Dear friends of Mondo, we are so excited about our upcoming MAP expedition to a small village outside Cartagena, Colombia. We are working in partnership with a wonderful Utah based NGO, Eagle Condor Humanitarian (ECH),  that is committed to implementing lasting solutions to break generational poverty for children, families and communities. In Colombia, one center, Semillas de Amor “Seeds of Love”, works with 100 children who are served food each day by three caring volunteers. For most children, this is their only meal of the day. Seeds of Love is in a part of Cartagenia called “New Colombia” where children and families have been displaced due to war and violence in the region over many years. Most of the children served have handicaps and their caretakers are struggling to provide the basics for themselves and their children. ECH is raising funds to provide a youth shelter to serve the food, tutor the children and let them play in a safe and loving structure.  Check out the last blog from a current intern: This week has been awesome in Colombia!! We have completed the floor of the main room in the construction site, which is a big step forward. The process to set the floor was amazing to watch unfold. First, twenty buckets of sand had to be poured in with one giant bag of cement. After a good mixing, eight bags of rocks and ten buckets of water were added into the pile, completing the cement. Then the floor had to be leveled flat with sand dug up from a giant well being dug in the back of the construction site. Once all of this was set in place, the cement was poured, and then smoothed down with wooden poles. Once it was harden a red paint powder was smeared on top to make the floor even more beautiful! Everyone came and looked at the finished product and the kids were so excited to be one step closer to having a finished place for them to play. One child, Neiker, was so happy about the finished floor that he came running in during a tropical rainstorm two days after the floor was finished to make sure the floor was okay. He mopped it and then carried buckets of water off of the floor to keep it protected until we are able to put the roof up!  See video of the project here: Eagle Condor and Seeds of Love The Mondo Art Project, through generous donations, will be working with ECH and the children and local artists of the village to create beautiful murals on the walls of the community center. Our goal for our time there is to help Eagle Condor Humanitarian and Seeds of Love with the construction of the main gathering room, paint murals in the classroom, have an art exchange with the children that will also help with the content of the murals, and hope to collect enough art supplies to leave with them to keep creating art and expressing themselves artistically long after we leave. We currently have enough funds to conduct the art exchange, and paint murals in the classroom. However, we are still needing to raise funds to help plaster the cinder block walls so that we have a surface we can paint on. We would also love to collect enough art supplies to last the children (100 students) long after we leave. How to get involved If you would like to get involved with this project, there are many ways you/your family/your classroom can help! 1- Collect and donate art supplies: pencils, colored pencils, crayons, rulers, erasers, pencil sharpeners, paper 2- Donate directly to the project through Eagle Condor Humanitarian: http://eagle-condor.org/donate-page/ ECH is still in need of donations to see this community center completely finished (kitchen, electrical, plumbing, and roof). Even a little donation goes a LONG way! 3- Donate drawings for the art exchange. Your child's drawings will be taken over to the students in the village.  Please use paper with dimensions 8.5"x 11", using crayons or colored pencils. As for content, encourage your child to express whatever is important to them, and that they would like to share with our Colombian children. We will collect drawings before our trip to present to the children upon our arrival and will bring drawings back from children that want to participate in the exchange. 4- Go on an expedition! Eagle Condor Humanitarian will be offering an expedition late 2012/ early 2013 back to the village to complete the building, part of the expedition fees go directly to the costs of the project, and you'll get the opportunity to experience the beautiful people and landscape of Colombia. See a video of their expedition last December when construction started: 2011 Colombia Expedition If you would like to help us meet our goals, please contact Mikell at mikell@mondofineart.com.  Thank you! Hasta Luego!

