Curated online resource for contemporary art

  • Since the fall of 2010, Culturehall has shared the work of four artists every season through our New Artists Features. Each quarterly issue brings together artists working in a wide variety of disciplines selected from our open call for applications. For the first issue of the New Year I am honored to present a selection of artists who touch upon location, time and memory through painting, photography, sculpture and public interventions. Please join me in welcoming Culturehall's newest members: Erin Hunt, Patricia Voulgaris, Suzanne Torres and Devin Balara.

    Based on the Newfoundland Island of Fogo, Erin Hunt creates intimate artworks that bring together moments and details. Appearing as abstraction, her paintings are rooted in the objects and images of her surroundings. E. Gray, like many of Erin's works, functions in the space of collage while existing in paint. Arriving at the idea for a painting is an iterative process that many times flows between media. The kernel of E. Gray is a watercolor painting created by the artist's daughter in her studio, which spawned a quick drawing by Erin on paper. Only sometime later, after being observed next to another artwork by happenstance, did the idea for the painting become fully revealed.

    In her recent series Fragments, Patricia Voulgaris presents inky darkness ceding to shining forms. Often these elemental parts crystalize — presenting iconic moments between the body and an indefinite, almost tumbling environments. Each scene stems from reconstructing and dismantling personal memories for the camera. Graphic negative spaces that spark flickerings of the past are brought to life with the traditional materials of a model, paper, and lights. Through their common materiality, depictions of the paper act as an agent for the physicality of the print. Blurring the boundaries of subject and medium as the two intertwine.

    Suzanne Torres' sculptural work Gray Frame exists for the space and time it defines. Hundreds of individual forms are brought together to traverse a long span between two timber pillars of what was once an old lumber factory. Rhomboidal geometry joins floor to wall to ceiling as one. Unlike the surroundings Gray Frame engages, by nature of its construction in fragile unfired ceramic sheets, the work is imminently transitory in nature. Literally built of air-dried clay, the architecturally scaled form ultimately is recycled to create something new. The conversation between the object and its home negotiates each entity's existence by comparing a lifetime composed of days with that of years.

    The series Greening is part of an ongoing body of work by Devin Balara that considers the relationship of nature and domestication in Southern suburban spaces. Taking place over the course of a week, each image documents the installation of $1,000 worth of common household rugs in publicly accessible spaces around Greensboro, North Carolina. The carpet patchworks overtook roadway medians, blacktop parking lots, outdoor stairs and other territory around town. Once completed, the merchandise was returned, with no questions asked, to the nearby chain stores from where it was purchased. While a gesture towards nature, the green patches are ultimately a rescission, collapsing mediated landscapes into domestic interiors through the ever-growing legacy of manufacturing and commerce.

    David Andrew Frey is a New York-based artist, curator, and technologist. He founded Culturehall to connect artists with curators and their peers. Recently David launched ArtMgt, a platform for providing artists with opportunities to create income through the enjoyment of their work. David earned an MFA in Studio Art from the University of Illinois at Chicago. He has also studied at the Camberwell College of Art in London, the Hochschule der Künste in Berlin, The University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, and the Savannah College of Art and Design. He has curated exhibitions in New York of work by Culturehall artists for Ligne Roset, Cindy Rucker Gallery and the Big Screen Plaza.

  • About Culturehall

    Culturehall is a curated online resource for contemporary art where selected artists can share their work with curators, gallerists, collectors and other artists. We provide free artist portfolios with an easy to use set of web-based tools to make presenting art online simple and efficient. Our community of artists consists primarily of MFA graduates, arts professionals and teaching artists. Membership is available by invitation or application.

  • Applications close February 26th

  • New York art events list via Artcards.cc
  • Culturehall 6th Anniversary Artist - Where are the now?

    Culturehall is thrilled to celebrate its sixth anniversary and the global community of artists and curators who have contributed to our growing online resource for contemporary art.

    In the summer of 2008, David Andrew Frey founded Culturehall as a new way for artists to connect with curators, gallerists, collectors, and other artists. Culturehall has been honored to witness the outstanding achievements of artists whose work has been featured in our issues during the past six years. We would like to take this opportunity to recognize some of the many remarkable accomplishments by artists within the community.

    The 2009 feature issue Framed by Nina Büsing Corvallo brought together four female photographers, including LaToya Ruby Frazier and Tiana Markova-Gold, whose work examines theoretical, political, social, and personal issues. LaToya's documentary photography about her hometown, Braddock, Pennsylvania, received critical acclaim during the 2012 Whitney Biennial, and her solo exhibition, A Haunted Capital, is currently on view at the Brooklyn Museum. Tiana was a 2010 New York Foundation for the Arts Fellow in Photography, as well as a 2010 recipient, with writer Saran Dohrmann, of the Dorothea Lange — Paul Taylor Prize from the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University for their on-going collaboration about prostitution and the marginalization of women in Morocco. This work was recently presented in a solo exhibition at the Camera Club of New York as the culmination of Tiana's 2012 Darkroom Residency.

    Kelli Connell and Debbie Grossman, two featured artists who digitally alter images to re-imagine gender roles and identity, were included in After Photoshop: Manipulated Photography in the Digital Age at the Metropolitan Museum of Art this past year. Also a recent MacDowell Colony Fellow, Kelli was featured in Other Places, an issue about different generations of international artists whose photographic work explores gender and sexuality. Other artists in this issue, including Doug Ischar, were part of a group show guest curated by Tema Stauffer at the Camera Club of New York in 2011. Doug's Marginal Waters series documenting a gay beach in Chicago in the mid-eighties was recently on view at Gallery 44 Centre for Contemporary Photography in Toronto and featured in the Guardian Weekend Magazine.

