The creativity of Gail Gelburd is multifold, as an art historian, author, professor, curator, artist and activist. She has curated exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art, taught at Hofstra University and received Rockefeller Foundation grants. She was justelected to the Council for the Arts at MIT. She has exhibited nationally and internationally and is an artist who is coming into her own with a burst.
Gelburd moved from New York City to Otis, Massachusetts 35 years ago to a rundown watermill that she and her husband refurbished. Here, she said, she’s able to think about how a drop of water comes down, merges with a river and waterfall, heads to the ocean, then rises to the sky before coming down again as rain. Whether the process is calm or raging, moves or stagnates and dies, the life of a drop of water represents our own inner life and stages of mortal life — and by this communion, inspires Gelburd to create some of her art.
Trees inspire some of her other works by the way they nurture each other, following, as Peter Wohlleben’s book, “The Hidden Life of Trees,” and Canadian forestry conservationist Suzanne Simard’s science suggest, how the underground web of fungus, roots, trunk and trees work in mutual symbiosis. “When I discovered the way trees work together, I loved it, and it seemed to present a solution for us,” Gelburd commented.