The Homeless by Pat Berger
Los Angeles-based artist Pat Berger’s poignant paintings of homelessness were originally inspired by her visit to a food and shelter outreach for the homeless in downtown L.A. around Christmas 1985.
What followed that eye-opening experience were at least five years of activism and a series of 35 paintings and lithographs intended to raise awareness about the plight of the homeless – many of whom shared their stories with Berger.
Her works on the homeless have since been exhibited in venues as different as homeless shelters, universities, museums and even California’s State Capitol Building in Sacramento.
Twelve of Berger’s homeless series paintings are now in the permanent collection of the Karpeles Manuscript Library Museum in Buffalo, N.Y. Another painting is in the permanent collection of Los Angeles’ Skirball Cultural Center.
In Central California, Berger’s work was displayed in 2009-10 at the Bakersfield Museum of Art in an exhibit called “No Place to Go: Paintings of the Homeless.” Berger’s exhibit was one of five homelessness-focused shows happening concurrently, including the main exhibit, “Hobos to Street People: Artists’ Responses to Homelessness from the New Deal to the Present.”
-Louis Medina
EARTH RHYTHMS by Betty Green
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Betty Green is a fine artist whose work has been exhibited in galleries and museums in Los Angeles, New York and Chicago. Green attended Cornell University and UCLA, where she studied painting under Richard Diebenkorn. In addition to painting, Ms. Green has worked as a graphic designer and is the winner of a Primetime Emmy Award for title design, as well as the recipient of an International Clio Award. She has created signature openings for many television and motion picture projects. Her contributions to the arts also include the development of an after school Art Enrichment Program at the Neighborhood Youth Association in Venice, California. She was
awarded The Certificate of Tribute – Accomplishments in the Arts by the City of Los Angeles for her work with these children. Green currently works in her Santa Monica studio where she experiments with a variety of mixed media techniques to create her canvases.
ARTIST STATEMENT
Betty Green’s mixed media series entitled Earth Rhythms presents a series of paintings inspired by the undulating patterns in nature and the pulsing energy connecting all living forms. Using natural and man-made materials, her canvases are layered with heavily textured materials such as sand, cord, wood scraps, steel wool, straw, and wire mesh to create an energetic surface. Color, applied by brush and palette knife, furthers the feeling of vitality. The combined effect creates a visceral liveliness, as shifting patterns play with our inclination to see recognizable objects in abstract shapes. Green’s paintings seek to create excitement and beauty on a tactile and emotional level. Her hope is that viewers will study her artwork and make their own discoveries and connections.
Click here to learn more about Betty Green.
New Cuts
by Corrie Siegel
“Wherever the relevance of speech is at stake, matters become political by definition,
for speech is what makes man a political being” - Hannah Arendt
New Cuts is an exhibition of flat and sculptural works created from single sheets of paper. Alternately delicate and spiked, the works are formed by overlaid matrixes of texts that are incised to obscure the original message and reveal a pattern composed of symbols. Each piece is built from statements made during the rise of the Third Reich or the Trump Administration. Through the form of a traditional paper-cut; these loaded texts are abstracted into jagged landscapes and fragile lace.
Corrie Siegel is a Los Angeles based multimedia artist who has exhibited nationally and internationally. Mining individual and collective histories, she uses labor intensive approaches to occupy a position between objectivity and interpretation. Her projects have been profiled in the Los Angeles Times, Mousse Magazine, Droste Effect, and Flash Art International. Siegel is currently an Armory Fellow, she was also awarded a Word Grant, Dream Lab Fellowship, Culture Lab Fellowship, and Six Points Fellowship. She is the director of the artist run gallery and community space Actual Size Los Angeles. Actual Size collaborates with established and emerging artists to animate the exhibition experience and engage the public. She received her BFA from Bard College and is currently pursuing an MFA with a concentration in Curatorial and Critical Studies from University of California, Irvine.
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