Kennedy Yanko, 2021. Photograph by Mike Vitelli.
Kennedy Yanko paints and sculpts to a kind of choreography. The Brooklyn-based rising star is known for her evocative and sensual sculptures made from paint skins (essentially, sheaths of latex paint) and manipulated pieces of scrap metal she has hunted down at junkyards across New York City.
Performance is a key element of her work, and Yanko, it’s worth noting, spent three years at the Living Theatre, New York’s oldest experimental theater group, followed by time as a yoga instructor and a bodybuilder while she pursued her artistic practice. All of which is to say that she is highly attuned to the presence of the body and her finished works, which are best described as a product of improvisation, timing, grace, and physical strength.
Lady Dada: Die große Sophie-Taeuber-Arp-Schau im Kunstmuseum Basel - Kultur rheinpfalz.de - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from rheinpfalz.de Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
After studying textile design in St. Gallen, Switzerland, and in Hamburg, Taeuber-Arp left for Zürich in 1915. That year she met Jean Arp, who became her artistic collaborator and then her husband (1922). Together Taeuber-Arp and Arp created abstract multimedia works that they called
Duo-Collages. Those early works were founded on geometry and patterns and were visibly influenced by Taeuber-Arp’s experience with textile design. Starting in 1916 she taught textile design at Zürich’s School of Arts and Crafts, a position she held through at least 1928. In 1916 she also immersed herself in the Dada movement, which had taken hold of the avant-garde artists of Zürich. That year she also began to study modern dance with choreographer Rudolf Laban. She became an accomplished dancer and performed, sometimes with German dancer Mary Wigman, at the Cabaret Voltaire, a central meeting place of the Dadaists.
Marking Modern Movement: Dance and Gender in the Visual Imagery of the Weimar Republic
Susan Funkenstein
Imagine yourself in Weimar Germany: you are visually inundated with depictions of dance. Perusing a women’s magazine, you find photograph after photograph of leggy revue starlets, clad in sequins and feathers, coquettishly smiling at you. When you attend an art exhibition, you encounter Otto Dix’s six-foot-tall triptych Metropolis, featuring Charleston dancers in the latest luxurious fashions, or Emil Nolde’s watercolors of Mary Wigman, with their luminous blues and purples evoking her choreographies’ mystery and expressivity. Invited to the Bauhaus, you participate in the Metallic Festival, and witness the school’s transformation into a humorous, shiny, technological total work of art; you costume yourself by strapping a metal plate to your head, admire your reflection in the tin balls hanging from the ceiling, and dance the Bauhaus’ signature step in which you vig