Run and Tell That! New Work from New York

Run and Tell That! New Work from New York presents, for the first time in Syracuse, recent and new work by twenty-one young New York City artists. Included in the exhibition’s wide array of media are several installation pieces created specifically for the SUArt Galleries. The show examines recent conceptual and aesthetic trends affecting today’s artists.

Synonymous with “spread the word,” Run and Tell That! is a phrase attributed to Antoine Dodson of Huntsville, AL, whose flamboyant July 28, 2010 television interview following the failed sexual assault on his sister, quickly became an internet sensation. The phrase has since been integrated into contemporary vernacular; a phenomenon that could only happen now, in a time when information is digested and distributed constantly via the World Wide Web. The artists in Run and Tell That! incorporate this wide spectrum of media into a conceptual focus that characterizes this younger generation.

Painters Kamrooz Aram, Steven Charles, Aaron Johnson, Liz Markus, Tom Sanford, Ryan Schneider and Aya Uekawa use personal experience, art history, abstraction, and social commentary to keep the medium fresh and relevant. Sculpture becomes a widely encompassing term as pieces by Robert Lazzarini, Diana Al-Hadid, Will Ryman and Ethan Greenbaum broaden the definition. In the series of thirteen screenprints entitled Ars Magica, William Powhida continues his astute satirization of the art world by likening its practices to sorcery and in the Mother Goddess series, Turkish photographer Pinar Yolacan examines pre-Neolithic deity figures that were the archetype of beauty in her geographic region thousands of years ago.

Site-specific installations include a first-time collaboration between Ethan Greenbaum and Adam Krueger; Valerie Hegarty’s dynamic wall-length installation in which a tree grows out of the wall and destroys an idyllic landscape painting by Thomas Moran; Virginia Overton’s minimal trompe l’oeil construction using only eight-foot 2 x 4’s and two facing sheets of mirrored plexiglas; Vlatka Horvat’s repurposed ceiling fan and aluminum ladder; and individual projects by Wade Kavanaugh and Stephen B. Nguyen whose monumental collaborative installation White Stag, 2010 is currently on view at Mass MoCA.

Also in the exhibition is Rashaad Newsome: Video and Performance, 2005-2010, an intimate retrospective of the artist's multi-media work exploring innovative forms of communication and expression in contemporary African American urban culture. This work was recently featured in the 2010 Whitney Biennial and in Greater New York 2010 at the PS1 Contemporary Arts Center, Long Island City, NY.