Along with new downtown apartments have come many accomplished new residents. The BID is happy to celebrate the work of Argentine-American Maria Foladori Weiss, a gifted painter and photographer born in Buenos Aries, who with her husband, planner and public arts manager Glenn Weiss, now lives and works on Main Street in downtown New Rochelle. With the work of Maria Foladori Weiss, the BID is inaugurating a new Artist Spaces Program, BID Windows on Art, at 249 North Avenue. Created in partnership with the New Rochelle Municipal Arts Commission, BID Windows on Art-249 has already caught the eye of Talk of the Sound.
As reported on her beautiful website, Maria Foladori Weiss was born in Buenos Aires in 1956. She graduated from the School of Fine Arts Priliadiano Pueyrredon and then returned to her first alma mater, the School of Visual Arts Regina Pacis, as the printmaking professor for seven years. In the 1980s, her delicate paintings and prints were successfully exhibited and sold as part of Argentine movement of “naive painting”.
The BID Windows on Art program builds on a City law advocated by the BID to encourage property owners with vacant storefronts to either decorate their windows or, to showcase art in their windows, until the storefronts can be rented. Storefront rentals are a Downtown priority. The works by Maria Foladori Weiss currently being featured are from a series “Isnik Blue” an exhibition of paintings inspired by Turkish tiles which showed originally at The Turkish Cultural Center in New York City.
A press release on the show reported that the paintings were based on her visits to Istanbul and eastern Turkey from 2007 to 2010. Ms. Foladori Weiss produced this suite of acrylic paintings inspired by decorative architectural tiles that were hand-painted in the ceramic workshops of Iznik (Nicea), Turkey in the 15th to 17th centuries. These Iznik tiles of floral geometric patterns in cobalt blues, pure white and accents of red cover the endless interiors of Ottoman-built, domed mosques and palaces.
On canvas or plywood up to eight feet in length, Foladori Weiss enlarged and recombined the traditional hatayi motifs or stylized flowers. Waves of tulips, twisting saz leaves, stable rosettes and the fat lotus-like flowers float in compositions of rectangles. The patterns overlap at a variety of scales typical of the original intimate ceramics, Victorian wallpaper and modern graphic signs.
See the beautiful “Isnik Blue” works of Maria Foladori Weiss at BID Windows on Art-249 at 249 North Avenue. Her work can be viewed, day and night. For information on “BID Windows on Art”, or renting the store: call 914-960-1460