Karen Barbour

White Columns is pleased to present a solo exhibition by the Inverness, CA-based artist Karen Barbour. Barbour’s exhibition comprises a group of fifteen figurative and abstract paintings – many of which employ collaged elements, fourteen painted works on paper, and a single painted sculptural bust. All of the works have come to completion during the past two years, but the majority have gestated over a much longer period of time.

Barbour’s works are often deeply personal, incorporating imagery drawn from dreams, the imagination, childhood memories and family folklore. Informed as much by visionary art and architecture as they are by her unabashed embrace of pattern and decoration, narrative forms and illustrative techniques, Barbour’s resulting paintings are at once deeply felt, acutely observed and profoundly idiosyncratic.

Writing frankly about her approach and process Barbour has said: “I have been working on most of these pieces for years, adding to them constantly. I write down thoughts and words – and things that I have read – in notebooks and I sometimes make paintings from them. I have visions where images pop into my head on pretty much a daily basis and I run to make a drawing of them. I constantly see stuff. If I sit down, my eyes start to make patterns and then pictures. If I look at the sky or the floor or a counter or tiles, images start to take shape and it’s very vivid and interesting to me. I immediately draw or paint these images because I tend to forget things very quickly and otherwise, they would disappear. The oil paintings too – they go through a lot of changes. The bigger ones pretty much started out as stacks of ‘parts’, to make a body or whatever, but over many years I would go back into them, continuously adding what was interesting to me at any given moment. It’s exciting to paint over something that already exists. This last year and a half I have started having more piercing visions and I discovered that I have temporal lobe seizures. (It’s okay now and not serious.) Sitting with my 102-year-old father in his last years as he hallucinated and saw people and things on the ceiling and in the walls, feels parallel to what has been happening to me.”

Karen Barbour (b. 1956), lives and works in Inverness, CA. She received a BA at UC Davis and an MFA in Film from San Francisco’s Art Institute. Barbour has worked as an author and an illustrator, and over the past twenty years her work has been included in exhibitions in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York, among other places. White Columns first encountered Barbour’s work when she submitted it for consideration for White Columns’ online Artist Registry. In February 2022 White Columns showed Barbour’s work in a two-artist presentation alongside that of her daughter Daisy May Sheff at the Felix art fair in Los Angeles.

To learn more: info@whitecolumns.org

White Columns is excited to present our second project with Ceramics Club, CC22. This fundraising exhibition will open on Friday, September 23 from 6 – 8pm, and be on view at White Columns from September 23 – October 29. During the show over 300 ceramics will be available for sale, as well as a limited edition T-shirt and a new zine that commemorates Ceramics Club’s past projects with photos, ephemera, and a selection of text. Ceramics Club will donate all proceeds from sales to the non-profit organizations Walk the Walk, Defend the Atlanta Forest, Greenwich House Pottery, Critical Resistance, Equality Florida, Trust Women, and Spilka. Like Ceramics Club’s first presentation at White Columns in 2015, all artworks are presented and sold anonymously, and the exhibition will empty as the ceramics are purchased and removed.* 

Ceramics Club is an informal association of artists who meet irregularly at the Greenwich Pottery House in the West Village. It was founded in 2007 by artists Trisha Baga and Pam Lins at The Cooper Union, as a group interested in using ceramics as a way to “socially interact, make material, collaborate, and see what happens from there.” Ceramics Club “models itself on propositions gleaned from amateur “clubs” that in organizing, were interested in dismantling and opposing professionalism – withdrawing distinctions regarding quality, institutions, representations, etc.” 

Since 2015 Ceramics Club has been partnering with non-profit arts organizations to present fundraising events and exhibitions, where ceramic artworks created by the members of Ceramics Club are sold to benefit charitable organizations. Ceramics Club combines the collective making of objects with fundraising, performance, craft, community, and comedy. CC has had shows and fundraising events at White Columns, MoMA PS1, Greenwich House Pottery, A.I.R. Gallery, and more.

Contributing artists of CC22 include: Sydney Abady, Bill Adams, Negar Azimi, Graham Anderson, Lauren Anderson, Anjuli, Michael Assiff, Tauba Auerbach, Trisha Baga, Phyllis Baldino, Karen Barbour, Travis Boyer, Jared Buckhiester, Samuel Lang Budin, Claire Calvert, Deville Cohen, Jennifer Paige Cohen, Ethan Cooke, Allison Cooper, Taylor Davis, Lucky DeBellevue, Charlie Dektar, Katie Dektar, Molly Dektar, Jessica Dickinson, Carla Edwards, Nicole Eisenman, Rochelle Feinstein, Kiani Ferris, Sydney Foreman, Marley Freeman, Kenji Fujita, Naomi Fujita, Oto Gillen, Onur Gökmen, Joanne Greenbaum, Chris Haag, Marc Handelman, Nora Handelman, Ethan Hardy, Jess Henderson, Dmitri Hertz, Evie K. Horton, Jacob Jackmauh, Matt Keegan, Caitlin Keogh, Kathryn Kerr, Brittany Adeline King, Trevor King, Josh Kline, Juliet Koss, Heidi Lau, Megan Mi-Ai Lee, Eric Lee, Miranda Lichtenstein, Pam Lins, Lia Lowenthal, Cathy Lu, Jenni Lukasiewicz, Medrie MacPhee, Isabel Mallet, Annabeth Marks, Cameron Martin, Walker Martin, Eddie Martinez, Kaitlin McClure, Bobbi Menuez, Benny Merris, Keegan Monaghan, Thilda Monaghan, Sam Moyer, Eli Neuman-Hammond, Tin Nguyen, Alix Pearlstein, Rob Racine, Ryan Rennie, Geoff Rickley, Halsey Rodman, Rory Rosenberg, Andrew Rubin, Saki Sato, Ingrid Schram, Lyra Shannon, Daisy May Sheff, Shelly Silver, Fin Simonetti, Jessie Stead, Taylor Stone, Daniel Sullivan, Josh Thorson, Geetha Thurairajah, Erika Vogt, Christine Wang, Adam Welch, Kristine Woods, Anne Wu, Amy Yao, Lu Zhang, and many more.

