For more information or a current C.V., send an e-mail to: studio[at]jonathanvandyke.com.
Recent works available via: info@scaramoucheart.com. Editioned works available at artwareeditions.com.
Jonathan VanDyke received his MFA from the Milton Avery Graduate School of Bard College in 2004. He attended the Skowhegan School of Art in 2008, and studied with Paul Pfeiffer at the Atlantic Center for the Arts in 2007. He has shown his work internationally, and served as a visiting artist at colleges and universities throughout the United States. He is based in Brooklyn, New York.
7-10
As part of the seven-gallery exhibition Lush Life on the Lower East Side of New York City, a photograph of my piece is reproduced in this New York Times interactive map. (Click on the top-most icon for "Y Gallery.")
6-10
I have a sculpture in the exhibition Lush Life, curated by Omar Lopez Chahoud and Franklin Evans. The exhibition is spread across nine Lower East Side Galleries. My work will be at Y Gallery, where the opening will occur on July 8.
5-10
I've just returned to my studio after several incredible months shooting a video with the talented youth of York, Pennsylvania. The premiere of my piece will happen in October - more info soon.
3-10
I've departed for York, Pennsylvania, to shoot a video with the amazing students of the William Penn Performing Arts Institute. The project is happening through the generosity of the Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation.
1-10
A review of my recent NYC solo show appears in the January issue of Art Forum.
1-10
A sculpture from my last show is featured in an article about young collectors in the January issue of Art + Auction.
10-09
An image from my show in New York, at Scaramouche, is featured in New York Magazine.
10-09
My exhibition at Scaramouche has been reviewed in Time Out New York and White Hot Magazine of Contemporary Art.
9-09
My solo exhibition of new work, entitled The Hole in the Palm of Your Hand, has opened at Scaramouche c/o Fruit and Flower Deli on New York's Lower East Side.
7-09
I am preparing a video and two photographs for the exhibition Like a Moth to a Flame, curated by Dan Halm, which will open at the gallery This Exile in Berlin at the end of the month.
6-09
I installed a piece in the first Bushwick Biennial in Brooklyn. My piece is at Pocket Utopia gallery, a project of artist Austin Thomas.
5-09
I shipped out a piece for the exhibition Splinter of the Mind's Eye, at Philip Slein Gallery in St. Louis. The exhibition is about the relationship between science fiction and abstract expressionism.
5-09
I just opened a new project at HQ Gallery in Brooklyn. The opening was great fun, and I was lucky to have two excellent performers, Ben Kerrick and Enrico Wey, to perform the piece.
4-09
The article on me in Modern Painters' April issue is out. There's a studio shot by photographer Brad Harris, and an article by Joe Wolin. Click here to read it.
3-09
The April issue of Modern Painters magazine will feature my work and me in their Introducing section, where they highlight two artists each month. There will be photos of my work and studio and an essay by critic Joe Wolin.
3-09
I am the recipient of a grant from the Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation to create a project in association with Yorkarts of York, Pennsylvania. We've received an Artists & Communities grant, which will allow me to make a city-wide project there in the fall of 2009.
3-09
In May I will open a solo installation at HQ in Williamsburg. HQ is a gallery and project space run by Jackson McDade, who asked me to create a new, experimental piece. The installation will also include a new performance on opening night.
3-09
I'm working on a new sculpture for the exhibition A Momentary Fantasy, curated by David Everett Howe. The show will open at the gallery Scaramouche c/o Fruit & Flower Deli on the Lower East Side in New York in late April.
1-09
One of my new photographic works is on view in the exhibition I Like Winners: Sport and Selfhood at the Sheppard Gallery of the University of Nevada, Reno, curated by Marjorie Vecchio.
11-09
The cups I made for Artware Editions are featured in the December issue of World of Interiors magazine.
9-08
After a great summer at the Skowhegan School in Maine, I am settling back into city life and getting back into the studio.
6-08
I'm off to Maine for the summer, as I'll be attending the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Looking forward to some country time to make some new work and get to know the other residents.
5-08
My studio in Brooklyn will be open during the first week of June, as part of Bushwick Open Studios. See their website for more information: www.artsinbushwick.org
4-08
I've created an image for the cover of a new book of poems by poet Temple Cone. As with much of Cone's work, this book - forthcoming from Pudding House Press - unfolds as a conversation between two mythological figures, Orpheus and Eurydice.
3-08
I have a new sculpture featured at the booth of Artware Editions, at the Pulse art fair in New York. It's a riff on Duchamp's piece Fresh Widow.
