THE NEW YORK FOUNDATION FOR THE ARTS PRESENTS ANNUAL EAST END STUDIO TOUR WITH ROSS BLECKNER, APRIL GORNIK, AND HIROYUKI HAMADA

ON AUGUST 3, 2018

Intimate Studio Tour to Conclude with a Seated Lunch with the Artists at a

Private Bridgehampton Residence

New York, NY – The New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) Leadership Council Members Carol Ross and Marjorie Silverman and Board Member J. Whitney Stevens will host an intimate tour of three artist studios on Long Island’s East End on Friday, August 3, 2018. Led by Andrea Grover, Executive Director, Guild Hall, the group will visit the studios of artists Ross Bleckner, April Gornik, and Hiroyuki Hamada. The ticketed tour will conclude with a seated lunch at a private residence in Bridgehampton with the artists, and will benefit NYFA’s programs for artists throughout Long Island and New York State. Past tours have featured artists including Alice Aycock, Quentin Curry, Mary Heilmann, Brian Hunt, Donald Lipski, Toni Ross, Joan Semmel, Arlene Slavin, Elizabeth Strong-Cuevas, and Joe Zucker.

The tour is open to the public, with advance RSVP required. Tickets are $350 and available for purchase here.

Ross Bleckner’s work deals largely with notions of loss, change, memory, and mortality, particularly in relation to AIDS and the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s. He received a NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellowship in Painting in 1985. His work has been the subject of numerous solo and group exhibitions, including a 1995 mid-career retrospective organized by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum that traveled to the Astrup Fearnley Museet for Moderne Kunst, Oslo, and the I.V.A.M. Centre Julio Gonzalez, Valencia, Spain. He has been represented in many group exhibitions including the Whitney Biennial, Biennale of Sydney, and Carnegie International. His work can be found in major public and private collections around the world, including Baltimore Museum of Art; Ho-Am Art Museum, Seoul; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid; and National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. Bleckner has used his prominence as an artist to advance philanthropic causes: he is on the board of the AIDS Community Research Initiative of America, and was the first fine artist to be named Goodwill Ambassador by the United Nations in 2009. He is represented by Mary Boone Gallery, New York.

April Gornik’s paintings of land, sky, and sea are rooted in observed reality and a world that is synthesized, abstracted, stored, and remembered. They offer the viewer an opportunity to explore dichotomies between past and present, expanse and its circumscription, and stillness and the inexorable momentum of atmospheric change. Her work is featured in many public and private collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Whitney Museum of American Art, and The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The National Museum of American Art and The National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C.; and High Museum of Art, Atlanta. In 2004, the Neuberger Museum of Art at SUNY Purchase organized a mid-career retrospective of Gornik’s work that traveled to the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia and the Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery in Lincoln, NE. Gornik has received a Lifetime Achievement in the Arts Award from Guild Hall Academy of the Arts, and the Award for Excellence for Artistic Contributions to the Fight Against AIDS from amFAR. She is represented by Danese/Corey, New York, and has had one-person shows in New York regularly since 1981.

Hiroyuki Hamada is a Japanese-born sculptor who has exhibited widely in gallery and non-commercial settings alike, including Guild Hall of East Hampton; Lori Bookstein Fine Art, New York; Southampton Arts Center; Roger Williams University, Bristol, RI; The List Gallery, Swarthmore, PA; Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art, Charleston, SC; and O.K. Harris Works of Art, New York. Hamada holds an MFA degree from the University of Maryland and attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture with a Skowhegan Fellowship. Over the years, he has been awarded various residencies including those at the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, Edward F. Albee Foundation/William Flanagan Memorial Creative Person’s Center, and MacDowell Colony. He has received a Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant (1998), two New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowships in Sculpture (2009, 2017), and a Guggenheim Fellowship (2018). He is represented by Bookstein Projects.

Andrea Grover became the Executive Director of Guild Hall, East Hampton, in September 2016. From 2011-2016, she was the Century Arts Foundation Curator of Special Projects at the Parrish Art Museum, where she initiated new models for temporary and off-site exhibitions via the museum’s “Platform” and “Parrish Road Show” series. From 1998-2008, she was the Founding Director of Houston’s Aurora Picture Show, a non-profit cinema specializing in media art and the presentation of multi-disciplinary performances and screenings. In addition to ten years of film and video programming at Aurora, she has curated film programs for the Dia Art Foundation and The Menil Collection.

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