CONTEXT NEW YORK Art Fair

Gina Adams, Nancy Cohen, Judy Pfaff & Marie Watt

May 3-7, 2017
VIP reception Wed May 3 - 2pm to 5pm

BOOTH C200
55th Street and West Side Highway
Pier 94, New York, NY 10019
 
Building on their ongoing program, Accola Griefen will highlight important American and Native American women artists.

Marie Watt is an American artist and a member of the Seneca Nation of Indians. Her work draws from history, biography, Iroquois protofeminism, and Indigenous principles. Blankets, one of her primary materials, are everyday objects that can carry extraordinary histories of use. In her tribe and other Indigenous communities, blankets are given away to honor those who are witness to important life events. Accola Griefen will exhibit some of her larger works which are made in “sewing circles,” participatory public events in which storytelling around the table plays an important role. Watt holds an MFA in Painting and Printmaking from Yale University, attended the Institute of American Indian Arts. Selected collections include the National Gallery of Canada, The Smithsonian institution’s National Museum of the American Indian, The Tacoma Art Museum, Facebook, The Seattle Art Museum, and Library of Congress. In 2015 she exhibited at SITE Santa Fe, and in 2016 was commissioned by the United States State Department’s Art in Embassies program to build a 36’ tall sculpture to be permanently installed in the newly expanded US Embassy in Islamabad, Pakistan. Her work is courtesy of PDX.

Gina Adams is a descendent of both indigenous (Ojibwe) and colonial Americans. Her cross-media work in sculpture, ceramics, printmaking and drawing is informed by extensive research into Native American history, cultural artifacts and stories. Sculptures with encaustic in the forms of basketballs from the Honoring Modern Unidentified will be exhibited along with related works on paper. For this series of ceramic works, Adams draws on cultural practices passed down from her ancestors as well as on family history of forced assimilation. Adams’ work is exhibited extensively throughout the US and resides in many public and private collections. Recent exhibitions include: Stands With A Fist at the Museum of Contemporary Native American Art in New Mexico; Survival/Zhaabwiiwin at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts in Nebraska and the Institute of Contemporary Art in Portland, Maine; and a solo exhibit at the Heard Museum in December 2014. In March 2017 her work was featured in articles in Hyperallergic and the Huffington Post.

Since the 1970’s Judy Pfaff is broadly acclaimed for her pioneering work in the genre of installation as well as sculpture and richly layered works on paper. Both of the later materials/genres will be represented in Accola Griefen’s booth.  Her groundbreaking, large scale print work will also be included. Pfaff has received many awards, including the Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Sculpture Center, the Guggenheim Fellowship and one of the highest honors possible, the MacArthur Foundation “Genius” Award.  This April 2017 she receives the prestigious Greenburg Award from Art Omi. Her work is in many important museum collections including the Brooklyn Museum, Detroit Institute of Art, The High Museum of Art, MoMA, National Museum of Women in the Arts, and the Whitney Museum of American Art,

Nancy Cohen is widely known for her experimental works with hand-made paper and large-scale sculptural installations, many of which also include glass, cement and rubber elements. Cohen's recent traveling exhibit, Hackensack Dreaming, was reviewed in Sculpture Magazine and was selectioned as top exhibitions of the fall by Interior Design Magazine. Cohen’s work is in the permanent collections of the NJ State Museum, the Zimmerli Museum, the Montclair Art Museum, and Yale University Art Museum among others.