Art Note: Gloria Maximo

On the occasion of the release of Cynthia Hawkins’s new book, Art Notes, Art, CARA has invited artists whose varied practices engage, in some form, the interplay of abstraction, painting, drawing, and sculpture, to share a page from their journal featuring sketches, drawings, notes, reflections on process, and other ephemera from the regular unfoldings of everyday life.

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Notes on color

“Instead of relying on static classifications of organizational type (as either bureaucratic or collectivist), Katherine Chen (2009) more recently called for a focus on specific organizing practices or outcomes. In her study of the organization behind the Burning Man arts festival, Chen shows, for example, how the organizers develop sufficient formalization and coordination to plan a large-scale event, while also maintaining accountability to members’ interests. By negotiating tendencies to under- or overorganize, Chen writes, organizations can become enabling structures that participants can use to realize their collective goals and values." (from The People’s Hotel, Katherine Sobering)

The color in my work is in service of a specific quality of attention. My paintings are not monochromatic (though they may at times look like that in digital reproduction, or if looked at quickly). The images suggest a spatial relationship expressed through movement—an enabling structure. The outcome is the inquiry/the knowledge.

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Notes and location research

In certain ways, Stanley Brouwn’s work, This Way Brown and many of Mierle Laderman Ukeles’s works are extroverted, with both artists addressing people directly in order to introduce an activity. In my work, I feel more aligned with an introverted formal relationship.

For the paintings’ installation, I am thinking of spaces which are in proximity to activity. Areas where shifts of meaning may indirectly arise between the paintings and surrounding movement, rather than being directly imposed. Spaces like a wall in a logistics hub, “a safe package room,” a corporate office, the Berkeley Institute for Research on Labor and Employment meeting room (students, researchers), Wolfhouse (glass architectural environment/natural landscape and light), or the Bobst Library gallery at NYU, which houses the Tamiment Library. The gallery is in the lobby, a space of 24/7 interchange between students, delivery persons, security personnel, teachers, cleaners, and many more people who inhabit the building at different times of the day.

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Gloria Maximo lives and works in Queens, NY. Her art spans painting, performance, and video, and has been exhibited at the Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry (University of Chicago), Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM), and the Queens Museum in New York City. Maximo experiments with visual representations of labor through movement. Informed by her relations and histories, Maximo’s work aims to explore concepts of relationality to expand understanding within social and economic contexts, fostering more inclusive and equitable exchanges.