11-07
My piece And Some Were Caught Up, a hand-made fence that rotates in space, is part of the exhibition Usufruct at Linfield College in Portland. Curated by fellow Bardian Seth Nehil, the leitmotif of the exhibition is the idea of an apple tree bearing fruit in the midst of an abandoned space. How does one gather up and use the information and the objects that are openly available, the things that already surround us?
11-07
I am deep in central Illinois, serving as the visiting artist-in-residence at Illinois State University for 5 weeks. Driving here from New York, the hills gave way to a steady horizon as the land became progressively flatter and emptier. When one's context is a wide open expanse, how does it affect the creative process?
10-07
I am down at the Atlantic Center for the Arts in Florida, taking part in a residency with Paul Pfeiffer. Paul chose 8 of us as 'associate artists', and while here we're digging deep into our artistic intentions, material concerns, and philosophical frameworks. It's a great group and a rare opportunity for endless conversation, all in a tropical nature preserve...
10-07
I’ve made an edition of hand-cast, tinted plaster cups for Artware Editions, www.artwareeditions.com, in Greenwich Village. The cups recall the material of fresco painting, and I made 6 different types, each named for a woman I met before the age of 20. Artware features functional objects made by artists, and when we put them all out on an Yves Klein blue-pigment table on display in their gallery, I couldn’t imagine a better framing device… One of the cups will be featured in the New York Times design magazine, T, on Sunday the 7th.
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9-07
I built a new installation at the Museum of Fine Arts at Florida State University in Tallahassee. It’s a room-size, site-conditioned piece for a show called Locating Secret Psychological Spaces, curated by Joelle Dietrick - a fellow Pennsylvania native and a first-rate artist, whom I initially met in a figure drawing class back in high school (!). My installation, called Closed Eye, has a dark exterior with a window, framed by plastic shutters I fabricated. I lined the interior in white material, so that the whole inner space casts a bright glow. Tinted liquid gels drip down a black rubber tube onto 80 carved-up Tallahassee phone books that I collected all over town (with the help of some art students); political images (Condi, W, et al), and images from the museum’s collection are tucked into the books. In part the piece is in homage to Cady Noland and Gober.
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9-07
I placed a sculpture and made a closet-sized installation in for the four-person show Weekend Without Make-up at PS122 in downtown Manhattan, which opened on the 15th and will run through October 7th. The show is curated by my friend Jeffrey Walkowiak, who is the sort of curator that artists always hope to have in their studio. Jeffrey always looks with great care, and opens up the work, revealing contexts and expanding meanings. For this exhibit he re-defines and updates notions of queer art, framing how we as gay artists consider notions of the body as it is revealed, concealed, mediated, and made the site of fantasy.
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9-07
I spent a week building in Rochester and opened my solo project, What It Feels Like, on the 12th. Thanks to huge support from the exhibition curator Mara Gladstone, Ph.D. candidate Derek Rushton, and many others at the University of Rochester, I found myself lucky to both extend themes in my work and to lunch a major experiment. The whole space was transformed, so that the gallery looked like an other environment altogether. The flat work I built, leaning against the walls at the beginning the opening, was transformed into sprawling 3-D structures by five excellent student performers who emerged from the crowd. I performed too, kicking off the night by climbing a scaffolding and watching attendees through binoculars. I’ll post pictures in the project section soon.
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8-06
Just got back from Rochester, where I’ll have a solo show at the University of Rochester’s Hartnett Gallery, opening September 12th. I studied the space, a triangular-shaped room within a large building designed by I.M. Pei. The space has the sort of quirks that I’m attracted to – a semi-circular balcony, a low ceiling on one end that rises up to 22’ on the other. I’ll be choreographing a group of students to perform the installation on the opening night. Mara Gladstone will serve as curator and adviser for the show, and Juliette Cezzar (www.juliettecezzar.com) will design the invitation.
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7-06
I’m back in Pittsburgh, finishing up a second summer teaching The Visual World class at the Pennsylvania Governor’s School for International Studies. We’ve studied modern art at the Carnegie Museum of Art [www.cmoa.org] and discussed the collections at the Warhol [www.warhol.org]. New York curator and governor’s school alum Eric Shiner visited to talk about his upcoming Japan Society exhibition. I finished up the class by organizing a debate, in which students debated topics including the publishing of the Danish cartoons of Mohammed. A great threesome juried the debate: Carnegie International curator Douglas Fogle; the Carnegie’s Assistant Education Curator, Lucy Stewart; and artist Kim Beck, who makes some very interesting, multi-disciplinary work.
