APPROACH
Artist: Karyn Olivier
City of Origin: Philadelphia, PA
Medium: Powder-coated aluminum and stainless steel
Commissioned by the Port Authority of New York & New Jersey and Munich Airport NJ, in partnership with Public Art Fund
To create Approach, Karyn Olivier embarked on an extensive photographic survey of Newark, Elizabeth, and the surrounding region. She captured the extraordinary tapestry of New Jersey’s iconic skylines, robust infrastructure and natural beauty. Slices of land and sky are suspended in two helix-like structures: one that depicts daytime and the other, night. Each ring is double-sided, and presents two distinct views: when looking up, a bird’s eye view; and when looking down from above, a skyward view. This inversion echoes the temporary disorientation that travel often causes as we transit multiple time zones to arrive in different places with new perceptions. As passengers approach the sculptures, the rings begin to align concentrically, revealing a rich topographical mosaic. The artwork may even appear to move, compressing or expanding as our view shifts. The result is a dynamic study of both landscape and time, two elements that define our unique experience of place.
BETWEEN THE FUTURE PAST
Artist: Layqa Nuna Yawar
City of Origin: Newark, NJ
Medium: Acrylic paint and inkjet print on fabric mounted to aluminum panel
Commissioned by the Port Authority of New York & New Jersey and Munich Airport NJ, in partnership with Public Art Fund
Between the Future Past celebrates the abundant diversity of Newark, New Jersey, and the New York metropolitan area. Layqa Nuna Yawar has reimagined the format of a historical mural to reflect an ongoing cycle of time that embraces past, present, and future. Drawing on his indigenous heritage and Kichwa language, he sees the mural as “a looped narrative that can be read from right to left and left to right.” The artwork features native flora and fauna, emphasizing nature as a symbol for growth. It is populated by a wide range of individuals across time, culture, race, and gender, highlighting narratives of personal accomplishment and perseverance that have often been overlooked. People brought by successive waves of global migration, including those from Black, Brown, Asian, and Middle Eastern backgrounds, as well as Indigenous people, are represented in this expansive vision. From airport workers to poets to LGBTQ+ heroes, Layqa Nuna Yawar’s mural rethinks who should be celebrated publicly, proposed that all individuals are equally remarkable in their humanity.
Diptych Artwork
Measured Sunrise, Measured Sunset
Artist: Shoshanna Weinberger
City of Origin: Newark, NJ
The two-panel commissioned diptych entitled Measured Sunrise, Measured Sunset is about how civilization measures time between the daily sunrise and sunset. The horizontal or vertical striped patterns signify a specific number of stripes for representing measured time and history: 24 hours; 7 days and 12 months. Employing black and white stripe patterns become identifiers that create a visual language and coding. The pattern signifies the societal lines of divisions (i.e. race, economic, class and political) created within civilization. These stripes also act as universal metaphors for hybridity, incarceration, fences, animals, borders, flags and barcodes. In between the stripes a portrait of an anonymous figure wearing braided or coiled hair like a crown, representing our collective consciousness within measured time.
Faces of New Jersey
Artist: Jesse Wright
City of Origin: North Haledon, NJ
Based in Newark, NJ, Artist, educator Jesse Wright’s work champions promoting empathy through considering one another’s stories. Wright explores spiritual connections underlying daily experience through his paintings (often involving reclaimed materials from the streets), printmaking and video. His visual approach to this content references his blended Jamaican American heritage. Wright’s work is a communication of narratives inspired by humanitarian work at underserved and disenfranchised communities – orphanages, medical centers, schools, displacement camps – both globally and locally while simultaneously developing an ongoing series reconnecting the artist to his mother’s homeland of Jamaica. These depictions of locals and family members offer commentary on their life throughout the diaspora in it’s complex beauty and tension. Wright is based in Newark, New Jersey. He received his BA from the School of Visual Arts in New York City and Middlesex Polytechnic in England.
Look Towards the Future
Artist: Rorshach
City of Origin: Newark, NJ
The artist Rorshach consists of Andre León and Robert Ramone. Two brothers born and raised in the gritty and beautiful city of Newark, New Jersey. Like many other inner-city kids from around the world, their childhood focus was solely on circumventing the obstacles set against them. Both from deeply rooted immigrant Latino households, these brothers were not bonded by blood, but by a connection at a young age that was due to both their many similarities and differences. This balance would follow them into adulthood as they grew into their respective artistic identities.
Crazy Faith Riders
Artist: Brian Branch-Price
City of Origin: Plainfield, NJ
Brian Branch-Price, A Plainfield native son began his career in photography at Plainfield High School, then as a freelancer for the Washington Post, then staffing with the News Journal in Wilmington, DE followed up with the Associated Press in Trenton, NJ. Brian specializes in reportage, portrait and fine art photography. Brian worked for Ebony magazine, GM, Ford Motor Company, The National Urban League, The Positive Community Magazine, Zuma Press Images, The Washington Post Magazine. Brian has exhibited at the Plainfield Public Library, Delaware Historical Society and the Major Taylor Museum in Worcester, MA. Brian earned a B.S in Environmental Geology and a minor in Fine Arts from Howard University. Brian is a member the Major Taylor Cycling Club of NJ, American Society of Media Photographers and The National Association of Black Journalists: Visual Task Force and VTF Parliamentarian.
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