We are excited to be featuring artist Erika Blumenfeld in concert with our Spring show, when space becomes place, opening this evening. Along with the show on view at Light Spot, we are doing a special online offer of Blumenfeld's "Antarctica Vol. 3 (Ice Horizons), 2009" portfolio, a suite of 8 digital pigment prints housed in an embossed handmade portfolio box, Edition of 20. This portfolio is only available through online order with Mondo Fine Art. Please contact us for more info at: info@mondofineart.com Erika Blumenfeld (b. 1971, USA) is an internationally acclaimed photo-based artist and Guggenheim Fellow with a BFA in Photography from Parsons School of Design. Blumenfeld approaches her work much like an ecological archivist, and has chronicled a wide range of subjects through the study, witness and documentation of our natural world and humanity’s relationship with it. Blumenfeld’s investigations have led her to follow a non-traditional career trajectory, and her work has led her to investigate the physics of atmospheric and astronomic phenomena as well as the simple beauties and complex afflictions of our environment and ecologies. Blumenfeld has been awarded rare opportunities to do projects with the Scripps Institution for Oceanography, the McDonald Observatory and the South African National Antarctic Program. Blumenfeld’s eco-photojournalistic work brings her work into the social context, and the artist documents the environmental and human impacts caused by industrial negligence and climate disruption in order to look at connections between nature and culture. In her documentation of the Deepwater Horizon oil catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico, she chronicles the ongoing struggles of fishing communities, marine ecosystems and human health across Gulf. Blumenfeld’s work in El Salvador documents the plight of rural communities along the coast as they work to establish a healthy sustainable environment and build solutions to mediate the effects of climate disruption. Blumenfeld’s work has been exhibited widely in museums and galleries in the US and abroad, including the TATE Modern (London, UK), Fondation EDF Espace Electra (Paris, France), Albright Knox Art Gallery (Buffalo, New York), New Mexico Museum of Fine Arts (Santa Fe, New Mexico), Ballroom (Marfa, Texas), DiverseWorks Art Space (Houston, Texas), Färgfabriken Norr (Östersund, Sweden), Galerie der Stadt Mainz-Brückenturm (Mainz, Germany), Kunstnernes Hus (Oslo, Norway), OCA (Sao Paulo, Brazil), Portland Institute for Contemporary Art (Portland, Oregon), Stadtgalerie (Kiel, Germany), Willem de Kooning Academie (Rotterdam, Netherlands), among many others. In addition to the Guggenheim Fellowship, Blumenfeld has received grants from the Creative Capital Foundation, Land Rheinland-Pfalz Kultusministerium, Polaroid Corporation, and a Purchase Award from the New Mexico Museum of Art. She has been awarded artist-in-residences with Cape Farewell and Ballroom Marfa, and was awarded a Special Editions Fellowship from the Lower East Side Printshop. Her work has been featured in Foto8, Art In America, ARTnews, and Camera Arts magazines, has been published by Al Jazeera English (both online and TV), Climatestorytellers, The Indypendent, Inter Press Service, Truthout, and has appeared on Democracy Now!, among others. Her work appears in more than a half dozen books, including Photography: New Mexico (Fresco Fine Art Publications, 2008), The Polaroid Book (Taschen 2005 & 2008), Arte da Antarctica (Goethe- Institut, 2009) and the forthcoming book Arctic Voices: Resistance at the Tipping Point (Subhankar Banerjee, 2012). Blumenfeld’s works are in the permanent collections of the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Lannan Foundation, Houston Museum of Fine Arts, New Mexico Museum of Fine Arts, The Polaroid Collection, Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, and the University of Texas.  

