Local Artist Sheila Elias Shines in ArtServe “Memories and Revolutions”
Local ArtServe member artists will get that chance when “Memories and Revolutions” opens there on Thursday, July 14 with a reception from 6:30 to 9 p.m. The opening reception is free and open to the public.
The exhibition runs through September 23. ArtServe is located at 1350 E. Sunrise Blvd. in Fort Lauderdale.
“Memories and Revolutions,” curated by ArtServe’s Sophie Bonet, features 16 artists in a mixed-media presentation with painting, photography and sculpture of their expressions of time, space, memory, nature and technology.
‘family-E and Nature vs Nurture’ Exhibit at The Art Center Highland Park
Nature vs. Nurture is a free-admission exhibit on display at The Art Center Highland Park, 1957 Sheridan Road, Highland Park, from June 17 through July 30th, with gallery hours from 10 AM – 4 PM, Monday through Saturday.
The Main Gallery highlights the exhibit, ‘famil-E’, with featured artists/guest jurors Sheila, Joyce and Joshua Elias who are exhibiting together for the first time. Audiences will be able to draw their own conclusions pertaining to the question of whether artistic ability is genetically inherited, passed through generations, or is creativity a product of environmental factors. Sheila Elias, mother to Joshua and Joyce, instilled a love of art, exposing her children to her own process throughout their lives.
Miami-Based Artist Sheila Elias Reflects On Four Decades Of Work And What Comes Next
Artist Sheila Elias’ blond curls are somewhat hidden behind her trademark folded bandana headband, but the blast of energy she emits is on full display. Buzzing around her North Miami studio, she races past large-scale paintings and collages, riotous with color. Even after four decades of creating photographs, sculptures, totems, vessels and reliefs comprising scraps of aluminum and found objects, plus interactive iPad paintings, Elis is still on fire. (Recently she even made some NFTs, while many still struggle to understand what they are.)
VoyageMIA: Meet Sheila Elias | Contemporary Artist
Known as a painter, photographer, and sculptor and for her installation art, and collages made by combining paint and photographs, the evolution of technology has always paralleled her work throughout its development. From the original copy machine to today’s iPad, and the influence of electronics permeates her process. Sheila’s work has been shown widely in museums and galleries throughout the United States and abroad over the past three decades, including the New York Public Library, Bass Museum in Miami Beach, and the Musee des Arts Decoratifs at the Louvre Museum in Paris.
Lowe Art Museum exhibits Painted Pixels by Artist Sheila Elias
Sheila Elias’ works in Painted Pixels come in and out of focus, buoyed by waves of colors, as one engages with them. Though abstract, many pay homage to her own body of figurative work as well as favored literary masterpieces that inspire her. Created on the iPad and printed on aluminum, whose luster and reflective qualities echo the effect of an illuminated screen, Elias’s works enable viewers to enjoy the so-called “liminal” or in-between spaces.
KHACHI LIFE Magazine: The Digital Works of Sheila Elias
Voyage MIA: Meet Sheila Elias of Sheila Elias Art
Art meets Tech: iPainting the Future
Miami artist, Sheila Elias discusses how she uses Apple technology to realize her artistic vision.
Though I have experimented with painting, photography, sculpture, and
mixed media, I have seen a transformation in my art through the digital
age. Departures magazine has called my series, “iPainting the Future”.
L’ETAGE Magazine: Sheila Elias, Ground-breaking Artist
An interview with Sara Nardea ->
Read interview from L’etage Magazine (PDF)
Art Business News: iPainting the Future
An interview with Rebecca Pahle
Sheila Elias modernizes the Act of Creation with Her iPad.
Read interview from the Winter issue of Art Business News
Visionary Art Trends: David Hockney, Sheila Elias and the iPad
“Throughout her career, Sheila Elias has expressed herself through many artistic mediums. This well known Florida artist has also taken on the Apple iPad with tremendous creativity. Sheila also uses her finger and various apps to open the potential of the iPad to produce new technological visions. She manipulates and explores new colours, lines and forms. She enlarges the abstract shapes that emerge from her iPad onto larger canvases and often adds touches of paint to complete her works of art. Stunning otherworldliness. A shock of cold water on the senses……. In a historic first, The Apple Store, will be presenting Sheila on Oct 17 to demonstrate how she creates her works of art.” ~ Roberta Gonella
Departures Magazine: iPad Art Heads to Miami Beach
By Erin Schumaker
After years of using a paintbrush, Miami-based artist Sheila Elias is exploring a new medium—digital painting on Apple’s iPad. Vividly colorful and full of movement, the large-scale works, printed on canvas and then touched up with paint, appear to be portraits from another world. In October, Elias demonstrated her craft during a live event at the Apple Store on the Upper West Side of New York. After showing at Manhattan’s Mayson Gallery, she is taking her series, “iPaint on My iPad,” to Florida for a pre–Art Basel Miami Beach kick-off exhibit starting December 4. (She will also be showing her more traditional works within Red Dot Art Fair, which is part of Art Basel.) We caught up with the artist for insight into her innovative technique. Read blog post here >
DEPARTURES: An American Express Publishing Corporation.
