After working with the client to determine the vision and the goals for the incorporation of art into new offices in New York City, Art Strategies principal, Mindy Taylor Ross, developed an art program for their two lobbies and key gathering and transitional spaces. Three site specific commissions were curated and managed by Art Strategies for the main lobby and 13 other existing works of art by national and internationally renowned artists were curated, prepared, and installed.

The integration of art resulted in spaces that feel more human, inspiring, and multi-cultural creating an atmosphere that reflects the company’s focus on providing a high quality workplace that promotes innovation through creative thinking and problem solving and celebrates its global staff and clientele.

PRIMARY RECEPTION AREA:

The reception area features three bespoke artworks—an installation by Paul Villinski and two paintings by Suzanne McClelland. These artists and their work connect to the environment, commerce, transformation, and social impact—all themes of interest to the client.

Paul Villinski (American, b. 1960)
Zephyr, 2021
Aluminum (found cans), wire, blue Flashe
Approximately 14 x 38 feet on three walls

Site specific installation created for the client.

Paul Villinski has created studio and large-scale artworks for more than three decades. Villinski was born in York, Maine, in 1960, the son of an Air Force navigator. He has lived and worked in New York City since 1982 completing his academic training at The Cooper Union. A pilot of sailplanes, paragliders and single-engine airplanes, metaphors of flight and soaring often appear in his work. With a lifelong concern for environmental issues, his work frequently re-purposes discarded materials, resulting in surprising and poetic transformations.

In this bespoke installation for our client—the artist’s largest to date—many of the afore mentioned themes are at play. The installation is composed of 45 different species of butterflies and moths and one hummingbird. Butterflies are symbols of transformation. The spectrum of species represents the power of diversity and the impact of one on the many. Through a decades long partnership with Sure We Can, a not-for-profit recycling center, community space, and sustainability hub in Brooklyn, Paul has worked with canners (people who collect cans and bottles from the streets to make a living) to source the foundational medium for his installations—discarded aluminum cans. All of these themes connect with the client’s focus on impact investing and corporate responsibility.

Suzanne McClelland (American, b. 1959)
PASSAGES: 4 Rivers- Arctic Waterways (NEP/NWP) in Reds, 2021
PASSAGES: 4 Rivers- The Amazon in Yellows, 2021
Polymer, graphite and oil on linen
102 x 102 inches each

Site-specific paintings created for the client.

In this new body of work, McClelland explores trade and commerce by way of their geographic origin in rivers. Attributing colors to major rivers– The Northwest/Northeast Passages in reds and The Amazon in yellows – McClelland emphasizes the influence climate and landscape have on the economic and social fabric of our culture. Rivers have played a pivotal role in the history of humanity, from the birth of civilization along their shores to the development of global trading lanes and hubs around their estuaries. The physical movement of these goods, currencies, and people through something so transient as water relates to McClelland’s past work of representing linguistic and physical expressions between bodies. Inspired by the seeming impossibility of capturing a river visually, similar to the impossibility of capturing a spoken word or a sound, the artist examines the many ways to measure a meandering form.

Approaching traditional landscape from a bird’s eye view, McClelland uses satellite images to map out and further abstract the passageways. Her fluid approach to painting mirrors how water as a sole medium controls and carves out a landscape, with the monochrome color palettes offering variations of reflection, absorption, opacity, and transparency within one color. For our client, the artist chose the world’s most extreme climates: Tropical (the Amazon) and Arctic (The Northwest/Northeast Passages). Using these powerful waterways and their corresponding climates as a point of reference for our economies, McClelland points to the passage of time, the history of trade, and the significance of connection, the passing through hands, through waters.

Judy Pfaff (American, b. 1946)
Year of the Dog #8, 2009
Year of the Dog #10, 2009
Woodblock, collage, and hand painting in an artist-specified frame Varied edition of 20
45 1/4 x 92 1/2 inches framed

Each of the office floors is connected by a central staircase. Art was installed in these important transitional and impromptu meeting spaces.

A pioneer of 1970s installation art and sculpture, Judy Pfaff is known for creating large scale layered environments in museums and galleries around the world. In her practice, Pfaff explores craft, materiality, color, and space. Her exploration of these formal elements can be seen in the two pieces from her Year of the Dog series seen along these walls. The title, color palette, and organic shapes are inspired by Chinese art and the Chinese zodiac. These prints were selected because they align with the company’s commitment to innovation, diversity, and the environment.

