KMA’s New Exhibition: Tradition Interrupted

KMA’s New Exhibition: Tradition Interrupted

The Katonah Museum of Art’s new exhibit, Tradition Interrupted, will open to the public on Sunday, July 10 from 2-pm-5pm. And will run through Sunday, September 25.

Tradition Interrupted showcases the work of 12 artists from around the world from Pakistan, Vietnam, Azerbaijan, Morocco, Iran, Japan and Mexico to five American artists from New York, Virginia, California, Florida and and Lee, Montana. The disparate  artists are unified by their works that fuse contemporary ideas with traditional arts and crafts to create provocative hybrid images and objects that give both traditional and contemporary ideas new meaning. The artists work in a variety of media from rugs and mosaic to metalwork and ceramics, merging age-old art and craft customs with innovative techniques.

Such as Faig Ahmed’s take on traditional Azerbaijani loose woven rugs that melt away into surreal abstractions that at once preserve the elements of the tradition craft and shakes off its roots into contemporary thought about identity loss. And Mounir Fatmi’s (France and Morocco) prayer rug skateboards.

Ana Gómez’s, Disposable series reflects on how cultural traditions of the family meal are lost in our fast-paced contemporary lifestyles by combining in one piece, take-out containers with ancient ceramic patterns in a way acknowledges history and tradition in present forms. In similar thought, Shirin Hoseinvand’s Star Cluster at Night invokes the Coco Cola logo in her Persian mirror mosaic in traditional gold and blue.

Photographer Dinh Q. Le’s photo weavings from images of Vietnamese culture, mimics the weaving technique traditionally used to create Vietnamese grass mats, that he learned from his aunt.

While Florida’s Jason Seife uses contemporary oil and acrylic painting techniques in his work Ocean Bed to reference traditional Persian carpets.

The Exhibit opens on Sunday July 10 at 2pm and runs through Sunday September 25. Museum Hours at Tuesday to Saturday from 10am to 5pm and Sunday from 12pm to 5pm. The Katonah Museum of Art is located at 134 Jay Street (Rt. 22) in Katonah.