Brenda Zlamany

July 10th to September 18th

Open by appointment

The Re Institute is pleased to present an exhibition of Brenda Zlamany’s Itinerant Portraitist Project in the main gallery and a selection of her oil paintings of birds in the smaller gallery.

In 2011 Brenda Zlamany began a multi-year project called The Itinerant Portraitist, in which she explores the constructive effects of portraiture in communities around the globe. The first chapter entailed a journey throughout Taiwan, during which she painted 888 portraits of indigenous inhabitants. Subsequent chapters of The Itinerant Portraitist have involved portraits of girls in an orphanage in the United Arab Emirates, taxicab drivers in Cuba, artists in Brooklyn, elderly and disabled adults in a nursing home in the Bronx, people affected by climate change in various locations throughout the United States, visitors to the King Abdulaziz Camel Festival in the Dahna Desert of Saudi Arabia, and, most recently, socially distanced mask wearers in New York. So far Zlamany has completed over 2000 portraits with The Itinerant Portraitist. A selection from each chapter will be exhibited at the Re Institute, along with a digital presentation, and a screening of her 20-minute documentary 100/100 ITINERANT PORTRAITIST from 2019. During the Upstate Art Weekend and at other times, Zlamany will be in the gallery painting visitors who have scheduled sittings. These portraits will become part of the exhibition and be added to the collection of people wearing masks in the time of COVID 19.

Work Statement: Iconography is powerful. It affects how people see themselves and one another, consciously and unconsciously. Encouraging populations to examine and control how they are depicted can lead to empathy and can open channels of communication. To explore this idea through portraiture, I created an ongoing, multi-year project called The Itinerant Portraitist. In this project, I travel the globe to explore the positive effects of painted portraiture. After each excursion, I create a multimedia installation to share my discoveries with the public.

In each chapter of The Itinerant Portraitist, I work with the local community to choose portrait subjects and work sites. Each day I invite two to six people to sit for watercolor portraits that I paint from direct observation using the camera lucida, a device for drawing dating back to the Renaissance that David Hockney introduced to me in 1989. Stories are at the heart of The Itinerant Portraitist. Because I work with the sketchbook lying flat, sitters observe their image as it emerges on the page and guide the painting verbally and nonverbally. Conversation is encouraged, and the connection that the subjects form with me during the portrait process helps them reveal themselves and explore their own narratives. Each painting takes forty minutes to an hour. At the end of a session, I photograph the subject presenting his or her portrait. The resulting photographs, used in installations and to create community on social media, are artworks as much as the watercolors are. Portrait sessions and the sites themselves are filmed, audio-recorded, or otherwise noted for use in a final presentation.

Cultural Statement: Reinvigorating portraiture has been the aim of my work since my first portrait exhibition, in 1994. In 2011 I received a Fulbright Fellowship for the inaugural chapter of The Itinerant Portraitist, entitled “Creating a Portraiture of the Indigenous Inhabitants of Taiwan.” In this excursion, I traveled to thirty-three places in Taiwan and persuaded 888 people from diverse socioeconomic groups to sit for watercolor portraits. These paintings formed the core of a multimedia installation called “888,” which included a documentary video; large-scale projections of subjects presenting their portraits accompanied by Bunan mortar-and-pestle music; a giant, talking, interactive virtual sketchbook of the 888 portraits; and a mural-size map charting the location of each portrait’s production. Subsequent chapters of The Itinerant Portraitist have involved portraits of girls in an orphanage in the United Arab Emirates, taxicab drivers in Cuba, artists in Brooklyn, elderly and disabled adults in a nursing home in the Bronx, people affected by climate change in various locations throughout the United States, visitors to the King Abdulaziz Camel Festival in the Dahna Desert of Saudi Arabia, and, most recently, socially distanced mask wearers in New York. My excursions with The Itinerant Portraitist have put my work before the public at large, involved me in critical social issues, and given me opportunities to collaborate with politicians, community leaders, filmmakers, musicians, and others.

