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Adventures Into Color and Space: Mixed Media Works by Deborah Forman

March 21-May 19
Reception: April 5, 5:30 - 7 pm
Gallery Talk: Thursday, May 2, 2 pm
    While Deborah Forman’s reputation rests primarily on her achievements as a journalist and author, she is also a talented artist. Forman’s collages and mixed-media works are vibrant explorations of color and form. The artist says she is “struck deeply by the passion of reds, the calming sensations of shades of blue, the buoyancy of yellows.” Adding found objects – scraps from printed media, theater tickets, labels, old maps, textured papers and anything else that strikes her fancy – gives her work a diversity of moods and, often, enigmatic meanings.
    While studying at Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia and the Philadelphia Museum School of Art during her first few years of marriage, Forman took numerous life classes and became totally absorbed by the body’s lines and shapes, which led to her interest in abstraction. From reading art history books and looking at works in museums and galleries, she found influences in the works of Robert Rauschenberg, Frank Stella and Kurt Schwitters as well as Matisse, Picasso and Braque. In the 1970s, the Metropolitan Museum of Art exhibition “The Cubist Epoch” sparked her desire to create mixed media work, which is where she has found the freedom to be most expressive, even venturing into representational images.
    “I am always interested in keeping my compositions alive, as Hans Hofmann taught, with a rhythmic play of form and color, which activates the work and incites new ideas and sensations,” she says.
    Forman, who holds a bachelor’s degree in journalism from Temple University in Philadelphia, is well-known on Cape Cod from her years as features editor for the Cape Cod Times and editor in chief of Cape Cod VIEW magazine. She wrote the script, did the interviews and worked on the filming for “Art in Its Soul,” a documentary on the history of the Provincetown art colony (co-produced by the Cape Cod Museum of Art and WGBH Channel 2 in Boston). Her book “Perspectives on the Provincetown Art Colony” was published by Schiffer Publishing in 2011. She is presently working on a series of books on Cape Cod artists, with “Contemporary Cape Cod Artists: Images of Land and Sea” due to be published this spring.
    Throughout her career Forman has interviewed a great many painters, sculptors and photographers – encounters she credits with enriching her work as an artist.
    She has shown in galleries on the Cape and in New York and Philadelphia and was represented in a group show at the Sakai City Museum in Osaka, Japan, in 1998. She is presently exhibiting at Harvest Gallery in Dennis.
Image: War and Peace 

 

 
Paintings by Lance Walker
March 21-May 19 
Reception: March 22, 5:30 - 7 pm
Lance Walker painting demonstration: 1 to 3 p.m. Sunday, May 5    
    Although primarily self-taught, Cape artist Lance Walker paints landscapes, marine scenes and other subjects with a polished realism that is truly impressive. “Paintings by Lance Walker” will feature more than 30 pieces – many of them the landscapes and marine scenes for which the artist is best known. Walker often meets with small groups of artists to paint the scenery of Cape Cod and other parts of New England. In January 2012, he traveled to Arizona to paint Tucson, Sedona and the Grand Canyon. Most recently he took an expedition to the Hudson River to paint scenes associated with 19th-century artists of the Hudson River School.
    Walker started painting in the late 1980s after years of developing his drawing skills and working in architectural and technical drafting, which helped develop his eye for detail. He began to seriously pursue a career as an artist after moving to Cape Cod in 2000. Today he is a member of the American Society of Marine Artists; has his own gallery, Lance Walker Fine Art in Dennis; has participated in group shows at the Cape Cod Museum of Art and the Cahoon Museum of American Art; and has snared his share of interesting commissions. He produced a commemorative painting for the 2008 Figawi race. In 2010, the late Sen. Edward M. Kennedy’s father-in-law, Judge Edmund Reggie, hired him paint a portrait of the senator’s boat, the Mya, as a gift for the senator and Vicki Reggie Kennedy. In late 2011, Walker won a commission to paint a mural for the new Osterville Village Library. 

 

 

 

Priceless: Works That Artists Wouldn't Sell  
March 28 - May 12
Reception: April 5, 5:30 - 7 pm
Gallery Talk by Cindy Nickerson: Thursday, April 11, 2 pm
   The “starving” artist is a picturesque stereotype, but most artists would just as soon make money by selling their work – and lots of it. So, the question arises: Why do many artists keep a piece or two (or more) of quite saleable art for themselves?  “Priceless: Works That Artists Wouldn’t Sell" is a group exhibition shedding light on that question.  
    Forty Cape artists are participating in the exhibition, with each of them having written something explaining why they consider the piece they’re showing “priceless.”
    Some of the works are, indeed, among the artists’ best – pieces that probably make them say – along with Katherine Ann Hartley: “Wow! Did I paint that?” Hartley, who recently relocated from Orleans to New Mexico, is showing “Plums with Winter Berries,” a horizontal still life arrangement with crockery, plums, grapes and foliage, all painted with a high degree of verisimilitude. Her use of browns, burgundies and greens creates a striking color harmony.
    However, a number of the works date from early in the artists’ careers – or even their student days – before they were really selling much of anything. Often these pieces have a place in the artists’ hearts and homes because they represent a breakthrough in proficiency. Harwich Port sculptor Heather Blume has kept “At the Market” since graduate school. Adapted from a painting by Renaissance artist Andrea Del Sarto, it was her first serious attempt at creating a multi-figure bas relief with perspective. Every spring she still hangs it outside by the front entrance to her studio. 
    Some artworks are precious to their creators because the subject is a beloved person, place, thing or special memory. Anne Boucher of Cotuit never had any intention of selling “Erin and Bird,” where a small brown bird perches at the base of her daughter’s throat like some soft, feathery brooch. Her beautifully rendered watercolor recalls the time when the artist and her daughter successfully nurtured a newly hatched bird – deposited at the back door by their cat – until it was ready to fend for itself. 
    Similarly, over a two-year period, Aleta Steward of Brewster painted “Jungle Dream” in her spare time, strictly for herself. Incorporating jewellike colors and a liberal use of gold and silver leaf, this splendid painting of a peacock was inspired by her love for the art deco style, her interest in the works of Austrian Symbolist painter Gustav Klimt, a perfume ad and the blooms of her own passionflower.
    William Muller, a Cotuit artist specializing in historical maritime subjects, has held onto his painting of the Hudson River steamboat Alexander Hamilton because, at age 19, he served as quartermaster-pilot on the classic sidewheeler. Also, in 1971, he watched its final, highly publicized trip. His canvas “The Last Landing” was originally destined for a New York gallery show. But “I realized, at the last moment, that this painting really belonged on our own home wall,” Muller says.
    In the case of other works, the artists would have been pleased enough to sell them – once upon a time. But somehow the pieces didn’t sell – as fine as they were – and ended up on the artists’ walls, eventually becoming an integral part of their homes. At Jo Ann Ritter’s house in Brewster, “First Snow,” a scene of a brook zigzagging across a glistening field of snow, is the first thing visitors see when they enter the foyer. It reminds Ritter of many pleasant stays at her daughter’s former ranch in Colorado – and often makes guests eager to see more of her work.
    Hillary Osborn of Falmouth is also showing a snow painting – “Snow on the Pamet River.” “I hardly ever hold onto a painting I have done,” she says. “The joy is in sharing your work with the world.” In this case, though, the work recalls a chilly, windy day some 10 years ago when she sat in her warm car painting in Truro. The movement of the clouds created abrupt shifts in light and dark across the white landscape, and she struggled with how to capture the ever-changing scene. “This is a painting I haven’t been able to let go of,” she say, “perhaps because it reminds me of why I paint.”

 

Frank Chike Anigbo: Skid Row: Paintings of Life on the Streets
February 7 - April 7, 2013
Reception: Friday, February 15, 5:30 - 7 pm
Gallery Talk: Thursday, February 14, 2 pm
    Frank Chike Anigbo chooses to paint – and paint beautifully – people mostly forgotten and ignored by the rest of society, people whose circumstances hold little beauty at all.    
    Currently a resident of Barnstable village, Anigbo was born in Nigeria, the fourth of six children of refugees from Biafra. He began to draw as soon as he could hold a pencil, but didn’t discover painting until he came to America to study computer science at age 17. He found the illustrations in a book on Impressionist painting “magical.” At night, after attending classes and working a job, he taught himself to paint by looking at books about such artists as Monet, Degas, Pissarro and van Gogh. “Painting was me, nothing else would do,” he says. Still, he began to feel that spending his life painting pretty landscapes and floral arrangements would be rather pointless.
    A trip to Spain in 1999 transformed Anigbo’s artistic vision. Upon seeing paintings by Velázquez at the Prado in Madrid, he was awed by the depth of expression in the faces. Velázquez, Goya and Rembrandt became his new heroes. He also pondered an indelible memory from the time when he’d been a boarding school student in Nigeria: A homeless man had died after living in a concrete gatehouse for two weeks, and it was four days before someone finally removed his gaunt body. When Anigbo returned to America, he destroyed all of his unsold impressionistic canvases. “I began teaching myself how to paint abandonment, loneliness – images and emotions that have haunted me all my life,” he says.
    Most of the paintings in the museum’s exhibition represent individuals the artist met while spending time in Skid Row, a small section of downtown Los Angeles with one of the country’s largest stable populations of homeless persons. Stories accompany many of the canvases, sensitively written by Anigbo with respect for his subjects’ humanity, but also full of perceptive, unflinchingly truthful details about their lives. Viewers will meet James, the young Jamaican who came to America because he wanted to own a car; Stephanie, the heroin addict yearning to see her children in Chicago; and “Shaky,” the man who shook every morning until he got his first drink. They’ll also encounter the “home” of Sherri, who took pride in sweeping her portion of the sidewalk every day.
    “My work explores the value of life, especially the life of isolated individuals on the margins of society – often the chronically homeless and mentally ill, people whose social contribution and impact is negligible by our accepted definitions of value,” Anigbo writes in his artist’s statement. “With writing and paintings that speak of the universal parallels of life, I aim to challenge the way we perceive worth and allocate value – at the same time staying true to the conditions of the subjects whose lives I document.”

Patrick Blackwell and Friends: 12 Years of Drawing Together
Jan 19 - March 17, 2013
Reception: Friday, February 15, 5:30 - 7 pm
Gallery Talks:
Thursday, Jan. 24,  2-3 pm: Barbara Adams and Leonard Sussman
Thursday, Feb. 7,  2-3 pm: Patrick Blackwell, Richard Perry and Phil Airoldi
Thursday, Feb 21, 2-3 pm: Ken Fishman and Richard Perry/Patrick Blackwell
    The human figure is one of the most enduring themes in art – and one of the most difficult to master. Approaching the study of the figure as a lifelong endeavor, one group of Cape artists have met together for years to draw from life.  
    The drawing group grew out of open figure drawing sessions held at the Provincetown Art Association and Museum: One artist there asked a few others to join him for life drawing sessions at the studio he was renting in Wellfleet. Many friendships developed from this small, intimate group. After Patrick Blackwell built a new home in Eastham that included a large studio, he invited his artist friends to join him there to continue their pursuit of figure drawing on a weekly basis. Each of them contributes toward the cost of hiring models, and they also have an anonymous patron who helps fund the sessions.
    For many years the group met on Tuesday afternoons, but recently changed to Mondays to accommodate the schedules of more artists and models. During each three-hour session, the model strikes a variety of poses, beginning with about five that last two minutes each. This allows the artists to loosen up with gesture drawings. The additional time is used for fifteen-, thirty- or sixty-minute poses. “The models are very important to our work and are exceptional collaborators in this challenging and mysterious art,” Blackwell says.
   The group is always changing, with artists coming and going. About five artists show up each week on the average, but there have been as many as 14. Sometimes they are joined by a few art students from Nauset Regional High School. This exhibition represents nine artists who have been attending the sessions for a long time and are currently regular participants. In addition to Blackwell, they are: Barbara Bemis Adams, Phil Airoldi, Kenneth Fishman, Robert Oberding, Richard O. Perry, Andrea Petitto, Len Sussman and Richard Swanson. 
    Petitto joined the group after moving to Harwich. “Having newly moved to the area in 2008, I was happy to find Pat Blackwell’s group of artists who meet weekly to draw the human figure from life,” she says. “It is not only an essential part of an artist’s practice, but an important opportunity to engage with others in the art community and share the experience of creating.”
    All of the more than 50 drawings in “Patrick Blackwell and Friends” were executed from life in the studio at Blackwell’s home. Generally working in such typical drawing mediums as pencil, charcoal, pen and ink, and Conté crayon, the artists have rendered the female nude in an endless variety of poses. This alone suggests why the figure so enthralls artists: Even the same model can create endless poses in standing, seated and reclining positions – and there are endless body types.
    Each artist has his or her own approach. Using a clean, crisp line, Blackwell emphasizes the models’ sinuous contours, from lithe limbs to flowing hair. In one drawing, he also suggests the tattoos decorating the young woman’s arms. At the other end of the stylistic spectrum, Oberding creates a strong sense of volume in his figures through the use of confident shading. Swanson’s pen and ink drawings – enlivened with color – have a kind of quirky humor about them.
    In all of these drawings – much more so than in a finished painting – we see the artists in the process of confronting such challenges as working out proportions or conquering some tricky foreshortening. Some of Fishman’s drawings feature multiple linear images, as if he made several attempts to capture the essence of the same pose. There’s a vitality here that more than compensates for the occasional awkwardness. We sense the immediacy of the interaction between the artist, medium and model, all accomplished within fairly brief time constraints. 
Image: Jen by Patrick Blackwell

 

Edward Smith: Avian Dreams
January 10 - March 10, 2013
Reception: Friday, February 15, 5:30 - 7 pm
Gallery Talk by Michael Giaquinto: Wednesday, February 20, 2 pm
    Birds of a feather stick together, as everybody knows. But swans, herons, kingfishers, spoonbills, egrets and other Louisiana shorebirds twine together in the most astonishing manner in “Avian Dreams: Paintings by Ed Smith.” 
    Although born in Naples, Italy, Ed Smith grew up in Yarmouth on Cape Cod. He took a workshop with Provincetown impressionist Henry Hensche while still a student at Dennis-Yarmouth Regional High School and has also studied with Wellfleet artists Robert Henry and John Grillo. After receiving a BFA from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and an MFA from Brooklyn College (City University of New York), Smith taught at Queens College (CUNY) for 12 years. Then, in 1999, he relocated to Baton Rouge to take a position as an associate professor of painting at Louisiana State University.
    There in his adopted state he discovered an exotic new world as he explored Louisiana swamps in his kayak. He became enthralled with the lush landscape, inspired by the work of 19th-century ornithologist and artist John James Audubon (who spent time there as well), and keenly aware of the impact industry is having on the region’s abundant bird population. He studied field guides. He studied bird specimens in the ornithology department at LSU. He visited the Audubon State Historic Site in nearby St. Francisville, where Audubon had painted 32 illustrations for his ambitious “Birds of America” project. 
    Despite Smith’s concern with naturalism, his vision also owes an artistic debt to surrealism and magic realism. His imposingly sized canvases suggest an apocalyptic world, conjuring up such environmental evils as shrinking habitats, oil spills, acid rain and global warming. They’re not without a disquieting beauty. His tangled conglomerations of birds dazzle with detail and have a scintillating sense of decorative design even while presenting darkly humorous avian predicaments. In “Weight of the World,” for instance, an ibis struggles – like some feathered Atlas – under the burden of an enormous ovoid of intertwined birds, piled up against a sky seemingly aglow with smoke and fire.
    “I paint large-scale oil paintings and use irony and metaphor in my depiction of birds and wildlife to address my political concerns, and also address the inherent difficulties that occur at the boundaries of the wild and developed world,” Smith has said. “My hope for my paintings is that they are visually appealing, intellectually stimulating and tell a good story.”
    Smith is represented by Soren Christensen Gallery in New Orleans and has had several one-person shows there. He has also had solo shows at Dartmouth College in Hanover, N.H., and Appleton Museum of Art at the College of Central Florida in Ocala, Fla., among other venues. “Avian Dreams” is his first exhibition on Cape Cod. 
Image: "Heavy Load"
    See more of Smith's work at www.sorengallery.com

 

