Climate and Environmental Sustainability: Meet April’s Artists in Residence
Alexander Russi, Randi Renate and Sarah Ann Weber
This month’s Climate and Environmental Sustainability residency is reserved for artists whose work contemplates the looming effects of climate change. April’s resident artists are generously sponsored by Jane Wesman.
Alexander Russi
Growing up in Kansas and Western Colorado with a single mother, Alexander Russi spent many weekends traveling with his mother to flea markets, where they would buy and sell antiques and collectibles to make a living. He spent that time absorbing the unfolding visuals of the Great Plains and the mythic American West, as well as learning from an eccentric community of dealers and collectors of Americana. Within this vast landscape full of objects and histories, he sought to record his impressions through drawing, painting, and Bluegrass music.
The Brooklyn studio adjacent to his backyard garden is where he derives most of his subject matter. His oil paintings archive the maintenance and organic changes of this intimate landscape. The labor in the garden is a conduit that grounds his perspective. Temporal concerns are documented in the work, and through observation and mark-making, these paintings explore a relationship with history and memory. Russi’s work has been exhibited at Halsey McKay in New York, Lipscomb University in Tennessee and at Cleaner Gallery in Chicago. He currently lives and works in New York. He has a BFA in Studio Art from New York University.
Randi Renate
Randi Renate’s scientific background in biology and oceanography informs her current artistic research. Operating across installation, sculpture, sound and video, her artwork choreographs bodies within a sculptural framework to investigate how the ‘micro’ of the individual weaves into the ‘macro’ of the collective whole. As an artist, Renate finds fulfillment in journeying into unseen or overlooked dimensions to find coherence—in search of emotive and cognitive strands that act as linkages, pulling us together. In her studio, she designs sculptural models rendered in ceramic as a process for refining the form of her large-scale sculptural propositions. Working with space on an architectonic scale allows her to physically bring the audience into an intimate space of imaginative perception, reflection, and action.
Renate received a BFA in Studio Art and a BA in Philosophy from the University of Texas at Austin in 2014 and later moved to Berlin where she maintained a studio and artist-run project space, TRACE. She is a 2020 MFA graduate of the Sculpture Department at the Yale School of Art. Her most recent permanent public sculpture, “blue is the atmospheric refraction I see you through,” at the Adirondack History Museum, was made in part by the 2021 New York State Council of the Arts DEC Community Arts Grant, and she is a current 2022 fellow at Socrates Sculpture Park in Queens, NY. Randi lives and works in New York.
Sarah Ann Weber
Sarah Ann Weber’s work focuses on the lush intersection of beauty, mystery and threat found in our natural world. She uses painting and drawing techniques and materials interchangeably to create overgrown landscapes that are both verdant and menacing, while confounding traditional expectations of the landscape genre. Rather than replicating the surface details of our natural surroundings, Weber’s evocations of nature concern themselves with the spiritual essence of the world and decentralizing the figure. She choreographs vegetation through imaginative stylizations, and proposes that psychological and emotional worlds are as complex and as ripe for exploration as the one beyond our bodies. Her all-over composition style results in works that are deliriously vibrant and feral, uncovering dualities of nature- as a source of beauty and innocence, equally entwined with aggression and indifference.
Weber’s work has been exhibited at the Anat Egbi gallery in Los Angeles, at Phillips auction house in Hong Kong and at The Franklin in Chicago, among others. In 2022, she was commissioned to create a quadriptych for the US Embassy in Guatemala City, Guatemala. Her work has been reviewed in Galerie, Artsy and Hyperallergic. Weber lives and works in Los Angeles.