  Mondo Fine Art is proud to present our annual Spring show: when space becomes place, curated by Mikell Stringham. This show brings together talented artists from New York (originally from Colombia and Berlin) and Utah who approach the topic of space and place in their work in unique ways. Most artists will be present at the show to talk about their work. In the meantime, we would like to give you a preview...         Adam Bateman: “My current project, “Senderos,” is an exploration of the relationship the landscape tourist experience has with the historical crossing of the North American continent and ideas about the sublime of the pastoral landscape stemming from American Transcendentalism and the Hudson River School. I think that as tourists, we travel through the landscape in curated and designated ways, over roads and pathways that have been chosen for us. Part of the effect of this is a sameness of experience as we visit landscape destinations that results in the creation of a national shared identity that is (as it always has been) tied to travel in the landscape. In a tourist landscape destination, whether it is a national park or a viewing point at a rest stop along the interstate, our relationship to the landscape is curated with the signage and the pathway itself dictating which plants and stones we see and which views we photograph. The experience teaches us the context in which we view things in the same way a museum curates the context in which we understand a painting hung between works by other artists.” Monika Bravo: “When does a space become a place? Is it when we endow it with an emotion? This series examines the intangibility of memory and where it can be located within space. I photographed diverse facades from buildings in NYC, Barcelona, Paris, Milan and Madrid. By using a transparent film and allowing them to rest against the wall, the light that passes through the image casts a shadow in the background rendering them very cinematographic, I am interested on playing with the medium, what is supposed to be still, I want to make the illusion that moves and when using time based media at times I want the images to look as if they were still."     Stefan Hagen: “The photographs in these series are prints of negatives which have been exposed for the duration of a journey at significant places as Thoreau’s Walden Pond. Each photograph, as a result, creates an image that contains all time and place experienced during the travel using the unique ability of the photographic process to collect light. Only points of light that had been prominent at one specific place in time are now represented as a precise image. What is important for me is to capture the remembrance of a journey. What we remember of a trip is often only a very few details, but the memory usually always contains a very distinct feeling of the light and the shapes which were surrounding us.” Josh Winegar: “Throughout its history photography has played an important role in popularizing the ideas of the sublime landscape, Manifest Destiny, and the ‘land of opportunity.’ It is my intentions with this series to explore those ideas within the genre while describing a more complex vision of the American landscape. I am interested in exploring our complicated and often uneasy relationship with nature-- our presence in it, dominance over it, reverence for it, and our need to control it. This work is shot on film with a large format camera and all manipulations are done in camera. Like many photographers before me, I focus my lens on the serene and picturesque, but unlike most of them I am not interested in reinforcing the myth of the untouched land by adjusting my frame to exclude man or the man-made. Instead its presence is recorded to film to be later removed by the same means with which it was recorded, light. This is achieved through a series of multiple exposures-- one of the scene, and a subsequent exposure shot in the studio for each burst of light. It is my hope that the resulting images appear simultaneously familiar & foreign, as well as both celebratory & critical. By replacing the evidence of man with bursts of light, these places lose what have become specific pieces of their identity and are transformed into open- ended spaces. It is my hope that these spaces leave room for one to contemplate our relationship with the world we live on and question the classic notions of expansion, monumentality, and nostalgia in landscape photography.”   Please join us at Light Spot for a special evening of fantastic art, food, music, and friends. Elizabeth Gilman Gunderson of Fleur de Sel Catering will be preparing culinary treats for us from different places around the world, and award winning DJ Jesse Walker will be keeping the party going with his signature sound. Special thanks to our partnering venue, Light Spot, for hosting us in their beautiful space for the past three years.

"This body of work represents my recent and continuing transition to motherhood.   I had a baby.  I am navigating new and foreign territory daily.  I have new limitations on my time, and space, and materials for art making.  I have new roles and priorities to fulfill, new hopes, insecurities and fears. The paintings of nests and derivatives thereof are my admittedly clichéd attempts to express what it feels like to become a mother for the first time.  They symbolize my idealized notions and misperceptions of, and my adaptations to the reality of motherhood.  They represent feelings of identity lost, new roles gained, inadequacy, hope, and complete contentment.  All of these works, above all, represent my recognition of the beauty of change, in whatever form it may enter our lives." - Sunny Belliston Taylor Sunny Belliston Taylor received her BFA at Brigham Young Universtiy and her MFA at Ohio State University and is currently Assistant Professor at Brigham Young University in the Department of Visual Arts. Taylor has had several solo exhibitions at galleries and museums in Utah, New York, Ohio, Arizona, Illinois and Louisiana and has taken either 2nd or 3rd place for the past three years in the Springville Museum of Art Annual Spring Salon, National Juried Exhibition. Click here to read a recent article in 15 Bytes on this body of work by Taylor that recently showed at the Springville Museum in a two person exhibition in January of this year. These selected works will be on view at the Poliform Grand Opening on April 19th from 5-9pm at their new location: 1625 South Foothill Drive, Salt Lake City. To RSVP for this event, please email events@as-slc.com These works are available through Mondo Fine Art for a limited time. Click here to see all available works. If you have any questions about Sunny Belliston Taylor or her artwork, or would like to acquire one of her works, please contact us at info@mondofineart.com

Our current featured artist, Amy Jorgensen, will be speaking tomorrow night at Weber State University. This is a great opportunity to hear about Jorgensen's unique photography process, philosophy and inspiration. Location: Lindquist Lecture Hall, KA 120, Kimball Visual Arts Building Date: Tuesday, November 29 Time: 7:00- 8:00pm   Sponsored and hosted by the Weber State Department of Visual Arts

