Minna Resnick – Craft Disasters

The Gallery at FOUND is proud to welcome a new show by local artist Minna Resnick entitled Craft Disasters.

The exhibit will run from November 1st through December 12th with an artist’s reception on Thursday, November 18th from 5-7pm.

Minna Resnick was born in New York City and has maintained a studio in Ithaca since 1987. She has been making prints and drawings for over 35 years and has shown extensively, both nationally and internationally.  Her work is in over 50 public collections, including the American Council on Education, Washington, DC; AT&T, and the United States Information Agency and numerous private collections.  Her work is also represented in the permanent collections of the Brooklyn Museum, NY; the Denver Art Museum, CO; the New York Public Library; the Newark Museum, NJ; and the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, England, among others.

She has been the recipient of many grants, including a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1980, the New York Foundation for the Arts in 1991 and 1995, and the Constance Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts in 1999 and 2004. Most recently, she has organized two international printmaking exhibitions and symposiums in China, in 2007 and 2009. You can read more about Minna and see her work at http://www.minnaresnick.com/.

Here’s what Minna has to say about her work and this particular show:
The Craft Disasters Series continues my examination of inter-generational expectations and realities through the use of illustrated early- and mid-twentieth century manuals on home management, décor, repair, health, education and etiquette.  In this case, the recycling of calamitous illustrations from textbooks on safety from the late 1930s has been combined with commercially available contemporary scrap-booking papers. I am misusing, or reusing, the craft paper for its intended decorative purpose. This remixes the narrative to create new associations. The juxtaposition of these two unrelated materials encourages information displacement and disorientation. The scrap-booking papers have been chosen for their pattern and color coordination, based on primary and secondary color charts: red, yellow, blue, orange, green, purple, plus black.

Additional images reflect this concern with communication as an information delivery system, proving that communication is elusive and dependent on historical and cultural contexts and can be re-purposed to address contemporary issues.