Captain Beefheart/Don Van Vliet is supposed to have said to Frank Zappa:
“the difference between us, Frank, is that you like to work and I like to play.”

Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects presents Free Time, a summer invitational in two parts, which celebrates the play spirit in contemporary art. The first section will run between May 25th and June 25th, and includes the work of painters: Daniel Herr, Anna Mendes, Paul Metrinko and Giordanne Salley, textile artist Liv Aanrud and ceramicist Beth Kaminstein.

Based in Los Angeles, Liv Aanrud creates all-over textile abstractions informed by the language of painting. She employs the traditional folk method of rag rug hooking. Aanrud received her MFA in 2011 at the Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University. She had a solo show at SHFAP project space in 2015 entitled, Ravel Ravel. Her work was recently included in Physical Painting at SUNY Purchase College.

Daniel Herr received his MFA in 2011 at Boston University. In 2015, his work was exhibited at The Inside/Outside Art Museum in Beijing. His work connects the dots between Hans Hofmann and Don Van Vliet with wide-open visual references in a polyglot, gestural language.

Beth Kaminstein lives in the Florida Keys. She is a master ceramicist who studied at Bennington College with Stanley Rosen. Subsequently, she taught at Greenwich House in New York City for a number of years. In 2013, her work was exhibited alongside Helen Frankenthaler at Cross Mackenzie Gallery in Washington D.C. She has created commissioned pieces for Greenways Project Broward County Art in Public Places.

Anna Mendes got her undergraduate degree at Wesleyan. She is attending UCLA this fall to work in their MFA program. Recently, she has, with several collaborators, created an environmental art space in Brooklyn called Treasure Town. Mendes began as a figurative painter. We will be showing examples from her snacks series.

Paul Metrinko studied at Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. While there, he received the Lois and Charles X. Landscape Residency where he met E. M. Saniga, an artist who exhibits with Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects. Metrinko is working on a series of small paintings of New York, which play with the conventions of outdoor landscape painting while illustrating an innocent surrealism.

Giordanne Salley’s paintings explore the intersection of love and nature. With sensitively textured surfaces, she creates close-ups of the memories of running through the woods, skinny-dipping, and being in love. Salley received her MFA from Boston University in 2013. She had a solo show at The Vermont Studio Center in 2011. Her first solo show in New York City was at Steven Harvey Fine Art Project’s Projector Space in 2015. The New York Times, critic, Roberta Smith singled Salley out as an artist to look out for.

Free Time, part 2 opens July 7, 2016. Please contact the gallery at 917-861-7312 or info@shfap.com for further information or photographs.