NYAB Event - "40 x 19 x 11 Emerging Artists" Exhibition

"40 x 19 x 11 Emerging Artists" Exhibition

M55 Art

This event has ended.

40 × 19 × 11 Emerging Artists is a group exhibition by Art Collective.

When the various guilds of fifteenth-century Florence were commissioned to fill the niches of the Orsanmichele Church with representations of their respective patron saints, their strategies were fundamentally similar: create works unique enough to establish their presence within the shared space. Knowing that most guilds were working with a classical approach, the wealthy Arte di Calimala, or wool merchants’ guild, hired Lorenzo Ghiberti to sculpt their St. John the Baptist within the International Gothic style. The aesthetic not only communicated their wealth and power—associations central to the style—but also served to distinguish them from a predominantly classical context. The very nature of competition was responsible for the appearance of many such artworks; receiving public attention meant greater prestige for both patron and artist alike. Such is the state of affairs that is intensely familiar today.

In a city with many more artists than available niches, the competition for space has never been greater in any other point in history, and neither has its diversity. Because art is reflective of the society that produced it, and changes stylistically depending on the pace of change within society, present-day artists create in a time of change so quick and dramatic that it is inevitable that their work would respond to it. What is more, our excavations and appropriations of non-Western art over the last few centuries have made the world’s immeasurably diverse artistic heritage readily available to us, expanding our standards, our expectations, and our view of the earth, diversifying our styles and exhibitions within it.

The title of the exhibition, 40’ x 19’ x 11’, uses the dimensions of the gallery to refer to our own niche carved within the four corners of the space. Just like the guilds and artists of Orsanmichele, it describes the honest concerns of the emerging, and no doubt, even the established artist: mainly, how one looks in a greater artistic context. The juried nature of the exhibition further emphasizes this idea, as it was through competition that artists were selected to display their work. This fight for space and attention is a critical part of the artists’ hopes of creating unique and compelling works that still manage to captivate even when viewed within a broad range of contexts.

Media

• Painting
• Drawing
• Sculpture

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