Orphans, 2009, oil on canvas, 4”x 4”
Orphans Offered Up is participation installation take evolve in a space that was formerly an art gallery. It is now the space that is empty. All serious offers will be posted and documented. The space is located at 547 W. 27th St. in Chelsea.
Orphans that I’m offering upare a series of conceptual paintings that are very small. They are the readable fragments that appear to be abstractions. They are offered up in several different ways.
Offer is defined as: act of worship or devotion: sacrifice; to present for acceptance or rejection; to propose or suggest; to try or begin to resist; to threaten; to make available; to present in performance or exhibition; to propose as payment; to make an attempt; to present itself; to make a proposal.
What will you offer? Stocks, bonds, a house, another painting, a manuscript, or something else? Something less tangible? What are you willing to sacrifice? If you insistent on money, then the price will be determined by random walk, and the price, a number between one and five hundred, will be generated randomly by RANDOM.ORG, Trinity College. They provide a “random number service that generates randomness via atmospheric noise.” Numbers will stamped on a poker chip and placed in a black velvet bag that will be hung from the ceiling. Pick one, that’s your price. Use it. Trade it. Sell it. Keep it as a souvenir.
The inspirational source for the paintings are the invisible engraving marks found in old postage stamps that belonged to my late father. Graphic arts have influenced fine art for the last hundred years. I push them back to the painterly. These painting were first started in 2002. They are not studies. They are not miniatures. They are finished paintings. I have completed more than fifty.
What do you do with your art? What’s your relationship? Do you hang it on the wall or put in storage? Relationships with art: Baldessari burnt them; Van Gogh shoved them under Theo’s bed.
Naming
Ask people to suggest a name by writing it on a post-its and then placing that post-it around the painting. The images and suggested names will be documented along with what I was offered. Names maybe also submitted by email. Peter Selz has already done just that.
History
This project is a variation of another conceptual project that I started in 2004—Open Adoption for Art. I took out an announcement and had an installation at the Pool Art Fair. I made people a gift a painting, with a contract, for up to a year. That project is now complete. And my Offering Project (Participant .net Ars Electronica 1998).
Holly Crawford, NYC 2010
Holly Crawford, Ph.D. is an artist, art historian, behavioral scientist and economist. Her art and poetry (www.art-poetry.info) give new meanings and draws categories themselves into question through transformative juxtapositions. Installations, interventions and performances include, Critical Conversations in a Limo, Outsourced Critics, Open Adoption for Art, May I have your autograph? Hospitality Suite, Tracking, 13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird, Offerings, Punctuation Performance, The Dinner Party, The Road: The Century Freeway, Offerings, Water!, Water$ Water?, Voice Over, manyexhibitions of her paintings, drawings and monotypes. Her projects comment on cultural, social, political, economic behavior and ultimately still art.
She has performed, installed and exhibited international: Ars Electronica, Tate Modern, Beyond Baroque, The Armory Art Fair, PhotoNY, Photo San Francisco, Artist Residency Polish National Sculpture Garden, Melbourne International Arts Festival, Riverside Art Museum, Downey Art Museum, Torrance Art Museum; Euphrat Museum of Art, Stanford Law School; U.S. Consulate Art Gallery, Florence; the Lab at the Roger Smith Hotel (NYC); The Lab (San Francisco); and many other galleries and non-profit spaces.
Press (comments, interviews, reviews) on art projects from: Holland Cotter, James Panero, Peter Frank, Judith Christensen, Jill Connor, Jaquelyn Lewis, Josef Woodward, Rie Kasini Kadour, Lucy Gallum, Tara Dennard, Michael Dwyer, Jeffrey Cyphers Wright, Goef Huth, Amanda Smith, Stephanie Bunburry, Kay Turner, Christian Parra-Duhalde and others.
Her writings include: Attached to the Mouse, Disney & Contemporary Art, 2006; Artistic Bedfellows, Histories, Theories and Conversations in Collaborative Art Practices editor 2008, and catalogue essay, “Disney and Pop” in Once Upon a Time Walt Disney Studio, 2006 and essay Who Can Play?, in Popular Culture Values and the Arts, ed. Ray B. Browne and Lawrence A. Kreiser, Jr.
She is the Director and Founder of AC Institute www.artcurrents.org which has spaces in Chelsea area of NYC. It is non-profit, 501 (c) 3 for research, exhibition and documentation of contemporary art. She was a Fellow in Art Education at the New Museum in 2003. She taught contemporary art issues in the UCLA art department and a new media course SVA. Her Ph.D. is in Art History and Theory from the University of Essex. B.A and M.A. in Economics and M.S. in Behavioral Science from UCLA School of Public Health. From 2004-2006, she was a non-clinical Fellow at NYU Medical School Psychoanalytic Center. She is President of American Friends of the University of Essex. She was born in California and now resides in the New York.