artist is exhibiting about a dozen works.

Both artists started out working in other media: Fink studied photography in college and Place is a professional graphic artist who started out in drawing and printmaking and now works primarily in jewelry and sculpture, including working with hot glass beads. Fink is now gravitating toward painting and drawing, part of her trend toward simplifying.

The two artists both say that the changes in the city’s demographics have changed the materials they use in their work. When they arrived in the early 1980s, Hoboken was an ethnically diverse town, with lots of local characters, gritty bars, pop-up art galleries and a dynamic music scene. Back in those days, they say, scrounging for “art stuff” was a constant thrill, and artists would call each other on moving days when a particularly rich pile of stuff appeared on the curb. Now, the cast-offs are likely to be less interesting, Ikea furniture and the like. However, the constant construction projects and greater access to the waterfront are supplying more interesting bits and pieces.

Half the fun of seeing a Fink-Place art installation is trying to figure out the origins of the individual parts. One of Fink’s pieces, “Ballerina,” is composed of an element from a gas stove, a pushmower handle, and a lamp bracket. Both artists have exhibited extensively at galleries around the region.

The exhibit is supported by a block grant from the State/County Partnership program for the Arts, administered by the Hudson County Division of Cultural and Heritage Affairs.

Click here to see a virtual gallery of the exhibit.

Tim Daly – “Important Clouds”

March 23, 2014 - May 11, 2014.

Most of us deliberately tune out the scenery along New Jersey highways as we drive past the railroad and highway bridges crisscrossing the Meadowlands marshes. It’s hard to categorize what we’re seeing—neither planned architectural landscaping nor unfettered nature, it’s a hybrid environment that evolved haphazardly. But these overlooked scenes take on entirely new significance when interpreted by the skilled hands of Hoboken artist Tim Daly.

Many of his landscapes are dominated by luminous skies filled with cumulus clouds, or skies that are empty but for streaky jet contrails floating over utility towers or highway overpasses. Or lonely night skies eerily lit by highway light fixtures. Daly’s pastels and paintings capture these scenes at those moments during the day or night when the light is at its most beautiful and mysterious, so that it almost doesn’t matter what is in the scene. Except that it does—these stretches are as much a part of our physical environment as the intentionally designed ones. Daly’s pastels and paintings help us appreciate them with new eyes.

“I’ve been told several times over the years that I create, in my believable realist landscapes, a psychological space as well,” he says. “It’s ephemeral, darkness visible, at times. I was drawn then as now to lights in the dark and to telling details. I’m a sucker for Ailanthus trees and the spectacles of bright and dark skies over wild industrial and urban landscapes.”

As a Jersey City native, who explored the Meadowlands as a boy, he began sketching that landscape during the eight years he worked at two Postal Service facilities located in the heart of the marshy no-man’s-land. He considers it his graduate school, after studying at New York’s School of Visual Arts from 1971 – 73, when video and photography were all the rage and the Dutch and English realist landscape schools of painting he so admired had fallen out of fashion. He honed his skills there, drawing and painting scenes from sea level and from the top of Snake Hill, the stone outcropping by the NJ Turnpike’s Eastern Spur.

Daly’s latest series of landscapes rendered in pastels with nearly photographic detail, plus giclée prints from earlier paintings, were on display in the Upper Gallery of the Hoboken Museum. Titled “Important Clouds: Pastels and Giclées by Tim Daly,” the exhibit opened on March 23, 2014 with a free reception from 2 – 5 pm, and remained on view through May 11.

Click here to see a virtual gallery of the exhibit.

In addition to his lifelong fascination with the Meadowlands, Daly has been working on scenes from around Los Angeles—not the glamorous California seen on TV and movie screens. His California scenes are of surfers at Venice beach, or stretches of highway with brush fires in the distant hills. Some of the recent works were inspired by scenes from Long Island City, where he works as a scenic artist, a proud member of the United Scenic Artists Local 829. He’s painted sets for such shows as HBO’s “The Sopranos,” “Girls,” and “Boardwalk Empire,” among others. See more examples of his work at timdaly.artspan.com.

Daly moved to Hoboken in 1977, when it was a different world: Maxwell’s was a funky bar, the Washington St. bus cost $.25, and rents were low enough for an artist to afford, he says. “I met my lovely wife, Sheilah Scully, and was drawn with her into Hoboken’s progressive political campaigns, including Mayor Tom Vezzetti’s victory, and a four-year long condo conversion battle.” He advises anyone interested in that period to seek out Nora Jacobsen’s documentary film, “Delivered Vacant,” in which he and Sheilah make cameo appearances.

