A weird kind of awe for graffiti

The Baltimore Sun

In the postmodern era, street culture is the most invigorating influence on American painting, and graffiti artists are the new avant-garde.

That, at least, seems to be the idea behind the paintings of Carl Thurman and others in the uneven but lively group show, Anonymous Rage, at Sub-Basement Artist Studios on Howard Street. The exhibition is an off-site venue for this year's Artscape, Baltimore's annual outdoor arts festival that opens Friday.

Most of the show's seven artists began as graffiti taggers who later received formal training in art or as art school students who took up graffiti as an extension of their training.

Their work spans a remarkable range of individual styles. The show includes painting, sculpture and installation, which also suggests that graffiti can be exceedingly versatile.

Thurman writes that graffiti expresses the disorientation of a generation of artists who were left stranded by the collapse of modernism's sense of certainty and basic optimism.

"The modern era's focus on moving into the future and ... away from the past has created a generation that feels detached and struggling to find relevance," he writes.

"For the last 20 or 30 years some of the most creative, powerful and relevant painting has been done by underground graffiti artists ... [who] have created their own traditions, methods and aesthetic."

Whether one agrees with Thurman's analysis, many of the show's works are powerful enough to convince people that graffiti art is more than a fad.

Thurman's painting of a potted plant on a table, for example, calls to mind the passionate mark-making of van Gogh's flowers and the visual exaggeration of comic books and graphic novels. You almost expect it to have a speech balloon above it that says, "Pow!"

It's over the top and kind of tasteless, but like graffiti scribbled 200 feet overhead on the side of a seemingly inaccessible highway overpass, it also inspires a weird kind of awe.

The show also includes elegant found-object sculpture by Emily C-D, paintings by Kelly Towles that burst through their nominal frames and spill down the walls behind them, Chris LaVoie's slacker sculpture made from office furniture, and Alicia Cosnahan's delightfully off-kilter fashion illustrations for a fictitious line of clothing and cosmetics.

Anonymous Rage runs through Aug. 31 at Sub-Basement Artist Studios, 118 N. Howard St. Call 410-659-6950 or go to sbastudios.com.

'Strength & Grace'

Gallery G at the Beveled Edge, formerly in Mount Washington, moved this year to Hampden's Rotunda, where it has reconstituted itself as a venue for poetry readings and musical events, as well as a visual arts exhibition space.

The current show, Strength & Grace, presents two sculptors whose efforts are both worth a second look.

Kini Collins' images of pigeons and other urban birds are clever and touching. Collins makes sculptures of the birds by bending wire mesh sheets into avian shapes over an armature held in her lap. Next, the mesh is painted with acrylics and lemon juice and then set on fire (caution: first remove from lap). The fired pieces are then mounted on small wooden pedestals with lengths of spiky barbed wire.

Collins' pieces are magical, as are her mixed-media paintings of birds, also on display.

June Rutledge Heintz makes modernist-inspired abstract ceramic sculptures that often involve images of mother and child. Her heavy stoneware pieces, which recall Modigliani and Brancusi, are formally sophisticated evocations of an age-old theme executed in a classic 20th-century style that will always be in fashion.

Strength & Grace runs through July 31 at Gallery G in the Rotunda, 711 W. 40th St. Call 410-235-9060 or go to thebevelededge.com.

glenn.mcnatt@baltsun.com

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