Ocean: Us
Three distinctive visions of the unfathomable
December 1 – February 3, 2013
Gallery Talk: Wednesday, Dec 12, 2 pm with the 3 artists and Michael Giaquinto, curator
Artists Reception: Friday, Dec 14, 5:30 - 7:30 pm
  “We do not associate the ideas of antiquity with the ocean, nor wonder how it looked a thousand years ago, as we do of the land, for it was equally wild and unfathomable always.” 
- Henry David Thoreau, Cape Cod
Benton Jones, Kiln-formed glass artist
Kathleen Sidwell, Print Maker
Thomas A.D. Watson, Painter   
    In Greek mythology, the god Oceanus personified the outer sea encircling the world. “Ocean:Us,” presents three distinct visions of the sea – still mythic in its fearsome power, unfathomable depths and wild beauty. The exhibition showcases the talents of three award-winning contemporary Cape artists who’ve been inspired by the ocean: glass sculptor Benton Jones, printmaker Kathleen Sidwell and oil painter Thomas A.D. Watson. While the artists embrace different mediums, they share a passion for the sea that blends scientific curiosity with a sense of wonder.
    Of the three, Truro artist Thomas Watson takes the most straightforward look at the ocean. The son of noted illustrator Aldren Watson and grandson of Ernest Watson (co-founder of Watson-Guptill Publications, the leading publisher of how-to art books), he is known for his representational landscapes of Cape Cod and the Adirondacks. With his ocean paintings, he explores the boundaries between myth and science in works ranging from near miniature watercolors to oversized canvases. Some of his paintings – like the 8-foot wide “Oceanus” – give an expansive view of water and sky that pays tribute to the vastness of the sea itself. Often, however, Watson peers beneath the surface to depict real and fictional denizens of the dim blue depths. His painting “Architeuthis” pictures a giant squid, a creature so elusive it was never photographed alive until 2004 – so that it is, in a sense, almost as mythical as real.
     Brewster artist Kathleen Sidwell’s inventive monotypes and mixed media paintings have been informed by a fascination with tides, currents and coastal erosion; her first-hand experience with Hurricane Katrina; and a love for tales concerning the sea. She takes her expressive cues from the ocean’s colors, textures, fluidity and motion. Rather than depicting the sea representationally, her works evoke the visceral experience of being near the water or shore. But Sidwell also expresses environmental concerns in her work. In particular, she is alarmed by the ill effects that trash from modern life is having upon sea life. Her mixed media piece “An Island the Size of Texas” references the floating plastic debris field at the center of the North Pacific Gyre, roughly the size of Texas.      
    Benton Jones, also of Brewster, often uses his art to comment on environmental issues. A number of the kiln-formed pieces he’s showing – including a four-foot fountain – are made from flotation spheres of clear glass used in climate-change research by Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, sometimes for 30 years or more, before being decommissioned. WHOI donated a number of them to Jones; each is 17 inches in diameter and weighs 40 pounds. Jones divides the buoys in half, then slowly heats each hemisphere until fluid, allowing it to drape over, slump through or sag into a stainless-steel or ceramic mold. He carefully monitors its developing shape, aiming to halt the progression at just the right stage for maximum artistic impact. He equates the process to the melting of the polar icecaps, and the flowing vessels do resemble ice that’s melted and refrozen. “Melting Hemispheres” he calls them.
    Jones has also fashioned glass sculptures from remnants of the blue glass walls of the old Provincetown Aquarium. With other works, he has achieved glittering results by encapsulating pieces (often strips) of bronze and/or copper sheeting between layers of glass. In conjunction with the exhibition, Jones has installed a gigantic jellyfish that towers over the small fishpond in front of the art museum. Its body is fashioned from two of the glass hemispheres. Its long copper “tentacles” sway and tinkle pleasantly with every breeze.
 

Enamel Guild (Northeast USA) A Juried Exhibition
November 15 - January 27, 2013
Artists' Reception: Saturday, November 17, 2 - 4 pm
Gallery Talk by Lois Grebe: Thursday, January 10, 2013, 2 pm
    The Enamel Guild (Northeast USA) was founded in 1992 for the purposes of promoting “the art of vitreous enamel to both the public at large and to the Guild members and to educate through activities such as exhibitions, workshops, publications, demonstrations, educational programs and symposia through the northeastern regions of the USA.” It is the largest enamel guild in the country with over seventy-five members.
    Their 20th anniversary exhibit will be held at the Cape Cod Museum of Art.  The exhibition was juried by noted metalworker and enamelist Linda Darty. Currently living and teaching in Certaldo, Italy, Darty is a recipient of the Lifetime Achievement Award from The Enamelist Society, an international organization. Those selected by juror Linda Darty are: Ruth Altman, Michael and Maureen Banner, Sheila Beatty, Susan Billy, Len Brondum, Joanne Conant,
Isabella Corwin, Erica Druin, Leni Fuhrman, Susana Garten, Orietta Geha, Kim Geiser, Lois Grebe, Anne Havel, Dorothea Hosom, June Jasen, Sandra Kravitz, Heidi Kreuziger, Tanya Migdal, Cynthia Miller, Averill Schepps, Toni Strassler, Marilyn Seitlin Tendrich, Elizabeth White-Pultz, Katharine Wood, Sally Wright, Cindy Wright.
   There will be 48 objects in the show, an assortment of jewelry, sculptures and wall pieces, both large and small.
    Enameling is an ancient art dating back to the third century B.C. With its bright, jewel-like colors, enameling has sometimes served as a substitute for precious stones. Decorative objects are made by fusing powdered glass to a metal surface, most commonly copper or silver. Using smaller kilns than potters, enamelists fire objects repeatedly – up to 40 times – building up surfaces one thin layer at a time.
    The most common traditional techniques are represented in the exhibition, though generally with a fresh and contemporary interpretation. With cloisonné, segments of color are separated by slender strips of metal. Former Enamel Guild/North East president Sandra Kravitz used a cloisonné technique on the brooch “Autumn Pond.” Within a flowing, vine-like silver setting, orange and yellow leaves float on a limpid pool while a small fish “swims” beneath the surface. Cloisonné wires define the fish and leaves in this evocative miniature scene. With basse-taille, the artist applies translucent enamel over a low-relief pattern in metal. Isabella Corwin used a basse-taille technique for “Cheirothrix,” a foot-wide enamel wall piece featuring a prehistoric fish, apparently trapped in stone in a fossilized state.
    Many pieces in the exhibition are small – fashioned as pendants, pins or earrings of unusual distinction. With its twisting anticlastic curves – and bits of cloisonné wires tracing silver curlicues against a velvety black background – Erica Druin’s “Evolving Through Darkness” pendant merits its romantic title. Earrings by Heidi Kreuziger feature arcs of wire and granules of glass against glowing fields of orange-red enamel. Ruth Altman’s “Chrysalis” and Sheila Beatty’s “Scarab Necklace” are pendants, both deriving their beauty and inspiration from the realm of insects. Abstract enamel designs float in sleek curvilinear settings in two silver brooches by noted Massachusetts silversmiths Michael and Maureen Banner.
    Larger pieces can be a challenge in this art form, but the show does boast several wall pieces. Measuring 20 by 16 inches, Altman’s “High Flying Birds” is a seeming mosaic of pieces forming a picture of two birds, large in the sky over a small house. It has a charming stained-glass look. Cynthia Miller took her cue from nature in creating the two sextet of tiles, “Rose Nebula” and “Rain,” both measuring 25 by 32 inches overall. Lois Grebe crafted a 10-inch circle from four segments of metal – two corrugated, one with folds and one made from overlapping disks – then variously enameled them for a unifying pearly, peachy glow.
Image: Autumn Pond by Sandra Kravitz

Cape Cod Potters Juried Show
October 27 - January 6, 2013 
    Cape Cod Potters, Inc. is a non-profit organization of artists with a common aim: to better understand the medium of clay by the sharing of knowledge. It operates as a charitable organization that educates through the dissemination of knowledge and experience. It seeks to maintain high standards and professional growth within its membership and to generally stimulate the education and appreciation of the making of pottery and its allied arts. 
    This juried show made up of 56 pieces by twenty-four potters demonstrates the development and fulfillment of an idea in clay from each exhibitor. The artist’s photographs and accompanying written explanation for the body of work show the conception, evolution, and resolution of a single concept in a glaze, form, or technique. During the exhibition there will be films shown in the screening room as well as gallery talks by the artists. Each talk will be an interchange and explanation of their work by two potters. 
    Artists in the exhibition: Linda Bender, Craig C. Brodt, Sarah R. Caruso, Louis C. Cormier, Nathaniel E. Doane, Hollis Engley, Joe E. Fattori, Shelley M. Fenily, Laurie A. Goldman, Diane B. Heart, Holly J. Heaslip, Lois Hirshberg, Frances K. Johnson, Amy Kandall, Toni Levin, Kimberly Medeiros, Tessa Morgan, Kevin M. Nolan, Traci M. Noone, Linda Riehl, Gail A. Turner, Sue Wadoski, Nate Williams, Paul Wisotzky
    In setting up the parameters for the exhibition, members of the Cape Cod Potters wanted to go beyond merely showing their best work: They agreed to challenge themselves to try something new. So when Ellen Shankin, a noted potter living in Floyd, Va., juried the show, she looked first at the strength of their pieces, but also took their written concept statements into consideration. Those same textural comments are incorporated into the exhibition, with each artist explaining the origin, evolution and resolution of a single concept in a glaze, form or technique.
    Although she generally works at a potter’s wheel, Holly Heaslip turned to making hand-built pieces in white earthenware in homage to the all-white embossed Wedgewood pieces her family has long used at holiday dinners. Linda Riehl looked to an even earlier form of pottery – the colorful Oribe pieces used for tea ceremonies in 16th-century Japan – in decorating a jar and bowl of contemporary shape.
    For Linda Bender, the inspiration for a series of abstract figures sprung from frustrating sessions at the wheel. While pushing the limits in fashioning a traditional vessel, “pot after pot slumped beyond repair,” she wrote. “It was as if the pieces didn’t want to be pots.” She redeemed the distorted forms by carving them to reveal “inner figures” when they were bone dry.
    Some of the artists describe the source of their decorative motifs. Diane Heart only had to look out her studio window to see the daisies she then incised on a round porcelain vase. Cape Cod native and fishing enthusiast Nathaniel Doane used sgraffito cutting to depict predator fish converging on a “bait ball” of schooling fish in a feeding frenzy. His “canvas” is a ceramic tile mural made from local clay.
 
Gallery Talks for Concepts in Clay:  All talks begin at 2 pm
November 10:  Traci Noone and Gail Turner
November 17:  Holly Heaslip and Linda Riehl 
November 24:  Hollis Engley and Sue Wadoski 
December 1:  Kim Medeiros and Lois Hirshberg
December 8:  Linda Bender and Paul Wisotzky
December 15:  Amy Kandall and Nat Doane  

Featured Films for this exhibition: (films are free for members of Cape Cod Potters)
2 p.m. Sunday, Dec. 2:
“Gifts From the Fire: The Ceramic Art of Brother Thomas”
“The Sleeping Pot” (about a two-week firing at the McKeachie-Johnston Anagama Kiln in River Falls, Wisc.)
“Classic Maria Martinez: Native American Pottery Maker of San Ildefonso.”
2 p.m. Saturday, Dec. 29:
“MC Richards: The Fire Within”
“Phil Rogers: A Passion for Pots.”
 

Artists in Their Own Right: Works by the CCMA Docents
November 15 – January 13, 2013
Artists Reception: Nov 17, 2-4 pm
    Of the museum’s 25 docents, at least a dozen are actively producing some form of art, including oil, acrylic and watercolor paintings; pastels; collages; and works in fabric. Most have some outlet for showing their work on at least an occasional basis, whether through a commercial or community art gallery or at a local guild or art association. Joyce Aaron – considered to be the museum’s first and longest-serving docent – is also one of the best known as an artist. Former docent Richard McGarr – who has had shows of his paintings at the Cultural Center of Cape Cod in South Yarmouth – is also participating in the exhibition.
    Cape Cod Museum of Art docents receive quite extensive training about the collection, with each of them becoming an “expert” on at least one particular artist. They also take frequent field trips and attend gallery talks in a constant effort to increase the range and depth of their understanding of Cape Cod art.
    One docent, Gail Burke, commented: “Artists are the best people to talk about what’s going on in the artwork. Rather than just talking about art history, they can help people see like an artist.” It also works the other way: Carefully studying the works of other artists helps them improve their own.
    Docents are generally on duty at the museum from 11 a.m. to noon and 2 to 3 p.m. Thursdays; 11 a.m. to noon and 1 to 2 p.m. Saturdays; and 1 to 2 p.m. Sundays. While happy to give tours of the museum upon request, they generally assume the more relaxed role of “museum guide.” After briefly introducing visitors to the museum and acquainting them with what’s on view in the galleries, they simply make themselves available to answer questions or call attention to points of interest. Some docents also make offsite presentations to interested community groups.
Image: Noon a Purple Glow by Dick McGarr
 

Milton Wright: A Retrospective
September 15 - November 18
Gallery Talk: Thursday, Sept. 20, 2 pm by Susan Kurtzman
Reception: Sunday, Sept. 23, 2 - 4 pm
     A painter of seascapes, landscapes, cityscapes, portraits, and still lifes, as well as a lithographer, Milton Wright’s life work spans more that seven decades. Grandnephew of the famous Wright Brothers, a teacher of more than 20 years, and a contemporary of Picasso and Matisse, Wright was born in Ohio in 1920. While studying for a degree in Fine Arts, his mentor and life-long friend Marston “Bud” Hodgin introduced him to the artistic community in Provincetown, where Wright would become actively involved in the local community.  During World War II, he was drafted into the Army Air Corps Training Film Unit in Colorado. While in training, he spent his weekends sketching the abandoned silver mining towns of the area. In 1948 he and his wife, Breene Loughridge, sailed to Paris, France where he studied at the prestigious Academie Julian for two years under the G.I. Bill. He admired the works of Cezanne, Matisse, and Picasso, and many of his earlier paintings reflect their influence. Upon his return to the United States, he would teach art for more than twenty years in New York. It was during this time he would often return to his summer cottage in North Truro to paint. 
    Born in Dayton, Ohio, in 1920, Wright began taking classes at Dayton Art Institute when he was just 7 years old. In 1942, he graduated from Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, where he began a lifelong friendship with Marston Hodgin, the dean of fine arts. Hodgin, who painted on the Cape every summer, introduced Wright to the Provincetown art community in 1938.
    Wright continued to summer on Cape Cod off and on before becoming a regular summer resident in 1955. Following his retirement from teaching in 1977, he and his family moved permanently to their cottage at Great Hollow Beach in North Truro. He was active in the community as a long-standing member of Truro Historical Society and Truro Historical Commission and served on the Save the Highland Lighthouse Committee, which raised money to move the endangered lighthouse back from eroding cliffs.
    The artist was also a frequent guest speaker at Truro Central School, where he told students about his famous relatives, pioneering aviators Orville and Wilbur Wright. He always brought along several artifacts, including letters from his Uncle Orville.
    Wright exhibited widely over the course of his career. He was honored with many one-person shows and had works included in national exhibitions at the Denver Art Museum; Dayton Art Institute; the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, D.C.; the Brooklyn Museum; and the Butler Art Institute in Youngstown, Ohio, among other institutions. He died in 2005.

Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts Alumni Exhibition
Sponsored by The Hess & Helyn Kline Foundation
September 22 - November 25, 2012
Opening Reception: September 21, 5:30 - 7:30 pm
Gallery Talk by Michael Giaquinto: Wednesday, October 10, 2 pm
Gallery Talk: November 25, 2 pm, with artists Wendy Brusick, Debra Hope Colligan, Jon Goldman, Lisa Hesselgrave, Judith Barbour Osborne, Sarah Son-Theroux and Jeanne Staples. Refreshments will be served. The talk is free with museum admission.
    Twelve regional alumni of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, the oldest art school in the United States, are represented in this exhibition featuring works from the prestigious academy’s notable alumni who currently live in the New England area. 
    Incorporating one of the country’s oldest museums, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts was founded in 1805. Nearly every major American artist has taught, studied or exhibited there, with graduates including such notables as Thomas Eakins, Mary Cassatt, Edwin Austin Abbey and William Harnett. PAFA (pá-fa) – as faculty, alumni and students affectionately call it – boasts an international reputation as one of the finest schools of figurative art in the world. Students there still undergo the time-honored disciplines of drawing from plaster casts and life drawing from nude models.
    The Cape Cod Museum of Art’s “Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts Alumni Exhibition” was curated by Jeffrey Carr, the school’s dean and Vice President of Academic Affairs, and Michael Giaquinto, the exhibitions curator CCMA. The participants include seven artists who live on the Cape or Martha’s Vineyard. The other five reside elsewhere in New England. 
    The earliest graduate among them is East Falmouth artist Debra Hope Colligan, who graduated in 1979. Her plein-air landscapes and portraits of people and animals have been collected by a number of famous musicians, including Bruce Springsteen, Jon Bon Jovi, Steve Van Zandt, James Taylor and Jackson Browne. The most recent alum is Cape native Dena Haden, who earned her MFA from PAFA in 2008 and now lives in Cambridge. In her mixed-media constructions, she explores the “rhythmic energies” inside the human body, using such materials as wax, pigment, fabric and wood.
    In a statement concerning the show, Carr wrote: “This exhibition of alumni of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts demonstrates many of the qualities the Academy is known for: an awareness of fine arts traditions, a respect for craft and a deep sensitivity to the natural world.” But he also noted, “The dozen artists in this exhibition display an extraordinary range of sensitivities, talents and expressive intents.”
    Almost all of the Cape and Islands artists are represented by paintings reflecting their responses to the natural beauty around them. A native of Shanghai, Deena Gu Laties of West Falmouth spent four years copying masterpieces of the Song Dynasty (960-1279) in China before coming to the United States to study at PAFA. Her watercolors on silk and rice paper incorporate a blend of Eastern and Western influences, as in her luminous “Sunset.” Seeing “a distinct spirituality in nature,” Sarah Son-Theroux of West Barnstable interprets landscapes – be it clouds floating over The Knob or a flowering dogwood tree – with a poetic simplicity infused with a sense of vibrant motion. At the other end of the spectrum, paintings by Woods Hole artist Jon Goldman have a heightened sense of concrete reality, with trees, rocks and water that seem to shine from within. An intense contrast of light and shadow helps evoke of strong sense of place and time of day in “Crick Hill – Menemsha,” a glowing oil painting by Jeanne Staples of Edgartown. Elizabeth Lockhart Taft of Vineyard Haven always paints on location, favoring expansive scenes of peace and serenity, building up her landscapes one carefully observed color note at a time.
    Landscapes are also the domain of Lisa Hess Hesselgrave, a pastel painter from Branford, Conn. Her “Twilight,” “Dusk” and “Foggy Snow” all offer times of day and/or weather conditions where tonal contrasts are soft and muted. Interestingly, all three works are of essentially the same scene under different conditions.
    Three of the alumni remain deeply interested in depicting the human figure – though in very different ways. While reflecting her academic training in figurative work, the canvases of Saskia Eubanks of Boston always go a step beyond, exploring moments of transformation in nature or psychological states. The recumbent nude in her “Laocoon” suggests the forms of rocks and hills. Wendy Brusick of Cranston, R.I., uses her command of the paintbrush and pencil to lend crisp reality to a highly personal surrealism – as in “Lady in Waiting,” where a woman’s head appears as a giant sea anemone. In paintings of a human head, a deer skull and a raven, Dianne Corbeau of Dennisport takes a more elemental point of view, seemingly reducing each subject to its essence.
    Besides Dena Haden, Judith Barbour Osborne of Old Lyme, Conn., is the only PAFA alum represented by abstract works in the Cape Cod Museum of Art show. With two pieces from her “Closer Alignments” series, she took unfinished monotypes from the past and added gestural markings in graphite and color pencil to bring them to striking completion.
    Featured Artists: Dena Haden (2008), Lisa Hess Hesselgrave (1981), Sarah Son-Theroux (1993), Jon Goldman (1982), Jeanne Staples (1982), Wendy Brusick (1989), Debra Hope Colligan (1979), Judith Barbour Osborne (1997), Saskia Eubanks (2003), Diane Corbeau (2002), Deena Gu Laties, Elizabeth Lockhart Taft (1997)
Image: Jon Goldman, "The Knob Rock " 

 

200 YEARS OF CAPE COD ART
May 19 - August 26, 2012
Curator's Statement by Elizabeth Ives Hunter
    This exhibition is a sampling of art of the region with the artists chosen to illustrate the level of artistic excellence achieved in the region.
    John Audubon came to the Cape in 1835 – before impressionism challenged the academic point of view in France and when travel to Europe meant a dangerous journey under sail. William Mathew Prior came here to paint the portraits of our distinguished citizens but Cape Cod could not support a full time, resident portrait painter.  By 1870, a number of inventions, such as the screw propeller and the triple expansion engine made trans-oceanic shipping economically viable. Thus began the era of cheap and safe travel and trade around the world which enabled American painters to travel to Europe to study their craft and to become familiar with the great treasures of European museums, palaces and churches.
    By the middle of the 19th century, impressionism was gaining ground in France which was the center of the art world at the time.  Practitioners focused their attention on the use of color and value to give the illusion or impression of light falling across three dimensional forms and held that if the color and value notes were correctly observed and recorded the end result would be visually correct and would obviate the need for careful preliminary value drawing.  The academicians of the time were correct in viewing impressionism as a threat to their position and training methods but the new movement gained ground and support until it was fully accepted. In 1872, John Enneking went to study in Europe and over the next four years he traveled to Germany, Switzerland, Italy and France.  He became friends with Claude Monet and painted with him in his garden at Giverny.
Similarly, although about fifty years later, Picasso, Matisse, Cezanne, Van Gogh and Duchamp began the grand experiment of abstraction which leads to the expressionist movement of which Hans Hofmann was perhaps our first and best known local proponent and practitioner.
    There are certain threads which connect the various artists represented. Charles W. Hawthorne’s teaching tradition was continued by Henry Hensche and later by Lois Griffel.  Ives Gammell came to Provincetown to study with Hawthorne in 1911 but by 1915 he had chosen William Paxton as his principal teacher.  Nearly 40 years later Robert Hunter came to Provincetown to study with Hensche but by 1951 he had become Gammell’s full time student.  Lucy L’Engle, Howard Gibbs, Arnold Geissbuhler, and William Littlefield all brought strong European influences to the region and integrated them in to that unique aesthetic which makes the art of our region unique.
Some of the artists represented in the exhibition have national, if not international reputations while others are not as well known.  Their work, however, is characterized by both excellence and imagination which is the mark of distinguished aesthetic work.
    Cape Cod and the Islands have a long tradition of being one of the richest and most prolific artistic centers in the US. The Cape Cod Museum of Art is the only art museum which represents the entire Cape Cod and island region past and present.  We define our region as it existed historically before the Canal – running from the North River in Duxbury on a more or less straight line down to New Bedford and including the offshore islands.
Image: Han Hofmann, "Untitled"

 

Etta: Jewelry as Art
March 31 - April 22, 2012
Reception: April 1, 2 - 4 pm
Gallery Talk: April 12, 2 pm
    Jewelry Designer, Etta, designs and produces an extraordinary range of one-of-a-kind works of art using amazing gemstones and precious metals. This exhibition is a retrospective of her unique jewelry designs from 1968 through the present.  Etta works with a variety of gemstones set in karat gold and sterling silver.  Especially well know for her work with Australian opals, she also includes champagne diamonds, pink tourmalines and color changing sapphires in her wearable art.
    Etta has been designing and creating hand-crafted jewelry since 1968. In 1970, she opened her shop, Jewelry by Etta, in West Dennis in an antique full-Cape studio/shop, where she creates only unique pieces of jewelry. Her work has been displayed worldwide in juried exhibitions.
    Born in Chicago, she moved to Worcester, MA at age 6 and attended high school there. She explored many forms of artistic media until she attended her first silversmith class in high school.  Once she had the experience of one small piece of work, she knew she had found her creative center, and never looked back. Excited by the potential, she also took a night class at The Craft Center in Worcester.  After high school, she moved to Cambridge with $10 in her pocket. Working on Charles Street in Boston in 1970 was a wonderful experience and helped shape her future in her chosen field. Six short weeks later she started her own wholesale company.
    In 1972, she decided to try retail once again. This time it achieved the momentum she needed to start her journey that has taken her around the world, and provided a quality of life she could not have possibly imagined. Challenged intensely by a cancer diagnosis in 2010, she continues to follow her dream to wherever it leads her. She’s humbled, honored, and grateful when she sees her work on a person who has come to cherish the heirloom-quality pieces she feels fortunate enough to have created over the years.
Image: Opal pendant
    

 

 

   The 15th annual ArtWork exhibition, featuring work created by students and mentors from the Cape Cod and the Islands School-to-Careers Art Internship Program, is on display April 27 - May 13. This exhibition includes a mix of painting, sculpture, textile design and a variety of other media produced by students during the course of their partnerships with renowned local artists. Their mentors will also have work exhibited. An artists’ reception, open to the public, will be Thursday, May 10, 5:30 - 7:30 pm. 
    The School-to-Careers Art Internship Program pairs junior and senior high school students with successful working artists twice a year. For eight weeks, students work with artists in their studios in a collaborative environment that promotes creative growth and offers insight into the lives and routines of professional artists.
Image: Katelyn Bess stands next to her pottery at the 2011 Art Internship Reception.

 

 

Richard Copello: A Gathering of Birds
Curated by Michael Giaquinto
April 28 – May 13, 2012
Gallery Talk by Richard Copello, Thursday, May 3, 1 pm
followed by Artist's Reception with light refreshments
    Richard Copello graduated from Brockton High School (MA) in 1962 and spent the next three years as U.S. Marine serving in Okinawa, Japan, Taiwan, and the Philippine Islands. Upon honorable discharge, he attended Bridgewater State College (MA), where he received a Bachelor of Arts degree in English and History with an Education minor. In 1970, he began a teaching career at Bristol County Agricultural High School in Dighton, MA, where he taught English, Civics, and World History for 31 years.
    In 1971, he made the acquaintance of Richard Michael Gibney of Rockport, MA, a well-known former Marine Corps combat artist. Having shared mutual Marine corps experience, the acquaintance soon blossomed into a wonderful friendship of father/son mentoring proportions, which lasted until Gibney’s passing 25 years later. Copello says, “As a mentor, Dick Gibney was without peer.”
    Copello’s development as a painter has been enhanced by his additional passions for fine woodworking, wood carving, stone carvinf, stained glass, poetry, music, and gardening. Philosophically, he feels that an artist’s life is enriched by the pursuance of the creation of beauty in any medium or form.
    It is because of this philosophy that, as an artist, Copello works in as many media as possible: oil, acrylic, watercolor, colored pencil, pastel, egg emulsion, and egg tempera.  This philosophy can be applied to subject matter as well: wildlife and birds, still-life, landscapes, seascapes, nudes, portraits, architectural renderings are all part of his artistic arsenal.
    In 1999, Copello received a gift of a Robert Douglas Hunter still-life painting. He soon developed a friendship with renowned artist who has been referred to as “the Dean of the Boston school of art”. Hunter, with his gracious manner and extensive knowledge of art, has offered encouraging critiques of Copello’s work, enabling Copello to futher refine his talents as an artist.
    In 2008, Copello had a still-life as well as a landscape painting juried into the All New England Exhibition at the Cape Cod Art Association. He also exhibits at the Front Street Gallery in Scituate, MA, as well as a number of businesses in MA. He was recently the featured artist in the Into the Wild show at The Morini Gallery at MMAS in Mansfield, MA. Copello lives in East Bridgewater, MA, where he pursues his many and varied interests.
    Philosophically, he feels that an artist's life is enriched by the pursuance of the creation of beauty in any medium or form. His current exhibition at the Cape Cod Museum of Art reinforces his belief that “Capturing the intrinsic beauty of nature is a spiritual thing – one’s chance to honor God’s creations.”
Image: The Alarm, Crows

 

Retrospective: Donald Stoltenberg
April 7 – May 13, 2012 
  Donald Stoltenberg is a painter, printmaker, teacher and author. He has exhibited in many major museums including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the Boston Institute of Contemporary Art, the Boston Athenaeum and the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. and is included in many collections public and private. He has many awards praising his contribution to art. The exhibition at the Cape Cod Museum of Art will include a variety of his work from paintings, and prints which will include collagraphs, and constructions.
    Stoltenberg constructs his art. He creates his art by combining parts, by adding to the whole. He likes to build things up. He has a strong interest in architectural and objects made by man. His interests range from bridges, trains, airplanes and boats.  He responds to all the angles and space of each object.
    Born in 1927 in Wisconsin, Donald Stoltenberg received his Bachelor of Science from the Institute of Design of the Illinois Institute of Technology in Visual Design Art in 1953. He then worked as a graphic designer under famed industrial designer and illustrator Raymond Loewy. In 1954 he relocated to Boston where he worked as a graphic designer at the Container Corporation of America. In 1960 he set up his own art studio on Commercial Wharf in Boston and began devoting himself full time to painting. Working on Commercial Wharf inspired Stoltenberg to paint marine art, concentrating on sailboats and steamships, particularly focusing on the study the classic ocean liners of the 20th century. The next decade would find him perfecting his craft and painting many different subjects in an abstract expressionist style.
    In 1957 Stoltenberg began to teach art at the DeCordova Museum School in Lincoln, Massachusetts where he taught oil painting, watercolor and printmaking. In 1962 he was the Visiting Critic as the Rhode Island School of Design. At the same time Stoltenberg was teaching across Cape Cod. He taught printmaking at the Castle Hill Center in Truro, and at the Falmouth Artist Guild, as well as printmaking and drawing at the Cape Cod Conservatory of Music and Art. He has also authored two books on printmaking and the environment of the artist. In 1980 he began to teach privately at his studio attached to his Cape Cod summer home where he relocated permanently in 1967.  Over the years he has exhibited across New England as well as in a number of other states, also having won a number of honors for his unique style of painting. Today Stoltenberg continues to produce art as a member of the American Watercolor Society and the New England Watercolor Society. He is also a Fellow of the American Society of Marine Artists. His marine works of Cape Cod illustrate many images of the ocean in a style that is distinctly his own.
Image: Railway

Thomas Eaton: Fantastic Dream World
March 31 - May 13, 2012
Reception: Thursday, April 19, 5:30 - 7:30 pm
   "The structure of a painting rather than formalities, sequence and limitations is usually the format I follow. Creating somewhat of a paradox of past and present events in everyday life. Taking an ordinary item, and reshaping the physical aspects, then placing them in an unusual setting, seems to be a good precedent for a surreal painting. I believe it is essential for the painting to arouse curiosity."  -Thomas Eaton

    Born in Schenectady, New York in 1948, Thomas Eaton became interested in painting at an early age. While exploring the different styles of art, Eaton was introduced to the Boston Schools as well as the “isms”, but upon reflecting on the different styles, he created one that was distinctly his own. Spending anywhere from four to seven hours a day in his studio, Eaton works in surrealist, contemporary and traditional styles on canvas and board. When painting, Eaton begins with an ochre under-wash which he develops into a predominant theme with many layers of paint. He has named his style of painting, “contemporary surrealist impressionism”. In this style, “A unique focused, personally symbolic take on the realities that lie beneath the surface of our minds” is created. Eaton reflects on our daily lives in his own personal way.  Eaton is a member of the Provincetown Art Association, the Cape Cod Art Association and the Cape Cod Museum of Art. He has won many awards, and has had multiple one-man shows across Cape Cod where he now lives. His paintings can be found both in museums and in homes across the country.
Image: Tea Time  

  

John Joseph Enneking & Joseph Eliot Enneking
from the Morris Cohen Collection of the CCMA permanent collection
January 28 - April 1, 2012
    This winter, visitors will again have the opportunity to view the work of John Joseph Enneking and his son, Joseph Eliot Enneking. These paintings were given to the museum from the estate of the late Professor Morris Cohen.
    John Joseph Enneking (1841-1916), American landscape painter, was born of German ancestry, in Minster, Ohio in 1841. Enneking was a plein-air painter and his favorite subject was the twilight of New England. During his lifetime, his work was known and admired all over the country. He enjoyed a distinguished career as an artist and served as president of the Boston Art club.
    His love for landscapes point to the role he played in American art history as an important link in the chain connecting the early French Impressionists to the American Impressionist movement. His first European trip, from 1872 to 1876, gave him the opportunity to study the established academic methods and the flowering of French Impressionism – almost a full generation before his work influenced the men and women who comprised the Boston School.
    Enneking cared passionately about unspoiled landscape.  He became an active conservationist, and was elected to the position of Park Commissioner in Boston.  The quality of his work and his personal humility are demonstrated by the fact that he declined Childe Hassam’s invitation to join the group of Ten American Painters. In 1915, a dinner was given in his honor at the Copley Plaza Hotel in Boston. Over 1,000 people attended, and Enneking was crowned with the victor’s laurel wreath by Cyrus Dallin, the sculptor whose Appeal to the Great Spirit stands in front of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.
    Joseph Eliot Enneking (1881-1942), studied with his father and at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, with Joseph DeCamp, Frank Benson and Edmond C. Tarbell. He was an impressionist painter who recorded the New England landscape and was known for his sun-splashed landscapes.
    The scientific world knows the late Professor Morris Cohen as the father of modern materials science, the winner of the Kyoto Prize and the National Science Medal.  He was also an art collector, and this collection of work that he left to the Cape Cod Museum of Art attests to the fact that he was able to bring to his collection the same characteristics of discernment and enterprise that define his scientific career.
    Dr. Cohen was drawn to Enneking’s work because he found it visually compelling.  The ability of an artist to attract and hold the viewer’s attention across generational frontiers is one key element in defining the success of the artist’s efforts.  During his lifetime, Enneking was an extraordinarily successful painter whose work was known and admired all over the country.   However there is another factor of importance and that is the contacts made by the artist during his lifetime, his influence on other practitioners, and their influence on him.
Images: Left "Forest Pool"; Right: "Obersee"   