The exhibit is supported by a block grant from the State/County Partnership program for the Arts, administered by the Hudson County Division of Cultural and Heritage Affairs.

Robert Forman – “Uncommon Threads”

January 26, 2014 - March 16, 2014.

From a distance, an artwork by Robert Forman appears to be many paintings at once, layered in some mysterious way. Up close, the mystery deepens: Instead of paint, the surface is composed of many colored threads, laid downwith as much complex color theory as any Impressionist painting—or maybe more so, because Forman’s pictures have added dimensions of overlapping images and patterns.

For example, one piece, Engine Co. 5, depicts Forman’s home, an 1898 firehouse he bought at a city auction in 1982 and converted into a four-family residence. The building’s outline, its iconic red, arched door and its steep, green copper roof with dormer window are easy to pick out of the scene. However, interwoven with that image are ghostly images of the people past and present that have lived or worked in the building or in the neighborhood, including the artist’s family and neighbors, firefighters, and Frank Sinatra, whose father was captain there. Overlaying it all is a wave pattern crisscrossing the picture, alluding to the inundation from Superstorm Sandy that the artist and his family were rebuilding from while he worked on the artwork in 2013.

Engine Co. 5 is one of the highlights of the exhibit, “Uncommon Threads: String Pictures by Robert Forman,” which opened at the Hoboken Museum on January 26. The exhibit will remain on view until March 16, when the artist will give a talk about his work at 4 p.m.

Another picture in the exhibit depicts a squirrel on the grass in Church Square Park, surrounded by people lying on the grass, mowing the lawn, playing on the sea creatures in the water park. Once again, Forman incorporates a pattern in the threads to create a focal point around the squirrel, showing his dog’s view of the world, where everything else in the visual field fades out, except his crystal-clear target.

Click here to see a virtual gallery of the exhibit.

Forman’s website, robertforman.net, explains his process: “I begin with full-size drawings (cartoons). I trace the drawings and transfer them to Clayboard with carbon paper. In the case of multiple images, I use different colored carbon paper. I then glue yarn of different weights, colors and material to the Clayboard using Elmer’s Glue. I use cotton, silk, linen and rayon yarns. The finished picture is sealed with Fabric Guard. The final step is the frame, which I mill and build in my wood shop.”

Forman’s technique is self-taught; he began “painting with yarn” in high school, in Englewood, N.J., and continued while majoring in painting in college at Cooper Union in Manhattan. He kept the string pictures a secret until a professor asked the class about what they had worked on during vacation. His professor recognized his originality and encouraged him to keep at it. Like a lot of artists, he has supplemented his income as a fine art framer, and consequently, his frames often have complementary qualities to the work they contain.

In the 1990s, he came across some kindred spirits: The Huichol, a native tribe from northern Mexico, had a tradition of yarn paintings, using thicker yarns and beeswax. He earned a Fulbright scholarship in 1992 to study with them in the cities and villages of the western Sierra Madre mountains.

It can take a whole year to produce a large picture, and he works on two or three pictures a year. “It’s a slow process,” he says. “Instead of going faster, as I get more experience, I try more things and it can even take longer. I just don’t want to repeat the same thing—new ideas are what interest me.” His work has evolved from focusing on “retinal” effects—replicating the surface colors and texture, as in the picture, “Hoboken Station” to more layered compositions.

Forman’s work has been exhibited in the Newark, Brooklyn, Jersey City and Montclair Museums, and at the Francis M. Naumann Gallery on 57th Street. Visit his website, glueyarn.com, to learn more about his many exhibits and articles on his unique art.

The exhibit is supported by a block grant from the State/County Partnership program for the Arts, administered by the Hudson County Division of Cultural and Heritage Affairs.

Hiro Takeshita – “Slices of Beauty on the Hudson”

December 15, 2013 - January 19, 2014.

Hiro Takeshita was born in Nagasaki, Japan, and from an early age was interested in art and American culture. Born two years after the atomic bomb blast in his native city, he can still recall his mother’s searing memories of that day. However, he also recalls the kindness of American soldiers and being captivated by American television shows on television, which ultimately motivated him to move to the U.S. in 1977 after studying art and print-making in Tokyo.

