Commissions and Projects: Public & Private

David Rockefeller Creative Arts Center, “Inspired Encounters: Women artists and legacies of Modern Art”

ESOPUS Magazine: Artist Project Issue 22 (Spring 2015)

“For the project Duets, artist Melissa Meyer uses images from a 1968 book on headgear orthodontics by her late father, the dentist Paul Meyer, as a starting point for a series of 15 stunning collages.

New York City–based artist Melissa Meyer received her B.S. and M.A. degrees from New York University. Since the early 1970s, she has had one-person exhibitions at Holly Solomon Gallery, New York; Elizabeth Harris Gallery, New York; and Galerie Renée Ziegler, Zurich. Meyer, who is represented by Lennon Weinberg Gallery in New York City, has work in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Jewish Museum, and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, among many other institutions. In 1978, Meyer cowrote with Miriam Shapiro “Femmage,” an essay published in the feminist journal HERESIES examining the contributions of women artists, non-Western artists, and folk artists to collage prior to Picasso and Braque. She has received numerous awards, grants, and fellowships, including those from National Endowment for the Arts (1983, 1993), the American Academy in Rome (2004), and the Pollock-Krasner Foundation (2009).

Paul Meyer (1904–1970) was an orthodontist from Hudson, New Jersey, who authored and self-published Headgear Orthodontics in 1968. A self-taught calligrapher, conceptual portrait photographer, violinist, and ephemera collector, Meyer was also a mentor of African-American dentists during the civil-rights era and established one of the first integrated dental practices in New York City.”

VIEW IMAGES HERE

Counterparts

US Embassy in Bishkek, Kyrgryzstan.

“Participating in the Art in Embassies program has been a great opportunity for me to
bridge my personal aesthetic with that of another country. It is still too soon to tell the real personal and cultural value of this experience, but I am already excited, and can feel the effects—personally and aesthetically—of my exposure to a new history and tradition of art making. I hope to further address these questions as I continue to develop this project for the embassy in Bishkek.” - Melissa Meyer.

Melissa Meyer was invited by Art in Embassies to create a site specific, large scale commission for the new U.S. Embassy in Bishkek. In October of 2014, Melissa traveled to Kyrgyzstan to learn about historical and contemporary Kyrgyzs textile production. Meyer met with the Tumar Art Group and their designers for a “show and tell” explaining and illustrating the history of the Kyrgyzs patterns and the uses of felt and embroidery. The artist was shown some of Tumar’s archive of historical works and given a tour of an embroidery shop. The Northern designs, based on animals, and their Southern counterparts based on flowers, could function as possible inspiration for the artist’s final commission.

The patterns and motives, besides being visually beautiful.. “made me realize that I was also interested in a correlation between the traditional Kyrgyzs arts and an article I researched and co-wrote with Miriam Schapiro in 1978 titled “Femmage”, which was originally published in the Heresies magazine issue called “Women’s Traditional Arts and the Politics of Aesthetics”. The artworks I was looking at were made before the collages of Picasso and Braque, and included quilts, devotional pieces made by nuns that were forerunners of valentines, and scrapbooks. If I had known about the art made by the women of Kyrgyzstan, I would have included it in the article.”

The Watermill Five / Private Commission

Elsa Bannister / The Peninsula Shanghai

Lincoln Center Festival

Project: Painter’s Tables by Joe Fig

Quinn

Skowhegan Blue Floating World
& Woodward Looking East

Commissioned for the Shiodome City Center in Tokyo, Japan. Commissioning Agency, Shiodome City Center.

“When Sarina Tang first approached me about the prospect of making large murals in Tokyo, I was enormously excited. I began to visualize the kind of effect I wanted— something more seemlessly connected to the architecture. I asked the architects, Roche Dinkeloo and Associates, if they could set the murals flush with the granite walls. I made a preliminary computer sketch, using watercolors and oil paintings and then ordered the panels— more than forty, of honeycombed aluminum with canvas glued to the surfaces, prepared for oil painting.

I often work big, but the unusual scale of these paintings posed special challenges. Technically, for instance, I had to work on the floor, using specially made adjustable long-handled brushes. The scale itself altered my brushstrokes, making each single shape more independent, sometimes more graphic. The most basic challenge was to make the images work for viewers from all different vantages.

When I’m painting, I work intuitively, physically, thinking about brushwork as a kind of choreography, a dance that happens in the wrists and arms, as well as the whole body. Because my process is improvisational, the circumstances are important. Skowhegan Blue Floating World was painted mostly in the summertime, in Maine. The studio was in a remote, wooded area, on a lake, and that setting became part of the work’s inspiration. The second mural, Woodward Looking East, was painted entirely in Queens, New York, not too far from where I grew up.

Some other visual memories helped shape these murals. One is my lifelong study of Japanese Ukiyo-e woodblock prints. The prints’ subjects— youth, beauty, theatre, the seasons and love— are transient, “floating”, and always changing. The second is a life-long study of collage. And thirdly, the practice of watercolor painting, something I took up with interest about ten years ago. Watercolor is usually connected with intimate, small-scale work and one of the pleasures of oil painting for me, is to reverse this relationship— to make watercolor effects into something major, assertive, flamboyant. I would like to make images that are as volatile, but also delicate, as water itself.” — Melissa Meyer, New York, NY, 2003.

Selections from Woodward Looking East,
A1, 93 in x 86 in; A3, 93 in x 86 in; A5, 93 in x 86 in;
B1, 102 in x 86 in; B2, 102 in x 86 in; B4, 102 in x 86 in;
C4, 102 in x 86 in; C5, 102 in x 86 in; E5, 100 in x 86 in,
oil on canvas on aluminum honeycomb panels, Shiodome City Center, Tokyo, Japan 2002.

Skowhegan Floating World #1 - #8, each oil on canvas on aluminum honeycomb panels, 139 in x 89 in each, Shiodome City Center in Tokyo, Japan, 2002. (click image to view in full)

Playing for Keeps

Self Portrait / The New Yorker

Art on the Beach - Ocean, Land, Sea

The Green Woman, for Ms Magazine

Book Jacket Collage