This past year has taken a toll on in-person art events, to say the least. From galleries to museums to art fairs, experiencing live art seems to be a thing of the past and has unfortunately led to more struggling artists now more than ever.
But in a time full of darkness, there is a beacon of light for both art lovers and artists as The Museum of Wild and Newfangled Art (mowna) announces their new online Biennial, a museum born out of the pandemic and specifically designed for the digital age. Launching Friday, April 30, 2021, the show will run until September 22, 2021, and features an international pool of artists selected from 44 countries throughout the world.
Co-founders Cari Ann and Joey Zaza created this new online Biennial with the goal of supporting artists by not only showcasing their work, but also helping them make a living. In fact, 70% of the profits earned by the museum through membership sales, store sales, and ticket sales go directly to the artists!
The Museum spent the greater half of January and February selecting artists to participate in their new online Biennial and they are proud to announce they will be supporting over 100 artists on their digital platform with over 20 hours of content to be viewed from images, paintings, drawings, videos, fashion, sculptures, photography, and much more.
Co-founder Joey Zaza says “there’s nowhere else that you can see this collection of art, in this way. There are hours of artwork to explore, play with, and listen to, twenty-four hours a day.”
Featured works include “The Lockdown”, a VR sonic memory installation by Mana Saei, “Planes of resistance” an empathy experiment to explore the world from the vantage point of a black woman using autobiographical acrylic compositions and sound by Linda Rebeiz, a Lebanese-Senegalese artist living in Accra, Ghana, “ERRANDS”, a portrait series documenting our shared shelter-in-place experiences by Zachary Handler of Baltimore, Maryland who will perform 3 slots of portraits per week for the month of May to museum guests, first come, first serve. “Susan” is an interactive augmented/virtual reality and video sculpture web experience by Sue Roh, a Brooklyn-based Korean-American multimedia artist navigating the IRL and URL. “Black Man in America” is a film by Vance Brown and Justina Kamiel Grayman from New York, NY. An interactive new-media installation, “AuxeticBreath”, visualizes the rhythmic respiratory rate, as well as tidal volume of collective human breaths using soft robotics covered with auxetic structures by Hyejun Younof Salzburg, Austria. “PETSCII leaks” by ailadi, an Italian artist whose works have been viewed hundreds of millions of times, are a series of ASCII inspired gif comics. A series of experimental music videos from the opera “The Magic Hummingbird” by Joseph Martin Waters from San Diego, CA will also be shown.
To kick off the Biennial, mowna will host a special screening of the feature doc The Faithful: The King, The Pope, The Princess, by Annie Berman on April 30th at 9 pm Eastern Time. The opening event will also be followed by a Q&A and a first look at the entrance to the Biennial!
Tickets and museum memberships can be purchased on their website, https://www.mowna.org/.
About mowna
mowna seeks to create an ever changing, fun, thoughtful, beautifully designed space to encourage awareness and mindfulness through the exhibition and experience of art and serves the public’s need for art for the highest good of all. By addressing the current needs of not only the artist but also the audience, mowna is breaking barriers within the global art community.
mowna offers the preservation of artworks through an online collection that is an educational resource and archive for its members and its artists, and aims to find, display, and support wild and newfangled art through the incorporation of innovative new technologies and mediums. mowna provides artists with financial compensation for their art and expands awareness of their talents via a sustainable platform where they can flourish.