 

 

 

Wellfleet Women: Del Filardi and Selina Trieff
February 25 - March 26, 2012
    Since its founding, the Cape Cod Museum of Art has been collecting the work of important artists associated with Cape Cod, the Islands and Southeastern Massachusetts. The initial impetus for the collection was to acquire and preserve at least one example of the work of each artist of importance to the region. Over time the museum has had the opportunity to collect the work of selected artists in depth. This exhibition focuses on two important women artists who reside on the Outer Cape and whose work is immediately identifiable: sculptor Del Filardi and painter Selina Trieff.
    Del Filardi received her B.S. in Health and Physical Education from State Teachers College at Cortland (NY), and a Master’s in dance from Columbia University. She went on to use her ability to analyze motion to create and choreograph metal steel into magnificent birds. From her home overlooking the Pamet River in Truro, she spends much of her time bird-watching. Observing the birds’ fluid movements, she captures this sense of movement by creating realistic sculptures.
    Filardi came to metal sculpture in her intense search for self expression and self fulfillment. She burst forth with her greatest productivity when she found herself mastering the challenge of steel with the welding torch. Early on, many of her works were abstract pieces, large and small. Later, sculpting large species birds proved to be a very exciting career.
    Former owner of the Blue Heron Gallery in Wellfleet, Filardi, the recipient of numerous awards including a gold medal from the Catharine Lorillard Wolfe Art Club (NY), has exhibited at many galleries and museums, including the Smithsonian’s National Academy of Science and the Boston Museum of Science.  Many of the prizes and honors she has received were for her Birds of Endangered Species. Her work is in both private and corporate collections.  She is an elected member of the Society of Animal Artists and the Salmagundi Club.
    Selina Trieff grew up in New York City and graduated from Brooklyn College (studying with Mark Rothko) before attending the Art Students League (studying with Morris Kantor) and the Hans Hofmann School both in New York and Provincetown. An abstract artist until the mid-1960s, she then began painting archetypal portraits, and, in the mid-1970s, turned her attention to a series of large charcoal drawings. By the 1980s, she developed her style to depict pastel-clothed clowns and black-robed pilgrims in the Commedia Dell’arte tradition. She also frequently paints farm animals.
    Trieff, who resides in Wellfleet with her husband, artist Robert Henry, has exhibited widely in solo and group exhibitions throughout the US as well as overseas, including Paris; Oslo; and Goteborg, Sweden. She has taught extensively at various institutions including: New York Institute of Technology; National Academy of Design; Vermont Studio Center; Pratt Institute; Kalamazoo Art Institute; New York Studio School; Fine Arts Work Center, Provincetown; Truro Center for the Arts at Castle Hill; Provincetown Art Association and Museum; Indianapolis Art League; New York Figurative Academy; Women's Artists Seminar; and Notre Dame University.

Recent Gifts and Acquisitions from 2011
January 21 - February 12, 2012
    The works of art in this exhibition are a sampling of gifts and acquisitions accepted during 2011. Included are paintings, sculpture and works on paper.  Some of the artists represented are John Babineau, photography; William F. Boogar Jr., bronze sculpture; Craig Brodt, ceramic sculture; Peter Busa, silkscreen print; Robert Cormier, pastel; Emily Farnham, watercolor; Arnold Geissbuhler, ceramic; Xavier Gonzalez, oil; Lena Gurr, linotype; Megan Hinton, oil; Harry Holl, ceramic; Gerrit Hondius, ink with watercolor; Irving Kriesberg, pastel; Arthur McMurtry, oil; Elliot Orr, watercolor;  Aiden Lassell Ripley, oil; Umberto Romano, oil; and Rose Ann Samuelson, acrylic.
Image: Robert Cormier, "Man with a Fur Collar"

 

 

 

 

Bill Armstrong: Photography
December 17, 2011 - February 12, 2012
    The photographs by Bill Armstrong in this exhibition are works commissioned by Christopher Hyland. The commissions came about for various reasons: the three figurative abstract Jeffersons because Hyland was interested in having the multiple aspects of personality manifest in photographic art; the three figurative abstract athletes to celebrate the Olympics and sport in general and the degree to which excelling in sport transforms the athlete and the viewer. Hyland commissioned the abstraction of Copley's painting, because of the seminal position of the African, poised at the center of the painting ready to rescue Watson, a white boy of English ancestry and because Hyland's friends, Julia and Alice Meyer, brought him to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, to see the painting which their mother had donated to the museum in honor of her husband, Ambassador George Von L Meyer. Most importantly, Hyland commissioned the triptych of The Last Supper in response to Pope Benedict XVI's request for contemporary art and because of Hyland's particular interest in Transubstantiation, transformation.
   Three of Armstrong's Mandalas, for Hyland, were included because they represent three universal forces often found in major belief systems throughout the world. The fourth Mandala was selected because it was chosen by Hyland who felt it represented the quintessential abstract photograph, and subsequently by Aperture for the front page of its seminal book on abstract photography. The final one was selected because, to Hyland, it was the first figurative abstract he had seen that merited attention and recognition.
   Bill Armstrong is a New York-based artist who received a BA in Art History, and an MBA from Boston University. His works have been shown across the country as well as abroad. His photography has a very unique quality to it; Armstrong plays with his photography, often manipulating the image through a number of different processes including photocopying, blurring or even changing and re-photographing a picture to create images that are very different from their original state. His photographs include both abstractions and images of figures.

Elizabeth Chater, Printmaker
December 17, 2011 - February 19, 2012
    Elizabeth Chater was born on August 10, 1914 in Baltimore, Maryland. Her mother had studied art with Charles Hawthorne in Provincetown and the family summered on Cape Cod.  In 1995, until the end of her life, Elizabeth lived and worked on Cape Cod, studying at the Cotuit Art Center and she had many local exhibitions of her work. 
    In my artwork I try to maintain a vision that is both alive to the world around & aware of a visual aesthetic that is strong & vibrant.  The integration of these two elements is what interests me most.  I find that working in a variety of media keeps my thinking alive.  One type of work helps the other & keeps me aware of form as well as content. By constant re-evaluation, I try to bring each work to a good resolution.  I love the contrast of character in a variety of face – the drama of everyday life is what motivates me.
My purely abstract paintings are expressions of the joy of color movement & a kinetic sense of music & dance.  I like to make us aware of the aesthetic qualities in the life all around us. My prints & collages are done in a variety of media – some in silkscreen alone & some with silkscreen & acrylic or pastels. I sometimes add color to the hand printed woodcuts.  The mono-prints are of two kinds – some done on a zinc plate with oil based inks and stencils; other made on ½” plastic sheets painted with luma paints or crayons.  They are printed in a press on wet Arches paper – the strong pigment creates a glowing mono print and may be enhanced later with more color. The colloges are of variety of things – old canvases – torn prints on Japanese paper-hand paper with silkscreen prints on top – nylon mesh screening or found objects.
           -Elizabeth Chater

Mary Moquin & Marc Kundmann: Timeless: Explorations in Wax-Based Media
November 19, 2011 - January 29, 2012
Gallery Talk: Sunday, December 11, 2 - 3: 30 pm
    Marc Kundmann’s recent work is an exploration of painting with encaustic wax, one of the oldest forms of painting. The technique allows him to build and remove textured layers of color, transparency, and pigments. He tries to focus on the joy of creating, and painting with honesty. His hope is that the resulting layers create not only intriguing and beautiful surfaces, but also give emotional life to the subjects, and hint at the mystery inside.
    Kundmann studied with fine artists connected to the long tradition of painting and art-making on the Cape including Robert Henry, a student of Hans Hofmann, and Fine Arts Work Center Fellows Jim Peters, Bert Yarborough and Richard Baker. Through them he learned to explore materials, freeing himself from the constraints of representing the real world and work in a more expressive way, responding to color and composition and creating work from both understanding and emotion. 
    Mary Moquin explores a sense of the prevailing unity found in the eternal rhythms of nature. She is drawn to the regenerative solitude of the timeless spaces she depicts.  Moquin has had a connection with the landscape since she was a small child. She was raised on the remnants of a 50-plus-acre-farm and explored miles of old work paths that led to secluded “special” places. She reveled in the sense of peace found in the silence and solitude they afforded. Mary Moquin currently lives on Cape Cod with her husband and spends the summer in a remote dune cottage on Sandy Neck, with no modern conveniences and only accessible by four-wheel drive or boat. It is here that she continues her intimate connection with the landscape. Most of her work is inspired from the contemplative time spent there.
Moquin uses a mixed media approach often incorporating the use of hot or cold wax. She holds a BFA in printmaking and an MFA in painting and teaches painting at the Cape Cod Art Association in Barnstable.  
  Mary Moquin and Marc Kundmann will also give a Gallery Talk, a conversation about their work and the timely and timeless technique of encaustic and wax-based  painting, on Sunday, December 11 from 2:00 to 3:30 pm. Wax medium has historical roots dating back to ancient Greece and is one of the hottest topics in the contemporary art market. Marc and Mary will discuss their individual attraction to the medium and their use of its unique properties to explore memory and place in the Cape Cod landscape and beyond.
   
Images:
Above: Marc Kundmann, Early July Morning
Below: Mary Moquin, Presence 

MATRYOSHKA DOLLS: A Collection of Malcolm Shriber
November 23 - January 30, 2011
    Matryoshka dolls, more commonly known as Russian nesting dolls, the most popular Russian national souvenir, are distinctive. The dolls are hand-carved, brightly painted wooden figures which separate at the middle to reveal another, smaller doll inside. The last doll of the decreasing sizes does not separate.
    Traditionally, the largest doll is a woman dressed in a sarafan, a Russian folk costume, and the smallest doll is a baby. The dolls in the middle are generally children. However, the possibilities available when painting these dolls are endless. Beyond those in traditional folk costumes, categories include animals, movie stars, athletes, musicians, and even political leaders. The collection on exhibition at the CCMA in memory of Shriber’s wife Roberta features a variety of categories providing a wonderful selection of the craftsmanship and artistry of matryoshka dolls.

Nancy Ellen Craig: Of Face and Body
Sponsored by the Hess and Helyn Kline Foundation
December 3, 2011 - January 22, 2012
    Although Nancy Ellen Craig is well known for her portraits, she is also drawn to painting scenes from the Bible and Greek mythology. Her large paintings featuring such subjects are reminiscent of the works of the great Italian Renaissance painters. Her works are larger than life and seem to capture images of both pain and glory. Craig’s paintings are action filled and seem to burst out of dream-like backgrounds. Her works are impressive both for their great size, and the immense talent that Craig has for the art of painting. 
    “She paints from imagination, often beginning with poses recorded in her sketchbooks over the years. Many of her subjects are taken from Greek myth or Renaissance iconography of such painters as Titian or Raphael. She is attracted to these epic themes, she says, because “the Greek myths embody extreme universal truths –”    - Berta Walker
    Born in New York, Nancy Craig attended a progressive school that allowed her to express herself freely, and it was there she discovered her skill at drawing and painting; often of forms that were larger than life. Later, Nancy attended Sweetbriar College in Virginia, as well as Bennington in Vermont. She then went on to study at the Art Students League in New York, and the Académie Julian in Paris where she learned the techniques of painting that she needed to transfer her drawings into paintings. Her teachers include many impressive painters such as Hans Hoffman, Edwin Dickinson and Frederic Taubes. Nancy obtained international notoriety early on as a portrait painter which led her to travel the world painting royalty, celebrities and the common people she saw in her travels.  In the 1970’s Nancy moved to Truro, Massachusetts and secluded herself from the world because she felt that the praise she was obtaining came too easily, and she wanted to have a chance to be forgotten and then become known again for her new work.
Image: Standing Before Custer

 The Great Silence by Lorrie Fredette
June 11 - January 8, 2012
Gallery Talk by Lorrie Fredette: Sunday, July 31, 2 pm
    The Great Silence, a sculpture created by Lorrie Fredette specifically for the Bank of America/Hunter Gallery, is made of beeswax, tree resin, muslin, brass, steel and nylon line and will be suspended from the beams in the gallery.
    Fredette’s work is inspired by medical sciences. She is particularly interested in the way that information is collected and passed on. Fredette says of her work: 
    Like tales of big fish, it is often distorted and misrepresented in the telling. My installation, The Great Silence began with the study of the smallpox virus, an epidemic of which is presumed to have killed 75 percent of the original residents of Cape Cod between 1614 and 1617. With smallpox as my host, I set out to uncover the story around this epidemic, and the altered memories associated with it through years of re-telling the story. Thus, The Great Silence is the most current factual version of a grossly eroded memory and its progression.
    Lorrie Fredette creates site-specific installations that comment on the distortion of memory and experience. She employs beauty, dimension and place as part of a process of alteration. Her work has been shown in exhibitions at Mass MoCA (Williamstown, MA), Gallery Ehva (Provincetown, MA) and the University of Virginia (Charlottesville). Awards include MARK 09 and a Strategic Opportunity Grant from the New York Foundation for the Arts (2010 and 2007 respectively). Recently, she was awarded and attended a residency at Women’s Studio Workshop in Rosendale, NY. Fredette earned a BFA in sculpture from the Herron School of Art/Indiana University. Born and raised in Burlington, MA, a very frequent visitor to Cape Cod, she now lives and works in New York’s Hudson Valley.

