Critical Mass.: "Cotton" at Fountain Street Fine Art

.

FRAMINGHAM-- Late last year I was invited to jury a show at 

Fountain Street Fine Art in Framingham, a city about 30 minutes west of Boston. While much of the art I view and write about is in New York City and at international art fairs, I like being able to look at art in other places. This members' gallery, founded and run by artists Cheryl Clinton and Marie Craig, offered such an opportunity. In this post I'll take you around the gallery in a few installation shots with views of some specific works, followed by my exhibition essay, which considers and shows the work thematically.

Cotton is up through January 27.

Installation view of Cotton. The gallery is on the ground floor of a large former factory building, now largely given over to artists' studios and small businesses. Photo: Marie Craig

Below: Stacey Piwinsky, Object of Labor 2, mixed media with oil and fiber

Cottoning To An Unusual Theme
Anyone who has celebrated a second anniversary knows that cotton in the form of domestic textiles is the sentimental gift of choice. For the second anniversary of Fountain Fine Art, however, the gallery’s founders, Cheryl Clinton and Marie Craig, had a different idea: an exhibition with cotton as a theme, a narrative reference, a material in physical or conceptual form.

The 25 artists whose work was selected for Cotton employ mediums as diverse as acrylic, oil, fiber, photography, steel and wax. Their works—there are 33 in this show— align with five threads I describe in the text that follows (after these images). 

Foreground: Catherine Weber, On the Line, digital print photographs on silk on cotton.
Continuing counterclockwise, three from Karen Rothman's Loop Loom Potholder series (more images in essay); Eugenie Lewalski Berg (shown below); Kathleen Volp (shown below and in essay)

Eugenie Lewalski Berg, Black and White and Shades of Grey, mixed media

Kathleen Volp, Twins

Installation view, continuing counterclockwise. Most works are shown following and in essay. Photo: Marie Craig

Patricia Dusman, Ruffled Feathers, wax and graphite on paper

Clara Bohrer, Wednesday Morning, embossed digital print

 

Installation view, clockwise: Jeanne Williamson (shown in essay); Stacey Piwinsky; Roy Perkinson, David Hawkins (both shown in essay); Cheryl Clinton; two by Willa Vennema (one shown below, the other in essay). On pedestals: Alicia Forestall-Boehm and Lisa Barthelson  both shown in essay). Photo: Marie Craig

Below: Willa Vennema, Fields and Sky #2, encaustic on panel

View of the gallery with Barthelson and Forestall-Boehm in foreground. Photo: Marie Craig

Textile as Image and Object

When I saw Catherine Weber’s image of five gossamer squares of silk and cotton printed with landscapes and strung like laundry, this exhibition began to take shape in my mind. Weber’s installation, On the Line, strung like prayer flags in the memory of her father, relates formally to Color, Texture and Sunlight, David Hawkins’s photograph of two well-worn towels hanging on a clothesline. They connect conceptually to Roy Perkinson’s arabesque of cord in an oil painting titled Interior Landscape (Rope).

Foreground: Catherine Weber, On the Line

David Hawkins, Color, Texture and Sunlight, digital photograph

Roy Perkinson, Interior Landscape (Rope), oil on canvas

Similarly three photographs have a lovely resonance: Rob Weisman’s Tallit, the detail of a prayer shawl, with Marie Craig’s two intimate views of deconstructed upholstery. Where Weisman captures tradition and order, Craig, in Layers and Re-Upholstered 3, offers a romantic depiction of neglect and entropy. 

Rob Weisman, Tallit,  photograph

Marie Craig, Layers, photograph

In her series of three small paintings of potholders, that classic handmade object from Baby Boomer childhood, Karen Rothman embodies image and object with cheeky directness. Ellen’s Loop Loom Potholder (as well as Karen’s and Julie’s) connect the structure of warp and weft directly to Modernism’s enduring trope, the grid.

 Karen Rothman,  Julie's Loop Loom Potholder and Karen's Loop Loom Potholder, each acrylic on canvas, app 10 x 10 inches each 

Structures

The grid is very much in evidence in this grouping of structural works. Stacey Piwinski’s mixed media work, Object of Labor #2  (shown at the opening of the post), is a rigorous tangle that  incorporates painting and weaving. Intertwined conceptually and physically, this flat image is also a perceptually dimensional structure. Jeanne Williamson’s The Fence as Lace #5 is the largest work in the show. Well over eight feet long and made of stiffened fabric, it asks us to see the handmade in an entirely different scale.

