“Plus Ten” Exhibition

Lennon, Weinberg, Inc.

poster for “Plus Ten” Exhibition
[Image: Joseph Zito "Dire Distress" (2018) encaustic, spray paint, wood, steel 22-1/2 x 22 x 13- 3/4 in. ]

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Joseph Zito places stock in the fundamentals of the human condition. Birth, nurture, family, friends, shared experience, memory, imagination, hard work and accomplishment, loss and the limitsof life are themes that have informed his art for more than thirty years. His 2015 exhibition at Lennon, Weinberg was a retrospective survey; the current show has tendrils in the past but is one in which he has chosen to endorse the present in all of its precariousness.

Last year he took up beekeeping and saw in it a perfectly calibrated, though fragile, example of environmental and social infra- structure and a satisfying metaphor to generate a body of work. Originally intending to make a series of sculptures in the form of exquisite beehives constructed in exotic woods, he realized after making the first one that as much as it satisfied an H. C. Westermann-meets-Donald Judd axis present in his work, it was inherently limited as simply craft and lacking an expressive component.
So he chose to invoke the social imperative of the bee colony by inviting ten artist friends to collaborate with him. He made for each of them an impeccable clear pine hive, a stack of one deep and one medium compartment of the Langstroth type, and asked them to do something, anything at all, to embellish them and allow him to make their beehives part of “his” exhibition. The results express both individuality and community.

The collaborating artists are Carolanna Parlato, Eric Brown, Jill Moser, Marthe Keller, Damon Brandt, Edward Burke, Gary Mayer, Glenn Goldberg, Jim Lee and Katherine Bowling. The exhibition also includes four of Zito’s own beehive sculptures, along with watercolors and two paintings on unstretched canvas dropcloths. Zito’s bee colony survived the long and frigid winter.

Joseph Zito was born in Brooklyn in 1957 and graduated from the School of Visual Arts in 1979. He had his first three solo exhibitions at Rosa Esman Gallery between 1988 and 1991, and this is his eighth exhibition at Lennon, Weinberg since 1993. An early pioneer in Red Hook, Brooklyn, he worked with curator Frederieke Taylor in using a raw industrial space to present three large group exhibitions called 55 Ferris Street in 1992 and 1993. His works have been included in numerous group shows in New York as well as in Rome, St Louis, Philadelphia, New Orleans, Amherst, Segovia and Katonah.

His work is included in collections including the Arkansas Art Center, the Blanton Museum of Art, the Fogg Art Museum, the Krannert Art Museum, the New School Art Collection, the Weatherspoon Museum of Art and the Art, Design & Architecture Museum at University of California Santa Barbara. His drawings were an ongoing interest for the noted works on paper collector Werner Kramarsky.

Media

Schedule

from May 17, 2018 to August 17, 2018

Opening Reception on 2018-05-17 from 18:00 to 20:00

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