 

 

 

 

America the Beautiful:  Artwork inspired by Katherine Lee Bates’ Song
September 17 – December 11
Artists’ Reception, Sunday, September 25, 2 - 4 pm
Gallery Talks by the artists are scheduled throughout the exhibition; see below

 

“Americans all see the country from their own point of view. ‘From different vantage points, we look out at this beautiful land… It takes our breath away- and invites us to breath together, side by side, our cultures diverse yet interwoven.”
    - From Cape Experience article by Debi Boucher, quoting weaver Katie Hickey

    “America the Beautiful”, written by Falmouth-born Katherine Lee Bates in 1885 as a poem, and then put to music by Samuel A. Ward in 1910, has been a favorite patriotic song of Americans for over a century.  In this exhibit painters and weavers from Cape Cod have created works that artistically reflect their interpretation of different lines of the poem. Collaborating together are eleven painters and eleven weavers. Some painters are creating their work as an interpretation of a weaving, while some weavers are interpreting the painting of their partner. This exhibition began at the State House in Boston before continuing to the Cahoon Museum of American Art in Cotuit, and then to CCMA.
    In creating this exhibit the artists hoped to interpret and honor the song as well as celebrate the beauty and diversity of America. Proposed by Shawn Nelson Dahlstrom, an artist from Dennis, the exhibit is meant to celebrate the beauty that is America, and even though the country has flaws, there is still much to be proud of and rejoice. For the twenty-two women from Cape Cod who worked together on this exhibit it was a unique and enjoyable experience. The artists, worked together to draw on different lines of the song to come up with a way to show just what makes America beautiful.
    Painters participating in the exhibition are: Rita Doddridge, Patricia Stark Feinstein, Anne Garton, Jane Lincoln, Barbara Melcher, Norma Mutch, Kate Nelson, Shawn Nelson Dahlstrom, Carol Odell, Suzanne Packer, Odin Smith. The participating fiber artists, who work in textiles such as fabric, yarn, and natural and synthetic fibers, are: Susan Clark, Sandra Godwin, Shannon Goheen, Christina Jervant, Katie Hickey, Nancy Kirchner, Beth Minear, Sue Pellowe, Janet Rice, Gretchen Romey-Tanzer, and Elena Tobin.
Image: "Amber Waves of Grain" woven by Sue Pellowe

 

 

From New Jersey To Cape Cod - Mel Leipzig, Daniel Finaldi & Linda Pochesci
September 17 - December 4, 2011
Gallery Talk by exhibition artists: Saturday, October 29, 2 pm
    From New Jersey to Cape Cod is a group exhibition of the works of painting buddies, Mel Leipzig, Daniel Finaldi and Linda Pochesci.
    Mel Leipzig is well known for his hyper-realistic portraits, including portraits of Cape Cod artists Robert Henry and Selina Trieff. Of special interest in this exhibition is a dual portrait of Elizabeth Ives Hunter and Michael Giaquinto, CCMA Executive Director and Exhibitions Curator, respectively, done by Leipzig. Leipzig, a longtime resident of Trenton, NJ, who comes to Cape Cod for a month in each summer to paint, is a  professor at Mercer County Community College where he teaches painting and art history. He studied painting with Josef Albers and James Brooks, among others, and earned a 3-year certificate from the Cooper Union in 1956. Throughout his career he has received numerous awards for both his art and teaching including a Fulbright Grant to Paris, 1958-59, and four grants from the New Jersey Council on the Arts. He also received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1995. His works are in the collections of many museums in the northeast, including the Whitney Museum of American Art and the National Academy Museum as well as the Springville Museum of Art in Utah.
    Daniel Finaldi’s work has always been concerned with a painterly and direct observation of reality as he sees it. In past years his approach was to discover a mood within a certain place or in a particular spot, interested in the spontaneous feeling that he was experiencing in that moment. He wanted to paint that feeling. The emotion was always based upon a visual experience.
    Within the past 9 years Finaldi’s work has taken on another dimension. While continuing to paint interiors and landscapes directly from life, he now finds that he wants people in those places, people in his life and environment; family,  students and friends.  Finaldi is devoted to observing people as they are and as he perceives them in their space.
    Finaldi teaches of fine art and art history at Freehold Borough High School. He has also and Adjunct Faculty member at Brooklyn College and Mercer County Community College teaching fine art painting. He was the 2009 Gerald R. Dodge Fellowship Grant Recipient.
    The paintings Linda Pochesci has been working on for the past six years are a composite of many different realities that are put together but don’t actually exist anywhere but on the canvas. She looks at the canvas as a type of stage, where she’s setting the drama or telling a story. Her paintings explore her search for home. She’s attracted to the dynamics of architectural space as a metaphor of a dwelling place of the soul.
    Pochesci was born in Massachusetts. She grew up in New Jersey and attended college there. While an undergraduate, she studied with Mel Leipzig. Upon graduation she moved to Boston and eventually attended graduate school at Massachusetts College of Art. She studied with the artist George Nick while earning her MFA in painting.
    She has exhibited extensively in Massachusetts and New Jersey. In 1995 The Dodge Foundation awarded her a major grant as part of their "Artist Initiative" program. Additionally, Linda has received numerous mini grants from the foundation for ongoing artistic development in the studio and in the art classroom. Linda Pochesci currently lives in New Jersey where she works professionally as an artist and educator. She spends the summer in her studio in Cape Cod, MA.
Image: Mel Leipzig paints on CCMA's Sculpture Porch

 

 

 

Men and the Sea: works of Frank Cardozo Nicholas 
September 10- November 27, 2011
Gallery Talks by Tracy Nicholas Bledsoe: Thursday, October 6, 1 pm and Sunday, October 23, 2 pm
    Frank Cardozo Nicholas was an artist whose paintings feature the landscape and people of Cape Cod; he also studied the Native Americans, as well as reflecting on his African American heritage. His works sought to reflect the human condition. The paintings in this exhibition feature his maritime paintings.
    He painted the common laborer as well as ballerinas, striving to show his love of nature, justice, freedom, music, dance and the sea bringing it all together to reflect the beauty and diversity that is America.  Nicholas painted laborers in the field, American Indians in ceremonial dress and fishermen working against the violent sea. He created his paintings using mixed media of oil, acrylic and casein to illustrate his diverse subjects.   
  
    “When I came to live on the Cape more than 30 years ago, like many artists, I had already been swayed by its natural beauty, open skies and wide-stretched shores. The extraordinary quality of light here has been well remarked on for a long time and I appreciate it as a natural mystery, one that reflects the relationship of light with the many waters of this place. It is a challenge and a glory to paint as even the sands boast a spectrum of tone and color. I have never failed to be amazed at the constantly changing natural wonders of Cape Cod and the Islands.”
    - Frank Cardozo Nicholas

 

    Born in Washington, DC, Nicholas was educated in art at the Pennsylvania Museum School, Pratt Collage, the Art Students’ League, and the Brooklyn Museum School before becoming a commercial artist illustrating trade books and text books before moving onto greeting cards. In 1970, Cardozo moved to Cape Cod, and by 1978 he was working full time as an artist, which he did for the next 25 years creating more than 200 paintings. His works have been exhibited across the Cape and throughout the country as well.
Image: "The Big Meadow"

 

Cindy Kane: New Directions                
September 10 - November 13 
    Cindy Kane’s map series is one type of artwork for which she is most recognized. Her creation of maps grew partly out of the connection she felt to the Middle East; her husband and his family are from Israel. Kane’s maps respond more to political feelings and the world around us, than to traditional maps.  In her maps she responds to war and conflict by combining images of fire with world maps and newspaper headings. She has also addressed extinction by painting images of birds on sheet music. Other subjects she often reflects on are her personal heroes, writers, thinkers and leaders both politically and spiritually; Kane brings her feelings on these subjects to life in her works of art.

 

    “It is easy to get lost in Cindy Kane’s map series.… Distressing for the navigational eye, each collage of countries, colors and geometric shapes leads everywhere and nowhere at once. Squiggles collide with severe shards of soft color, pinned down by webs of jagged lines. Like a smattering of yarn, glass, and sticks, everything is chaotic.”  - Sara G. Levin

    "These maps reflect my sense of balance or instability as I observe the political and environmental tumult of our times. They are not about particular places, but rather concern my fascination with migration patterns and the forces of nature."   - Cindy Kane

    She has lived on Martha's Vineyard with her husband and two children since 1996. Kane is a self-taught painter whose maps reflect her interest in politics and the environment.  She has created her own works of art ever since she was a child, and many of her works today contain some of the artwork of her own children. Some of her work is shown and sold locally at the Louisa Gould Gallery on Martha's Vineyard.  Her works have been in exhibited in galleries across the country from San Francisco to NY. Currently she is represented by Lora Schlesinger Gallery in Los Angeles,  and by the Cross MacKenzie Gallery in Washington DC.
Image: Hallelujah!

 

 

 

Rosemary Simpkins: Remember... A 9/11 Trilogy Honoring the Victims of September 11, 2001
September 10 - October 9, 2011
    Book Artist Rosemary Simpkins created an interactive sculptural bookwork, Twin Books, in 2002, as a memorial to the victims of the World Trade Center's Twin Towers, destroyed on September 11, 2001. Twin Books was exhibited at CCMA in the fall of 2006, the fifth anniversary. It was then that Simpkins read an article in the Boston Sunday Globe that stressed that the people who died on 9/11 deserved to be remembered.
    Five years in the making, two new projects join Twin Books, on the tenth anniversary of 9/11 to remember all the victims killed on that horrific Tuesday morning:
    Crater of Tears is a sculptural interpretation of United Airlines Flight #93, which crashed near Shanksville, PA.
    Pentagon Red (They Were Engulfed by Fire) pays tribute to the 125 Pentagon workers that were killed on 9/11. Pentagon Blue (They came from the Sky) describes the ordeal of the passengers and crew of American Airlines Flight #11 before it crashed into the west side of the Pentagon.
    Rosemary Simpkins received her degree in Graphic Design from Parsons School of Design in New York, and her Master of Art/Book Arts from the London Institute's Camberwell College of Arts. She has been a member of the Center for Book Arts in New York City since 1993. Born in Mexico City, Simpkins and her husband, Bud, lived in New Jersey, Connecticut, New York City (across from the World Trade Center), and London, before retiring to Cape Cod in 1997.

Random Distribution: Landscape paintings by Joyce Zavorskas
July 16- Sept. 11, 2011
Illustrated lecture: Tuesday, August 16, 2 pm
Artist’s reception: Friday, August 19, 5:30 - 7:30 pm
    Random Distribution, an exhibition of recent oil paintings by Joyce Zavorskas, documents landforms silently transformed by gravity and the forces of nature. They record aspects and oddities of the activity of erosion where ocean encounters sand, and fix in time the face of the beloved before its demise. Random patterns arranged by wind and rain appear and dissolve, elusive and uncertain. The paint application and crusted surfaces present images of natural disorder, fragments of time, suggesting aspects of our contemporary culture and circumstances, under siege from wars, recession, climate changes, and indifference to the fragility of our environment. Zavorskas endeavors to transform paint into sand and clay, to construct layered crusted surfaces that become cliffs or ocean or remain abstract rhythmic patterns. She feels compelled to pursue a deeper level of scrutiny in her work, and emphasize the loss of beloved narrow land places.
    The natural world has always been a sanctuary for me, a place to breathe wind and think and feel, undistracted at last. The activity of erosion presents images of natural disorder, inevitable entropy, as well as renewal and redemption. Random visual quirks and oddities arranged by natural forces document fragments of time and suggest aspects of our contemporary culture and circumstances, under siege from wars, recession, climate changes, and indifference to the fragility of our environment.
    Retreating to the studio after walking in nature provides distance from direct observation, an opportunity to edit and explore with more diverse organic materials, letting go of specificity and allowing pigment, wax, sand and debris to create the work. Random patterns and rhythms appear and disappear, elusive and eternal.
                 - Joyce Zavorskas
    Joyce Zavorskas was awarded a month-long residency at the Vermont Studio Center in February 2011 to complete these new paintings, surrounded by snow instead of sand. A year-round resident of Cape Cod for 28 years, her home studio is in Orleans.
Image: "Gravitational Pull"

 
CAPE COD PLEIN AIR PAINTERS: Painting the Changing Light
July 9 - September 11
    The Cape Cod Plein Air Painters include Lora Barrett, Philip Bergson, Robina Carter, Jane Eccles, Maryalice Eizenberg, William Maloney, Rosalie Nadeau, Merylle-Lee Thompson, Phil Thompson, Joyce Zavorskas, JoAnn Ritter, and Steve Kennedy.
    The term “plein air” emerged with the Impressionists during the 19th century. Pierre-Henri de Valenciennes, a painter and academic, wrote and influential paper in 1800 in which he stressed the importance of completing outdoor studies quickly and directly, without developing the detail of an exhibition painting.
    The Cape Cod Plein Air Painters evolved in 2004 when several local professional artists decided to paint together on a weekly basis, to observe directly from nature, and to share ideas and expertise. The group travels to a different site each week, in all four seasons, to document a moment in time.

Matthew M. Schulz - Chasing The Light: Landscapes, Wildlife and Sporting Art 
The Third Annual Arthur J. McMurtry Memorial  Exhibition  
August 5 – 30, 2011
    Osterville artist Matthew Schulz’s love of the outdoors began at an early age with his grandfather.  These early experiences became the driving force behind his artistic expression.  Color and light have always fascinated Schulz.  His work expresses the inter-relationship between these two elements which he feels with an almost physical force.  This exhibition will include the full range of Schulz’s work from highly finished studio pieces to plein air studies.

 

 

 

Perspectives on the Provincetown Art Colony
June 4 - August 7
Sponsored by Terry Hart Cogan, and Richard Cuda & Family
Members Reception: Sunday, June 5, 2-4- pm
Talk and Book signing for Perspectives of a Provincetown Art Colony: Thursday, July 7, 6 pm
    This exhibition, highlighting the rich cultural heritage of Provincetown, is directly associated with Deborah Forman’s new book, Perspectives on the Provincetown Art Colony. Last year the National Trust for Historic Preservation designated Provincetown “home of the nation’s oldest art colony” and Forman’s book, largely based on her interviews with artists and writers, traces that history. When Charles Hawthorne opened his Cape Cod School of Art in 1899, he turned the little fishing village into an artistic treasure.
    Forman’s book explores 20th-century art as it played out in Provincetown. A microcosm of American art during that century, the town hosted a diversity of styles, including traditional art, impressionism, early modernism, Abstract Expressionism, Pop Art and beyond. The exhibition features works included among more than 300 images in the book; artists represented in the exhibit include: Robert Motherwell, Jack Tworkov, Hans Hofmann, Red Grooms, Michael Mazur, Chaim Gross, Paul Resika, Anne Packard and dozens more.
    Deborah Forman covered the artist colony in Provincetown for 30 years, interviewing dozens of artists and writers for articles for the Cape Cod Times, Cape Cod View magazine, Art New England and Boston Magazine. These interviews are at the core of her book. Among the numerous artists she interviewed are Robert Motherwell, Jack Tworkov, Red Grooms, Raphael Soyer, Chaim Gross, Myron Stout, Fritz Bultman, Paul Resika, Arnold Newman, Joel Meyerowitz, Sidney Simon, John Grillo, Leo Manso, Michael Mazur, Helen Frankenthaler, Paul Bowen, Jim Peters, Varujan Boghosian, Sal Del Deo, Tony Vevers, Anne Packard, Selina Trieff, and Robert Henry.
    Forman was the features editor of the Cape Cod Times and editor-in-chief of Cape Cod View magazine. She wrote the script, conducted the interviews, and worked on filming for Art In Its Soul, an award-winning documentary of the history of the Provincetown art colony, which aired on Boston’s public television station, WGBH, and subsequently on public television stations nationwide. She has a degree in journalism from Temple University, and has studied art at Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts and at Philadelphia Museum School of Art.
Image: Karl Knaths, "Flight from Egypt"

 

 

 

Twosomes: Photography by Mark Chester
June 18 - July 10, 2011
    Twosomes, an exhibition of photography by Mark Chester, presents images culled from Chester’s 40 years of traveling with a camera, presented in pairings related by subject matter, graphic interest or, as the photographer puts it “a stretch of the imagination”. The Twosomes photographs, published in a book of the same name, will travel through the US, and internationally, hosted by such venues as OK Harris in NYC and Reykjavik Museum of Photography in Iceland.
    Mark Chester, a professional photographer since 1972, was Director of Photography and staff photographer at ASCAP (American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers), in NYC. His photographs, in the permanent collections of museums in Baltimore, Brooklyn, Denver, Portland (ME), Washington, D.C., and San Francisco, among others, have been widely exhibited and published. Charles Kuralt, a Twosomes subject, whose book Dateline America was photographed by Mark Chester, said of him: "...one of our finest ...a wonderful eye and consummate skill...nothing murky or artificial."  

 

 

 

Penelope Jencks: Eleanor Roosevelt
April 2 - May 29, 2011
    The first public monument to an American woman to be commissioned by the city of New York is an 8-foot tall bronze sculpture of Eleanor Roosevelt, which now graces Riverside Park. The sculptor, Penelope Jencks, has given CCMA her entire series of maquettes, created in preparation for this commission, as well as the original ceramic sculpture from which the final bronze statue was cast.
    Jencks, a working sculptor whose career has spanned 40 years, is best known for her life-size sculptures of people. She received her BFA from Boston University in 1958, then studied under Hans Hofmann in Provincetown, at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Skowhegan, ME, as well as Stuttgart Kunstakademie in Germany. She has perfected her own unique style and has created numerous works in terra cotta, bronze and stone. Jencks is the recipient of many awards including the 1988 Henry Hering Memorial Medal for "Outstanding Cooperation between Architect and Sculptor" by the National Sculpture Society.
    Her public and private commissions are many, and range from an ordinary beach-bather, to the sculpture of one of America's leading historians, Samuel Eliot Morison, who is casually seated atop a 20-ton granite pedestal looking seaward on the Commonwealth Avenue Mall in Boston, and the statue of Robert Frost on the campus of Amherst College, Amherst, MA. Jencks’s sculptures are not classical figures - all have a casual but realistic presence and are easily recognizable as real people, including their unattractive flaws. She also has the uncanny ability to capture her sitter's gesture and expression in a moment in time.
    Penelope Jencks is a member of the National Academy of Design and the Royal British Society of Sculptors. She is also a Fellow of the National Sculpture Society. Some of her notable public collections and commissions include: The White House, Washington, DC; The Maggie Cancer Care Center, Edinburgh, Scotland; the Readers Digest Corporate Headquarters, Pleasantville, NY; the Boston Public Library, Boston, MA; the Bibliotecca di Pietrasanta, Italy; and Brandeis University, Waltham, MA.

