FEATURED GALLERY
COURTING THE UNCONTROLLABLE, PARTS I & II
NATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF WOMEN ARTISTS OF MASSACHUSETTS
GALATEA FINE ART
460 HARRISON AVENUE B-6
BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS
PART 1: JANUARY 3 THROUGH 28
PART 2: FEBRUARY 1 THROUGH 25
by J. Fatima Martins
In her statement about “Courting the Uncontrollable I & II,” artist Marsha Nouritza Odabashian explained why she was selected as exhibition juror: “Establishing a relationship to the uncontrolled is an interest of mine, through the stories extracted from onion skins randomly poured onto paper and canvas. While I have enjoyed developing and jurying these two shows, my work is only included through imagery to help clarify my choices.”
“Courting the Uncontrollable I & II” are the inaugural shows in the Curator’s Platform at Galatea Fine Arts, Boston, and the theme of the exhibition was developed by Jennifer Jean Costello, co-vice president and exhibitions chair of the National Association of Women Artists of Massachusetts (NAWAMA).
As you would expect, the exhibitions offer diversity, although abstraction predominates the presentation. In her juror’s statement, Odabashian explained what the exhibition attempts to communicate: “The works range from simply musing or dreamlike, to playfulness and obsessing. The uncontrollability of the external world of politics to the imaged natural forces of the psychological and internal plays on human relationships. Through our art we express our past, we interpret our world, we comment on our condition, and we express our hopes and fears about the future.”
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FINDING A VOICE: SEVEN OUTSPOKEN WOMEN AT HESS
FEATURED EXHIBITION
OUTSPOKEN: 7 WOMEN PHOTOGRAPHERS
HESS GALLERY
PINE MANOR COLLEGE
400 HEATH STREET
CHESTNUT HILL, MASSACHUSETTS
THROUGH FEBRUARY 10
by Lisa Mikulski
What does it mean to be outspoken? In today’s social and political environment, there are those of us who have certainly been outspoken. The political resistance, scores of journalists, the Women’s March and, most recently, the #MeToo Movement have rolled through our nation like sweeping tides. But even as women now come forth in staggering numbers to express themselves, often the voices of these individual girls and women are dismissed or victim-blamed into submission. There are those whose voices have never, nor will ever, be heard.
“Outspoken: Seven Women Photographers,” now on view at Pine Manor College’s Hess Gallery, presents the voices of women who illuminate their stories — their messages for us — through the medium of photography.
Curated by photographer and educator Marky Kauffmann, the show seeks to present and challenge cultural assumptions of what it means to be a woman in an overwhelmingly patriarchal society, both within our own borders and without.
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MENDING FENCES: REALITY VS. ILLUSION IN CHESTER
ARTIST SPOTLIGHT
FENCES: A PHOTOGRAPHY EXHIBIT BY MICHAEL PRESSMAN
THE MAIN STREET GALLERY OF THE CONGREGATION BETH SHALOM RODFE ZEDEK
55 EAST KINGS HIGHWAY, CHESTER,CT
THROUGH OCTOBER 16
by Tom Soboleski
Photography, as we all know, is not real at all. It is an illusion of reality with which we create our own private world. So said American photographer Arnold Newman. Illusory is one way to describe the images in “Fences,” an exhibit of new photography by Michael Pressman in Chester, Connecticut. Composed mostly of composite photos that blend fences with out-of-place natural elements, they might be the trompe-l’oeil of photography — are the scenes real or an illusion? They certainly fool the eye.
On display at the Main Street Gallery of the Congregation Beth Shalom Rodfe Zedek synagogue through October 16, many superlatives could aptly apply to the photos — bold, striking, dramatic. Perhaps most of all, they are captivating — in their subject matter, in their method, in their presentation, in their contrasts.
Software has elevated the artistry of photography to a whole new realm. Overlaying images allows for limitless creativity. Purists who believe the “as shot” image shouldn’t be manipulated beyond some dodging and burning might cringe at the notion. But it’s not simply pasting one image over another. One needs to know how much blending and dodging is just enough. Can you adjust edges and shadows to create seamlessness? As Pressman pointed out, the raw shot is still there and “I’m not putting anything in that isn’t in the shot.” His imagination conceives images rooted in his feelings and emotions. “I see many sides of many things,” he said. “It can be very much rooted in seeing, feeling and reacting.”
