Brainard Carey

Frank Juarez is a gallery director, art educator, artist, published author, presenter, and arts advocate living and working in Sheboygan, Wisconsin. Organizing local and regional art exhibitions, community art events, facilitating presentations, and supporting artists through professional development workshops, use of social media and networking has placed him in the forefront of advancing and promoting local artists and attracting regional and national artists to interact, collaborate, network and exhibit in the Wisconsin.

Juarez is the art department chair at Sheboygan North High School. He is actively involved in local, regional, state, and national arts organization such as the Wisconsin Art Education Association, and the National Art Education Association. He has served as a board member in the following organizations: Milwaukee Artist Resource Network, Arts Wisconsin, and the Cedarburg Cultural Center. He is the founder/former director of the Sheboygan Visual Artists. In 2011, he has opened his first art gallery, the Frank Juarez Gallery in Sheboygan and has relocated to Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He has been presenting at local universities, colleges, galleries, and artist groups on the Business of Art | Art of Business. He is the founder of two projects focused on contemporary art and art education called The Midwest Artist Studios and the 365 Artists 365 Days Project. In 2015, he was recognized as the 2015 Wisconsin Art Education Association Teacher of the Year and in 2016, he was recognized at the 2016 National Art Education Association Wisconsin Art Educator of the Year. Recently, he has joined the faculty of the Vermont College of Fine Arts, SchoolArts Magazine as a contributing editor, and co-founded the  Randall Frank Contemporary Art Collection Artist Grant Program.

Tim Murphy is a longtime journalist on HIV/AIDS and LGBTQ topics for the New York Times, New York magazine, Poz, TheBody.com, Out, and the Advocate. He also reviews books for the Washington Post and writes about culture, entertainment and politics.

He is the author of Christodora and two previous novels, The Breeders Box and Getting Off Clean. He is a founding member of the gun violence prevention group Gays Against Guns. He lives in Brooklyn and the Hudson Valley.

I don’t have a story to tell through painting.

I try and I fail.

I try to understand how to ‘make a painting’ but instead the painting makes me.

It taunts me.

I am obsessed with paint; it is a fetish, a stand in for what I used to desire in my work, but it is more demanding and unresolved than any desire I have ever experienced.

How do you talk about something that involves every aspect of your present state and know-how to someone who is not you, other than by stepping back and letting them experience their own reception and perception of the work?

I want the seduction of paint itself to be perceived.

Personal details: born and raised in Toronto, deep roots in Newfoundland and the Gaspé, spouse still living, child long grown, MFA, PhD, EiEiO

-P Elaine Sharpe

In the following interview, the book mentioned can be found here, and the details for the current show she is having is below.

Pareidolia – P Elaine Sharpe
October 5 – October 28
Opening Thursday, October 5th, 6-9pm

Pareidolia, an exhibition of paintings by Toronto based artist P Elaine Sharpe, marks her first solo exhibition with Wil Kucey Gallery.

Sharpe focuses her time in the studio on examining the intricate subtleties and boundaries of the painting process. The resulting collection of work reflects an intimate engagement with exploring surface and application. The results are generous to both producer and viewer.

Sharpe has developed a vocabulary of line and formal expression in paint that provides the framework for the multiple bodies of work included in the exhibition.

Whether focused on the unfurling of sinewy strands or reveling in the geology of paint revealed through sanding, obscuring, and reconstruction, Sharpe finds a tactile and sense-based pleasure in making her work, honing her interests in pushing the inherent constraints of space, material and the search for fulfillment throughout her processes.