Wednesday, December 30, 2020

Creating + Community + COVID






Above: Our "COVID Art History Collage" was inspired by Sandro Botticelli and Amedeo Modigliani.

What is the best that can be said about the year 2020 (other than it is almost over)? It was a socially distancing, zoom-group-chatting year, allowing us to view artist symposiums and exhibitions online; it was also a year in which DOEprojekts (Deborah Adams Doering and Glenn N. Doering) persevered to create art and community through diverse creative projects. In addition, we taught art to several groups online, and took time to visit whatever museums and galleries were open in person (with masks, of course).  

We participated in "Masked NYC," a thoughtful and diverse documentary project by photographer AJ Stetson. We wore our custom-made Coreform masks (and Deborah wore a Coreform shirt) to Stuyvesant Square Park in Manhattan to be photographed. We were introduced to AJ by our artist/photographer friend Todd Drake, who took the photo of us shown at the conclusion of this blog post. More of AJ's work can be seen at www.ajstetson.com, and Todd's multimedia work can be seen at www.the-equalist.com.



In a previous 2020 blog post, we wrote about the "100 Mandalas Series" that we created at the beginning of the COVID pandemic, inspired by our Coreforms (zero, one, hyphen, tilde, and period) and also our cultural keywords and phrases. Some of these mandalas inspired us to conceptualize and cut stencils from a mylar-type material called Yupo. We have spent the last few weeks of 2020 painting the stencils on various surfaces. Two prints (overlapping) are shown here:


And, we were invited to be a part of a future exhibition titled "Net Gain: Experimenting with Geometric Folding," curated by Maddy Rosenberg, artist/director of CENTRAL BOOKING. We thank Maddy and her staff for their dedicated work during the pandemic. The exhibition, which already has a catalog-pdf, will ultimately travel to community venues and galleries, hopefully later in 2021. Until then, check out https://centralbookingnyc.com/exhibitions/net-gain/


As we prepare to enter the New Year, we anticipate the COVID vaccine releasing us from the restricted movement we have experienced in 2020. It has been helpful for us to remember that the "heart" of DOEprojekts' Coreforms concept is MovementMoving, changing perspectives, and creating community connections through art continue to be our focus and our central goals for 2020.


We thank all of you who have supported our journey to date and we wish you a healthy and happy 2021. Keep in touch and stay safe.

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