APRIL GORNIK - Artist, Environmentalist, Co-founder of The Church: Arts & Creativity Center

Art · The Creative Process: Artists, Curators, Museum Directors Talk Art, Life & Creativity

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.

"I've chosen my work because I've loved the outside world. I love the things outside of myself. I love what isn't immediate to me. And I love projecting onto that as a way of kind of trying to reach the distance between my inner self and the vastness. To try to do that in a way that makes other people feel inspired by it, not be chided for not taking care of it. It's not something that I intend to be a message per se, but I think it might be a better message if it's not saying, "People, you've been bad. You have to change your evil ways!"

You know, I'd rather people look at the natural world and see the heartbreaking beauty of it and sense its fragility and its impermanence and their own impermanence and fragility and then have a response to that rather than say, you know, you have to act, you have to do something. I would hope that would inspire action rather than to cudgel them with a directive.

In terms of The Church arts center. It's not a religious institution, but it had been an old Methodist church that was built originally in 1835, and we renovated it to be an arts and creativity center. The arts are deeply important and creativity in all its forms is equally important to encourage and extol. So it was a natural place to develop that way, where we have art and poetry readings, and we have dance performances and rehearsals. And all of our residents are from different kinds of creative endeavors, and we haven't quite enacted this as much as I would like, but we want to have people who are computer scientists, composers, environmentalists, and anyone who is using creativity to make a positive change in the world and to express themselves. So that's the basic idea."

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.