Generated through interweaving narratives from the news, historical events, his imagination, and personal memories, William Tyler’s fantastically inventive drawings are abundant with distinctive imagery ranging from the everyday to the magical. Having maintained a creative practice in Creative Growth’s Oakland studio since November of 1977, Tyler has produced an extensive and complex body of work spanning forty years.
Read MoreErnie Titus
Titus’ work is divergent from traditional concepts of drawing in that the element of mask-making is central to his execution. Rather than creating sculptural paper masks, Titus instead uses the process and materials of drawing to engage the paper, resulting in a two-dimensional object with a compelling language of drawing - agile lines articulated in his distinct hand…
Read MoreByron Smith: Cover Girls at Institute 193
Byron Smith’s Cover Girls offers earnest and adoring tributes to glamorous movie, TV, and music industry icons. Smith’s drawings are typified by a hyperbolic allure, with an archetypal framework revealed collectively throughout the portrait series; this becomes most evident in simplified yet distinctive feminine features - elongated eyelashes radiating outward from almond-shaped lids, cherry red lacquered fingernails and lips, pronounced cupid’s bows, and wide, toothy grins....
Read MoreDontavius Woody
We recently traveled to MAKE, a Baltimore progressive art studio; Dontavious Woody is one of the artists we were most interested in meeting, struck by his compelling works on paper that convey an enduring fondness for humanity.
Read MoreTerri Bowden
In her boldly marked drawings, Terri Bowden portrays the figures as if they are intense, strikingly present memories - fleshy and visceral in some aspects, but broadly summarized, distorted, and surreal in others. Faces are rendered with a realism and clarity that evokes vulnerability, re-contextualizing familiar icons of distant pop culture with a mysterious, untold narrative. Bowden’s work achieves the uncommon combination of dreaminess and gritty power reminiscent of Philip Guston. Recent exhibitions include Vis-à-vis curated by Michael Mahalchick at Andrew Edlin Gallery (New York) and stARTup Fair (San Francisco); her work will also be included in the upcoming exhibition Indigo Mind at StoreFrontLab (San Francisco).
Bowden works at Creative Growth's studio in Oakland, California; from Creative Growth:
"Terri’s whimsical and quirky sense of humor is delightfully evident in her artwork. Having befriended other albinos–who, like herself, are legally blind–Terri often uses albino animals and people as the subject of her drawings. Whether it’s reimagining Led Zeppelin’s Robert Plant, pop music icon Michael Jackson, or a nondescript winking punk rocker, Terri’s ability to capture the nuances of human expression exceeds far beyond the photos she uses as reference. Her fixation on albinism extends to ceramics as well, with her pigmentless fruit, Hershey’s kisses, cookies, rabbits and ducks, all executed in the same whitish pink palette that appears in her drawings." (more)