Jeanne Williams' The Fence as Lace #5

A second Williamson work wraps around a column, flatness assuming dimension and totemic stature. There’s a symmetry between Williamson’s wrapped column and Joe Carpineto’s seven-foot columnar frame, Piecework, which evokes the New England weaving mills that helped build the economy of New England. Formally, it relates to Eugenie Lewalski Berg’s minimalist sculpture, Black and White and Shades of Grey, which packs a lot of disparity—long and short, hard and soft, dark and light—into a neatly resolved piece.

Jeanne Williamson, Fence as Lace #7. Detail from Marie Craig photo

 

Joe Carpineto, Piecework, mixed media with metal and woven fabric

Narratives

The narratives here are both direct and oblique. David Hawkins’s black and white photograph of four young women enjoying a sunny afternoon on the grass, In their Summer Cottons, is the most literal but it shares a thread of tender nostalgia with Kate Gasser’s pencil drawing, My Old Dress. Kathleen Volp’s two mixed-media works, The Twins and the black and white diptych, Two Shirts, have an edgy presence--dark-memory narratives, perhaps--yet there’s a formal connection between the ruffle on the white shirt in the diptych and the gathered folds of Patricia Dusman’s sweetly domestic Ruffled Feathers.

David Hawkins, In their Summer Cottons, photograph

Kate Volp, Two Shirts, mixed media diptych

Patricia Dusman, Ruffled Feathers

The thread continues with Through the Curtains, April 1, 2011, Peggy McClure’s photographic evocation of a particular view on a particular day through the folds of a gauzy cloth. The sense of time and place is echoed in two mixed-media prints by Clara Bohrer, Sunday Afternoon 1 and Wednesday Morning 1. With their embossed surfaces of lace and cloth, they evoke a tactile memory of domestic life through a scrim of time past.

Peggy McClure, Through the Curtains, photograph

Both Linda Dunn and Kay Hartung employ mixed media—collage and image transfer, respectively—to tell their stories. Dunn’s Unfolded Time depicts a life from childhood to old age; poignantly, there are letters and domestic textiles embedded in layers. Hartung tells a heroic story: the picking of cotton. I welcomed her work for the connection it makes to that part of the theme which is not all fluffy and light, and this would also include Carpineto’s Piecework, which hints at the long hours of life in the mills. Jane Coder’s collaged painting, Jerome’s Robe, references textiles as it hints at a narrative. There’s a private story in those layers and markings.

Vessels

This is a small grouping of three small sculptures: Vessel 26 by Alicia Forestall-Boehm; Tween Nest, Family Debris Series by Lisa Barthelson; and Migration, Within and Without by Amy Hannum. The works share not only modest proportions but fiber as a primary medium. Yet Barthelson’s nest is as intentionally unkempt as Forestall-Boehm’s basket is meticulously shaped, while Hannum’s lidded sculpture falls between the two, embodying organic form in formal order.

 
Alicia Forestall-Boehm, Vessel, woven cotton and encaustic

Lisa Barthelson, Tween Nest, mixed media, app 12 inches diameter

Landscape

The four paintings in this last group are sophisticated in their evocation of landscape. In Willa Vennema’s two almost-abstractions in encaustic, Fields and Sky #2 and #5, white dots are dispersed throughout. I am enamored of her loose brushwork. Pamela DeJong’s Cropland, also encaustic, depicts a more “cottony” view but with an effective economy of means. This is true, too, of Cheryl Clinton’s Cotton Sky, a small acrylic painting that captures the essence of her subject.

Willa Vennema, Field and Sky #5

Cheryl Clinton, Cotton Sky, acrylic on canvas

The joy (and peril) of jurying an exhibition is that you have no idea what you will be asked to view. I feel fortunate in having been able to consider and select a number of very good works. Moreover, these are works that hew to the theme while offering welcome surprises.     

Read more:
. More artists images on gallery blog          

. Feature and videos at Metro West Daily News

Critical Mass.: Nancy White at Steven Zevitas

Gallery in Boston's South End

.

Nancy White, #40, 2012, acrylic on paper, 10 x 8 inches

BOSTON--Less than a mile south of Newbury Street is the South End, a once thriving, then down-and-out, and now thriving-again area that holds the majority of the city's galleries. If Newbury Street is the 57th Street of Boston, then the South End is its Chelsea, SoHo and Lower East Side all rolled into one.

.

Nancy White's first solo show in Boston is up now at the Steven Zevitas Gallery in the South End, through January 26.  White, an accomplished and much-exhibited painter who lives and works in San Francisco, makes the kind of quiet painting that would get swallowed up at an art fair. But in a modestly sized gallery such as Steven Zevitas’s, and with an installation such as the one he gave her—enough space between the works for the contemplation of each one—the setting was perfect.
..

.

