Catherine Brukalo Coaching

March is women’s history month - let’s celebrate! 🎉

Yayoi Kusama (1929 - ), sometimes called “the Princess of polka-dots” is a Japanese contemporary artist who works primarily in sculpture and installation, and is also active in painting, performance art, video art, fashion, poetry, fiction, and other arts. Her work is based in conceptual art and shows some attributes of feminism, minimalism, surrealism, pop art and abstract expressionism, and is infused with autobiographical, psychological, and sexual content.

She has been acknowledged as one of the most important living artists to come out of Japan, the world's top-selling female artist, and the world's most successful living artist.

Kusama has been open about her mental health and has resided since the 1970s in a mental health facility which she leaves daily to walk to her nearby studio to work. She says that art has become her way to express her mental problems. “I fight pain, anxiety, and fear every day, and the only method I have found that relieved my illness is to keep creating art," she told an interviewer in 2012. "I followed the thread of art and somehow discovered a path that would allow me to live."

Kusama tells the story of how when she was a little girl she had a hallucination that freaked her out. She was in a field of flowers when they all started talking to her! The heads of flowers were like dots that went on as far as she could see, and she felt as if she was disappearing or as she calls it ‘self-obliterating’ – into this field of endless dots. This experience influenced much of her later work.

By adding all-over marks and dots to her paintings, drawings, objects and clothes she feels as if she is making them (and herself) melt into, and become part of, the bigger universe.

Today, I share with you “The Infinite Room of Mirrors - Phallus Field” 1965.

If you’re interested in learning more about Yayoi Kusama and her body of work, check out:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yayoi_Kusama

Honored to be nominated for the Niles Chamber of Commerce and Industry’s “Ken Scheel Chamber Member of the Year Award.”

I am humbled to have been nominated by the Village of Niles - Municipality community for this award.

Congratulations to all of the award nominees. 🎉

Voting is now open to all - one vote per email.
(Voting closes April 8, 2024)
You don’t have to be a Niles Chamber member or Niles resident to vote - everyone’s support helps 🥰

Please use the link below to cast your vote:

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScdmmufoJSCHodgCUR7oZT1rNtw_SgX5fjuCHn8UNL26bCh-A/viewform

I would love your support 💜

March is women’s history month - let’s celebrate! 🎉

Betye Irene Saar (born Betty Irene Brown)
(1926 - ) is an African-American artist known for her work in the medium of assemblage.

Saar, who started her adult life as a social worker and then later pursued her passion in art, is a visual storyteller and an accomplished printmaker.

She was a part of the Black Arts movement in the 1970s which engaged myths and stereotypes about race and femininity.

Her work is considered political as she has challenged negative ideas about African-Americans throughout her career; she is best known for her artwork that critiques American racism toward Blacks.

In Saar’s work, time is cyclical. History and experiences, emotion and knowledge travel across time and back again, linking the artist and viewers of her work with generations of people who came before them. This is made explicit in her commitment to certain themes, imagery, and objects, and her continual reinvention of them over decades. “I can no longer separate the work by saying this deals with the occult and this deals with shamanism or this deals with so and so…. It’s all together and it’s just my work,” she said in 1989.

Today, I share with you “Gliding Into Midnight” 2019.

If you’re interested in learning more about Betye Saar and her body of work, check out:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betye_Saar

Honored to be nominated for the Niles Chamber of Commerce and Industry “Ken Scheel Chamber Member of the Year Award.”

I am humbled to have been nominated by the Village of Niles - Municipality community for this award.

Congratulations to all of the award nominees! 🎉

Voting is now open to all - one vote per email. Voting closes April 8, 2024

Please use the link below to cast your vote:

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScdmmufoJSCHodgCUR7oZT1rNtw_SgX5fjuCHn8UNL26bCh-A/viewform

I would love your support 💜

We are thrilled to announce that community voting for our annual Night of Roses Awards is now open!
Click on this link to see all of this year's nominees: https://www.nileschamber.com/nor/
Click on this link to vote: https://forms.gle/maPU6jb1SxZGGefy7

The winners of 8 prestigious awards will be announced at the Night of Roses Gala on April 26th🌹

The voting form will be open until April 8th. This is your chance to learn about all nominees and cast your votes!

March is women’s history month - let’s celebrate! 🎉

Cynthia (“Cindy”) Morris Sherman (1954 - ) is an American artist whose work consists primarily of photographic self-portraits, depicting herself in many different contexts and as various imagined characters.

For four decades, Cindy Sherman has probed the construction of identity, playing with the visual and cultural codes of art, celebrity, gender, and photography. She is among the most significant artists of the Pictures Generation, who came of age in the 1970s and responded to the mass media landscape surrounding them with both humor and criticism, appropriating images from advertising, film, television, and magazines for their art.

Sherman was always interested in experimenting with different identities. As she has explained, “I wish I could treat every day as Halloween, and get dressed up and go out into the world as some eccentric character.”

While she sometimes portrays glamorous characters, Sherman has always been more interested in the grotesque.

Throughout all of her work, Sherman subverts the visual shorthand we use to classify the world around us, drawing attention to the artificiality and ambiguity of these stereotypes and undermining their reliability for understanding a much more complicated reality.

Today, I share with you “Untitled #153” (1985)

If you’re interested in learning more about Cindy Sherman and her body of work, check out:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cindy_Sherman

March is women’s history month - let’s celebrate! 🎉

Judy Chicago (born Judith Sylvia Cohen), 1939 -

Chicago is an American Feminist artist, art educator and writer known for her large collaborative art installation pieces about birth and creation images which examine the role of women in history and culture.