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6-06
The opening for The Salon of the Covered Bride at Pocket Utopia was most excellent – thanks to Austin, all the folks who helped me out getting the show ready, and all the friends, old and new, who came out to Flushing Avenue for the party. Here’s the gallery’s site: www.pocketutopia.com. The show has been discussed on the art blogs of Ed Winkleman and James Wagner, and here are the links: http://jameswagner.com/mt_archives/006333.html
http://edwardwinkleman.blogspot.com/2007/06/thwack-and-tonic.html
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6-06
My friend Austin Thomas [see www.austinthomas.org], whose work was in the show Let’s Get to Work that I curated with Gavin Wade [see his recent projectds at www.strategicquestions.org] is opening a gallery around the corner from my new-ish studio in Bushwick. The space is super cool in its current incarnation - an empty, abandoned hair salon. Austin’s going to demolish the salon fixtures, but before that happens I am going to create a pre-demolition installation/solo show featuring new work, with a performance. I’m calling the project The Salon of the Covered Bride. [One of Austin's perches can be seen in the curatorial section on this site.
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5-06
I was asked to be in a video documenting how contemporary artists have been influenced by Louise Nevelson, as part of a retrospective of Nevelson’s work, organized by curator Brooke Kamin Rappaport for the Jewish Museum, opens this month . In the video, which also includes appearances by Jessica Stockholder, Alice Aycock, Willie Cole, and Jean Shin, I am interviewed, and images of my project for Socrates Sculpture Park are shown. I was obsessed with Nevelson in college, and the retrospective looks really amazing, so I’m very pleased to be in the video, which is on view at The Jewish Museum through September.
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3-06
The Free Frisbee project has now traveled to L.A., where it will appear at Circus Gallery. I’ve changed my poster a bit, though it still declares The Americans Are Sorry. Here’s the link for the project: www.freefrisbee.com.
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2-06
The purse piece that I made for the show Casting Off, mentioned below, will now appear at the Armory Show in New York. It will be featured in the booth of Socrates Sculpture Park. The Park is a great place run by great folks, and I made a project there not long ago (see Projects section). Here's their site: www.socratessculpturepark.org.
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12-06
I’ve made a poster for a guerilla art project organized by artist Jen DeNike and curator Anat Ebgi. The project is called Free Frisbee and the posters will be plastered around Miami as part of Art Basel Miami, where I’m headed this week. My poster is based on a drawing I made that says The Americans Are Sorry. I like the improbable idea that a work of art could try and speak for the whole country, using a simple and much-needed phrase.
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9-06
I’ve just made a new piece that will head to Texas. It will be part of a show curated by Annie Simpson, entitled Casting Off: Gender Exploration Down South, which appears in conjunction with the International Drag King Extravaganza in Austin. I’ve been wanting to make a new sculpture with a purse in it (a purse last appeared in Monument to the Anonymous Purse, see the Objects section). I made a purse that sits on a cedar pedestal, and out of the pedestal emerges a carved tree. The tree grows through the purse itself. The purse is filled with nuts.
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7-06
I’m in Pittsburgh for 5 weeks, teaching a class I’ve designed for the Pennsylvania Governor’s School for International Studies. The program (of which I am a graduate) is an intensive course for high school seniors from across the state. My class, entitled The Visual World, is designed around the idea that if we learn to approach art that is unfamiliar to us - and really observe it, talk about it with one another, research it, write about it - that it prepares us to experience otherness in the broadest sense.
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6-06
Finishing up my time at University of Chicago. I’ve been lucky to have great students, a sunny studio, and an apartment with a view of the lake. I’m mounting a show of new, object-based work that I’ve made while I’m here (to a certain extent, the work is still in progress). The show will go up in the gallery located in the art building.
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3-06
I am off to Chicago for a few months, for a teaching fellowship and residency at the University of Chicago. Here's the link:http://dova.uchicago.edu/vandyke.htm I’ll teach two classes of my own design - an introduction to sculpture, and an advanced class called Sculpture in Context in which we will consider our relationship to objects, and how objects are contextualized in modern art. We’ll make such things as fetish objects, objects that reveal the process of their making, and ‘inappropriate support structures’ for other people’s art.
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3-06
I’ve just dismantled my piece Involuntary House that I built for Socrates Sculpture Park in Queens. I pulled it down on a cold and windy day. Given it’s size, it came down a lot faster than it went up. The House weathered well, and its interior got heavily coated with color from the paint rain that the structure generated. Somehow I liked it best in its melancholic dismantled state, with sheets of tyvek blowing in the wind, its skin lying on the grass, and its skeleton on full view. I hope to make a dismantled structure as a piece in and of itself.