 

 

 

Overlooks: Contemporary Landscape Painting by Megan Hinton
April 30 - June 12, 2011
Gallery Talk by Megan Hinton, Saturday, May 7, 2 pm
    The works in this collection put into question notions of traditional landscape and nautical painting that is deeply entrenched in regional art history and offers a fresh, contemporary approach to the landscape painting.
    These landscapes come from my Cape and Islands surroundings, from walks along the shorelines, sea ponds, bogs, and creeks to the interior of my studio where the process of achieving these abstracted pictures takes place. I place emphasis on what is objective, water formations, horizon lines, and what is not, abstract painterly brush work, drippings, and sculptural impasto marks. This duality suggests my interest in the tension between subject and process. What the painting is doing is as important to me as what it is depicting.

 

 

 

ArtWork - Student Art Interns & their Mentors
May 12 - June 5, 2011
Opening Reception, Thursday, May 12, 5:30 - 7:30 pm
    The 14th annual ArtWork exhibition, featuring work created by students and mentors from the Cape and Islands School to Careers Partnership, is on display at CCMA May 12 - June 5. This exhibition includes painting, sculpture, textile design and a variety of other media produced by students during the course of their partnerships with renowned local artists. An opening reception, open to the public, will be Thursday, May 12, 5:30 - 7:30 pm.
    The School to Career Art Internship Program pairs junior and senior high school students with successful working artists twice a year. For eight weeks, students work with artists in their studios in a collaborative environment that promotes creative growth and offers insight into the lives and routines of professional artists.
Image: Glass vase by Mark Vokey

 

 

 

Naturally Inspired: Paintings Abstracted from Nature
April 2 – May 29, 2011
Curated by Jan Lhormer
    “The eclectic mix of contemporary works that will be showcased should create a jolt of excitement that will surpass the white cube mentality of traditional gallery walls. Also, it unifies artists and venues from opposite ends of the Cape who interpret landscape with inventive visual language.”      - Jan Lhormer
    The Naturally Inspired: Paintings Abstracted from Nature exhibition will feature paintings from the seven artists associated with Cape Cod: Bert Yarborough, Mike Carroll, Bailey Bob Bailey, Francie Randolph, Jan Lhormer, Carol Odell and Betty Carroll Fuller. These artists paint in an abstract expressionist style, illustrating the incredible variety of artistic expression on Cape Cod. The artwork in this exhibition is inspired by nature and organic forms ranging from plants and gardens, to the sky and outer space. The abstract representation of these forms is just as beautiful as they appear in nature.
Image: Untitled by Mike Carroll

 

 

 

Faculty Spectrum: Cape Cod & Islands Art Educators Association
January 29 – March 27, 2011
Reception: Thursday, February 3, 5:30 - 7:30 pm
    The Cape Cod & Islands Art Educators Association meets once a month at the Cape Cod Museum of Art throughout the school year. This year, the museum will host an exhibition of the artwork of member teachers from the Cape and Islands. This exhibition follows Through Young Eyes, a Cape-wide student art exhibition recently held at CCMA. The personal artistic endeavors of an art teacher can often become overshadowed by their teaching careers. This exhibition allows the artist behind the educator to come to the forefront.
    Artists included in the exhibition: Art Balzotti, Liane Biron, Alexandria Boudreau, Bonnie Brewer, Craig Brodt, Eileen Casey, Ursula Coute, Jody Craven, Kristen Curtis, Deborah Donovan, Molly Driscoll, Abby Fay, Celine R. Federici, Lisa Fox, Deborah Fowler Greenwood, Frances K. Johnson, Jenny Kelly, John Krenik, Carl Lopes, Peter Mann, Kathryn Meyers, Tom Noonan, Nathan Olin, Judi Olkkola, Janet L Olson, Kimberley Possee, Maria Daluz Reid, Gretchen Romey-Tanzer, Marcia Simpson, Daniel Springer, Bernadette Waystack, Lee Connolly Weill, Ho Yin Yuen.
Image: Wood fired sculpture by Craig Brodt

Marguerite E. Falconer: Scenic Impressions
January 29 - March 27, 2011
    Marguerite Falconer attended the School of the Museum of Fine Art in Boston and the DeCordova Museum in Lincoln, MA. She also studied with Robert Douglas Hunter, Robert Curtis, and Emile Gruppe. From 1969 to 1993, Falconer, along with Daniel McElwain, was the co-proprietor McElwain-Falconer Art Gallery in Chatham, where she displayed her own oil paintings, along with the work of McElwain and other Cape Cod artists. Falconer’s landscapes are very soft and clear, always giving the viewer a feeling of tranquility and peacefulness. She has exhibited in numerous group shows, and has received many awards over the years. This exhibit brings together some of the best landscape paintings that Falconer has created.
Image: "Sunset at Paine's Creek"

 
Creative Convergence: Cape Cod
Cape Cod Museum of Art; January 15 - February 28, 2011
Addison Art Gallery: January 15 - February 28
    A renowned group of artists from across the United States and Mexico decided to meet in Provincetown, our country’s oldest art colony, and to explore Cape Cod, the region that inspired Charles Hawthorne, Edward Hopper and Henry David Thoreau. Like other artists who have been drawn here for over 100 years, they came to be inspired by the landscape, the light, the sea, our communities and each other. We invite you to discover their own interpretations of this place and its people.
    Artists included are: Jeff Bonasia, Rick Casali, James Coe, Daniel Corey, Ian Factor, Frank Gardner, Jerome Greene, Logan Hagege, Marc Hanson, Ignat Ignatov, Pater Kalill, Stapleton Kearns,  Jeremy Lipking, Eric Merrell, Ernesto Nemesio, Colin Page and Paul Schulenburg.
Image: "Cape Sunset" by Colin Page

 

The documentary film, Painting Together in Provincetown: Creative Convergence Cape Cod, made by Chatham filmmaker, Jon Goward and Creative Convergence artist Paul Schulenburg, was filmed during the artists' October 2010 painting excursion in Provincetown. The half-hour film gives the viewer an entertaining insight into the artists' creative philosphies and will shown at the museums Saturdays through the end of the exhibition.  
 

 

The Subject is Light:
The Henry and Sharon Martin Collection of Contemporary Realist Paintings 
August 21 - November 7, 2010
This exhibition is sponsored by Cape Cod Five Cents Savings Bank Charitable Foundation, The MacKenzie Charitable Trust and an anonymous donor. 
    Henry and Sharon Martin, who began to collect art over 30 years ago, have built what is arguably the strongest Hudson River School luminist collection in private hands today. Within the last 10 years, they have expanded their focus on the living artists of Cape Cod – concentrating on work that meets their exacting criteria. Henry Martin says, “When we’ve looked at the same picture 100 times, we want to look at it for the 101st time and still see something new”. The Martins believe that representational art is re-emerging as an important element in American art and are focused on excellence in all areas. Their goal is to acquire the best works by the best artists of this region.
    The exhibition at the CCMA includes work by Jacob Collins, William Davis, Donald Demers, Robert Douglas Hunter, Joseph McGurl, Anne Packard, Pam Pindell, Peter Quidley and Matthew Schulz. The Martins, as well as some of the artists represented, will give Gallery Talks during the course of the exhibition. The Martins, charming, articulate and passionate about their art, will guide gallery visitors through their collection at the CCMA and talk about the collecting process which has engaged them for so long.
Image: "Oncoming Sea" by Don Demers

 

 

 

The Christopher Hyland Collection of Photography
By Way of These Eyes – The Sublime, Exotic and Familiar
June 5 – August 8, 2010
Sponsors: The Ellen and Richard Cuda Foundation of the Cape Cod Foundation
U.S. Trust, Bank of America Private Wealth Management
Wednesday, July 14, 2 - 4 pm:  Christopher Hyland will give a personal tour of this exhibition, free with museum admission. You won't want to miss this remarkable opportunity to hear him discuss his extensive collection as well as his own photography.
    
    Textile designer Christopher Hyland has had a life-long love affair with visual beauty which he has pursued with passion and panache.  A resident of New York City, he is an avid furniture designer, photographer and a collector of African art, American art and photography. The CCMA is fortunate to be able to exhibit his photography collection during the summer of 2010.
    Photography is a mechanical extension of the human body which enhances the individual’s ability to view the world in ways beyond one’s own eyes and mind. The Hyland Collection includes many of the iconic images of the early 1900s side-by-side with masters of the 21st century.
    Fifty-three photographers are represented in the exhibition. Edward Weston’s Shell; Andreas Feininger’s The Photo Journalist; and a fascinating group of photographs by Thomas Barbèy who integrates images of historic sites in Venice and Vatican City with waterfalls and flowing rivers included. Also represented are Henri Cartier-Bresson and Herb Ritts as well as Robert Mapplethorpe, all of whom whose images challenge our understanding and appreciation of their work. John Dugdale is represented by a series of small and exquisite images. Marcus Leatherdale’s images of India stand in striking contrast to his work in New York in the 1980s as part of Andy Warhol’s circle.
    Christopher Hyland is both photographer and collector and some of his work is included in the exhibition. Of particular interest is the seven-piece Transformation series, completed in 2009, which speaks to the contrast between the fierce and the vulnerable.
Image above: "Transformation IV" by Christopher Hyland

 

   
L-R: "The Photojournalist" by Andreas Feininger; "Behind the Gare, St. Lazare, Paris" by Henri Cartier-Bresson; "The Artist's Mother" by John Dugdale; "Sleeping Cupid" by Robert Mapplethorpe

 

 
ROBERT MARCUS: Sculpture
April 10 - June 6, 2010
Demonstration: Molding from a Live Model - Sunday, May 9, 2 pm
Gallery Talk: Lost Wax Casting of Bronze Sculpture - Thursday, May 20, 2 pm
    Robert Marcus enjoys the texture, appearance, and strength of bronze. Many of his pieces originate in clay or plaster, and his life-sized works begin from wax body molds made directly from a human model. Most of his sculptural ideas, however, find their final form in bronze metal. Marcus is inspired by the flowing curves of the human form and the negative spaces they create. His work, which is highlighted by topologically interesting surfaces, ranges from wall reliefs of playful biomorphic shapes to life-sized bronze abstractions.
    His sculptures “Dream,” “Dreams II,” “Jublilation,” and “You and Me,” are partial human forms in contemplative or other expressive configurations. The negative, or “missing,” parts create tension and draw the viewer into a more intimate relationship with the figures. Giving equal visual weight to both positive and negative spaces adds an additional dimension to the pieces.
    Marcus has been creating indoor and outdoor bronze sculptures since 1975. He studied at the Summit Art Center in Summit, NJ and at the Johnson Sculpture Atelier in Princeton, NJ. He learned the “lost wax” method for creating bronze sculptures through visits to a number of art foundries in the New York area. Marcus taught courses in sculpture at the Somerset Art Association and the New Jersey Center for the Visual Arts in New Jersey, gave workshops in mold making and in the lost wax casting of bronze, and has taught privately. He has a Ph.D. in physical chemistry and has worked as a research scientist and as a university professor in physics and nanoelectronics. Marcus’ pieces have won prizes in multiple exhibitions in the New York area, and many of his pieces are housed in private collections in this country and in Canada.

 
John Babineau: Ongoing Projects
January 29 - March 13, 2011
Presentation on Photographic/Printing Processes with Bob Korn: February 5, 2:30 pm
Gallery Talk: February 26, 2:30 pm
    Ongoing Projects, an exhibition of the large-scale photography of John Babineau, presents two themes that are of continuing interest to the artist. One project, Brotherhood of Dreamers, is a collection of images of men in quiet contemplation. Babineau watches for the un-staged nuance or fleeting moment of revelation that presents light, the male figure and the back- and foreground in an integrated and exalted composition.
    The other project, France in General, draws images from another growing archive of photographs taken during various trips to France.  Babineau and his wife regularly travel to France. His interest in the country goes beyond the visual; he’s also interested in the social and political ferment that is still taking place there. Babineau combines multiple images that play off one another in contrasting or complimentary ways.
    In both of these projects, Babineau uses photographs from his archive to create a diptych or triptych with the original image. Adding these images from his archive give the pieces more depth and understanding.
    John Babineau is a fine art photographer specializing in street photography. Born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, John was raised in the Boston and South Shore area. At age eleven, he received a Kodak Brownie Starflash camera for Christmas and a life-long love of photography ensued. After a three year enlistment in the US Army in the late 1960s, John attended the New England School of Photography and the Massachusetts College of Art and Design (Boston, MA) graduating with a BFA in photography and art education. He has taken many graduate-level art courses and photography workshops since, most recently at the Fine Arts Work Center, Provincetown, MA.
     He has taught photography to a variety of age groups and skill levels. He has exhibited in a variety of photographic venues including the Atlanta, Boston, New York and Washington, DC areas. 
    In 2008, John was selected by Arlington County (VA) Cultural Affairs to photograph Arlington’s sister city, Reims, France. The subsequent exhibit “Crossing Glances/ Regards Croises” was held simultaneously in Reims and Arlington in 2009. Cecile Bethleem, a photographer from Reims, photographed Arlington in this joint exhibit with Didier Rousellet writing the text for the combined French/English language book.
    John is a resident of Arlington, VA and South Yarmouth, MA. He and his wife Barbara are presently transitioning to the Cape full time.
For more information on the work of John Baineau, click here: www.johnbabineau.com
Image above: "Young Men, France"
 
 

VARUJAN BOGHOSIAN: RECENT WORKS        
EDWARD GIOBBI: COLLAGES & PAINTINGS
June 11 - July 31 
    The Cape Cod Museum of Art features companion exhibitions: Collages and Paintings, works by Edward Giobbi, and Recent Works by Varujan Boghosian. Varujan Boghosian and Edward Giobbi are both friends and artists who use pieces of the past and present in their work. Boghosian, Giobbi, as well as Romanos Rizk, Ciro Cozzi, Salvatore Del Deo, Robert Douglas Hunter and Marge Osborne (later Mrs. John Whorf, Jr.), came to study with Henry Hensche in the summer of 1949.  Boghosian and Giobbi have remained especially close ever since.
    Varujan Boghosian attended the Vesper George School of Art in Boston and the Yale School of Art and Architecture. He has taught at Cooper Union, Yale, Brown and Dartmouth. He is a master of the arts of collage and assemblage whose work has won national recognition and  is largely inspired by the past. His collages are creations of items he finds at antique shops, flea markets, yard sales and items found while beachcombing. When arranging the items in his work, he gives the items a new life while maintaining their personal and historical identities. Boghosian’s work is represented in the Denver Art Museum, the Mattatuck Museum, the Hood Museum and the Cape Cod Museum of Art among others. Image at left: Boghosian's "Skeleton"
    When Edward Giobbi was a young boy, his family told him stories of artists. As Michelangelo, Da Vinci and Giotto became is heroes, he knew he wanted to be an artist. Giobbi works with a strong and historical Italian influence, and revives the atmosphere of traditional Italian heritage in his mixed media work. Like Boghosian, he also uses found items (dried flowers) in his collages. Giobbi’s work is represented in the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Whitney Museum, and CCMA among others.  Image at right: Giobbi's "The House from My Window" 
    Boghosian and Giobbi will be exhibiting together because of their homage to history through the found items they incorporate into their work. The notion of the past and the mystery that goes along with it has greatly influenced both artists.  Giobbi is still indebted to Hensche about whom he says: ''He taught the Impressionist style, which is when I learned color logic, whereby all colors fit as they do in nature.  This enabled me to build a color vocabulary that I continue to use today.''

13th Annual ArtWork Exhibition
School to Careers Art Internship Program
May 8 - 30
Reception: May 13, 5:30 - 7:30 pm
    The 13th Annual ArtWork Exhibition features art work produced by students during the course of their partnerships with renowned local artists. The School to Careers Art Internship Program pairs high school juniors and seniors with successful working artists for eight weeks, working in a collaborative environment that promotes creative growth and offers insight in to the lives and routines of professional artists.
    A reception for the artists and their mentors is May 13.
Image: Pastel by Rachel Maginnis

 

 

 

SARAH SON-THEROUX: Landscapes
2nd annual Arthur J. McMurtry Memorial Exhibition
February 27 - April 11
Gallery Talk by Sarah Son-Theroux: Saturday, March 13, 2 pm
Gallery Talk by CCMA Curator Michael Giaquinto: Thursday, April 1, 1 pm
   This exhibition features recent landscapes Sarah Son-Theroux has painted over the last several years, including some she did as a Fulbright Scholar in Estonia from 2007 - 2008. A plein air painter, her extensive education includes an MFA from Indiana University and a Fulbright grant in 2007 to paint in Estonia in affiliation with the Estonian Academy of Art. Son-Theroux's engaging and forceful landscapes capture the literal and spiritual powers of nature, hinting at the sacramental connection between man and his environment.
Image: "Pair of Oak Trees"

 

 

 

BARBARA ROCKEFELLER: A RETROSPECTIVE
October 31 – December 6
 Painter, photographer and teacher, Barbara Rockefeller attended Parsons School of Design and the Art Students League in New York, and received degrees in Art Education, Visual Arts and Museum Studies from NYU. She works in oils and watercolor, and has received numerous awards in juried shows.
    Rockefeller has exhibited at Lincoln Center, the Rockland Center for the Arts in New York City, Fairleigh Dickinson University, the Ridgewood Art Institute in New Jersey, and the Creative Arts Center in Chatham. She is a past president of Salute to Women in the Arts, a creative non-profit organization in New Jersey dedicated to giving women artists an “arena for their ideas and a platform for their work.” Rockefeller is former registrar and trustee for Cape Cod Museum of Art.
  