Her work incorporates a variety of artistic skills, such as needlework counterbalanced with skills such as welding.

Her most well known work is “The Dinner Party” (1974-1979) which is now permanently installed at the Brooklyn Museum. “The Dinner Party” celebrates the accomplishments of women throughout history and is widely regarded as the first epic feminist artwork.

Believing in the need for a feminist pedagogy for female art students, Chicago began the first Feminist Art Program at California State University, Fresno in 1970.

For over five decades, Chicago has remained steadfast in her commitment to the power of art as a vehicle for intellectual transformation and social change and to women’s right to engage in the highest level of art production. As a result, she has become a symbol for people everywhere, known and respected as an artist, writer, teacher, feminist and humanist whose work and life are models for an enlarged definition of art, an expanded role for the artist, and women’s right to freedom of expression.

Today, I share with you “Earth Birth” 1983.

If you’re interested in learning more about Judy Chicago and her body of work, check out:

https://judychicago.com/

March is women’s history month - let’s celebrate! 🎉

Lenore “Lee” Krasner (1908-1984) was an American Abstract Expressionist - she is identified as such due to her abstract, gestural and expressive works in painting, collage painting, charcoal drawing and occasionally mosaics.

Throughout her career, Krasner embraced change through varying the mood, subject matter, texture, materials and composition of her work often.

Her interest in the self, nature and modern life are themes that commonly surface in her works.

Krasner has been described as a force of nature, always pushing abstraction forward. Krasner was quoted to say: “I like a canvas to breathe and be alive. Be alive is the point.”

Despite her critical success, Krasner’s work was often overshadowed by the career of her husband, Jackson Po***ck.

Today, I share with you “Untitled”, 1964.

If you’re interested in learning more about Lee Krasner and her body of work, check out:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lee_Krasner

March is women’s history month - let’s celebrate! 🎉

Louise Josephine Bourgeois (1911-2010) was a French artist with a career spanning eight decades.

She is one of the great figures of modern and contemporary art. Best known for her large-scale sculptures and installations that were inspired by her own memories and experiences, she was also a prolific painter and printmaker.

Over the course of Bourgeois’ career, she explored themes including domesticity and the family, sexuality and the body, as well as death and the unconscious.

She exhibited with the Abstract Expressionists, and though her work has much in common with Surrealism and feminist art, she was not formally affiliated with a particular artistic movement.

Bourgeois said: “I need to make things. The physical interaction with the medium has a curative effect. I need the physical acting out. I need to have these objects exist in relation to my body.”

Today, I share with you “Maman” - bronze, stainless steel and marble sculpture(s)/installation(s) in several locations, measuring over 30ft high and 33ft wide (1999-2002).

If you’re interested in learning more about Louise Bourgeois and her body of work, check out:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louise_Bourgeois

Also, the 2008 film made about her life titled “Louise Bourgeois: The Spider, The Mistress and The Tangerine.”

March is women’s history month - let’s celebrate! 🎉

Frida Kahlo (1907-1954) was a Mexican painter known for her many portraits, self-portraits and works inspired by the nature and artifacts of Mexico. She employed a native Mexican folk art style to explore questions of identity, post-colonialism, gender, class, and race in Mexican society.

Her paintings often included a mix of realism and fantasy.

Kahlo suffered from polio as a child and was involved in a crash in her youth which left her impaled by a handrail that went through her pelvis. Kahlo endured tens of surgeries in her lifetime and life-long physical and mental pain/anguish.

Kahlo said of her paintings: “My painting carries with it the message of pain.”

Kahlo was married to the Mexican muralist Diego Rivera. Their relationship was a tumultuous one and Kahlo did have a diverse group of male & female lovers (many well known artists and thinkers of their time).

Kahlo’s fame grew after her death in 1954, with her “Blue House” being opened as a museum in 1958, and with an interest in her work and life in the 1970s, coinciding with the Feminist Movement. Kahlo was viewed as an icon of female creativity.

Today, I share with you “The Two Fridas (Las dos Fridas)”, 1939, which lives at the Museo de Arte Moderno in Mexico City.

If you’re interested in learning more about Frida Kahlo and her body of work, check out:

https://www.fridakahlo.org/

March is women’s history month - let’s celebrate! 🎉

Georgia Totto O’Keefe (1887-1986) was an American Modernist painter with her own unique style that melded abstract & realistic styles, whose career spanned seven decades and whose work remained largely independent of major art movements. Called the “Mother of American Modernism”, she gained international recognition for her meticulous paintings of natural forms.

By the 1920s, O’Keefe was recognized as one of America’s’ most important and successful artists, known for her paintings of NY skyscrapers - an essentially American symbol of modernity. She received unprecedented acceptance as a woman artist from the Fine Art world due to her powerful graphic images and within a decade of moving to NYC, she was the highest paid American woman artist.

Flower paintings made up a small percentage of O’Keefe’s paintings. She consistently battled against the Freudian interpretations of her flower series. By utilizing small flowers to suggest the immensity of nature, O’Keefe sought to call into question her viewer’s habitual ways of looking.

O’Keefe stated: “Paint it big and they will be surprised into taking the time to look at it - I will make even New Yorkers take time to see what I see of flowers.”

Today, I share with you “Pink Tulip” (1926), which lives at The Baltimore Museum of Art.

If you’re interested in learning more about Georgia O’Keefe and her body of work, check out:

https://okeeffemuseum.org/