Steve Hurd's "GOD" for Washington Square Windows

For the 80 Washington Square East Galleries exhibition, the artist Steve Hurd has created three curtains with painted verses of an urban poem, “God”, which dates from the early eighties. The poem was conceived from sales slogans of various name brand products as the reason to worship God. Hurd’s recreation of these poems as painterly curtains reflects the artist's interest in the miraculous as experienced in art and pop culture and how these ideas are recontextualized when viewed in a major metropolitan area like downtown New York. The text of the poem attempts to describe the miraculous, but the awkward language and literal metaphors are too leaden to ever be miraculous. They instead bear the weight of contemporary corporate culture while tweaking art and religion. As a form of redemption the artist has painted the poem in a drippy ritualistic hand on translucent fabric creating an ethereal floating feeling of the sublime that is both complementary and conflicting to the meaning of the poem.

Steve Hurd has had numerous solo exhibitions including ones at Rosamund Felsen Gallery, LA; Dan Bernier Gallery, LA; Jack Tilton, New York; and Gallery Vedovi, Brussels, Belgium. Recent group exhibitions of the artists include "Elements of Nature, Selections from the Frederick R. Weisman Art Foundation," Carnegie Art Museum, Oxnard CA and "Sea Change," Rio Hondo College Art Gallery, Whittier, CA. Hurd has a BFA from San Francisco Art Institute and an MFA from UCLA. He is a 2005 winner of the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation. Steve Hurd lives and works in Inglewood, in the Greater Los Angeles area and teaches at Otis College of Art and Design.

The exhibition runs through May 28, 2011.

(information from NY Art Beat)