Andrei speaks on the life and art work of his friend, Ivan in beautiful Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat, France:
Ivan Suvanjieff, the iconic American artist, activist, musical and literary icon, has been nominated 17 times for the Nobel Peace Prize for the work of PeaceJam Foundation, co-founded with his wife Dawn Engle. A true heir to the American counterculture, Ivan's activism is well known – his art work less so.
First famed as the leader Detroit’s punk rock band the Ramrods, he went on to co-edit CREEM ("America’s Only Rock’n’Roll”) Magazine. Remaining at the center of American counterculture through the 1990s, he founded the illustrious art and literature publication “The New Censorship”: 50 issues featuring Allen Ginsberg, Charles Bukowski, Kathy Acker, Anne Waldman, Andrei Codrescu... among many literary and artistic luminaries.
While Ivan’s visual artistic contributions to CREEM and New Censorship were in black & white, he has emerged over the last decades as a powerful, colorful, large-scale abstract painter. Through his startling paintings, Ivan’s strength and intelligence burst with color and emanate an élan vital – a life force – not seen in visual art since the work of Joan Miro, Hans Arp, Max Ernst or Mark Rothko, his closest artistic kin.
Just as Dada in the last century combines art, science and activism, Ivan’s works are informed by extraordinary recent biological, technological, and cosmogonic discoveries. Having learned of these developments directly from the Dalai Lama, Ivan’s “Quanta Dada” exhibit wordlessly combine these seemingly disparate disciplines . These works place him squarely as a leader of the quantum-inspired artistic revolution.
His expansive vision translates not only to his art, but to practical, tangible global improvement as well. Learn more here about how Peacejam unites youth organizations around the globe with Nobel Peace Prize Laureates, leading to powerful mentorship opportunities. Peacejam can claim decades of global initiatives and improvements resulting from their work. Theirs is quantum kindness wedded to the quanta of matter.
Sponsored by The AIDA Association
