Made in the South Bronx: A Group Exhibition On Memory, Movement & Metamorphosis

In 2023, the legendary Margarete Roeder Gallery in New York City presented the five Bronx-based women artists in the exhibition Bronx Fivefold: Harmonious  Convergence, highlighting the diversity of their visual expression, as well as the  creative collaboration born out of 20 years of friendship and artistic comradeship in  an art scene that is both unique and dynamic. 

Extending this multifaceted solidarity and wanting to bring a piece of the South Bronx to Athens, the artists present works in a variety of media in the show Made in the  South Bronx. They reveal ways in which their daily contact with this particular area of  New York City, as residents and active artists, has influenced their visual practice.  Their themes include the importance of the cultural heritage bestowed upon us by  indigenous peoples, the tragic destruction of life and nature due to human brutality,  the transformations of neighborhoods due to gentrification mechanisms, and the  personal changes in our emotional and spiritual worlds caused by the interaction with a rapidly changing global socio-political environment. 

Formally trained as a painter, Mexican-American Blanka Amezkua's creative  practice is greatly influenced by Mexican popular art and culture, from papel picado  to comics. She combines traditional and contemporary techniques, as well as socio cultural mythologies and philosophies to preserve evidence of the past in the present. Honoring the wisdom of the indigenous people of the Americas, Amezkua has made  research on medicinal plants and flowers from the first book of medicine created in  the Americas, the Codex de la Cruz-Badiano (1552). The visual result is a series of  papel picado pieces dedicated to the Cempasuchil flower and the California poppy, created in collaboration with maestro don Rene Mendoza from Huixcolotla, Puebla,  Mexico in August 2024. Underscoring her ancestors' respect and admiration for plant diversity, Amezkua pays tribute to the valuable knowledge of Mexico's ancient and  modern culture and its special contribution to world art and science. 

 

Carey Clark's video installation includes elements that she has been exploring for  many years in her current practice. Her idiom involves merging different figurative  elements to convey a reality that is not dictated by visual observation, but  encapsulates the emotions and sensations experienced. Exploring a new body of  work that incorporates her long term interest as a figurative painter in picturing  alternate landscapes, cityscapes and portraits through montages of diverse  elements, Clark shows a series of painted images-portraits of her Bronx  neighborhood combined with projections of videos displaying diverse places from  which she got inspiration for her paintings. The overlap between the moving and  painted images, the interplay between movement and stillness, allude to the endless  impermanence of our world and the multiple rapid or slow, positive and negative  transformations it creates- though often invisible to our eyes and not perceived by our direct perception. 

Linda Cunningham's work is concerned with time, transience and contradictions,  with a particular interest in the architectural and structural remnants of present and  past cultures. Her images employ a fluid, calligraphic line and drawing form. With  compelling forms she often challenges the viewer to accept the sometimes  discomforting content of her works. In Cunningham's mixed media South Bronx  Waterfront Sagas series, her materials and images merge, revealing a broken history of the South Bronx, an area that was once a haven for clean air and greenery. The  themes addressed are environmental concerns in relation to industry, urban blight  and loss of the natural environment, as well as her concern for her Bronx home area  facing the mechanisms of gentrification. Athens residents share a number of parallel  concerns, which reveals the universality of socio-political strategies aimed at  economic gains at the expense of community cohesion and economic equality, as  well as the environment and history of the area. In another series of works,  Cunningham addresses the consequences of the climate crisis, depicting the  devastating hurricanes that have hit America in recent years. 

Mimma Scarpini is an Italian artist living in New York who creates with various visual media. Her work is characterized by both an abstract and figurative idiom, engaging  in a dialogue with both the European figurative and abstract art traditions. The  triptych drawing on paper entitled Black Eden depicts a burnt Garden of Eden, which, according to the Bible, was originally created by God as a Paradise for humans. The  medium Scarpini uses, charcoal, is itself burnt organic matter (wood), intensifying the idea of the irreversible evil perpetrated by the human hand. In the mixed media work  on paper Maria Mesa fleeing tear gas at the border, she is inspired by the Pulitzer  Prize winning Kim Kyung Hoon's photograph of migrants running away from tear gas  at the border with Mexico. Hoon’s photograph captures a paradox, underlined by  Scarpini’s use of color: as the woman and her children flee from tear gas, their  shadows appear to move in the opposite direction, as though returning to the very  place they are trying to escape. This aesthetic detail reflects key elements of the migrant experience: while they flee from danger and economic hardship, they also  leave behind their culture and history—an identity that calls them back, like the  irresistible pull of a siren’s song.

Tammy Wofsey's art attempts to condense the essence of the natural world within  the confines of paper. Paper acts as the conduit that gives life to all her prints. Her  creative pursuit is guided by the goal of creating a deeply human connection to our environment and evoking a sense of slowing down over time. In this series the artist  prints blue mountains on large flat paper, engraves them and folds them. According  to the artist, the folded paper contains a memory that cannot be erased, telling a  story that can be revived at any time with specific stimuli. Images evoke memories  and vice versa, and connections between past and present are effortlessly activated:  the smoke from the forest fires in California and Canada erases the artist's memories of her home state of Colorado and the view from her apartment in the South Bronx,  respectively. The viewers can pick Wofsey's works in their hands and process them  as they would flip through the pages of a memory-filled photo album. She hopes her  work will give viewers the time to 'slow down', reflect, experience positive memories  and aim for a better balance between their inner and outer worlds.