The spare installation

White’s work—small unframed paintings which appear almost monochromatic from a distance—reward a patient viewer with a richness of composition and hue. Once you get close enough, the paintings pull you in as if by chromatic magnetism. Those "monochromes"  hold a value-constant spectrum of one hue, along with grays that appear to have a complementary tinge. It's hard to tell about those complements, because they might be doing what the eye wants the color to do--or what White is directing the color to do.  I thought their creamy flatness was gouache, but it's acrylic. There's a lot of mastery in those little paintings.

Nancy White at the opening of her show, New Work. The painting at her left shoulder is the one that opens this post; the one behind her is shown below

Compositionally, White fills the plane with hard-edge geometric shapes. Allow your eyes to wander and you'll find that those flat shapes in flat colors do something unexpected: They begin to suggest pictorial space. Indeed it seems that the closer you are to the work, the deeper the space becomes. This is definitely what White is directing the composition to do. Personally I waver between wanting to see them as pure abstraction and allowing my eye to wander into their depths.

#35, 2012, acrylic on paper, 10 x 8 inches

 #42, 2-12m acrylic on paper, 10.5 x 8.75 inches

 



 

As I was wandering pictorially, I found myself thinking of the Cave of the Sibyl of Cumae, near Naples. I'm not sure that's what White had in mind, but that's the thing about opening up ambiguous space. You never know where it will lead.

Entrance to the cave. Image from Wikipedia

Another view. Image from Philip Coppens blog

 

 

#44, 2012, acrylic on paper, 10.5 x 8.5 inches

 

See more of Nancy White's work on the gallery website

Read The Boston Globe review here

 

Critical Mass.: Newbury Street

Nancy Natale and Marybeth Rothman

 

Nancy Natale in the window at Arden Gallery

 

 

BOSTON--There are two gallery neighborhoods in Boston: Newbury Street in the Back Bay, which we're visiting today, and the South End, about a mile south, which we'll visit this weekend. Newbury Street is  the 57th Street of Boston, full of tony shops and galleries. Some galleries, like Arden and Lanoue Fine Art, have windows that face the street. It's a uniquely Back Bay experience to walk up Newbury Street and see art displayed so beautifully in the windows and then to ascend the stairs to the parlor floor--I think most of the lovely brownstones used to be residential--into a refined white-walled space. (Disclaimer: I am represented by Arden Gallery.)

 

Nancy Natale, an artist due for some serious attention, has the window at Arden Gallery this month. Her show, The Resonance of Time, is up through January 28. Metaphorically and physically, Natale pieces together disparate elements--cultural and industrial remnants: book spines, metal snippets, painting strips--into a mashup of memory and emotion. The work is from her Running Stitch series, but it's not stitched. Everything is held together with tacks in a kind of polyrhythmic syncopation to the horizontally placed elements. You might think of quilts or stained glass, or maybe the organization of information when your computer is in the process of defragmenting. It's all there visually. Natale invites you to make sense of it on your own terms.

In the window: Singing the Blues, 2013, mixed media with tacks and encaustic on panel, 48 x 30 inches

 

Believing Destiny, 2012, found and invented elements with tacks and encaustic on panel, 24 x 36 inches

The artist, left, in spirited conversation with gallery owner, Hope Turner

 

. . . . . .

Next door at Lanoue Fine Art, Marybeth Rothman, who has been showing in New York at Tria Gallery, is here represented by several large photo paintings in a three artist exhibition with Hung Liu and Eric Zener, also up through January 28. Rothman has the window.



Marybeth Rothman in the window at Lanoue Fine Art: Eugene, encaustic and mixed media on panel, 40 x 40 inches

 

 

Interior view of the gallery, with Hama on the far wall

 

Below: Hama, encaustic and mixed media on panel, 40 x 40 inches

 

 

Rothman selects what she calls "orphaned photographs"--snapshots and portraits that have been discarded by their origial owners--and lives with them in her studio until she develops affinities for some of them. The affinities lead her to imagined biographies, which she expresses by scanning and digitally manipulating the images in size and color to create a visual memoir with layers of words and a painted scrim in nearly transparent wax. Some of the newest paintings, like Eugene  and Hama, are almost Fauvist in coloration; others have the evocative soft hues and patterns that befit fading over time. The works' inventive formal issues aside, anyone who has glimpsed a stray photograph and wondered about the life it represents will respond to the tenderness and mystery of the personnages in Rothman's oeuvre. 

 

More info: 

. Arden Gallery

. Lanoue Fine Art 

It's Monday. Where's a Post?!

I'll be back

Photo: Marie Craig

SALEM, MASS.--No, I'm not turning my back on you. That's me pondering the placement of work for Cotton, a show I was invited to jury at Fountain Street Fine Arts in Framingham, Mass. I'll have more on it soon. 

