This past weekend, Yonkers celebrated its 11th annual Yonkers Arts Weekend (YAW) two-day festival. With events spread throughout the city, residents and visitors had the chance to engage in workshops and attend exhibitions.
In the Carpet Mills Arts District (CMAD), visitors were allowed to walk through the YoHo Artists Open Studios and engage with the artists. Exploring the studios is a unique experience to see the variety of art and art styles produced by the artists, and to walk in and explore their studios, a behind-the-scenes look at the creation of the art, spanning across the five floors of the studios. While there, I had the opportunity to speak to many of the artists who graciously allowed people to peruse their studio setups and breadth of work.
James Henry
James Henry, an abstract artist based out of New York City with a studio on the fourth floor, greeted us first. His art is full of raw emotion, splayed over beautiful canvases. As a professional graphic designer, his work is typically meticulous, while his art is, as he states, “pure emotion.” Unlike the precision of his work in marketing, abstract art allows him the freedom to explore his feelings and thoughts. He also loves the opportunity to merge the two and believes that true art comes from the ability to shake things up. “I love taking advertisements and degrading them,” Henry explains.
Steven Nedboy
Further down the hall on the fourth floor is Steven Nedboy‘s studio. Nedboy is a multidisciplinary artist whose work includes paintings, sculptures, textiles, antique furniture, and brownstone restorations.
Most of the paintings on display in the studio are oil and wax medium on vinyl, linen, or canvas. In his artist statement, Nedboy says that his paintings deal with “scale, balance, memories, and relationships,” and he hopes “the viewer’s immersion and interaction with these various components will create a beneficial and positive experience.”
Nedboy also enjoys experimenting with different tools and, though many people say yellows and oranges are the hardest to use, he finds those colors are the easiest for him.
Emily Stedman
Emily Stedman, a watercolor artist and urban sketcher, had on display her vast range of work, from her historical illustrations to her notebook sketches and watercolor flowers. Stedman’s historical illustrations came together from assembling archival photos, inspired by the idea of revisiting the past. “I like the idea, I don’t know, it kind of feels like in the past, it seemed like a simpler time, even though it probably wasn’t that far in many ways,” Stedman explains. Bringing old black and white photos to vivid, colorful life creates a more immersive experience for the viewer.
Stedman’s illustrations work is typically looser, often created from nature, many of which are based on her own garden. Flowers, to Stedman, represent an eternal and timeless cycle of life.
Alison Collins
Growing up in New York, steel sculpture artist Alison Collins‘ mother taught her how to sew, which she found to be a key metaphor for understanding and mastering steel sculpture. Collins would later encourage her students to approach steelwork methodically and creatively, starting with sewing to grasp the fundamentals of form. Collins finds steelwork fascinating because of its association with industry, masculinity, and permanence, and often uses her steel art to convey themes of nature, culture, gender, decoration, time, decay, and memory.
Also on display was Collins’ work that was previously on display at the North Carolina Museum of Art, in which she used dye made from iron oxide she collected from some of her steel sculptures that rusted to create ink. With the ink, she copied an excerpt from Marcel Proust’s novel In Search of Lost Time onto a large piece of muslin, which originally spanned 225 yards.
Stefanie Wolfson
Stefanie Wolfson is a printmaker and painter who uses vivid colors to represent nature. Starting off as a printmaker and working with silkscreens, Stefanie has focused her more recent works on acrylic paintings with eye-catching, vibrant color palettes.
Growing up surrounded by nature, Stefanie likes to recreate what she sees as a means of slowing down and appreciating the natural beauty that exists all around us.
These are just a few of the talented artists working out of the YoHo Artists Studios. Learn more about the space, events, and the individual artists at the YoHo Artist Studios Website.