ArtDistricts: “Sheila Elias: In Search of Light”
By Ashley Knight
Sheila Elias is a multidisciplinary artist based in Miami Beach whose works capture those invisible connections between art and social consiousness. through her ouvre, she portrays the collective soul of a country that today tries to overcome with cleverness and optimism the debacle of the American dream. ArtDistricts talked to her about her successful artistic trajectory, the sources that motivate and inspire her work, her new series “iPaint on the iPad” and her mid-career retrospective book Somewhere-Anywhere, published by Nova Southeastern University.
Read entire article here (PDF) >
ARTDISTRICTS supports the local and regional art scenes with up-to-date articles, interviews, reviews, news and calendars covering the most significant events and exhibitions. Every two months, a new issue of ARTDISTRICTS is available at galleries, museums, art centers, and artist studios throughout Florida; it is also distributed in up-scale hotels and condominiums. ARTDISTRICTS is an invaluable reference for residents and visitors.
“iPaint on my iPad”
Apple Store, Lincoln Center, New York City
October 17, 2012
Artist Sheila Elias uses her finger and various apps to open the potential of the iPad to produce new technologica visions. She manipulates and explores new colors, lines and forms with the sole use of her iPad. Watch now >
Sheila Elias Makes Art with Her iPad
Click here to read MacDirectory article
ARTnews New York Reviews:
Sheila Elias’s 911 Series
Michelle Rosenfeld Exhibition
October 2002
Review by Mary Schneider Enriquez
Laredo Morning Times Newspaper [ Special to the Times ] : ‘Somewhere, Anywhere’ takes you there
by Cactus Salazar
Friday, September 12, 2008
Sheila Elias’ body of work titled “Somewhere-Anywhere,” showcased at the Laredo Center for the Arts through Sept. 26, is a mid career retrospective. Her work, as mentioned in her artist statement, is about the layers of life and art history, seeking in it a connection between art aesthetics and social consciousness. Her recent works are digital photo collages, strong in positive shapes.
In “Fire Dancers,” she uses black marker to outline the shape to move it to the foreground. A gold-tip pen adds dimension to the shape of the figure, re turning it into the background. This dance of shape and space is wonderful to experience in this work of art. Movement appears to be another element of art Elias masters. In “Dream I Had While Awake,” her shapes are influenced by Matisse, but the movement is pure Elias. The artist draws you to the painting and then holds you there before you fall into it. It makes you walk back to view it at a safer distance and begin to see the dance of the positive shapes of people.The negative shapes become bold, making one well aware of the difference between the two. The snakes are there, juxtaposed to the shapes of the ropes. Elias uses these as symbols of life struggle.
I am wary of glitter in artwork that deems it necessary to glow from things other than natural highlights, but Elias manages to make these components work for her. Her butterflies applied with foil paper makes them reflective, yet still appearing elusive. The glitter and iridescent cellophane on “Bee Marilyn” from her American Icon series, is a true art form. One of her paintings from the American Icon series was featured at the Louvre in Paris as part of a group show. This must be a crowning moment of her career.
On the south side wall of the gallery, paintings influenced by Sept. 11 can be viewed. Elias’ former studio was two blocks away from Ground Zero. She left New York two weeks before the tragedy, relocating to Florida to set up her new studio. The work has “angels,” figures of life and death – the danger of life along with death, caution tape. There are ropes that makes us question whether they can save us or if they are the ropes of human sacrifice and endurance. These works demonstrate her criteria of art aesthetics and social consciousness to the viewer.
“Heels” is a very daring in subject matter and very discreetly displayed. You’ll need to play Indiana Jones with this one: Come downtown and find it in the gallery. I promise you, it’s there!
This is a world-class art show and, such, should not be missed by anybody in town who is an art lover. To have her work here in Laredo, the exhibit is a must see. Save your dates this month. Bring your credit card and add to your collection. Sales support the Laredo Center of the Arts.
Artnews 95th Anniversary, November 1997
Sheila Elias Exhibition – Lowe Art Museum
by Elisa Turner, Miami Art Critic
Brash bursts of flowers and busily textured passages of collage crowd the paintings, drawings, and wood sculpture in “Secret Gardens” a survey of 1990s work by Miami-based artist Sheila Elias. Undermined by a repetitive decorative strain, the paintings’ elaborate and overworked odes to the still-life tradition predominate, with an occasional nod given to landscape, as in the large painting Water Garden.