Bio:

Brenda Zlamany is a painter who lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

Since 1982 her work has appeared in over a dozen solo exhibitions—including in New York City at Laurie M. Tisch Gallery (2018), Derfner Judaica Museum + The Art Collection (2017), Taipei Economic and Cultural Office (2012), Jonathan O’Hara Gallery (2007), Galapagos Art and Performance Space (1999), Stux Gallery (1998), Jessica Fredericks Gallery (1996), and E. M. Donahue Gallery (1994, 1992, and 1991) and elsewhere at the Studios of Key West (2019), the Museum of Contemporary Art (Taipei, 2012), Sabine Wachters Fine Arts (Brussels, 1995 and 1994), Galerie Quintessens (Utrecht, 1994), and Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center (Buffalo, 1989)—as well as in many group shows in the United States, Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. Museums that have exhibited her work include the Susquehanna Art Museum (Harrisburg, 2018), the National Portrait Gallery of the Smithsonian Institution (Washington, 2018 and 2006), the National Museum (Gdansk, 2007), the Fine Arts Center, University of Massachusetts, Amherst (2001 and 1995), the Museum of Contemporary Art (Denver, 2002), Museum voor Schone Kunsten (Ghent, 2000), the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art (1999), the Frankfurter Kunstverein (1997), and the New-York Historical Society (1991).

Her work has been reviewed in Artforum, Art in America, ARTnews, Flash Art, the New Yorker, the New York Times, ArtCritical, Artnet, the Taipei Times, and elsewhere and is held in the collections of the Cincinnati Art Museum, Deutsche Bank, the Museum of Modern Art (Houston), the Neuberger Museum of Art, the Virginia Museum of Fine Art, the World Bank, and Yale University. Zlamany has collaborated with authors and editors of the New York Times Magazine on several portrait commissions, including an image of Osama bin Laden for the cover of the September 11, 2005, issue, a portrait of Marian Anderson for an article by Jessye Norman (1996), and a portrait of Jeffrey Dahmer for special issue on evil, illustrated by artists (1995).

Awards she has received include a Peter S. Reed Foundation grant for her project “Climate in America” (2018), a Fulbright Fellowship for “Creating a Portraiture of the Indigenous Inhabitants of Taiwan” (2011), a Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant (2006–07), a New York Foundation for the Arts Artists’ Fellowship in painting (1994), and a Jerome Foundation Fellowship at the Printmaking Workshop, New York City (1981–82). She has had residency fellowships at Denali National Park (2019), Chalk Hill Vineyard (Sonoma, 2019), King Abdulaziz Camel Festival (Riyadh, 2019), ADAH (Abu Dhabi, 2013), Ucross Foundation (1999 and 1987), Yaddo (1997), MacDowell Colony (1995, 1992, and 1986), Triangle Artists’ Workshop (1990), Millay Colony (1988), and elsewhere. Among her public commissions are The Davenport Dining Room Scene (2018), a large-scale group portrait permanently installed in the dining room at Davenport College, Yale University. Her commissioned portrait of Yale’s first seven women PhDs (2015) is permanently installed in the university’s Sterling Memorial Library. She is currently working on a large-scale portrait of five diverse historical women scientists for Rockefeller University, to be unveiled in 2021.

Video: 100/100 ITINERANT PORTRAITIST 2019 20 Minutes In 2017 the Hebrew Home at Riverdale, NY turned 100. Over the course of the year, I painted one hundred residents. One hundred surprising, unique and inspiring stories emerged. Through the collaborative nature of the portrait process, this film focuses on the engagement between artist and subject. Older people in our society are often discarded, their stories unheard. We see in the film that as soon as the paint brushes come out, the conversations start. 100/100 was exhibited at the Derfner Judaica Museum in the Bronx (2017) and at the Laurie M. Tisch Gallery in NYC (2019). 100/100 ITINERANT PORTRAITIST was awarded Best Documentary Short at The 2019 Greenpoint Film Festival. CO-DIRECTORS, Brenda Zlamany/Laure Sullivan. ORIGINAL MUSIC/COMPOSER, Aaron Kernis.