Utah contemporary artist Amy Jorgensen explains her Body Archive series: "Body Archive began as an inquiry into the practices and aesthetics of historical  criminal photography and associated assumptions of the photograph as a document of the moment, or a representation of truth – what Walter Benjamin describes as  evidence of an occurrence. Technological innovation in contemporary forensic  methodologies position the body as the central locale for the collection of residual  trace evidence. As a culture we are spellbound by the potential implications found in skin cells, DNA strands, and microscopic fibers, as evidenced by the multitude of  television series dedicated solely to the reporting and dramatization of criminal investigations. This work examines our artistic and scientific expectations of photography and the body in challenging and transformative ways. Traditional notions of the body in art – the figure as object on view – are set aside to consider the body as an active participant in artistic process. I incorporate performance and photography with a willingness to use my own body as both test subject and subject matter in an investigation of personal and cultural assumptions linked to violence, media, the body, and photographic practice. I explore the body as a site of experience, and the body as both repository and author of information. In an attempt to develop a document without bias and point of view, I place photographic emulsion, sans camera, on the surface of my body to record my actions. The images are created over time: minutes, hours. The resulting photographs are the striking visual residue of my experience: traces of body fluid, clothing, skin prints, and the fine edges of body hair are evidence of my occurrence. I live in a body. And my body is an archive, my skin the surface through which I experience the world." Amy Jorgensen was born in Milan, Italy. She received a BFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and Tufts University in 1997, and an MFA from the University of California, San Diego in 2002. She currently lives and works remotely in Utah. To see more of Amy Jorgensen's available works through Mondo Fine Art, click HERE

If you've been wondering why we haven't been doing as many shows this fall, like we usually do, it is because we have been updating our business model, and by extension, our website, and are pleased to announce that the new beta site is live! One of the major changes you will notice on our website and with our business in general is more of a focus on consulting.  Since the beginning, Mondo has been more than an online gallery with pop-up exhibitions, it has also been a source for people looking for specific art pieces for their collections and projects. We have enjoyed guiding our clients through this process and finding works that are suited to their collecting goals. With our growing number of collectors and designers, with their unique collecting goals or vision, we have expanded our network of artists and galleries that we work with, to provide even more options, and better serve our clientele.  We still work regularly with our original group of Mondo artists, and have access to their artwork, and also commission works with them on projects.  Our featured artwork page is now dedicated to a more revolving set of featured artwork, showcasing spotlight artists or works of art that are currently on view. We at Mondo want to understand you better, so we have developed a new online tool, my mondo, which allows you to create your own private profile where you can list your art preferences.  Once you've set up your preferences, we will then create a private viewing gallery of artwork that we think you will enjoy.  You can provide instant feedback on the works, letting us know what you like or don't like. This is especially beneficial for our designers, as we will be able to organize your artwork by project, with each having their own gallery. Since our website is still in beta, we want your feedback! If there is anything we can do to make the site even more user friendly, please let us know by emailing us at info@mondofineart.com, with subject "beta site". Thank you for your continued support over the past two years and helping make all this possible!

Mondo Fine Art invites you to celebrate the arrival of Spring with a special show, featuring new works by Aaron Bushnell, Angie Renfro, Carlisle, John Bell, Lane Bennion, Olivia Pendergast, Pilar Pobil, Roland Thompson, and Zachary Proctor. Thursday, April 28th 7-9pm Light Spot Modern Design 2927 South Highland Drive Salt Lake City, UT Join us for the evening, see the new work, meet the artists, enjoy delicious appetizers provided by Fleur de Sel and music provided by award winning DJ, Mr. Jesse Walker. Special thanks to Light Spot Modern Design for hosting us in their beautiful modern space. For more information on Light Spot, or to recieve notifications of other special events, please join their contact list.

Mondo Fine Art painter Lane Bennion is featured in this month's issue of Southwest Art Magazine for his artistic interpretation of interior spaces. "I am often drawn to busy or chaotic scenes in my still lifes and interiors. Perhaps when there is so much going in a scene, I find that by painting it, I can slow it down and exercise some control over the chaos—or at least hear what it has to say.” Check out the article HERE. Click here to see available works by Lane Bennion.

Mondo has been hibernating on the show front this Winter (as is tradition for us), but it's now Spring and time to celebrate with a Spring Group Show!  We've asked our artists to bring their freshest, boldest, most inspired work (no pressure, right?) for this special event. This show will feature works by all our Mondo represented artists: Aaron Bushnell, Angie Renfro, Carlisle, John Bell, Lane Bennion, Olivia Pendergast, Pilar Pobil, Roland Thompson, and Zachary Proctor. So thaw out from Winter with us Thursday, April 28th, from 7-9pm with food and drink, music, and the freshest works from our fabulous artists! Location: Light Spot   2927 Highland Dr. Salt Lake City, UT