Wing’s Over Wall Street’s first contemporary art installation ‘Close to you’: A Tribute to Karen Condron by Jim Condron, Adjunct Professor in the Department of Art + Design, Art History, Art Education.
“Through adversity we find our heroes” – Steve Gleason
Karen Condron Modeling, circa 1965 
Karen Condron and son, Jim, circa 1973
‘Close to You,’ an art installation to honor the memory of Karen Condron, will be featured at the Muscular Dystrophy Association’s annual Wings Over Wall Street Benefit Gala. The stirring exhibition includes ten sculptural installations by her son, the artist Jim Condron. Karen Condron passed away in July of 2018 after a nearly eight-year battle with ALS. She was the 2015 winner of the MDA Spirit Award and embodied all that the award represents.
Birds suddenly appear, Karen Condron’s purses, plastic, steel, 2019 
Moondust in your hair, vintage crib, Karen Condron’s clothing, 2019
To make the sculptural works, Jim Condron combines his mother’s clothing and shoes with materials such as a bicycle, a crib, mannequin arms, yarrow and straw to create intangible forms that express his mother’s ebullience throughout her life and the challenges of the disease. Each piece expresses the complexities of nostalgia and deep grief. The exhibition will also include personal photographs and ephemera that openly depict his mother’s joys, and her losses as ALS progressed through her body.
Every time you walk by, Karen Condron’s shoes, straw, yarrow, 2019 
All the girls in town, Karen Condron’s clothes, straw, yarrow, 2019
Jim Condron’s works of art honor Karen’s life and were created to raise awareness of the life-threatening effects of muscular dystrophy and muscle-debilitating diseases, such as ALS, and of MDA’s important mission to find a cure.
Gala / Exhibit Location: Building – 555 West 18th Street, New York City (at 11th Avenue) NY, NY. Registration Required. https://jcondron.com/wingsoverwallstreet/
BIOGRAPHY: Originally from Long Island, NY and Connecticut, Jim Condron earned his MFA at the Hoffberger School of Painting at the Maryland Institute College of Art (2004) and a BA in Art and English from Colby College, Waterville, ME (1992). He also studied at the New York Studio School of Drawing, Painting and Sculpture (1993-’95). Since 1993, Condron has studied with Rohini Ralby, the artist’s mentor. His work appears nationally and internationally in galleries and museums as well as in corporate, university, public and private collections. Jim Condron is adjunct faculty in the Department of Art + Design, Art History, Art Education at Towson University.
Artist Statement: Condron’s pieces express humor, absurdity and beauty through the combination and interaction of everyday objects, castoff remnants and paint. Each piece is titled with a textual fragment from a story that intends to add to the work’s rhetoric rather than naming or defining it. Titles are applied to the pieces the same way Condron assembles materials and are appropriated from literature by an array of great authors such as Don DeLillo, James Salter, Anton Chekhov, Nikolai Gogol, Oscar Wilde, Hunter Thompson, Kurt Vonnegut, Ernest Hemmingway, Henry Miller, Anais Nin, and others. https://jcondron.com/