The bright colors of his native city and his fascination with American pop culture led him to admire artists of the post-Impressionist period, particularly Henri Matisse, Abstract Expressionists like Richard Diebenkorn and Pop Artists, especially Andy Warhol.

He moved to Hoboken in 1985, where he creates artwork that reflects his fascination with the Hudson River and its views of New York City. If you stroll along Hoboken’s waterfront walkway, you may have seen him with a large 14”x17” sketchbook, finding inspiration in the ever-changing panorama it offers.

“I always enjoy sketching scenes on the Hoboken waterfront, of people enjoying the outdoors, walking, kids playing, the happy moments,” he says. “Art is communication; I like to share the joy and beauty with other people.”

At first glance, his works appear to be delicately painted in saturated colors and fine lines. The lights of New York City twinkle across the Hudson, a fine tracery of fireworks showers down over the river, tree branches twist in the wind. But step up closer to the pictures and you just might be able to detect the sliced paper. In some cases, there might be four or five layers, but he uses fine origami paper, so the surface is virtually flat. It’s a technique known as “kirigama,” in Japan, but is practiced in many forms, including much of Matisse’s late work.

Click here to see a virtual gallery of the exhibit.

The Museum’s Upper Gallery featured his latest creations in a show titled, “Slices of Beauty on the Hudson, Cut-Paper Works by Hiro Takeshita,” on view from Deccember 19, 2013 – January 19, 2014. View more of his work at www.hirotakeshita.com.

This is Takeshita’s second exhibit at the Hoboken Museum, and his work has been exhibited in New York City and elsewhere. He has also created works in oil paints, pastels, watercolors, and print-making, but his prime concentration these days is in cut-paper works. Each year, he contributes works to a group art show dedicated to the Peace memorial at Nagasaki on the anniversary, August 9, of the atomic bomb blast.

The exhibit is supported by a block grant from the State/County Partnership program for the Arts, administered by the Hudson County Division of Cultural and Heritage Affairs.

Peter Gutierrez – “Let It Fly!”

November 3 - December 8, 2013.

Ever since his mother took him to an airshow and let him take a ride in a B-24, at age 9, Peter Gutierrez has been fascinated by airplanes. He started making drawings of aircraft, and then his grandfather, a civil engineer who spent a career working on cars, trains and other machines, encouraged him to work on model aircraft and gave him books on how to fold paper into airplanes. Before long, he ran out of room to display all the models he’s made from kits or from balsa wood or paper.

Part of his growing collection of invented aircraft were displayed in an Upper Gallery exhibit titled, “Let it Fly: Model Airplanes by Peter Gutierrez,” which opened Sunday, Nov. 3, 2013 with a free reception from 2 – 5 p.m. Peter returned to the Museum to give a demonstration of his aircraft-making skills on Sunday, Nov. 17, during the city’s regular Third Sunday Gallery Walk.

Peter has read nearly every book he could find on the history of flight, from Leonardo Da Vinci to the Wright brothers to the airplane manufacturers Boeing and Lockheed, and can identify most fighter planes and other planes, even the Russian models. He’s also a big fan of World War II movies, including Memphis Belle and Saving Private Ryan. For inspiration, he transcribes quotes that he finds in his reading about inventors and scientists and posts them on his walls. A recent one, very appropriately, was Carl Sagan’s “Somewhere, something is waiting to be known.”

Peter has channeled his passion for making airplanes into his science club, which met on Mondays at his old elementary school, as well as the robotics club. With other members of the club, he would make bomber-style planes out of paper, and devise wind-tunnel tests for them using a fan and string. Through persistent experimentation, he learned which designs would sustain flight the longest – he estimates that about 90% of his designs will fly. He credits his grandfather’s advice, “Just stick with it!” for the persistence to keep trying new models and figuring out how to make his robotic Lego sets work.

Now entering the 9th grade at Hoboken High School, Peter has set his sights on studying aerospace engineering in college, eventually working at an aircraft manufacturer like Boeing or Lockheed and then hopes to start his own aeronautics company someday. He’s also an invaluable assistant in the Museum’s summer camp and family day programs..

This exhibition was made possible by a Block Grant from the State/County Partnership program for the Arts administered by the Hudson County Division of Cultural and Heritage Affairs/Tourism Development, Thomas A. DeGise, County Executive, and the Board of Chosen Freeholders.