Raquel Albarran, The Latin Horse with Human Meatball Toes, 2017, Colored pencil on paper, 19 x 24 inches, all images courtesy SUMMERTIME.
Sophie Larrimore, Red Hand, 2019, Acrylic and roll-a-tex on linen over wood panel, 12 x 9 inches
Aurie Ramirez, Untitled, 2014, Watercolor on paper, 22 x 30 inches
SUMMERTIME, the latest forward-thinking initiative spearheaded by arts professionals coming from progressive art studios, opened on December 13th in Brooklyn. In addition to inclusive gallery programming, this non-profit collective aims to cultivate a communal space for contemporary artists with developmental disabilities to create work alongside artists without. Its inaugural exhibition Footnote brings together a selection of works by Raquel Albarran, Hope Esser, Austin Furtak-Cole, Raina Hamner, Camille Holvoet, Sophie Larrimore, Misleidys Francisca Castillo Pedroso, and Aurie Ramirez. Rather than just coexisting, these idiosyncratic drawings and paintings appear to belong together. Unabashedly personal, Footnote presents a lively conversation between artists with shared interests, accentuated by feel-good color palettes and subject matter leaning toward the optimistic and pleasurable. In the dead of winter, SUMMERTIME anticipates those sunny days at the beach ahead.
Co-founders Sophia Cosmadopoulos and Anna Schechter recently shared more with us about their exciting new endeavor.
Disparate Minds: You’ve come together to co-found SUMMERTIME by “parallel paths”, while offering different perspectives. Much like Sophia, we entered the disability field through the intersection of contemporary art and progressive art studios. Anna, we understand that you recently became a licensed clinical social worker. Can you talk a bit about your human services background and how you initially began working with art studios? How long have you known each other and what motivated this collaboration?
Sophia: My first experience in a progressive art studio was a winter internship at Creativity Explored in San Francisco. It changed my life.
Anna and I met in 2013. I was an Art Studio Coordinator at Pure Vision Arts in Manhattan, she approached me to collaborate on the group exhibition, Any Colour You Like, at then Weird Days (now SUMMERTIME) in Williamsburg.
Anna: I fell in love with the world of Progressive Art Studios during a college internship at Spindleworks in Brunswick, Maine. It was clear to me Spindleworks was having a profound impact on the artists involved as well as the local community and graduate school offered an opportunity to study the how and why of positive change. I met Sophia in New York while studying social work and the rest is in some ways history.
DM: Integration is a complex and increasingly discussed issue in the progressive art studio movement. These studios affect a form of integration that surpasses most service providers by creating visibility for artists in their communities and the broader art community. At the same time, however, progressive art studios still operate in the “segregated site” model in which they originated. In what ways are you approaching this issue through SUMMERTIME? For you, what constitutes integration?
Sophia: Since the first progressive art studio opened in the 1970s, they have provided a historically underserved and isolated population much needed access to supplies, space, community and recognition. Studios have changed the lives of its artists, its staff, its visitors and collectors. Studios like Creative Growth in California and LAND in New York have paved the way in their programming. Through SUMMERTIME, we hope to expand and modify these models, bringing artists together based on their interests to make work and not solely their diagnosis. We hope to help build a strong community of artists that make and show work outside of a typical “outsider” setting.
Anna: Inclusion is a giant part of SUMMERTIME’s mission. Bringing diverse voices and perspectives together is essential for the art world and for all humanity. The ways in which we approach inclusion will be directed by SUMMERTIME artists — where artists want to work, who they want to exhibit with, and what is most important to them. SUMMERTIME provides opportunities for artists to connect with one another based on shared passions, rather than a shared DSM diagnosis.
DM: Can you talk more about the inspiration for Footnote and the process of selecting these particular artists?
Sophia: The idea for Footnote came about when I was looking at the work of some of my favorite artists, Raquel Albarran and Austin Furtak-Cole, and I realized they both share a similar adoration for extremities. I then started seeing hands and feet everywhere. I like the idea that hands, in particular, are what we use to introduce ourselves to others. They are sensory, they receive and give pleasure. Our feet guide us through the world. It was fun for me to see how this group of artists dealt with those themes in their own aesthetic language.
Anna: What I love most about my job is running with whatever an artists’ passion may be. When Sophia suggested the idea of a hands and feet show I was all in. Much like Sophia, I began to recognize these forms everywhere. When I couldn’t sleep, I googled JELLO molds in the shape of hands and feet (if anyone needs one, I now own quite a few!). This theme began quite literal and was abstracted by the varied significance these body parts play for each artist and each viewer. There’s beauty in the way everyday body parts become a vessel for individualized meaning.
Austin Furtak-Cole, Exploratory, 2018, Flashe on paper, 24 x 24 inches
From SUMMERTIME on Footnote:
Our hands and feet extend out from the core of our bodies and into the world, making first contact with the people and places that define our lives. We reach out to others as a means of introduction, to gauge something’s temperature or texture, and to perform the most loving or mundane tasks of human existence. Our feet—the subject of both folklore and fetish—ground us within our environments and guide us both to and around each other. The palms we extend to strangers are sometimes believed to bear maps of our lives, both past and future, while the soles of our feet are said to provide insight into the interiors of our bodies.
The stories we tell about our extremities are evident in artistic representation throughout the ages. The history of art is filled with portraits in which a disembodied hand serves as surrogate for the work’s subject. Feet gesture towards symbols of prosperity, luck, mourning and sex. The works in Footnote inevitably evoke the layered meanings we attach to these appendages, but also encourage us to think beyond conventional paradigms. Misleidys Pedroso’s cut-and-taped paper foot and Hope Esser’s clear acrylic hand remind us of the bodies they were once attached to. Austin Furtak-Cole’s fleshy tableaus and Aurie Ramirez’s anthropomorphic nail art underscore the tacit ways our appendages frequently do a lot of the talking. Raina Hamner’s ominous hands rain down from the sky and yank us into the abyss. Grotesque or gothic, amputated or augmented, the hands and feet on display within Footnote present tactile experience as an idiosyncratic and nuanced form of knowledge—one that not only connects our bodies to our environment and to others, but which also allows us to imagine bodies, and the environments they inhabit, otherwise.
Footnote continues through March 9th at SUMMERTIME, 145 Ainslie Street, Brooklyn, NY.
Misleidys Francisca Castillo Pedroso, Untitled, 2010, Gouache on paper, 11 x 17 inches