Online via Zoom. See the newsletter or contact Megan M for details on how to join. Guest ARE welcome!
Social time from 7-7:30. We will meeting in small breakout groups which will get mixed up every ~10 minutes.
Program starts at 7:30. April program will be portrait weaver Cyndy Barbone. Cyndy Barbone is an artist based in Greenwich, New York, where she lives and maintains a studio. Working primarily on the handloom, she creates figurative work, inscribing her woven textiles with images that are personal yet have cultural or political references. For her, weaving has been a metaphor for the creation of something other than just cloth, whether a moment or a narrative.
Artist Statement
At the beginning of the pandemic and continuing through April and May, I wove the portraits of my nieces, who are nurses, wearing their hospital scrubs and masks. These portraits were consistent with the work I had been doing since 2018 and these earlier portraits were exhibited in the 2020 Mohawk-Hudson Regional Invitational at Albany Center Gallery. Two hours after I delivered my work, the gallery closed its doors and the exhibition was only viewed virtually.
As fatalities in New York continued to rise in unfathomable numbers, I wanted to do something that would commemorate those lost to the pandemic and also comment on what that number of 32,350 (when I began) would look like in a visual form. The process of weaving for me is a documentation of time, as one works row by row, almost as if breathing in and out. The state flower of New York is the rose and in traditional overshot weaving there are rose motifs found among these patterns. Thus the idea to weave 32,350 plus roses in fabric form was begun. (The number of fatalities as of March 5, 2021 is 47,565)
Overshot patterns were brought to North America by immigrants and their extensive development as a form of design and expression was fostered by hand-weavers in the United States starting in the early 1800s and continuing into the early 20th century. Now that the US tops the world in coronavirus cases and deaths, it seems fitting to weave my “roses” in a weave structure that gained a place in history once it came to the US. It is this process that fills my days and at the same time keeps me in the moment.
This artwork, titled, A Rose is a Rose is a Rose, is comprised of lengths of hand-woven white And black fabric hung side by side on the wall. Each length of fabric contains a count of roses based on the fatality rate in New York State taken from data found on the New York Times website. Starting on March 14, 2020, when the first Covid-19 deaths were reported, the roses are large. As the daily deaths increase, the roses become increasingly smaller, the fabric wider to accommodate the number of people lost to this virus in any given day. I hope the beauty & history of the weave structure, the simplicity of the black & white, and the enormity of the work will come together and show the number of Covid-19 deaths in New York State to be more than just an abstract number that we are becoming immune to.