Posted September 2009

Re:  “Hanging in There”                                     

We all must hang in there during this difficult beginning of the 21st Century. How about artists? Yes, they are hanging in there with their passion and talents…

…And some of those artists will be showing how they are “Hanging in There” at an art show of the same name at Broome Street Gallery from September 15^th through 20^th.

Yoko Komori Olson who is a member of New York Artist Equity Association (NYAEA), organizes art shows for emerging artists. She says,” When I have an opportunity for artists, I do not hesitate to take a chance.” 

When Yoko talks about art, her face lights up, “Art is artist themselves; you will feel the energy from these artists. Art is communication, sending a message to the society. No matter what happens, we need art, which will communicate with your thought and your heart”. Yoko suggests “We need to see art in our homes; I would like you to have this special experience having art in your heart.”

Ms. Komori Olson is also a past president of Soroptimist International of New York City (SINYC), NGO organization which works with the UN in helping women all over the world. She is keenly aware of the challenges facing women around the world; she is dedicated to doing what she can to help through her art and her life. 

 Yoko will hold a silent auction for one of her paintings, with the proceeds going to SINYC projects for women and girls who need help.

Broome Street Gallery is well-known for supporting artists, and is located in a historical artist zone on Broome Street in SOHO.

The Opening Reception will be held on Thursday, September 17th, 5 pm to 8 pm.

 For further information about this article, please contact: 917-601-7670 (Yoko Komori Olson)

About Artist

Yoko Olson

Yoko is a dedicated painter, with a love of bright, lively color and a particular affinity for the color blue and the calm, happy feelings it inspires in her. Yoko is continually breaking new ground with her creative use of color, texture, and method. The more you look into her paintings, the more you are drawn in to discover yet another side of the often enigmatic character of this talented artist and her artwork. Yoko is a past president of Soroptimist International of New York City (SINYC), which works with the UN in helping women all over the world. She is keenly aware of the challenges facing women around the world, and is dedicated to doing what she can to help, through her art and her life. 

Jon Olson

Jon has been fascinated with photography for most of his life. A professional magazine photographer in the 1980′s, he now pursues the artistic side of photography, which includes digitally manipulating his photos to take on the appearance of paintings. “I’m a frustrated painter, inside”, he says. His works are a beautiful and interesting exploration of colors, shapes, textures, and emotions. From his “Digital Paintography” to the faces he has discovered by pouring cream into Starbucks coffee (“Haunted Starbucks”), Jon’s images can be described by a variety of adjectives, but “dull” and “ordinary” are not among them.

Toru  Shibata

Mr. Shibata has been started as a street graffiti since he was a high school student and got some techniques of the airbrush by self-learning style.

His recent commission works are mostly paint on cars, motorcycles, and architecture world. Most of works are trying to make mixing his original style and the motif of Japanese traditional art to make contemporary art for the foreign countries.

Several works are commissioned by famous artist in that field and it has been made deepen interchange between Toru and other foreign artists who is working around the world. Recently, he did work for  Japanese TV station for paint onto the body as a tattoo airbrush painting.  

In 2006, Toru was frequently visiting to Europe for appeal and also produce his own artistic works. And now, he is trying to work harder to be more advanced skills from day by day. Since 2008, Toru wants to challenge more active to join  the group exhibition and solo exhibition. This is his début show in New York City.

Yoko Gato

Her life has been dramatically hanged after she lived in New York City with her husband. The life in New York was excited and passionate. She started to learn quilt in  New York City, where is the center of art world. Now she lives in Japan and started to participate in quilting competitions. She received first prize of “Honda Quilt Fair 2006” .

After she encountered with quilts was enjoyed looking at quilts book thirty year ago. Now she became a full time quilt artist, she is showing her work in Japan and in New York City. This is her second times showing her work in SOHO.

Yoko Gato and her husband Yozo love wine. Her dream is that her designs of quilt will be used on the labels of bottles of wine which she loves. 

Robert Kane  

 Bob has had one man shows at New York’s Cinque Gallery, Carver Federal Savings Bank, Peg Alston Fine Arts, Larry Aldrich and Betsy Marden Galleries and Restoration Corporation. Organic Curves and Totems have been displayed at SOHO’s Jayne Baum Gallery, the Brooklyn Museum, Randolph Tate Associates, Columbia University, Mount Sinai Hospital, Harlem Hospital, the New York State Office Building and Christies.

His compositions are part of collections in Japan, Germany, Amsterdam, Paris, London, Brazil, Tanzania as well as Washington D.C., La Jolla, San Francisco and Los Angeles. Mr. Kane’s Organic Images may also be seen in the movie New Jack City. Mr. Kane has a B.F.A. from Pratt Institute and an M.F.A. from Brooklyn College.

A former assistant director of the Guggenheim Museums’ Learning to Read through the Arts Program, Mr. Kane is a retired Professor of Fine Arts at Marymount College, Manhattan.

Ismael Checo

Ismael Checo is a painter with a knack for finding beauty where other people have overlooked it. Although his subjects are drawn from the world, trouble politics and complex sociology are not what he is out to capture; his terrain is of a different kind, propelled by close looking at things which delight him. He is, by his own description, a “perfectionist,” preferring to address the ubiquitous, those things familiar and accessible. He is a master of all small truth about the particular light of a particular place, a specific quality of this one thing. In his hands, the ordinary is transformed into something finer and more enduring. Checo is a realist who always works from direct observation. It is easy to admire the artist’s fastidious observation and industriousness in rendering what he sees. He has a fine eye for how the world appears, for recognizing and rendering enough detail to persuade, not so much as to overwhelm. He knows how to keep details in their place, allowing form to exist as edgeless presences, skies to merge with the land, figures to dissolves into the background. Ismael Checo has a disciplined attention to the organized field of painting. One is reminded of impressionism in its purer nineteenth century incarnations but impressionism as a carefully built structure. Something calculated to interest or holds the eye. Such attention to formal concerns – composition, paint application, and surface textures – recalls impressionism yet these concerns are absorbed without compromising the artist’s primary attention to recognizable subject matter.                                                                                     Alexis Mendoza/ Curator