ELLEN ALT
STORY
As a kid I was always making things. We had a rule on our home that you couldn’t buy cards for celebrations and I would expand the rule to include the gifts. I always watched the TV shows about crafts and fancied that one day I would be the host of such a show. One day, I think I was about eight, the lady in TV said to gather all your art materials in one box and keep them in a special art place. I did this immediately. I remember so clearly how powerful this idea was and it turned out to be the basis of how I work. I am a materials artist, organizing art rooms in many locations, managing supplies for large scale projects and events and working with a very wide range of materials as a mixed media artist. I find that clearly organized art spaces encourage creativity because you can find what you need and can expand your ideas in unexpected directions.
Since that first box, I have always had an art space, either where I lived, through a designated space at work or my own studio outside my home. They all work.
In art school I tried everything: drawing, clay, fiber arts, painting, print making and photography because I wanted to know how do it all. One of the most influential classes was the one I had no interest in but needed for the credits to graduate. It was calligraphy with John Cataldo, the Dean of the Massachusetts College of Art and Design. He taught this class as if it was painting, emphasizing color, form and ideas as well as skill. One of the assignments was to create three calligraphic pieces about love: eros, agape and philia. The experience of this class led me down the road of alphabets, languages and symbols, an idea that has been a constant in my work.
After art school, I started working in collage. I had collected everyone’s leftover color aid packs and got to work, eventually expanding to papers from all over the world. The papers led to found objects which led to mixed media.
I have shown my work in many solo and groups shows in many countries including the U.S, Germany, Russia, China, U.K, and Israel. One of my pieces was presented to Hillary Clinton on the occasion of the peace treaty between Israel and Jordan and is in the collection of the White House.
I am a member of New York Society of Women Artists since 2016, New York Artist Circle since 2005 and Jewish Art Salon since 2010.
My first art supporter was my mom. She would take me to the Albright Knox Museum where I first fell in love with Renoir and was subsequently exposed to the inspiring work of Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg and Judy Pfaff. Johns because of his use of stencils, numbers and letters, Rauschenberg because of how he used everyday objects in both two and three dimensions and Pfaff because she turned the museum into her canvass. My first role model art teacher was Mrs Marangus. She would let me come to the art room whenever I had free time. I would often stay after school to organize her art room and she let me have extra supplies. One of my most influential teachers was Elizabeth Leyl. She was from Utica NY, but we met in Ashkelon Israel. I was volunteering with an organization called Inter Action, which was based in London. Their motto was “Helping People to Help Themselves” using the arts to foster confidence building programs. Liz taught me how to facilitate building concrete sculptures and painting murals as community organizing tools. I already had a BFA in art education from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design and an MA from NYU in studio art, but this was the best and most useful education I ever received. I was in Israel during the Oslo years, 1993 – 2000 and during this time I employed these skills between Arab and Jewish Israeli neighboring communities to foster mutual trust. I was also able to create projects with Catholic and Protestant young people from Northern Ireland. Using art to help people understand each other has been one of my most gratifying experiences.
http://www.ellenaltcommunity.com/
Being an artist is a constant: locating inspiration, getting to the studio, looking at art, showing and sharing. I have found that teaching produces the perfect balance between the isolation of the studio and fostering creativity in others. I teach in elementary and middle school, precollege and graduate education programs at Brandeis University, adult classes and critique groups. Since 2003 I have been the Artist in Residence at the Park Avenue Synagogue where I generate visual arts programming and where I had a studio for many years, (until they renovated the building). Rather than feeling that teaching detracts from my personal art practice, I get a lot of energy from fostering other people’s creativity and appreciate that the money from teaching allows me to maintain a studio without monetary pressure. I am in the studio 2 – 3 days a week.
I got married late, at 47. I had 18 years with my loving husband, Carlos Narvaez, a photographer. He opened the world to me and we traveled yearly, interacting with the people we met through art and photography. He died in 2019 and I am very close to his two daughters, Yael and Ayala.
Being an artist has been the most consistent aspect of my life. It has given me the way to be in and react to the world, to encourage understanding between different communities through mixing concrete, create a series about languages that stem from Cannonite pictograms, to paint murals in India in a special needs school and to produce a series of 50 pieces about melting arctic ice. For me these are all part of the same motivation: to pursue and share the amazing gift that is the creative process.