Thanks to a Google Alert, on the 12th I became aware of the NYC artist Calder Zwicky, through an announcement of a two-person multimedia exhibit “Mistakes Were Made – Adam Tetzloff and Calder Zwicky”, October 12-16, at the West Side Art Coalition, “exploring themes of public space, found objects, destruction, beauty and humor”. That led me to this wonderful photo:
(#1)
In an online course from the Museum of Modern Art, Calder Zwicky, associate educator, demonstrates color mixing techniques.
This seems to be CZ’s day job, as it were, in which he gets to pursue, among other things, teen outreach (a project of importance to him) for MOMA, while he exhibits in many shows around the city.
Yes, cute and curly-haired, with a lovely smile. Piecing things together from breadcrumbs on his website and elsewhere (artists in the NYC scene post mostly for one another, and their sites are often frustrating for outsiders to extract even basic information from), it seems that CZ is now in his mid-30s, was born in Minneapolis and went to school there, apparently rather indifferently, until he discovered the Teen Arts Council project at the Walker Art Center there (WACTAC), where he became a serious artist and set his sights on NYC; his current teen outreach work in New York is something of a payback for the encouragement he got in WACTAC.
Diverse works. From the Inkwell site on a current exhibition at the Meulensteen Gallery in NYC, if I understand it correctly (not a sure thing: it’s a group show, and the site isn’t good about identifying the individual artists and their works), this entertaining piece by CZ:
(#2)
Then a 2016 still life (of sorts) I’m fond of, “Flower Blinds”:
(#3)
And from the 2016 SPRING/BREAK show, CZ’s “Child Angels” of 2015:
(#4)
(The piece is very wide and the figures small, so it doesn’t reproduce well.)
The SPRING/BREAK show was curated by Adam Parker Smith, an interesting artist in his own right. Here’s Smith (in a Gagosian Gallery baseball cap, of all things), embracing a happy CZ at the show:
(#5)
APS’s work seems to be mostly in two genres: what he calls “wall works” (works on flat surfaces) and sculpture, much of it deliberately provocative. Here, from a series of “Bottom” sculptures, #2:
(#6)
A piece that manages to be phallic, anal, and vaginal, all at once.
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