DAYS LUMBERYARD STUDIOS 1915 - 1972
September 19 - November 15
Sponsored by Renate, Hans & Maria Hofmann Trust through JPMorgan Private Bank; Philanthropic Services
   This is a comprehensive exhibition featuring artwork spanning almost 100 years by artists who once had studios at Days Lumberyard. A broad and eclectic mix of artwork in a variety of media by over 30 artists will be on view. This exhibition was previously on view at Acme Fine Art, Boston, MA.
    The Days Lumberyard Studios in Provincetown, MA, ranks among the most important incubators for artists of the 20th century. Two of that century’s most influential teachers, Charles Webster Hawthorne and Hans Hofmann, along with many of their students, worked in these studios. Between 1915 and 1975, more than 100 artists had studios at the lumberyard and/or the adjacent Brewster Street Annex. Some of the most highly regarded American artists of the time maintained studios at Days for at least one season, including Edwin Dickinson, Ross Moffett, Vaclav Vytlacil, Mercedes Matter, Perle Fine, Myron Stout, Fritz Bultman, George McNeil, Robert De Niro, Sr., John Grillo, Peter Busa, Robert Motherwell, Helen Frankenthaler, Ed Corbett, Lester Johnson, and Jan Muller, among numerous others.
    The works in the exhibition come from private collections, the estates of artists, from Acme Fine Art and other galleries. A handful of pieces are on loan from various museums’ permanent collections.
    Accounts differ with respect to the date that artists began using the studios at Days Lumberyard. Records indicate that Frank Days, Sr. acquired the 24 Pearl Street property in 1911. The first evidence of studios on the property as indicated in town tax records was 1916; however, several artists claim to have used the space as a studio as early as 1914.
    Over the years, the studio complex was expanded with the addition of the Brewster Street Annex. In 1951, the Days family sold the studio complex to Joe Oliver and Manuel Raymond. Oliver and Raymond immediately began much needed maintenance and renovations.
    About a decade later, in 1972, the Fine Arts Work Center acquired the Days Lumberyard property, and to this day many of the original studios continue to be used as living and work spaces by artists who have been awarded fellowships by the Work Center. The Fine Arts Work Center itself was founded in 1968 by a group of distinguished Provincetown writers and visual artists, a number of whom had studios in the original Days Lumberyard. They include Gil Franklin, Philip Malicoat, Fritz Bultman, and Robert Motherwell. The Fine Arts Work Center is a non-profit organization dedicated to continuing the same tradition and spirit of artistic creativity that was engendered by the artists of Days Lumberyard so many years ago.
Image: Hans Hofmann at Days Lumberyard studio

HEATHER BLUME: Adrift
September 19 - November 1
   Adrift, an art installation by Heather Blume, will be on exhibit at the Cape Cod Museum of Art September 19 - November 1. Blume has created a multimedia installation especially for the museum’s Ocean Edge Gallery.
    Blume graduated with an MFA cum laude in sculpture from the New York Academy of Art in 1994 and has been an avid artist and art educator since.  She enjoys a rich and varied career; her figurative works are collected nationally and internationally. Most importantly, Blume lives, works and is inspired by the people and landscape of her native birthplace, Cape Cod.   
From the artist's statement:
    In considering the opportunity to create an installation for “the red room” of the CCMA, I had an immediate idea of the type of artwork I would undertake.  What came to mind was the pulse and flow of the sea and the memory of rhythm it leaves behind on the beach each day in the form of the tide line. A tide line is primarily composed of a drift of seaweed entanglements, marsh grass, and occasional egg cases each in its’ own way evidence of earth’s origins and sustenance. I decided to create the memory and feeling of the shoreline against the intense backdrop of the red walls.
    I have reached a new stage of my life and artistic career; although I am not old, I am older and do sense a difference in how I experience my being. As the horizon of life approaches I find I have a deeper appreciation for the surrender of the flowing dislodged and drifting sea forms; I feel an impassioned surrender to being a small part of a greater whole.
                    - Heather Blume
       “We want eternal oceans. But we are perishable;
             Friends, we are salty impermanent kingdoms”
                     - Robert Bly

ROWLAND SCHERMAN: Photographs of Our Times
March 6 - April 11
    The images of photographer Rowland Scherman will be familiar to baby boomers because they document the political and cultural celebrities of the formative decade of the 1960s. As a photographer for Life magazine, a young, hip long-haired Scherman had easy access to events and used his fast-moving camera lens to capture many of the iconic images of that era:  Bob Dylan silhouetted against a blue aura used as the cover of Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits, Robert Kennedy strategizing with advisers, Janis Joplin at Woodstock.  Scherman was everywhere the action was in those days. Disillusioned after the 1960s, Scherman traveled extensively. He settled for a while in Wales and later in Alabama, working new jobs, always taking new photos along the way.  In 2000, he came to Cape Cod, the place of many fondly remembered childhood vacations, and stayed.
Image: "Bobby Kennedy" (photo) by Rowland Scherman

Betsy Bennett Retrospective at Cape Cod Museum of Art
November 21, 2009 – January 17, 2010
Curator Talk with Michael Giaquinto:  Sunday, January 3, 2 pm
    Betsy Bennett, Artist: A Cape Cod Treasure, a selection of Betsy Bennett’s works, will be on exhibition at the Cape Cod Museum of Art, November 21 – January 17. The paintings in this exhibit are done in egg tempera and watercolors. Bennett is well known for her mastery of the egg tempera technique.
    Bennett's training began at age 13 at the Philadelphia Art Museum and the Pennsylvania Art Association. After high school, she was awarded a four-year scholarship to Moore College of Art in Philadelphia. In 1955, she moved to Cape Cod where she and her husband, Sid, raised three children. She began teaching watercolor, oil painting, and drawing in 1958 at Chatham, Harwich, and Dennis-Yarmouth adult education programs, plus substituting as an art teacher in the elementary and high schools of those three school districts. She also taught at the Cape Cod Art Association and the Nauset Painters. In 1976, the Bennetts moved to the Oregon Coast where she continued to teach and exhibit. Returning to Cape Cod in 1993, she continued to paint in her studio in Harwich. She was on the Cape Cod Museum of Art’s Collections and Acquisitions Committee until a year prior to her death in 2007. 

 

 

 

ROGER COOK: Language of Dimension
September 12 - October 25
    Roger Cook, an internationally known graphic designer, photographer and artist lives in Washington Crossing, PA. He has been the President of Cook and Shanosky Associates, Inc., a graphic design firm he founded in NYC in 1967.  The firm produced all forms of corporate communications including: Corporate Identity, Advertising, Signage, Annual Reports and Brochures.
    His graphic design and photography have been used by IBM, Container Corporation of America, Montgomery Ward, Squibb Corporation, Black & Decker, Volvo, Subaru, AT&T, New York Times, Bell Atlantic, BASF, Lenox, and many other major international corporations.
    For "Symbols Signs"  their 52 transportation-related symbols designed for DOT (the US Department of Transportation), he received the Presidential Award for Design Excellence from President Reagan and Elizabeth Dole on January 30,1984 in the Indian Treaty Room of the Old Executive Office Building in Washington, DC.
    Roger Cook's statement about this exhibition:
    In 1999, after 46 years as a graphic designer, I found time to explore this new medium, sculptural "assemblage". The inspiration and opportunity to explore this mode of artistic expression comes at a time when my commercial career has sufficiently matured so that I can apply my skills, experiences, and a lifetime of artistic perspective to create "statements" with these assemblages.
    Most of my "raw" materials come from private collections, my own photography, flea markets, and antique shops, where I spend hours searching for items that inspire use in my art. My process, using these "found" materials, feels to me much like theater. As in the legitimate stage, I work within a three-dimensional form to portray  the comedy or tragedy of life. (See “Odyssey” art)  I create these  miniature, silent, "theaters" to express my feelings about a range of subjects. The three-dimensional objects I construct,  using the found and fabricated objects (my "Thespians"), are a series of "performances" that share my feelings with my audience.
Image: "Times 4" by Roger Cook

NICK PATTEN: Interiors
July 18 - August 23, 2009
Gallery Talk: July 18, 2 pm
    “Settling on a composition for one of my room interior paintings is a progressive process. I pick and choose the most interesting and necessary elements from an array of photographs, often adding items from my imagination. Light and dark is a primary focus of my painting with particular attention to brushstroke and gradation in the darkest areas. Though working from photographs with the aim of creating believable paintings, I strive to bring a quiet drama to everyday scenes. My paintings are never too photographic. In part, I aim to paint so that the content of the image is most compelling and how the painting was made is secondary.”        - Nick Patten
    A recent article described Patten as “a master at creating spaces that speak not through people or movement, but through shadows, light and reflections.” He has won numerous prizes in nationally juried shows. The most important honor awarded him to date is winning the Gold Medal of Honor in the oil painting category at the juried Allied Artists of America in New York City in 1999.
   For more information, click here for Nick Patten's website.
Image: Remembering White Trees

 

 

 

PHILIP KOCH: Unbroken Thread: Nature Paintings and the American Imagination
June 20 - August 16, 2009
     According to Eva J. Allen, Ph.D, Philip Koch’s works constitute “a contemporary re-imagining of the romantic panoramas of the great 19th- century American landscape painters.” The works in this exhibition were created over the past seven years at various locations throughout New England as Koch followed in the footsteps of artists from the 19th century through the present. He considers himself very much a part of the “unbroken thread” that has evolved through the tradition of depicting New England in art for almost two hundred years.
    Philip Koch studied studio art and art history at Oberlin College in Ohio.  In the Oberlin library, he found a monograph on Edward Hopper and developed an interest in drawing from life. He also discovered the school’s collection of the Dutch Old Masters paintings. Their works caused Koch to become restless with his “simple abstract paintings as they came to seem more clever than insightful. I (Koch) wanted something deeper and began scratching about another path.”
    In the summers of 1968 and 1969, Koch studied at the Art Students League where he became interested in 1930’s regionalism, especially the work of Thomas Hart Benton, Grant Wood and Charles Burchfield. 
    The regionalists’ colorful expression of the Midwest landscapes prompted Koch to pursue his MFA in painting at Indiana University in Bloomington, where realism was still encouraged. This is where Koch “discovered the romance of 19th-century landscape painting.”
    In 1973, Koch began teaching at Maryland Institute College of Art, where he is now a full professor. Since 1983, he has spent twelve summers as the resident artist in Edward Hopper’s studio in Truro, MA.

 

 

 

RICHARD NEAL: Face to Face 
June 6 - July 13, 2009
Reception: June 13, 5:30 - 8 pm 
    All visual art, even realism, has an inherent abstract quality. Colored shapes enter the eye and are interpreted by the mind, which convinces us that we are seeing a landscape or a portrait.  I am curious about that mysterious space between the eye and the mind, which can cause us to question reality.  What is it that makes us feel so sure that we are looking at a face, when maybe it is all just in our imagination?  - Richard Neal, 2009
    Richard Neal has had a long interest in piecing together imagery from the material that makes up the world around us. There is a physicality about the work that reflects the wounds created by pulling things apart and the healing process of piecing things back together.  Painting and drawing are the activities that help the works transcend their often mundane material origin.
    He is a graduate of the Cranbrook Academy of Art and his work has been shown in museums and galleries in many places including Provincetown, Boston, New York City and Washington, DC. His work is included in private collections in the United States, Canada and Germany.
Image: "Premonition"

PASTEL PAINTERS SOCIETY OF CAPE COD: Signature 2009
April 18 - June 14, 2009
   The high standards of its Signature Membership affirm the Pastel Painters Society of Cape Cod’s nationwide prestige. The honor of Signature Membership is awarded to working artists of consistent excellence, who may then may write PPSCC after their name and may submit to the prestigious Biennial Signature Exhibitions. Signature Members of the Pastel Painters Society of Cape Cod serve the community through offering high caliber art exhibits for viewers of all ages.
    PPSCC was founded in 1995 by a handful of local pastelists for the purpose of establishing viable soft pastel exhibition venues while fostering public understanding and appreciation of the pastel medium. Just a few years later, the non-profit organization's membership spanned the nation.
    The following artists are included in this exhibition: Edith Cohenno Bryant, Carolyn Caldwell, Robina Carter, Ed Chesnovitch, Shizue Cooper, Diana DeSantis, Kimberly Ann duCharme, Carole Chisholm Garvey, Liz Haywood-Sullivan, Anne Heywood, Susan A. Hollis, Joan Ledwith, Marge Levine, Jane Lincoln, Pat Ross Marx, Ann M. Murphy, Rosalie Nadeau, Mona Podgurski, Debra Quinn-Munson, Susan Ransom, Donna Rossetti-Bailey, M'Lou Sorrin, Phill Thompson, Lorraine W. Trenholm, Penny Viscusi, Margaret Williams-McGowan.
Image: "Jessica" by Diana DeSantis

JENNIFER DAY: Air & Ocean: New Paintings
April 25 - June 7, 2009
Gallery Talk: May 16, 2 pm
    "This work explores the mystery of natural phenomena, it communicates a vastness of air, water and space that suggests something is going to happen, or has just happened."  - Jennifer Day
Jennifer Day's large-scale monochromatic paintings of the sea have been exhibited throughout New England. A graduate of Bowdoin College and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, she received her Master of Fine Arts from the University of Pennsylvania.

ROBERT CIPRIANI: 'I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For'
May 1 - June 7, 2009
    Robert Cipriani is a graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), and is both a professional artist and a noted graphic designer. His paintings are represented by many galleries and have received a number of awards, including the “Artist of the Year, Painting” designation from the Cambridge Art Association in a show juried by Edgar Driscoll, formerly the Boston Globe art critic for 30 years. In February of 2008 he was part of a three-person show of nationally known Expressionistic artists at the Phillips Gallery at Big Arts in Sanibel Florida.
    "Expressionism is the most natural form of painting for me as there are no boundaries to my imagination and curiosity, just a process of discovering and expressing new ways to look at life and at creativity. I usually do find what I’m looking for, then start searching all over again.
    "I typically know where I’m going with a painting, but often find that it starts to lead me, to draw me in other directions. I look for, and am always open to this,  because new ideas often arise from just the process of starting to paint,  and by being open, aware, and really curious.  My multimedia paintings often incorporate collage, photography, type, acrylics, and modeling mediums - a great selection of tools.
    "In addition, I am very influenced by my life’s work as a graphic designer, art director, and creative director. Conversely, my approach to painting influences my design work in a way that makes it richer and more interesting. The two arts share many parallels: solutions that flow naturally from well-defined objectives; a need for passion, creativity, innovation, and exploration; the use of color for representation, emotion, and effect; and juxtaposition of large and small, strong and delicate, soft and sharp, dark and light, smooth and textured and the desire to be influenced and directed by the act of creativity itself.
    "When I paint, I'm spontaneous and precise at the same moment, always within the halo of a consistent vision."