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Guerrero and Wright: Architecture Stories: Photographs by Pedro E. Guerrero at The Art Gallery at Eastern Connecticut State University
By Kristin Nord
Willimantic, CT – The year was 1939 — when the then 22-year-old Pedro E. Guerrero, his portfolio in hand, arrived at Taliesin West in Scottsdale in search of a job. Frank Lloyd Wright, in the midst of building the campus, needed someone to document the process. Despite the paltry pay and lack of job security, Guerrero signed on.
Wright had made an uncanny choice in hiring the young man who’d just narrowly escaped the segregated schools and pervasive prejudice of Mesa, Ariz. Guerrero’s intelligence and quick wit would stand him in good staid with the boss, and his remarkable portraits of Wright suggest the ease with which the two took to each other’s company. There was no question but that Guerrero would play a significant role in reinvigorating Wright’s career; his iconic photographs continue to exert a force.
The two men would remain friends and working companions long after Guerrero had departed for the army, and then set off on a career as an architectural photographer in the heyday of the shelter magazines. Although Guerrero lived in New Canaan, Conn., with its close proximity to Manhattan, for the remainder of his working life, Wright summoned him regularly for assignments.
In “Picturing Wright,” Guerrero revisits those early years, serving up a picaresque tale of one young man’s quest and exposure to greatness, alongside the photographs these adventures inspired. In what would have been his 100th year, 33 of his photographs have been selected for a traveling exhibition, currently on view at Eastern Connecticut State University and moving later to Taliesin East in Spring Green, Wis.
It’s a banner year for Guerrero in general, with his work featured in shows in the coming months at The Farnsworth Museum in Rockland, Maine, and The Mexican Museum in San Francisco, Calif, and prominent in a catalogue from the Museum of Modern Art, “Frank Lloyd Wright at 150: Unpacking the Archive.” Last year, as part of PBS’s American Masters series, Guerrero’s life story was introduced to new generations.
The exhibition at Eastern sets the stage for the premier of “Cantilever,” a play written by J. J. Cobb, an assistant professor of theater, about Wright’s apprentices.
It’s somewhat astonishing that even during the years of the Great Depression the fellows selected to work with Wright were charged tuition for lives that boarded on indentured servitude. Apprenticeships at the two Wright campuses included building, cooking, cleaning and entertainment duties as well as design work.
“In today’s world you have to wonder if that self-isolation and intensity of experience could even be possible,” Cobb said, yet at the same time most serious artists commit themselves to years of learning by doing, whether or not they think of this commitment as an apprenticeship.
Would dedication to one’s art today lead people to sign up to work as these fellows did, away from family and with no guarantees of recognition or success? “How did these men and women, artists in their own right, strive to reconcile their own desires to embrace Wright’s philosophy?” she asks.
“Taliesin West would house the dreamers, and there they would be steeped in Wright’s curriculum of drawing, dance, music and sweat,” Cobb writes. “Young draftsmen and designers flocked from around the world to study at the feet of the master, and found themselves serving food and pouring concrete into textile-block molds in the Arizona sun. Some quickly deemed the arrangement a manipulation, but many stayed for decades.”
Guererro spent long hours in the darkroom during his time as a Wright fellow, honing his technical skills while responding with his fresh eyes to structures that seemed to emerge from the desert floor. In this world buildings of redwood and stone pulsed with life, as ropes and pulleys lifted and lowered roofs and shades for climate control. No wonder Shangri-La and Aladdin were suggested names for what loomed as a world of considerable enchantment.
“Mr. Wright’s promise to teach me what I needed to know did not come about in the traditional way,” Guerrero reported. “His only instructions were “photograph everything and anything that interests you. Show me what you can do.”
“As I became more comfortable with my surroundings, I began to realize what a marvelous opportunity this new job provided for testing my training,” he continued. “Here were interrupting forms, studies of texture and shadows, and the entire spectrum of values from black to white to test my techniques and the limitations of film and paper.”
In time, Guerrero would distance himself from the stifling Mesa of his youth, a place actually and metaphorically “across the chill desert air and the waterless Salt River.” By willingly throwing his “bedroll, suitcase, cameras, hopes and apprehensions” into those preparatory days, he had laid the foundation for a professional life that would usher in decades of adventure.