Photocopied bits of fabric and handsomely printed Japanese papers fashioned into bristling bouquets commingle with imagery inspired by ancient Greek kraters and amphorae. the painted vessels often bear photocopied reproductions of running warriors boasting classical musculature. Such a combination does give Elias’s work a hectic energy, which produce es both engaging images, as in the spiraling whirlwind of Flying Blossoms (1996), and stilted quotations, as in gray Flourish (1996).
The strongest work in the show has Elias breaking free from the rectangular canvas, a framework that seems to stifle her longtime fascination with fluid, darting forms that slightly echo Matisse cutouts. Tondos Rondo (1997) is a wall mounted cluster of 24 works, ranging in diameter from 8 to 24 inches. They feature spunky cameos plucked fro Elias’s colorful cast of images. Mounted separately from her larger canvases and reassembled here, the floral forms and ovoid vessels, which together suggest a swift shower of confetti, hover on a white wall in a nearly cinematic stream of gardens.
EL NUEVO HERALD: SHEILA ELIAS – THE JOY OF PAINTING
By Armando Alvarez Bravo
Translation by Elena A. Zayas
February 21, 1999
Sheila Elias arrived in South Florida at the end of the ‘80’s. Born in Chicago, she studied at the prestigious Art Institute of Chicago, bringing with her not only an impressive curriculum of personal and collective exhibitions, but also the reputation of being one of the most original creators, both in New York and Los Angeles.
This reputation extended to Miami, backed by the presence of her work in important private and public collections, outstanding honors, and extended bibliography and her public activities, all of which allow us to follow her constant and ascending career.
Persistent in the diffusion of her work, in 1997 she had three exhibitions in Florida, at the Lowe Art Museum at the university of Miami, the Hollywood Art and Culture Center, and the Jeanine Cox Gallery of Miami. In 1998, her traveling exhibition, “Secret Gardens,” became part of the program of the New England Museum of Contemporary Art in Brooklyn, CT, the Public Art Program of Orlando FL, and the Edison College of Fort Myers, FL. SECRET GARDENS can be taken as a point of reference to the new exhibit of her most recent works at the Veneto Gallery in Miami.
This previous exhibit was a visual challenge by the power of its enormous sunflowers, almost at a burning point, the balancing labyrinths of her rose petals, and the green of the climbing vines. An exuberant vegetation world infiltrated then emerged from the surface of her canvas and also from the papers she executed using collages to achieve the most elaborate backgrounds.
The collection, as viewed by critics – in spite of obvious distances, – invites us to a comparison to what many have called the “overdecorativism” of Matisse. Also there are elements from Art History, such as sinuous lines from antique Greek vases. In these vases, the figure of a warrior represents the synthesis of physical harmony and drawing ability. These elements continue to appear in this new collection.
If SECRET GARDENS was a celebration of the joy of creativity and the splendor of nature, in spite of its many possible meanings, this new collection opens up to the subject spectrum to a new repertoire of reflections and emotions intersecting the labyrinth of the human condition and the possibilities dictated by each epoch. In other words, these new works are Elias’ answer to immediate stimuli. Once more, the artist directs her passion to that constantly renewed challenge, constituting the main sign of contemporary man’s identity.
There is no doubt that the complex world which Elias portrays, expresses the profound understanding of the everyday life she knows so well. These paintings and sculptures are just a vision of what is beyond the visible. However, this “beyond” cannot be understood without the configurations of immediate elements.
A clear example of this may be found in the painting titled, “First Garden.” Suddenly, in a canvas profusely populated by figures and shapes, e are able to imagine the reality of a garden or of an interior, or even a synthesis of both spaces. This is suggested by a combination of elements belonging to each “ambience,” and by the floating quality of the human characters, dealt with a shadowy relief. They seem to be either trapped or evaporating in the “first garden,” as real as it is symbolic, where everything acquires and defines its own dimension, imposing its absolute over the whole.
The floating quality of persons and things dominating Elias’ world is even more profound in “Blue Dot”, where the relationships of the figures stemming from their isolation gives a different perspective to her human characters and their symbols, and where she playfully inserts the image of a frog shown in five of her works.
Elias is an artist who, although deeply playful, reveals an impressionistic imprint of her work. One example of expressionism, in its violent shapes and colors, appears in “Dream of Reality”, one of the paintings of the collection.
These works, a constant combination of reality and spontaneity of perception, are both strong and delicate. They can be deeply aggressive and kind at the same time. Exuberance is at both ends of the expression range. But whatever Elias’ approach to her subjects may be, her encounters and execution are a testimony of something that may forget, a tremendous joy of painting. This joy, no matter its character, gives a different meaning to her work.