 

 

 

ARNOLD GEISSBUHLER: SCULPTOR (1897 - 1993)
Shaped by the 20th Century: Drawings & Sculptures from his Lifetime
November 8 - January 25, 2009
Curated by Al Kochka, Director of the Geissbuhler Project
Sponsored in part by a grant from the Jeremiah Kaplan Foundation of the UJA Federation, NY
     Born in Switzerland in 1897, Arnold Geissbuhler apprenticed with Zurich architectural sculptor Otto Munch before moving to Paris in 1919. He studied with sculptor Antoine Bourdelle, who had been a student of Rodin’s. At the Académie de la Grande Chaumière he became friends with many artists, including Alberto Giacometti, who became a lifelong friend. He also met a young student, Elisabeth Chase of Dennis, MA, who later became recognized as a Rodin scholar.  They fell in love and married.  
    The Geissbuhler’s travelled extensively. He exhibited in Paris, New York and Boston. The first showing of his work was at the Whitney Studio (later the Whitney Museum of American Art) and his first one-man show was held at the Kraushaar Gallery on Fifth Avenue, where drawings by Rodin were also on display. 
    They resided in Provincetown from 1934 – 1937. Geissbuhler taught drawing and sculptural techniques at Wellesley College for 21 years from 1937 through 1958. He had a sculpture studio in Dennis where they set up residence in 1970.
     Geissbuhler brought with him to America the academic tradition of monumental, heroic sculpture. But he went beyond the traditions of realism and became more abstract, working with new materials such as ceramic.
      The selections in this show trace the artist’s evolving forms of expression influenced by the time in which he lived, the changing artistic movements around him, and how he responded to them.
        This exhibition highlights examples of his work: from his early academic years, his changing styles during the 1930s while at Wellesley and Provincetown, his work during the Great Depression and WW II, his own Atomazon series, his family themes and in his final years, his heroic-sized ceramic works.

CREATIVE CONVERGENCE: Renowned Painters Showing on Cape Cod
A collaboration between Cape Cod Museum of Art and Addison Art Gallery
Cape Cod Museum of Art exhibition dates: January 12 - February 28
Reception: Friday, February 12, 5:30 - 7:30 pm
Gallery Talk: Friday, February 12, 1 pm
Reception: Saturday, February 13, 5:30 - 7:30 pm 
    In the fall of 2009, award-winning painters, with roots and homes from across the United States, Mexico, Ireland, Bulgaria and Russia, met in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. Inspired by its thriving art colony, historic town, as well as its magnificent surrounds, and each other, these artists created a wonderful diversity of plein air works in their individual styles. All established artists, they are bringing their completed works together for exclusive shows on Cape Cod, another area widely known for its natural beauty, history and for nurturing the arts.
    Participating artists included Jeff Bonasia, Scott Burdick, Daniel Corey, Frank Gardner, Jerome Greene, Logan Hagege, Marc Hanson, Ignat Ignatov, Peter Kalill, Jeremy Lipking, Kevin McNamara, Ernesto Nemesio, Colin Page, Paul Schulenburg and Alexey Steele.

 

    Impressionist landscape painters are drawn to the beauty of light falling across the landscape. Their avowed intent is to capture that impression in the two dimensional plane of the canvas. We live at a time when this art of seeing and recording the look of nature is widely practiced and has been brought to an extraordinarily high level of excellence. Since the 19th century, Cape Cod had been a center for plein air painting because of the special quality of its light and the sculptural aspects of its landscape. It is a rare treat to be able to see the work of an internationally trained group of impressionist painters focused on one of the other amazing regions of the world. We will see the reality of San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, presented through the filter of the artist's eye - some things familiar and some things arrestingly novel - and thus be able to vicariously experience the place. CCMA is fortunate to be able to work with Addison Art Gallery in presenting this exhibition which represents a local painting tradition in a much larger context. 
 - Elizabeth Ives Hunter, Executive Director, CCMA
 

 

A. LESLIE ROSS: Magazine Illustrations
October 24 - January 3
     A. Leslie Ross’s works are very diverse.  He was well known as a magazine illustrator,  especially his action sports covers for Super Sport, All Sports and Popular Sports and his work for Boy’s Life magazine. He also worked with oil and watercolor painting.  Ross will be remembered for his use of compelling composition, vivid color and understanding of movement.  In 1971 he was awarded the Two Thousand Men of Achievement honor.
    Ross studied art at The New York School of Fine Art (Parsons) and Pratt Institute in New York City.  His first studio was on East 63rd Street and from there he started his successful illustration career.
   During World War II he served as the Art Director of the US Training Aid Division and designed hand cut silk screen teaching aids for the U.S. Forces. At the close of the war he returned to Poughguag, NY, where he resumed his illustration work, combined in later years with university teaching at Dutchess Community College in Poughkeepsie, N.Y.
   As a young man, Ross spent summers on his aunt’s farm in Amenia, NY, working with horses, developing his drawing ability and the knowledge of horses that established his reputation, becoming best known for illustrations involving action and horse movement.  He produced over 300 Western covers in oil, gouache and acrylic between 1947-1956, working for Famous Western, Pocket Books, Popular Library, Street and Smith and Pines Publications to name a few.

ART VISIONS: K-12 CAPE-WIDE STUDENTS' ART EXHIBITION
December 4 - January 17, 2009
    Student artists steal the spotlight during Art Visions, a Cape-wide student art exhibition at the Cape Cod Museum of Art. This annual exhibition features artwork created by Cape Cod students in grades K-12, opens Friday, December 4, 2009, through Sunday, January 17, 2010.
    The exhibition represents a large-scale collaboration between the CCMA and schools from Provincetown to Falmouth. For this show, teachers chose up to four pieces of artwork created by students. The artwork, matted, framed and prepared for hanging prior to installation at CCMA, is a comprehensive selection of drawings, paintings, prints, pottery and sculpture that traces the creative development of young artists from the region.
    Art Visions will hang in Hope McClennen Gallery, offering a unique comparison between the students' artwork and the work of regional artists exhibited in adjacent galleries.

PRINTMAKERS OF CAPE COD
April 17 - May 30
Opening Reception: Sunday, April 18, 2 - 4 pm - free with paid museum admission
    A juried exhibition of works by Printmakers of Cape Cod will be on display April 17 – May 30 with the Marcia Howe Collection of Printmakers of Cape Cod. Works in the exhibition will feature printmaking techniques including woodcut, wood engraving, linocut, collagraph, lithography, and intaglio printing.  Marc St. Pierre, art professor at UMass/Dartmouth, and chair of the printmaking department, is juror for the exhibition.
    The diversity and vision and innovation among members make our exhibitions an exciting learning experience for members and the public alike. Members work in a wide variety of methods and media from traditional methods such as etching and lithography to experimental surfaces and digital imagery. All work is original. 
                                            - Printmakers of Cape Cod
    The Printmakers of Cape Cod began in 1976 as a small group of artists dedicated to creating original prints. It was started by Ruth Berry, who in retirement on the Cape encouraged local artists to promote and produce prints. The original group was five members, including Marcia Howe of Orleans, who helped other artists to investigate new media and a variety of printmaking methods by teaching classes in her home studio and other places from Orleans to Provincetown. She organized the printmakers and became Printmakers of Cape Cod’s first president. Today, Printmakers of Cape Cod has more than 90 members from Cape Cod and the south shore of Massachusetts.
    Printmakers of Cape Cod, a non-profit organization of artists, is devoted to the production of artist-made prints and to fostering education and understanding of original, unique and limited editions of prints by sponsoring exhibitions, workshops, and demonstrations for its membership and the public.
    Gertrude (Marcia) Herrick Howe, artist, teacher, and printmaker was born in Canajoharie, New York in 1902. A 1924 graduate of Mount Holyoke College with a major in art, she continued her studies at Pratt Institute and the Art Students League in New York and Provincetown. After marrying Arthur A. Howe, she lived in Westchester County, NY and illustrated children’s books and designed book jackets for several New York publishers. About printmaking, Marcia once said, “It’s a step up from painting,” describing it as her favorite form of work, “full of complication and mystery”.
Image: "The Wave" by Marcia Howe

ARCHITECTURE OF THE CAPE COD SUMMER
   Work of Polhemus Savery DaSilva Architects Builders
November 1 - January 4, 2009
    "Each house is a wish—a place of tranquility by the sea, where memories are made with families and friends…a particular version of the endless summer."
  - Michael J. Crosbie, PhD, AIA; introduction to book, Architecture of the Cape Cod Summer
   
    This exhibition shows the design process and creations of the region’s top architecture and construction firm, Polhemus Savery DaSilva Architects Builders. It explores the compelling art – underpinned by the science of construction, influenced by the specific demands of the region and client, and executed by master craftsmen that make this firm so respected in their profession. The show includes a chronology of the firm’s major work – including its work on CCMA – and a close look at three houses. 
    See the design process of a dazzling seaside home, “House on Champlain’s Bluff,” the inner spaces and architectural details that make “Pepperwood” a unique work of art, and learn how regulatory constraints were turned into positive influences for “Home On Harper’s Island.”
    The work comes alive through drawings, models, small architectural elements, and stunning color photographs taken by some of the nation’s top architectural photographers.
    The book, Architecture of the Cape Cod Summer, is available in conjunction with this show, with an introduction and text by Michael J. Crosbie, Ph.D., AIA.

SAM FEINSTEIN (1915 - 2003): A Retrospective
May 31 - July 27, 2008
Curated by Patricia Stark Feinstein
    This exhibition will reveal the seventy-year trajectory of Sam Feinstein’s development from realism through expressionism, cubist expressionism, Hofmann-influenced abstraction to Feinstein’s own unique language of color—vibrating and luminous — in his monumental, mature abstract paintings.
    Born in Russia and raised in Philadelphia, Feinstein taught and supervised classes at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and filmed the museum’s first art documentary. He later moved to New York and studied with Hans Hofmann, whom he filmed in 1950 to create his documentary, Hans Hofmann.  Feinstein taught at Pratt Institute, wrote for Art Digest magazine and exhibited his paintings in New York, Philadelphia and Provincetown until he withdrew from the exhibition world in 1960 to dedicate himself to refining his principles and teaching for the remainder of his life. Feinstein spent his summers on Cape Cod, during the 1950s in Provincetown, and in 1960 moved to Whig Street in Dennis where he painted and taught for the next 42 years.
    Curator Patricia Stark Feinstein, a painter, teacher, curator, lecturer and former faculty member at Riverdale Country School in New York City, will expand upon the art and philosophy of her husband in related events during the show. She studied with Sam Feinstein and taught with him for eighteen years. She has written a book on her husband’s work that will be released by the award-winning Fields Publishing in conjunction with this exhibition.

 

 

 

FOUR PAINTERS: On Common Ground
June 7 - August 10, 2008
Curated by Paul Resika
Gallery Talk: Donald Beal on Thursday, July 17, 11 am
    To make something New, without tricks, requires talent, perseverance and a dedicated life. It also takes passion. I have known the work of Beal, DuToit, Paulson and Radell for 30 years.  I believe they have these qualities.      - Paul Resika
    Donald Beal, Robert DuToit, David Paulson and Thaddeus Radell have a 30 year history of friendship – at one time or another schooling together, living together, and studying with  Paul Resika at Parsons School of Design in New York. 
    Like Resika they all have a deep respect for the modernist principles of his teacher Hans Hofmann. They went their different ways: Beal and DuToit to the Outer Cape, Radell to France and New York, and Paulson to upstate New York, but they share an ongoing dialogue that continues to shape their work and lives. As Beal describes it, “Our work differs as our natures differ, but there is a like spirit and feeling that runs through all the work and unites us.”   
    Donald Beal was born in Syracuse, New York and lived in Westford Massachusetts until graduating high school in 1977.  He studied art at the Swain School of Design in New Bedford, Massachusetts, where he earned his BFA in painting in 1981. After moving to New York City to study at Brooklyn College, he went on to receive his MFA from Parsons School of Design.  Provincetown, Massachusetts has been his home since 1985, where he is represented by the Berta Walker Gallery. Beal has been a professor in the College of Visual and Performing Arts at the University of Massachusetts, North Dartmouth since 1999.
    Robert DuToit of North Truro was born in Boston in 1956 and began painting at the age of 10. He received a BFA from the University of New Hampshire and an MFA from Parsons School of Design in New York City and has studied for extended periods in France and Italy. An active Cape artist since the 1980s, he has been involved in numerous solo and group shows in Boston, New York and the Outer Cape, most recently at Maurice Arlos Fine Art Gallery in New York and the DNA Gallery in Provincetown. His recent work consists of elemental landscapes of various motifs as well as small direct figure compositions.
    David Paulson was born in Providence, R.I. in 1955. At 17 he began drawing with charcoal and watercolor.  He attended Swain School Design in New Bedford and studied printing and drawing with David Loeffler Smith. In 1978 he attended Parsons School of Design MFA program, where he studied with Paul Resika. He took sculpture classes with Peter Agostini in 1980 at New York Studio School of Drawing, Painting & Sculpture, where he also taught. He lived in Brooklyn until 1994 and spent some winters in Provincetown.  He currently lives in Ghent, New York.            
    Thaddeus Radell was born in 1956 in Grosse Pointe, Michigan, the son of artists. In 1978, he received his BFA at Mercy College of the University of Detroit and his Master of Fine Art at Parsons School of Design in 1982.  After graduating, he moved to France where for 14 years he divided his time between Paris and the South. He is currently living and working in New York City.  He has had numerous solo shows in France and at the Marurice Arlos Fine Art Gallery in New York City. 
    Curator:  Paul Resika     
    Born in New York City, Paul Resika studied with Hans Hofmann in New York and later in Provincetown. His work merges the emotions of abstract expressionism with his representational subjects, often of nature. He has received numerous awards and his work is included in many museums including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the National Museum of American Art.   Resika currently divides his time between New York and Provincetown.
Image: "Sunflower," pastel painting by Robert DuToit

AIDEN LASSELL RIPLEY (1896 - 1969): A Retrospective
Curated by Elizabeth Ives Hunter, CCMA Exec Director
August 2 – October 5, 2008
Gallery Talk with Elizabeth Ives Hunter: Oct 5 at 3 pm
    Aiden Lassell Ripley was born in Wakefield, Massachusetts and spent much of his life in the Boston area, often traveling to Cape Cod.  The son of a musician, Ripley developed his talent as a tuba player and considered a career as a musician, but he soon discovered that painting was his true passion. He studied at the School of the Museum of Fine Art in Boston and received the Page Traveling Scholarship which allowed him to travel and paint in Europe from 1923 to 1925.
    During the 1940s and 50s, Ripley became known as one of America’s pre-eminent painters of sporting scenes – hunters and game, fly-fishing on pristine rivers, and plantation life -- but his work extends well beyond this subject matter.  The CCMA exhibition will focus on the totality of his work – portraits, still lifes, non-sporting landscapes and allegories.  Ripley’s ability to maintain excellence of design and convincing emphasis and subordination marks his work as truly outstanding.
    According to CCMA Executive Director Elizabeth Ives Hunter, curator of the exhibition, “The full breadth of Ripley’s work is examined in the book THE ART OF AIDEN LASSELL RIPLEY by Julie Carlson Wildfeuer and Stephen B. O’Brien, Jr., published in conjunction with the show. Taken together, the exhibition and the book will facilitate a re-evaluation of Ripley’s reputation as an artist.”
    Ripley studied art at the Fenway School of Illustration and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston with Philip Hale and Frank W. Benson.  He was elected to the Guild of Boston Artists in 1925, an honor that signaled acceptance by the most important painters of the day.  He served as president of the Guild from 1959 until his death in 1969.  Ripley received fifty prizes during his lifetime. 
    This exhibition is made possible in part by The Ellen and Richard Cuda Family Foundation of the Cape Cod Foundation.
    An essay on Aiden Lassell Ripley (1896 – 1969): A Retrospective by Elizabeth Ives Hunter which appeared in American Art Review Magazine is available on request.
 

Harry Holl Sculpture and Clay Studio Exhibition    
December 18 – January 9 
    This exhibition will display the work created by the artist-teachers, and selected students of the Harry Holl Sculpture and Clay Studio. The work ranges from simple bowls and vases, to more advanced pieces such as castles, fountains and tableware. Opened in February of 2008, the studio offers wheel-thrown pottery classes year round taught by Nathaniel Doane, Matt Kemp, Steve Kemp, Sarah Holl, Kim Holl, Lois Hirshberg, Alex Roberts, Mark Knowland, Marita Burns, Caitlin Nesbit, Angela Persechino and Jenn Reed. Open studio can also be scheduled for students to work on their own projects.
Image: Pottery by Laurie Goldman

 

 

 

Through Young Eyes: K-12 Cape-wide Student Exhibition
December 10, 2011 - January 15, 2012
Reception: December 15, 5:30 - 7:30 pm
Student artists steal the spotlight in this annual exhibition of student art, Through Young Eyes. This large-scale collaboration between CCMA and schools from Falmouth to Provincetown invites each art teacher to submit three works of art created by their students to exhibit at the region's premier art museum. A great diversity of styles and media is shown including paintings, drawings, sculpture, ceramics, jewelry, printmaking, digital art, collage and other multi-media works by children in kindergarten through high school.
For more information about Cape Cod & Islands Art Educators Association, click here.

 

Mud Toy, Bri Mecham, Harwich High School

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