City of Enchantment featured 41 paintings and drawings by the internationally recognized artist Mark Kostabi, who was one of the key players in New York’s East Village Scene during the 1980s. The exhibition focused on imagery inspired by the artist’s frequent visits to Venice, Italy, a place overflowing, in Kostabi’s words, with “mystery and sheer beauty.”
As a young artist, Kostabi took his cues from Andy Warhol, whose “Factory” was a prototype for making art according to a business model. Early on, Kostabi developed a practice of employing a team of creative thinkers and skilled technicians to assist him in the production of his art. Kostabi soon established his own style or “brand,” which consists of faceless figures who engage in allegorical or metaphorical narratives.
In this exhibition, Kostabi’s anonymous figures are in Venice, Italy, where they are placed in situations that invite viewers to reflect on a wide range of topics, including art history, music, love and romance, dreams, spirituality, and the endangered environment. Executed mostly in bright and sometimes psychedelic colors, Kostabi’s paintings possess an aesthetic sensibility that reflects the high-tech domination of the 21st century.
Robin Willis is the MACC’s Healing Arts Coordinator. She also works as the Exhibition and Events Manager and Director of Outreach. Robin has a Bachelor of Arts in Architecture from Clemson University with a minor in Entrepreneurship. She is a multi-discipline artist with emphasis in writing, mixed media abstract painting, alternative process photography, collage, and book arts and binding. In addition to her art practices, she holds several healing modalities certificates, such as extensive kundalini yoga teacher training and education, Reiki master, systemic family constellation facilitator, and depth psychology-based therapy trainings. As an avid learner, she explores and encourages others in their exploration in art, psyche, and our relationship to the micro and macro worlds within and around us. Influenced by John Muir’s quote, When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe, she fuses art, healing, and organization throughout her work and personal life as a creative-scientist minded person.
Kaylin Warden serves as the MACC’s Creative Design and Operations Manager. In this post, she oversees the organization’s graphic design work for exhibitions, events and special projects. She also coordinates the MACC’s arts outreach activities and assists with bookkeeping, among other duties. Kaylin, above all, is passionate about the arts. It comes as no surprise, then, that she is now pursuing a master’s degree in art history. When she’s not at the MACC, you can find her reading her favorite books (especially ones dealing with maritime mysteries), cooking, gardening, playing with her cat and two dogs, and cheering for the Nashville Predators.