Annette Hur, Lure, Oil on canvas, 2019. Courtesy of the artist.
Online Exclusive:
Featuring Women Artists of Assembly Room, Part 2
Featuring works by Blanka Amezkua, Haley Hughes, Annette Hur, Helina Metaferia
August 6 – September 13, 2020, Online Exclusive
More and more women of all ethnicities, races, and cultures are joining forces to challenge the status quo and demand equality through individual and collective action. We have been doing this for generations.
As we acknowledge the passage of the 19th Amendment to the Constitution, which gave women the right to vote on August 26, 1920, we are excited to present four dynamic women who inspire us with their strong messages, motivate us to stand in solidarity, move us with their creativity, and remind us of how far we have come and how much further we still have to go.
Artists Blanka Amezkua, Haley Hughes, Annette Hur, and Helina Metaferia bring a beautiful, powerful, and energetic force to their work. While each artist has a different way of expressing themselves, they are united in their courage to speak out against the abuse of power, sexism, racism. It has been an honor and pleasure to know and work with them over the past year.
Please join us in celebrating the artists and sustaining their work during the epic crises facing all Americans.
ARTIST BIOS
Blanka Amezkua is a Bronx-based artist and recipient of the BRIO award from the Bronx Council on the Arts in 2007. Formally trained as a painter, Blanka Amezkua’s multidisciplinary practice employs techniques often considered traditional or domestic – primarily embroidery and crochet to address timely cultural, political, and gender issues. The images of women in these embroidered series are taken from comic books. Aiming to appropriate and take the imagery of the women back and empower them with her hand and her composition, Amezkua removes them from the male gaze with her media. Suddenly, these females are seen as strong and powerful, honoring their sexuality and femininity.
Blanka Amezkua studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Florence, Italy, and received a Bachelor of Fine Arts from California State University, Fresno. She initiated AAA3A, an artist-run space in Mott Haven, Bronx, that supports the visibility of Bronx-based artists.
Haley Hughes is a self-taught artist and has lived and worked in Brooklyn for the past fourteen years. Her paintings and sculptures act as a form of visual and emotional journalism. The mobility and accessibility of the image as both charted landscape and unfolding narrative are important to her work. They are abstracted narratives of current events, war, globalism, drone attacks, global warming, mass shootings, capital, and politics, as seen through a Technicolor dreamscape. Fire is her consistent metaphor for an unchecked, destructive force of pain and suffering. It is the medium of natural disaster and war, and also of sainthood and martyrdom. Oftentimes Hughes transforms her figures into saints, adorning them with licks of flame, applying each orangey brush stroke adhered each white feather, or arranged flowers on earthly effigies, as on a gravesite. Through these works the artist questions assumptions of empire and dominant historiographies in vivid, gory detail.
Haley Hughes has been published in the Nation Magazine, Vellum Magazine. She is the WaterMill Collection and has shown at SPRING/BREAK Art Fair, Assembly Room, Flux Factory, EFA Project Space, The Sunview Luncheonette, Field Projects, The Whitney Huston Biennial, among others.
Annette Hur is a visual artist working with abstraction on large scale oil paintings and Korean silk textiles, where she investigates the inherited traditional culture that subconsciously manipulates and subverts female sexuality. Heavily abstracted bodily forms and a palette that mimics the colors of viscera or surface wounds of the body create an atmosphere of tension between the physical body and everyday violence around it. As a result, although the entire image is abstract, hints of fingers, breasts, genitals, wounds, and acts of vomiting or penetration create narratives of unsafe bodily experiences. Through this work, Hur is empowered to express her vulnerability with strength, rejection with acceptance, and to reveal what has been hidden. The intricate, time-consuming, intuitively constructed Korean silk textile works emphasize the intimacy of the source materials. Through its deliberately constructed fragility, each textile piece hints at the competing imperatives of ambiguity: fear and trust.
Annette Hur has previously shown in solo /group exhibitions at Wallach gallery, Gavin Brown Enterprise, Urban Zen, Times Square Space, 33 Orchard gallery in New York; Zhou B Art Center in Chicago, Dafen International Oil Painting Biennale in Shenzhen, China. She holds a BFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and MFA(2019) from Columbia University.
Helina Metaferia is an interdisciplinary artist working in performance, video, collage, and assemblage. Her work interrogates the politics of the body in space, particularly as it relates to notions of identity and citizenship. The “By Way of Revolution” series presented in this online exclusive exhibition examines the impact of civil rights eras of the past on today’s social justice movements. The project centralizes women of color as its main protagonist, highlighting the undertold labor of women in activism histories by combining archival research with performative gestures to produce mixed-media collages.
Helina Metaferia has exhibited her work at venues including Museum of African Diaspora (San Francisco), Museum of Fine Arts (Boston), Smack Mellon (New York), Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (Detroit), and Modern Art Museum Gebre Kirtos Desta Center (Addis Ababa, Ethiopia). She completed her MFA in 2015 at Tufts University’s School of the Museum of Fine Arts and attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Her artist residencies include Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, MASS MoCA, and Triangle Arts Association, among others. She has taught in the BFA and MFA programs at the San Francisco Art Institute, Michigan State University, and Parsons Fine Arts. She is currently an Andrew W. Mellon Fellow / Assistant Professor at Brown University and lives and works in New York City.