Volume III: JOSH REAMES BRINGS TRIPPER TO CIRCUIT 12

Located in the Dallas Design District, Circuit 12 is run by husband and wife team Dustin & Gina Orlando. The Orlando’s sharp and ever searching eye brings a national and international freshness to a sweltering  arts community that’s thirsty for a new flavor. What sets Circuit 12 apart is what could be thought of as the “cult of color” that the gallery presents.  The space offers a crisp, brash and theatrical flair to a community that, at times, treads lightly. The gallery extends invitations to curators for their Regional Quarterly series that opens the space to experimental exercises from Texas based artists, exposing work that might not otherwise make it to Dallas. For their current show, Circuit 12 mounted Tripper, a solo show from Chicago based artist Josh Reames. The paintings in Tripper flicker light and are full of an absent neon glow that references your local corner stores cheap beer signage. Unlike the trap of a promised R&R scenario that those signs offer, Reames’ work never takes a break. It’s in constant motion and only interrupted by abrupt, painfully ordinary images. In their blatant dumbness the works beg to be dismissed as trite, formulaic approaches to painting. But Reames’ masterful sense of space and line pull these out of the naïve conversation. After recognizing their formal power, the paintings reminded me how Sean Penn’s understanding of his craft allowed for Spicoli to exist. Reames, like Spicoli challenging the oncoming wave, surfs abstraction; “Surfing's not a sport, it's a way of life, it's no hobby. It's a way of looking at that wave and saying, ‘Hey bud, let's party!’" Indeed. - Arthur Peña, Dallas Contributor

Husband and wife collectors and curators, Bernard and Shirley Kinsey, started collecting African American art, manuscripts, and ephemera over forty years ago.  Their passion for this art and the very art of collecting has led to a traveling body of work known as The Kinsey Collection.

One of the places the Collection is currently exhibiting is at Pepperdine University’s Payson Library.  Original artworks, books, paintings, posters, letters, and documents are on display.  The Collection’s motto “Where Art and History Intersect” is quite fitting for many reasons.  At the opening, Shirley Kinsey said that one of the multi-layered goals of the Collection is to “preserve the past for the future,” to help remind people “where you are from and where you are going,” and to assure that viewers know “who you are and whose you are.” – Ellen C. Caldwell, Los Angeles Contributor.

Come and Join Us Brothers: United States Soldiers at Camp William Penn, 1863, Published by the Supervisory Committee for Recruiting Colored Regiments, Courtesy of The Kinsey Collection.

September traditionally marks the beginning of the art season, at least as far as commercial galleries are concerned. As collectors and art world professionals return from summer destinations far and wide, you can feel the art world start to shift into high gear. Not surprisingly, many galleries choose to present shows by their top talent in September, and this year is no exception.

Among the dozens of strong painting exhibitions around the country this month are more than three-dozen shows by New American Paintings’ alumni. We pay careful attention to the careers of our alumni at NAP, and over the past twenty years we have seen a number of them go on to achieve great success, both critically and commercially. Some of our favorites are on view this month.

Internationally acclaimed artists Wendy White and Matthew Day Jackson were both featured in NAP when they were still finishing their graduate school work; be sure to catch their shows at Andrew Rafacz Gallery in Chicago and Hauser & Wirth in New York City, respectively.  Two solid, and in my mind underrated, mid-career painters, John Bankston and Alexis Rockman, have solo shows at Walter Maciel Gallery in Los Angeles and Sperone Westwater in New York City, respectively. If emerging artists are your thing, then don’t miss two of Los Angeles’ hottest artists, Eric Yahnker at Ambach & Rice and Devin Troy Strother at Richard Heller Gallery, or Jeanette Mundt at Clifton Benevento and Andrew Schoultz at Morgan Lehman, both in New York.

A big shout out to one of my favorite cities, Chicago, where I will be heading next week to catch the attempted reboot of Art Chicago in its glory days, Expo Chicago. Those living in Chicago, or visiting this month, have a lot of gallery shows to be excited about. Aside from the aforementioned Wendy White show, don’t miss work by the incredible Bill Traylor at Carl Hammer Gallery, or Rebecca Morris at Corbett vs. Dempsey. One of Chicago’s best known exports, Judy Ledgerwood is also on view at Rhona Hoffman Gallery. - Steven Zevitas, Publisher

Devin Troy Strother, Courtesy of Richard Heller Gallery.

