Carl Heyward is an artist and writer living in San Francisco. He has exhibited his mixed-media paintings and artists’ books internationally and has been collected by numerous institutions and individuals including: The Sackner Archives, Califia Books, The New Museum of Art (NY), SF Museum of Modern Art Library, SF Art Institute, SF Academy of Art University, Yale University Art Library, The Australian National Gallery and Sonoma County Museum of Modern Art. He taught History of Art Criticism, Introduction to Film and Video Production and Thesis Writing and Presentation in SF Academy of Art’s MFA Program and served as a graduate adviser. Heyward produced Artspeak for Viacom SF, a program of interviews and conversation with performance demonstrations. His work in performance includes collaborative grants for New Performance from National Endowment for the Arts.
Originally Carl Heyward and Lorna Crane began a friendship and
correspondence via Heyward's KNEE(jerk) Fragmentation (mail art ) Project in
2011 which consists of a one-for-one exchange of post card sized art works made
exclusively for the project that has attracted over 500 artist- participants and
produced over 3,000 individual art works. The idea of fragmentation is central
to his aesthetic mission in that the pieces of a culture, the debris, the
archaeological products of waste and discard give evidence of culturally
assigned value and worth; of conscious and sublimated preoccupations of
contemporary culture and that their combination through collage, assemblage and
other art methods allows a reading of place and time that includes and
transcends these elements. Heyward is currently considering museums, galleries
and archives to donate part of thiscolleection and is preparing traveling
exhibitions.
In the course of these electric endeavors, both artists have exhibited in
their respective countries as well as having participated in international
shows. In expanding their inclusion of other artists in the aforementioned and
similar projects, Heyward and Crane added painter Joan Stennick of San Francisco
(she has exhibited widely in two-person shows with him as well as her own solo
exhibitions); Akiko Suzuki an award winning contemporary quilt maker from Osaka,
Japan; the hugely popular self-taught Vered Gersztenkorn (Tel Aviv, Israel) a
painter-collagist; and Chaewon Laura Oh of Seoul, Korea a multi-media artist and
accomplished portraitist, completing the Global Art Project (GAP) in November
2013.
Our work reflects individual, personal and global concerns by virtue of
intention. We are creating and exhibiting work that allows the freedom of
expression by the very opportunity to communicate beyond language and culture
with diverse artists form all over the world while remaining open to the
opportunities of the moment accessed through this circumstance in a settings
such as Mazatlan Mexico, Marin County, San Francisco and Benicia, California as
well as Venice, Lecce and Treviso, Italy, sites of our workshops,
demonstrations, workshops and studio environments.
We are linked by activity in mixed-media art practice, which may be reduced
to working with the materials at hand and has antecedents in collage,
assemblage, found-object and related practice.
GAP (Global Art Project) is an international, multi-cultural,
multi-national, pan-ethnic conglomerate. A group of international artists
working in various media, promoting collaboration, experimentation and mutual
development of art practice, that regularly organize international workshops and
exhibitions. In recent years GAP meetings where organized in Lecce, Italy,
Mazatlan, Mexico and Ca' Zanardi - Venice.
This diverse GAP group of painters, mixed-media artists, textile, photo and collage practitioners share a common interest in what they term 'fragmentation': the taking of disparate elements (frags) not ordinarily associated with art practice and combining them with creative passion, inventive ingenuity and above all, a belief in the democratization of the art process from inception to execution to presentation to acquisition. GAP collaborative activity as a vehicle for stimulation and enhanced creative discovery having experienced the rewards of group interaction and the illuminating effect in enhancing personal practice.