CC22 is organized by Trisha Baga, Marley Freeman, Dmitri Hertz, Pam Lins, and Halsey Rodman. For more information please contact info@whitecolumns.org.

*Due to the volume of artworks available, sales will only be made in-person at the gallery and all sales are final.

White Columns is pleased to announce African Bird Dynasty the first exhibition in the United States by the London-based artist Ntiense Eno-Amooquaye. The exhibition has been developed in close collaboration with the artist and Intoart, a South London organization that seeks to address the “inequalities of access to, and participation in, the visual arts, education and culture by people with learning disabilities.”

In October 2021 White Columns’ director Matthew Higgs encountered Eno-Amooquaye’s exhibition Art Deco Zebra Crossing at Flat Time House, an independent exhibition space and archive located in the former South London home of the persistently influential British artist John Latham (1921—2006.)  Eno-Amooquaye’s exhibition was developed over more than a two-year period – much of it during the uncertainty of the pandemic – and in dialog with and in response to Latham’s own work and ideas. Eno-Amooquaye’s exhibition at Flat Time House was at once domestic in scale but almost cosmic in its complexity and ambition.

Eno-Amooquaye’s exhibition at White Columns expands upon Art Deco Zebra Crossing. The central elements from the Flat Time House exhibition – including a video of Eno-Amooquaye performing her poem Art Deco Zebra Crossing, a series of six paintings on paper collectively titled the Language of Rights that reflect upon the urgency of recent and historical civil rights movements, a decorated velvet dressing screen, the dress that Eno-Amooquaye created specifically for the reading of her poem, and silk wall hangings – reappear at White Columns alongside African Bird Dynasty, a group of four new large-scale wall hangings that combine Shibori tie dyeing and hand screen printing. (Each of the new wall-hangings will function as a backdrop to a scene to be performed by Eno-Amooquaye as part of a new film project that is currently in development.)

Ntiense Eno-Amooquaye’s far-reaching practice integrates the visual, written and spoken word through print, text, image and live performance. Writing about her experiences at Flat Time House and the relationships between her practice and Latham’s Eno-Amooquaye said: “Flat Time House is a living sculpture by John Latham about his dreams and his history. He has gone now so it’s hard to see him again, but I see him in his books. He spoke about the universe, I look at the globe of the world, the maps of the world and the stars. The flying chariots in ‘Art Deco Zebra Crossing’ are related to the world and outer space. … I have a memory that tells the whole story of history. When I perform I have dreams that I show in the stage set, the screen and the silks. The dress that I designed to perform in is organised with images, it tells a story about art. The dress talks about the world and about having a stage, having a voice for storytelling.”

Ntiense Eno-Amooquaye is a member of the Peckham, London-based collective Intoart. Previous solo exhibitions include: Flat Time House, London (2021); and the National Poetry Library, Southbank Centre, London (2014). Other group exhibitions and performances include the Whitechapel Gallery, London (2009); Museum Texture Kortrijk, Belgium (2017); Peer, London (2018); and the Copeland Gallery, London (2022), among others. In 2017 Eno-Amooquaye was awarded the Artists International Development Fund by the Arts Council England and the British Council.

About Intoart: Based in Peckham, London (UK), Intoart supports the work of over 20 artists addressing inequalities of access to, and participation in, the visual arts, education and culture by people with learning disabilities. Established in 2000 by co-founders Ella Ritchie and Sam Jones, the Intoart studio is a site of collective action and ambitious art, design and craft production. Intoart has realized exhibitions, commissions and research projects with contemporary art galleries and museums in the UK and internationally. Pioneering in their support for the careers of artists Intoart house over 3,000 artworks in the ‘Intoart Collection’. Intoart recently published the book The Intoart Collection – An Octopus with Boomerangs featuring the work of artists affiliated with Intoart and with an introduction by George Vasey. To learn more: www.intoart.org.uk

To learn more about Flat Time House: www.flattimeho.org.uk

White Columns would like to thank Ntiense Eno-Amooquaye; Sam Jones and Ella Ritchie of Intoart; and Gareth Bell Jones and everyone at Flat Time House for their enthusiasm, assistance and support in making this exhibition a possibility.

Ntiense Eno-Amooquaye’s exhibition has been generously supported in part by funds from the Mitzi and Warren Eisenberg Family Foundation, Martin and Rebecca Eisenberg, Ronald and Debra Eisenberg, Shelly and Neil Mitchell, and Randi and Eric Sellinger.

Since 2005 White Columns has collaborated extensively with national and international organizations that support the work of artists living with disabilities, including: Creative Growth Art Center (Oakland, CA); N.I.A.D. (Richmond, CA); Visionaries & Voices (Cincinnati, OH); H.A.I. (New York, NY); Fountain House (New York, NY); Tierra Del Sol (Los Angeles, CA); Gateway Arts (Brookline, MA); and Project Ability (Glasgow, Scotland).

For further information, please contact: info@whitecolumns.org

White Columns
91 Horatio Street
New York, NY 10014
Tuesday–Saturday, 11 AM–6 PM
info@whitecolumns.org
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