Beauty for Ashes at Jersey City Museum, NJ
JERSEY CITY, NJ.- The Jersey City Museum presents Duda Penteado: Beauty for Ashes Project, on view through March 2nd, 2008. Duda Penteado opened his exhibition, Beauty for Ashes Project, at the Jersey City Museum with a performance entitled Why Bones?. Accompanied by the students who assisted in the creation a colossal mural in the museum's Project Gallery, Penteado, clad in pajamas, pushing a baby pram filled with bronze-cast bones through the crowd of 600 guests. Combined with mural's potent examination of the impact of globalization on our world, the performance piece served as a solemn reminder of the legacy of September 11th and was received with bittersweet applause by those assembled. Included in the crowd were Jersey City Mayor Jerramiah Healy, Council President Mariano Vega, and Davino Ribeiro de Sena, Head of the Cultural Department of the Brazillian Consulate in New York.
Beauty for Ashes Project, on view through March 2nd, was conceived as an international initiative that will visit Jersey City's sister cities in order to facilitate cultural communication and mutual understanding between people of disparate backgrounds through artistic creativity. Exhibitions in Puerto Rico, Brazil, Spain, and China have already been planned, and more are underway. In each location, Penteado will recruit local youngsters to create murals.
There will be several interpretative programs and publications produced in conjunction with this exhibition, including an ArtTalk featuring Penteado on Thursday, November 29th. For more information please contact the museum.
Duda Penteado: Beauty for Ashes Project is supported in part by a grant from the Lucius and Eva Eastman Fund.
Jersey City Museum's gallery hours are Wednesday and Friday from 11am to 5pm, Thursday from 11am to 8pm and weekends from 12pm to 5pm. Admission is $4 for adults, $2 for seniors and students, and free for children under 12 and museum members. Admission is free for all on Thursday evenings from 5 to 8pm. Jersey City Museum is located at 350 Montgomery Street at Monmouth in the Historic Downtown District of Jersey City, within walking distance of the Grove Street PATH and Jersey Avenue Light Rail stations.
Museum displays work rising from ashes
The Jersey City Museum has mounted two overtly political artworks on long-term display, one devoted to the aftermath of 9/11 and the other to the Newark riots -- just the sort of art you don't see much in institutions these days. The first piece, called "Beauty From Ashes," is by Duda Penteado, a painter of Brazilian descent who lives and works in Jersey City. Penteado simultaneously has a large mural, called a "Tapestry of Nations," hung in the Jersey City Hall Rotunda (and promoted by the recent Jersey City Studio Tour) that was made by students under his direction at block parties around the city. And the sprawling drawn mural called "Beauty for Ashes" in the museum's main downstairs gallery combines Penteado's own hand with work by six students: Krystal-Ann Calro from the Hope Center Art Academy; Anthony Willis, Shrimattie Wheeler and Jinja Johnson from the Create Charter High School; and Mateo Cartagena and Saira Perez of the performing arts department of the Jersey City Public Schools. Penteado's mural is the first ever to be drawn onto all four walls of the museum gallery.
The core of the display is a painting by the artist very much in the key of Picasso's "Guernica," featuring the World Trade Center towers topped with wick flames and thereby transformed into huge votive candles. (2007 marks the 70th anniversary of the destruction of the Republican village of Guernica by the Nazis that Picasso commemorated as a demonstration of what Stuka dive bombers can do.) Everywhere Penteado has re-created Picasso's scribbled shorthand doodles for people's faces, mouths are seen in profile like bays on a map with tongues floating in the middle like islands, great staring eyes, even hearts suspended on wings. The cityscape is painted on a deep blue background studded with stars, and the foreground alternates red and white stripes. But all around the painting are the notebooks, newspaper articles, personal logs and other paraphernalia of the artists' working processes, like the outward sign of how Penteado and the students came to see connections between the attacks and economic globalization.
One wall is taken up with a black-and-white drawing of a female head rendered as a tree, surrounded by little gremlin lumberjacks busily chopping it down. Comic book heroes proliferate on the walls, including the internment scene from the "Superman is Dead" comic from 1993. Newspaper pages are pinned up, their edges blackened and burned, and images of George Bush and Osama Bin Laden float by like a two-headed sheep.
Penteado's work is deeply involved with bones and thereby the decaying past, and somehow tries to remind its viewers that the past is the terrain we move above; but this six-years-on contemplation of the attacks is an aggressive phantasmagoria, the past so confusingly alive in the present that both have become a macabre mess. In that, at least, the artists are honest journalists.
