How Do the Arts Build Community & Inspire Change? - Artist & Environmentalist APRIL GORNIK - Highlights

"I was just saying to Eric yesterday, we were walking down the quay and talking and suddenly I said, "People just don't think about place enough. We don't recognize the importance of place." I think it's a little bit the social media environment that we're living in now where we're all bent over a screen, but to try to locate yourself in a place is reifying. It's identifying. It gives you a sense of positive self-consciousness. I think if you find that you're comfortable or not, just being able to feel out the positive or negative effects of a space or place is really important. And I don't think people spend enough time affording themselves that contemplation of place. And, to go back to my work, that's a little bit what I'm doing...I've been trying to sort of locate myself outside of myself as a way of reflecting back on who I am as a person."

In this fractured world, how do the arts build community, understanding, and inspire change? How does art help us define who we are and our place in the world?

April Gornik is known for her large scale landscape paintings which embrace the vastness of sea and sky. Her imagined landscapes, built up through a series of underpaintings are meditations on light and time. Her work is included in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, DC.
She is a director of the board of the Sag Harbor Cinema Arts Center and co-founded The Church arts, exhibition space, and creativity center, which is a sanctuary for visual, performing, literary artists, and other creatives. Together with her husband the artist Eric Fischl, they are at the center of Sag Harbour’s arts district, and in this episode, we’ll also hear from some of the talented artists they’ve brought to their stages.

www.aprilgornik.com
www.thechurchsagharbor.org
www.milesmcenery.com/exhibitions/april-gornik2
https://sagharborcinema.org/

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Kimiko Ishizaka - Bach - Well-Tempered Clavier, Book 1 - 01 Prelude No. 1 in C major, BWV 846
Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain

Additional audio courtesy of Sag Harbor Cinema Arts Center.