Donald Sultan (American, b. 1951)
Mimosa with Red, 2021
Screenprint with enamel inks, flocking, and tar-like texture on Rising 4-ply museum board; edition of 40
42 x 84 inches

Donald Sultan is a noted painter, sculptor, and printmaker who rose to prominence in New York in the late 1970s as part of the “New Image” movement. He’s known for his monumental paintings that employ industrial materials, including tar, spackle, and enamel, to render basic geometric and organic elements with a formal minimalism. Throughout his career, he has revisited and reinvented the still life with images of fruits and flowers, lemons, poppies, playing cards, and other objects. Interested in contrast, he explores such dichotomies as beauty and roughness, nature and artificiality, and realism and abstraction. Sultan has received several awards and his work can be found in collections around the globe.

Jim Dine (American, b. 1935)
The Cottonwoods at Night, 2015
Woodcut, etching, collograph, and screenprint; edition of 24
64 x 47 1/2 inches

Viewers may know Dine’s work because of the outdoor Venus sculptures on 6th Avenue between 53rd and 54th streets. His work has incorporated many symbols that are both personal as well as universal. Here he depicts the heart—a simple form that can symbolize the love of family and friends, health, and more. Dine is of a generation of internationally renowned artists associated with the New York School of the 1950s and 60s whose styles encompass both abstract expressionism and pop art. We see both styles at play here.

Paula Scher (American, b. 1948)
World Trade Routes, 2018
Screenprint, edition of 150
34 3/4 x 60 inches

Scher’s father, Marvin B. Scher, invented the ‘stereo templates’ for the government—a device that corrects the lens distortion in aerial photography. He taught his daughter, Paula, that maps are not the literal truth. They are distorted and their information changes based on the mapmaker’s point of view. Paula Scher’s maps are a kind of data visualization. Here she is interpreting world trade routes—the paths that physical commerce takes as it circumambulates the earth.

Historically, Scher has been known as an award winning graphic designer and the first female principal at the firm Pentagram. Her design work and now her art have been exhibited around the world and can be found in leading museum collections.

Jacob Hashimoto (American, b. 1973)
From the series The Necessary Invention of the Mind, 2020
Woodblock and screenprint, editions of 37
22 7/8 x 20 5/8 inches each

This series of prints is an extension of Hashimoto’s practice of creating complex constructions of hundreds and sometimes thousands of Japanese paper and bamboo kite forms. The prints and smaller constructions allow Hashimoto to push that practice creating forms and patterns that reference video games, virtual environments, and cosmology.

Hashimoto is a graduate of the Art Institute of Chicago. He has been featured in solo museum exhibitions at LA MoCA’s Pacific Design Center, Rice University, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Rome and the Fondazione Querini Stampalia in Venice.

Odili Donald Odita (American, b. 1966)
Cut, 2016
Lithograph, edition of 60
29 1/2 x 21 3/4 inches

Just one year after Odita was born his parents fled Nigeria during a civil war and settled in Columbus, Ohio. Odita’s father is an art historian at The Ohio State University and it was evident from an early age that his son would become an artist. Odita is known for his large-scale wall paintings that combine color theory with geometric abstraction. His choice of colors and forms are inspired by both African textiles and Western modernism. Odita has taught at major institutions such as Yale and Temple universities. His work may be found in collections around the world.

Odita’s practice connects with our client’s interestsin creating diverse, inclusive teams that embrace different perspectives.

AFFILIATE BUSINESS RECEPTION AREA

Katherine Tzu-Lan Mann (American, b. 1983)
Castle, 2021
Acrylic and sumi ink on paper
55 x 80 inches

Katherine Tzu-Lan Mann combines traditional Chinese sumi ink landscape painting with American abstract expressionism and multi-media artmaking. Her latest work confronts the challenge of creating landscape painting in a world where "landscape" is represented and defined through an ever-widening field of technology. She asks, “How can a painting capture flux, abundance, waste, fertility, and the collision and collusion of diverse forms? How can it respond to the pressure we place on our era's fragile ecosystem?”

Mann’s painting was selected for our client because of its reflection on multiculturalism, the environment, and the various impacts of technology.