June Kosloff: “Recipes For Life: The Lucky Bubby Cookbook”
Positive Space Tulsa
May 4, 2024
Quietly but persistently, Positive Space has become one of Tulsa’s most vital art spaces, one where womxn-identified artists feel safe to breathe in their own practice, push into new creative territory and make work from perspectives that are often underappreciated in the art world at large. Proprietor Nicole Finley Alexander makes it clear to exhibiting artists that they can really do whatever they want in the space; that freedom has generated some of the most moving, exhilarating shows I’ve seen in Tulsa lately.
For June Kosloff, the opportunity to have a show at Positive Space turned into a chance to try something — large-scale portraiture — she’d never tried before. Kosloff is a mixed media artist and curator in Queens, NYC, where she grew up, and where she and Finley met a few years back. Her creative career has taken her from the music industry to running a clothing business to (during the pandemic) wheatpasting on the streets of Long Island City. (On her Tulsa show’s windy opening day, she offered a wheatpasting workshop for attendees in the gallery’s back lot.) But her life in art started way before all that — way back into her own ancestral line, in fact. “Recipes For Life: The Lucky Bubby Cookbook,” on view through May, brings the story of that lineage into view in a set of canvases that are as big, bold and surprising as the family members they honor.
The metaphor in that title is as poignant as it is direct. You can’t necessarily see all the ingredients that went into a dish when it’s served up in front of you. Spices dissolve, flavors blend together; the whole is literally the sum of its parts, while also being its own distinctive thing, whose depth comes from the elements that make it up. That’s true for humans, too. When you look at Kosloff, you see a hardworking artist with a passion for her community. When you stand in “Recipes for Life,” you see the full story of what’s made her her. The ingredients of her life are, as she discovered while creating these works, gigantic—these acrylic portraits are massive, done on unframed canvases that hang like banners all around the viewer.
Kosloff’s grandmother Anna, nicknamed Bubby, would often call herself “lucky,” and that’s who we see at the head of one wall in Positive Space: a woman in glasses, held in strong lines of black paint, standing in a kitchen in a tilted stance that’s half-exhausted, half-bemused, with a spatula in one hand, a pot hovering beside her, and a cigarette dangling from her lips, her distance from us in time erased by the bigness of her presence. Bubby’s husband stands next to her on an adjacent canvas with the golf club and golden gloves that marked his early roustabout life. “He was hilarious,” Kosloff told me, and his grave marker really does read “Sidney The Champ.”
Next to him is Pearl, Kosloff’s mother, a dressmaker who died when the artist was just 13. She reclines into a swirl of flowers, looking gently but directly at the viewer. “Her gaze says to me, ‘I am powerful, beautiful and strong … do not mess with me,’” Kosloff said. “Making this painting changed the inner dialogue I have about my mother; Pearl was a woman who had a life, she met a guy, fell in love, had three kids and then got sick and died at 47 years old. I think of how hard that must have been for her. I want to celebrate and honor her for bringing me into this life.” That guy — Kosloff’s father — stands next to Pearl on this wall, captured in a jaunty pose inside the custard shop he ran in the 1950s West Village, holding a baguette (he lived in France for a while after World War II) and surrounded by the books he loved to read — a few of the ingredients that made him him.
Across the room hangs one of the show’s most striking portraits: Kosloff’s Uncle Dick, whom she described as her personal “art spirit,” on a rich violet-blue background with a corona of vintage cameras around his head, one side of which is brilliantly lit. Dick Lubinsky was an artist who, after being institutionalized with schizophrenia in the 1950s, collected cameras and made portraits on newspaper of people in the Bronx who had fallen on hard times. Kosloff has curated exhibits of his work for the Fountain House Gallery, the Outsider Art Fair, the American Visionary Art Museum, and the Erie Art Museum, and plans to show more of it in the future. For now, she said, “I really just feel like he wants me to focus on me … because I’m here.”
And Kosloff is literally here, in this show, in this family circle. Her ten-year-old self stands directly across from the gallery’s front door, painted with lines that blend the boldness of those in Bubby’s portrait with the delicacy in that of Uncle Dick. Looking at it, I was dropped into an intersection in 1970s Queens, inside the life of a little girl whose mother was dying, yet who found (in Kosloff’s words) “things that brought me joy: a basketball, a tennis ball, a skateboard, my dog Charlie who saved my life once, trees that I climbed, my Uncle’s 1960’s VW camper van, the duplex buildings I lived in and my favorite Pumas.”
That intersection — of joy and hardship, love and family, everyday life and creative life — is the tender spot Kosloff celebrates in “Recipes for Life.” These portraits are serious yet unsentimental; they capture strong personalities, haunting eyes and off-kilter humor. Their fantastical realism is uncomplicated and enigmatic at the same time, both specific to and untethered from time and space, building on Kosloff’s background in zines and collage. (Aren’t we all a collage of those who’ve come before us?) I felt myself falling in love with these people as I took in the shape and detail of their bigger-than-life-sized lives, succinctly rendered in the artist’s brilliant use of color, perspective and framing.
Open a family cookbook and you’ll see the recipes that literally kept that family going generation after generation. Step inside “The Lucky Bubby Cookbook” and you’ll see those generations living in front of you, all the way from Queens. Standing in this no-fuss show, surrounded by these people and boosted by Kosloff’s smaller works peppered around them, you become a guest in this family kitchen — with an unspoken invitation to think about what makes you you.
Next at Positive Space: Kiona Wooten Millirons, “Vermillion: The Absence of Humanity,” opening June 1