My friend Tamar Zinn, whose splendidly cerebral paintings are in a solo exhibition at Kathryn Markel Fine Arts in Chelsea, noted on Facebook that I've been missing in action. Don't I know it. All that writing about Miami, while fighting the flu, slowed me down. And now, the return of sciatica is grinding me down. But I'm working on a few posts with Massachusetts datelines, and as soon as I can drive back to Manhattan--that is, when I can sit comfortably long enough to make the return drive (I'm blogging standing up)--I'll make a beeline to several exhibitions I want to report on.

I'll have more in a day or two. Stay tuned.

In Her Own Style: An Artist's Eye with Judith Shea

 . 

A view of the exhibition, In Her Own Style. Screengrab from NYC-Arts

You have until January 13 to get to the National Academy Museum on Fifth Avenue, across from the Met, to see this marvelous gem of a show: a selection of portraits of the women academicians of the institution. The exhibition takes place on the ground floor at the foot of the building's dramatic winding staircase, and in two galleries on an upper floor, including the lovely oval room which contains a self portrait of Cecilia Beaux, one of the most successful society painters of the late 19th century.

 

Self portrait: Cecilia Beaux, 1894. Image: National Academy via Examiner.com

 



Sculptor Judith Shea was invited by the National Academy to curate an exhibition at the museum. When she was brought into collection storage and saw the portraits of the women academicians from the late 1800s to now, she knew she had her show. The portraits, she explains in a video that runs during the exhibition, were given to the National Academy when a painter was accepted for membership. They are, then, each artist's vision of herself. In viewing over a century of work, Shea saw how the portraits paralleled the history of women in our society.

 

 Self Portrait: Ellen Emmet Rand, 1927. Image: National Academy Museum via Examiner.com

 

 

Long involved with the human form, which she has expressed in materials as varied as sewn industrial felt, carved wood, and cast bronze, Shea was intrigued by the ways these artists had chosen to present themselves. Her research into the women behind the portraits yielded some interesting stories. For instance, Ellen Emmet Rand, portrait above, meets the viewer's gaze in what Shea describes in the Arts-NYC video as "dead-on eye contact." She holds her palette "almost like a shield."  Shea learned that in 1930 Rand made $75,000, a fortune in those days (and still a welcome figure for an artist) as she supported her entire family from her work. Rand painted three portraits of FDR, one of which was his official White House portrait.

 

Gertrude Horsford Fiske, portrait below, painted herself in what is clearly her studio, wearing not her painting clothes but a good dress and hat. In the Twenties, explains Shea, a woman dressed this way was dressed for business. Fiske, then, made clear in her portrait that she was no dilettante. She was a business woman, and painting was her business.

 

Self portrait: Gertrude Horsford Fiske, 1922. Screengrab from NYC Arts

 

 

As the century progressed, portrait styles changed along with womens' lives. Marion Greenwood, a young beauty in the Fifties, "shows the influence of Hollywood" in her self portrait, suggests Shea. She depicts herself dramatically in closeup, and she's holding a cigarette, not a paintbrush. "'I don't have to prove I'm an artist,' she seems to say," says Shea.

 

Self Portrait: Marion Greenwood, 1954. Image: National Academy via Examiner.com 

In the absense of press material from the museum, I relied on notes I'd taken when visiting and followed links to videos on the museum's website. I hope what you see will pique your interest sufficiently to go see the show. If that's not possible, the links provided will allow you to trace the steps I took in researching this material. You will find a slideshow of images on the Examiner.com site and links to seven videos on the museum site of Shea discussing the show.(But if you can, go!)

 

 

Self portrait in a mirror: Jane Freilicher, 1971. Image: National Academy Museum via Examiner.com

Self portrait: Louisa Matthiasdottir, 1985. Image. National Academy Museum via Examiner.com

 

Judith Shea, from left: Portrait of Louise Bourgeois, 2012; self portrait, Still Standing, 2010-11; and Portrait of  Elizabeth Catlett, 2012. Click here to hear Shea talk about the making of her portrait, which she calls a "redemption piece" in the wake of 9/11

 

Below the artist/curator with her sculptures in the third gallery of the exhibition

 

 Click  here to hear Shea talk about the making of her Elizabeth Catlett sculpture

 

Portrait of Louise Bourgeois by Judith Shea,2012. Image: National Academy Museum via Examiner.com

Click here to hear Shea talk about Bourgeois

 

Click here for a full 30-minute episode of NYC-Arts in which Shea talks about the exhibition. (Start at the 4.5 minute mark.)