Victory Hall Press

This yearbook catalogue spotlights all exhibits and programs of the Jersey City art center, Drawing Rooms, for 2018, including images and text on all exhibitions and outreach projects, and including over 200 artists' works shown this year. Drawing Rooms is a contemporary art center in a former convent, featuring two and three-dimensional works by emerging and mid-career artists in NJ and the NY metropolitan Area. Located in vibrant downtown Jersey City, the gallery has 20 rooms, including the Tenth Floor Gallery Shop and Third Floor Artist Work Spaces. Drawing Rooms is operated by Victory Hall Inc. a 501c3 non-profit organization producing exhibitions, programs and public art projects in the NJ/NY area since 2001Drawing Rooms is operated by Victory Hall Inc. a 501c3 non-profit organization producing exhibitions, programs and public art projects in the NJ/NY area since 2001. Other Victory Hall Inc. programs include Rainbow Thursdays Artists (art classes for developmentally disabled adults), Victory Hall Press and The Art Project, exhibition development for Art House, The Oakman and Hamilton House.

Sandra DeSando's panel painting burst forth fully realized, following a lifetime of work in graphite and inks on paper. The intense interplay of color and form in these paintings is developed from her years of realistically rendered studies of light and shadow from nature and a translation of observation and experience into mark and line. This volume chronicles this New Jersey artist's emergence as a painter in multi and single panel works, tracking her recent career through her residencies at the Eileen S. Kaminsky Family Foundation Studio at Mana Contemporary, Jersey City and Dilsberg, Germany. In these new works, DeSando reaches a fluid, full understanding of seeing and being in the natural world

This yearbook catalogue spotlights all exhibits and programs of the Jersey City art center, Drawing Rooms, for 2017, including images and text on all exhibitions and outreach projects, and including over 200 artists' works shown this year. Drawing Rooms is a contemporary art center in a former convent, featuring two and three-dimensional works by emerging and mid-career artists in NJ and the NY metropolitan Area. Located in vibrant downtown Jersey City, the gallery has 20 rooms, including the Tenth Floor Gallery Shop and Third Floor Artist Work Spaces. Drawing Rooms is operated by Victory Hall Inc. a 501c3 non-profit organization producing exhibitions, programs and public art projects in the NJ/NY area since 2001

A story about 111 First Street is for me irresistible. It is an address that represents all addresses, a center point. And, like many mythical center points, it is a scene of conflict and drama, driven by primal and existential issues of territory. And I lived there.... This work of photographing around studios and other parts of the 111 building was a way for me to contemplate a unique lifestyle; how artists make their homes/studios from scratch in an industrial environment; how their work evolves behind the scenes; how the old industrial world looks next to the brave new world of pre-fabricated modular construction. There are almost no people in my pictures of 111, no contentious meetings, no courtroom scenes. The atmosphere is quiet and uneventful in most instances, even as reporters and tv crews wait outside to cover the latest arson or demolition. I prefer to observe and record small things, probably unnoticed by most observers. This is how I pay tribute to my friends and colleagues and the little civilization that flourished for a time and faded away. - Edward Fausty

The Universechild drawings combine elements from abstract expressionism, surrealism and psychedelic poster art into a fantastic existential comic narrative. Universechild was inspired by the early comic strip work of Windsor McKay (Little Nemo), Hal Foster (Prince Valiant), Alex Raymond (Flash Gordon), and later comic art by Will Eisner, Jack Kirby and others, and is loosely based on William Blake's drawings for Dante's Divine Comedy. In the inventiveness of its abstract elements and complexity of form it seeks to travel beyond comics, through contemporary art and into the unknown."James Pustorino synthesizes science fiction, comic books, Abstract Expressionism and psychedelic art, all in the service of approximating the profound mystery of existence. A mythic narrative about a being born into space, where he struggles to understand his surroundings and purpose."- - John Motley, The OregonianRevised June 2011 edition features 44 full color pages.