(“Guerrero and Wright: Architecture Stories” runs through April 20 at The Art Gallery, Eastern Connecticut State University, Fine Arts Instructional Center 112, 83 Windham St., Willimantic, Conn. The gallery is open Tuesday and Wednesday from 11 a.m.–5 p.m., Thursday from 1-7 p.m. and on Saturday and Cantilever performances run from April 25 to April 30 in the Proscenium Theater at the Fine Arts Instructional Center. For more details, visit https://easternct.showare.com.)
Irving Penn: Beyond Beauty
Ode to a Modern Master’s Legacy
by Franklin W. Liu
It’s been said that photography walks alone. As a 20th Century fine art medium, it opens our eyes to the world around us, near and far, challenging us to think and inducing us to feel what is conveyed through a singular, compelling moment captured through a discerning eye with the click of a shutter.
“Irving Penn: Beyond Beauty” is a major retrospective exhibition presenting 146 striking, stark photographic images made with passion by photographer-artist extraordinaire, Irving Penn (1917-2009). This nationwide traveling tribute was assiduously culled from the prestigious Smithsonian American Art Museum’s permanent collection by distinguished guest-curator Merry A. Foresta, who served as the Smithsonian’s curator of photography from 1982 through 2000, when she became the director of the Smithsonian’s Photography Initiative.
Foresta wants gallery goers to appreciate that Irving Penn’s camera lens enticingly coaxed a vast range of subjects, from fashion models to celebrities to everyday people, from local neighborhoods to exotic cultures in remote locales around the world. Penn was equally drawn to expressing the simplistic beauty of still life, esthetically arranged and articulated through sensitive accent lighting. Similarly, once out of the photography studio, Penn’s raw imagination took aim at variegated, poignant street scenes, as if there weren’t a precious moment to squander. All of these images were made throughout a long, vibrant career, lasting nearly 70 years in the forefront of commercial and fine art photography.
From an early series of black and white images of urban storefronts and street scenes, one 1939 image, “Beauty Shop,” New York, shows Penn leading viewers to peer through a store window; sitting on a display pedestal is the bust of a nubile young woman. This yesteryear mannequin seems to come alive, averting her gaze, her head turned shyly to one side with a coy smile. Her exposed soft shoulders glow, enhanced by a flattering, simple, black spaghetti-strap dress, as she is seen placing her right palm into her left palm in a gesture of flirtatious anticipation.
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Michals and Avery at Bennington
Making Their Own Rules
by Marguerite Serkin
DUANE MICHALS
Duane Michals has never played by the rules. Almost exclusively self-taught, his storied approach to photog-raphy has grown out of years, now decades, of hard work and experience.
On view at the Bennington Museum, “Duane Michals: Photographs from the Floating World” represents the photographer’s more recent work, from 2005 to the present.
“A great wave of melancholy swept over Tanya” portrays a young woman in traditional Japanese garb, appearing in sharp deꔀnition against the softer focus of the trees and brook behind her. By contrast, in “Vincent Van Gogh,” sun똀owers dominate, with an almost incidental ꔀgure carrying a ladder, making his way among the blooms. This balance and counterbalance between human form and natural surroundings invite the viewer to look more closely, drawn in by the artist’s riveting intent…
MILTON AVERY
Milton Avery was an artist compelled to create. In the face of personal adversity, deferred artistic recognition, and the turmoil of his times, Avery painted assiduously and proliꔀcally over the course of almost six decades. Now showing at the Bennington Museum, “Milton Avery’s Vermont” includes a wide scope of paintings, watercolors, and sketches inspired during the artist’s stays in Vermont between 1935 and 1943.
“Country Brook” (1938) portrays, in dramatically blunt strokes, bathers enjoying an outing to the local swimming hole. Simply rendered yet alluring in its textural warmth, the painting exudes the artist’s found pleasure in this natural pursuit. Among the watercolors on display, “New England Autumn” (1937) illus-trates Avery’s radical use of color, with blue ꔀrs, mauve foliage and a slate-tinted sky.
The summers into autumn spent in the hills of Vermont were a treasured respite from city life. The Vermont countryside, replete with hues of maples, barns and all manner of burgeoning growth, afforded the artist an opportunity to further stretch the boundaries of his use of color and form. Changing landscape allowed Avery’s interpretive vision to trans-form the pastoral views, in keeping with his singular approach of blending the abstract with the observed.
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