Insight Sunday With Joe Zucker

NOTE: This event has been cancelled, as of August 22, per the organizers.

On Sunday, August 27, at 10:30 a.m., The Church in Sag Harbor will present the next installment of its Insight Sunday series, this month featuring artist Joe Zucker.

Over his long career, Zucker has been interested in the connection of imagery and process. Changing his materials and techniques, the constant in his work is how different mediums have allowed him to move forward.

“I, in a sense, am a cultural anarchist, which is a person who believes in the organization of chaos, not the chaos of organization,” says the artist.

Building up his surface and image simultaneously, Zucker’s differing series of works speak to the fact that his paintings are about painting. He sees a similar balance of experimentation and process in basketball, as seen in the 2017 documentary “Killer Bees.” Zucker volunteered as a basketball coach at Bridgehampton High School for many years and has remarked how the sport’s systematic nature reflects how he thinks as a painter.

Zucker will speak about his work, “Boxing Painting #8,” (1981), which is included in The Church’s summer exhibition “Strike Fast, Dance Lightly: Artists on Boxing” and reflect on his life in the crucible of his studio.

Born in Chicago in 1941, Joe Zucker (started exhibiting in 1961 and since the 1970s, Zucker has experimented with what has become his signature technique — canvases composed with cotton balls rolled in paint. Resulting in a highly textured surface reminiscent of mosaic, this technique radically transforms the surface of the canvas and challenges the “flatness.” He was and remains acutely focused on building a painting out of painting’s most basic means and materials: the visible interaction of the painting tool, the application of paint, the materiality and shape of the support.

Zucker’s work is in numerous public collections, including The Chicago Art Institute, The Museum of Modern Art in New York, The National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne, The New Museum in New York, The New York Philadelphia Museum of Art in Philadelphia, The Tel Aviv Museum in Israel, Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, The Brooklyn Museum, The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and many others.

Insight Sundays, held the last Sunday of each month, allow individual artists to talk in depth about their processes, techniques, and concepts in the presence of their work. The program allows the audience to see through the artist’s eye.

Tickets for the program are $10 (free for members with RSVP) at thechurchsagharbor.org. The Church is at 48 Madison Street, Sag Harbor.