Barry McGee’s recent retrospective highlights a common dilemma in the rising popularity of bringing street art into museums and galleries—namely, how do you capture the ephemeral nature of the work and evoke its urban context in a white cube, and how does the message of the artwork change? The ICA show sought to confront these dilemmas, and the result was a show that revealed itself as an environment more than simply a survey. Replete with floor-to-ceiling wall installations, animatronic sculptures, and a massive totem of 130 television screens, the show drew heavily on McGee’s Bay Area roots and graffiti aesthetic. - Nadiah Fellah, NYC Contibutor (Visiting Boston!)

Barry McGee, Installation view, Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston

For all of you unable to meet the regular deadline for the Northeast Competition because of the holiday, take note that the deadline has been extended.

Artists living in CT, DE, MA, ME, NH, NJ, NY, PA, RI, VT, you can still apply! -

Apply Now!

Extended Deadline:

September 8th at Midnight, EST. GOOD LUCK!

*The late entry fee is $60.

The San Francisco painter Joan Brown achieved international recognition when she was scarcely out of her teens. By 1960, the same year she graduated from the California School of Fine Arts (now SFAI), she was represented by a major New York gallery, and was one of thirty-six artists included in the Whitney’s Young Americans exhibition. But even as she worked in San Francisco among a burgeoning cohort of fellow artists that included Elmer Bischoff, Jay DeFeo and Manuel Neri, Brown’s work developed in the following decades in a way that was distinct from others. Thinly brushed lines of enamel replaced her signature thick oil application, and shifting concerns in composition and tonal contrasts followed. However, themes within her imagery remained consistent even as her style evolved—namely, the reoccurring motif of water. Although many other California-based artists are known for their water-themed works—David Hockney for his swimming pools, and Richard Diebenkorn for his aquatic-framed cityscapes, among others—this running theme throughout Brown’s work is rarely given critical attention in the same way. - Nadiah Fellah, NYC Contributor

Joan Brown, Rio Vista, California, 1971; Courtesy of The Joan Brown Estate

A knockoff usually refers to a copy of a more expensive original, bringing to mind tables of faux designer handbags and leather jackets on street corners. When painter Roger Shimomura creates a knockoff, his is a human version—specifically, a person, or a punch to the face, literally knocking you off. The artist mashes up imagery from American pop icons, Kabuki actors, Korean and Japanese manga characters, Hello Kitty, Lichtenstein-style faces and Chinese propaganda, into in-your-face, self-portrait battles between himself and the stereotypes that portray Asian American people as less valuable citizens, or “American knockoffs,” the title of his new show. These works from 2009-2012 on view at Greg Kucera Gallery in Seattle, WA, continue the battles Shimomura has fought for over four decades, a testament to the persistence of both the artist’s pursuit and the forces he is up against. - Erin Langner, Seattle Contributor

The deadline for the Northeast competition is lingering. Avoid late entry fees and apply now!

Artists living in CT, DE, MA, ME, NH, NJ, NY, PA, RI, VT, this one is for you!

Northern California-based artist Eric TiIlinghast has been working with water for almost two decades. His diverse oeuvre includes ambitious large-scale installations, sculpture, site-specific works, public art commissions and paintings. In his exhibition Water/Nymph, currently on view at Richard Levy Gallery in Albuquerque, Tillinghast offers up 41 re-contextualized vintage postcards. In these works, he identifies the water feature and meticulously paints over the surrounding environments, leaving only the essential shape of the water and the occasional figures. In many cases, his obsessive process requires the application of 50 of more layers of paint to seamlessly blend and cover up the background image, leaving the surface impossibly smooth and almost devoid of the artist’s hand. As Tillinghast explores bodies of water in all forms - swimming pools, lakes, waterfalls, dams, watersheds and tidal flows, what emerges is a meditation of form in both a natural and domestic context. The results of this aesthetic experience offer a sublime contemplation of our perceptions of Earth’s most abundant resource. I recently had the opportunity to ask Tillinghast some questions about his process. -Claude Smith, Albuquerque/Santa Fe Contributor

Eric Tillinghast |Clytie, 2013, acrylic on postcard, 3.5 x 5.5 inches; Image courtesy of Richard Levy Gallery

The New American Paintings, Midwest Issue, #107, is expected to hit newsstands across the US sometime in the next few weeks. Eric Crosby, Assistant Curator at the Walker Art Center, juried the competition. 

You can order the issue here!

After the jump see a full list of the artists selected for the NAP #107 and few sneak peek photos!