    Among a long list of gallery exhibitions of work by Culturehall artists in New York City, Higher Pictures included work by four featured artists — Artie Vierkant, Jessica Eaton, Letha Wilson, and Joshua Citarella — in the group show, Photography Is, in 2012. Artie, Jessica, and Letha also each had solo shows at Higher Pictures in the last two years. Letha's new series of photo-based sculptures examining the magnetic pull of the American West was recently exhibited in her solo show, Landmarks and Monuments, at Art in General. Cultured Stone, a solo show of work by another featured artist Ethan Greenbaum, was presented at Theirry Goldberg Gallery in 2012.

    This spring in Chicago, conceptual artist Jason Lazarus's Chicago Works was installed in two separate areas of the Museum of Contemporary Art. His installation of work from Michael Jackson Memorial Procession is included in a group show, Love to Love You, at MASS MoCA, bringing together artists who explore the notion of being a fan as an opportunity for shared social experience and extreme personal obsession.

    Constant Dullart's solo show Jennifer in Paradise opens at Import Projects in Berlin in September 2013. Featured in Being There by Jenny Jaskey, Constant also participated in an event at the New Museum in 2012 in which he released a series of works in response to the new Terms of Service conditions of several Internet services. Photographic portraits shot in Vietnam by Jamie Maxtone-Graham were shown at the Nooderlicht International Photofestival 2012 in the Netherlands this past fall. In Paris, featured artist Jo-ey Tang was selected to curate a group exhibition Forming Loss in Darkness at Praz-Delavallade as part of young curator season of Palais de Tokyo that opened in June 2013. The works in the exhibition set an alternative mise-en-scene of the rarely screened silent super-8 film Beautiful People (1998) by David Wojnarowicz, tracking the journey from slumber to death, with the history of material as a form of narrative.

    Jesper Norda's recent video and sound piece, Right Hand-Left Hand, was installed in three adjacent rooms at the Gothenburg Museum of Art in Sweden. Culturehall highlighted The Centre of Silence, an earlier sound installation at the Kalmar Museum, in our New Artists Feature, Spring 2012. A Swedish artist living in Berlin, Erik Bünger will exhibit work in a group show opening at the Gothenburg Museum in September, Nyförvärv, displaying work the museum has purchased in recent years.

    One of the artists selected for our New Artists Feature, Spring 2011, Sarah Palmer received the 2011 Aperture Portfolio Prize. A solo show of her photographic series, As A Real House, was presented by Aperture Gallery in Fall 2012. Featured in Traces along with three other women artists, Corinne May Botz was recently awarded a New York Film and Video Grant from the Jerome Foundation. The grant will fund an experimental video that will use the construction/deconstruction of a standardized patient simulation to explore empathy and the performative aspect of doctor-patient encounters.

    Featured photographers Juliana Beasley and Christoph Gielen received Aaron Siskind Foundation Individual Photographer's Fellowships in 2009 and 2010, respectively. Sasha Rudensky, whose work was included earlier this year in Scout by Jacob Rhodes, recently received one of six fellowships granted in 2013.

    Part of what made it possible for Culturehall to feature the work of this diverse and accomplished community of artists were the insights of exceptional guest curators from around the world. Culturehall has reached out to dynamic figures who shape the arts — such as curators, writers, poets, educators, artists, and gallerists — to invite them to share artists with our audience and to write essays about their work based on a curatorial theme. We've collaborated with guest curators in over twenty cities including New York, Los Angeles, Berlin, Paris, Moscow, and Mexico City.

    Culturehall would like to thank all of the guest curators who have contributed to the site: David B. Smith (28/73/91), Jordan Tate (32/62), Ruben Natal-San Miguel (34), Nina Büsing Corvallo & Candace Gottschalk (35), Erin Sickler (36), Ian Cofré (37), Leeza Meksin (39/49), Shane Lavalette (40), Zeina Assaf (41), Elissa Levy (42), Alex Ebstein & Seth Adelsberger (44/72), Matt Olson (46), Melissa Levin (48/64), Emily Carter (50), Tracy Candido (51) & Chelsea Haines (51/79), Allison Browning (52), Debora Kuan (53), Silke Bitzer (55), Jenny Jaskey (56), Ethan Greenbaum (57), Amy Fung (59), Jo-ey Tang (61), Howard Hurst (66), Oliver Wise & Eleanor Hanson Wise (67), Amy Elkins (68), Corinna Kirsch (71), Tucker Neel (75), Anna Knoebel & Tess Knoebel (76), Lauren van Haaften-Schick (78/82), Sean Justice (80), Gerardo Contreras (83), Helen Homan Wu (85), Yulia McCutcheon & Dasha Kutasina (86), Pauline Magnenat (88), Legacy Russell (89), Elly Clarke (92), Jacob Rhodes (94), Elizabeth White (95), Cindy Rucker & Brad Silk (97), Keri Oldham (98), and Abigail Smithson (100).

    Thank you also to all of the artists who have shared their work on Culturehall and to our friends and supporters. We look forward to building new relationships and featuring more exceptional artists in the years ahead.


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