Nearby Gallery Exhibits Strong Trio with Into the Ether

While New Englanders enjoy a culturally rich region, there are always precious few opportunities for local artists to see their work exhibited in high quality spaces. Nearby Gallery in Newton, Massachusetts, was founded during the pandemic to share the work of emerging and mid-career art-makers in their community. On view through July 13, 2022, the gallery’s current exhibition Into the Ether is the product of an open curatorial call hosted by the space. The resulting show brings together works by Massachusetts artists Monica DeSalvo, Tatiana Flis, and Rob Trumbour. The exhibition is excellent and serves as a testament to the talent of the exhibiting artists as well as the vision of those behind Nearby Gallery.

Nearby Gallery’s dramatic brick clad main space sets off artworks on display.

Featuring work in a variety of media, from prints and collage to hand-made books and sculpture, Into the Ether is a survey of three artists probing issues around loss, grief, and fragility. Many of the artworks on view are achingly sensitive and entice audiences to experience them with a distinct depth of feeling. 

Monica DeSalvo is an artist and graphic designer based in Arlington, Massachusetts. Much of her work is influenced by her caregiving for her late father, who experienced dementia. DeSalvo was one of the artists featured in a strong recent installment of the Attleboro Arts Museum’s lauded 8 Visions Exhibition. Into the Ether provides viewers an opportunity to see another selection of DeSalvo’s work thoughtfully presented alongside two fellow artists who also relish in craft, surface, design, and texture. One standout is her Resting on Water, a collection of ten small mixed media works that juxtapose forms and invite close examination. Lines and surfaces appear to buck and sway, throwing the viewer off course and challenging them to recalibrate. A graduate of the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth, DeSalvo is an active exhibitor and is now a Core Member of SoWA’s Fountain Street Gallery. 

Monica DeSalvo’s Resting on Water on view at Nearby Gallery.

Tatiana Flis creates works that are, like DeSalvo’s, multi-layered and incisive. The overlaps between Flis and DeSalvo tend to be a keen sensitivity towards design and construction of images. In Flis’ Prairie Night, multiple ambiguous geometries overlap and interplay across the surfaces of a large triptych. Nearby, a monoprint titled What Goes Unseen #1 sees Flis’ technique played out on a smaller scale. The installation of two works at such divergent sizes alongside one another shows off how the artist’s sense of structure, composition, and precision serves her artmaking in whatever format she chooses. Working out of a studio in Millbury, Massachusetts, Flis has exhibited widely. She completed her BFA at the Ringling College of Art and Design in Florida and earned her MFA at Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan.

Prairie Night and What Goes Unseen #1 by Tatiana Flis.

Rob Trumbour is both an art-maker and an architect. An associate professor at the Wentworth Institute of Technology, Trumbour earned his Master of Architecture at the University of Texas at Austin and his MFA at MassArt. His contributions to Into the Ether push boundaries and meld media from sculpture to printmaking to create a cohesive body of work. At the heart of the show, Trumbour’s Before Half of Two is a three-dimensional work that tilts into and out of space. Created using burnt out fallen tree limbs in cast concrete, the sculpture has the aroma of fire. Another strong entry by Trumbour is his collection of carbon composite prints titled Becoming, in which burnt casts are employed again. The finished pieces play with language and obsolescence. Trumbour’s work is complementary to that of Flis and DeSalvo, bringing to bear different forms of making with no less attention to detail.

Rob Trumbour’s triptych of prints titled Becoming.

Nearby Gallery bills itself as an “artist-owned showroom and community art space”, but it could also be called one of the sleekest venues in the region. A vast space by retail gallery standards, Nearby Gallery offers artists the opportunity to share their work in an environment where viewers can step back and look at things more deeply. A large open gallery at the front of the space is clad in brick, while two smaller rooms at the rear counterbalance the aesthetic with pristine white walls.

In addition to Into the Ether, a collection of works in a range of scale and style by other artists associated with the gallery are on view in their own space. The resulting installation is something akin to a contemporary salon show, celebrating many talents at once. Both the main show and this space offer works at accessible price points, with many pieces on offer at less than $500.

Another space within Nearby Gallery is dedicated to an eclectic display of many artists’ work.

Nearby Gallery’s Into the Ether offers three sensitive takes on issues of concern to many. Whether marveling at the artistic acumen of any of the three artists, or reading into their works for meditations on loss and impermanence, there is much to appreciate in this show and it is well worth seeing before it closes on July 13.

Nearby Gallery is located at 101 Union Street in Newton Centre, Massachusetts. The gallery is open Wednesday and Thursday 1-6pm, Friday and Saturday from 1-8pm, and Sunday from 11am - 4pm. Into the Ether continues through July 13. Learn more and plan your visit at www.nearbygallery.com.

South Coast Art Celebrated at DeDee Shattuck Gallery

Community-based art organizations serve a number of important roles and among them naturally is their capacity to give artists space to celebrate their town or region. South Coast Artists (SCA), a non-profit collective of creatives based in Southeastern Massachusetts and Rhode Island, is one such organization. On view through May 29, 2022, SCA is hosting its Spring Invitational Exhibition at DeDee Shattuck Gallery in Westport, Massachusetts. A richly varied salon-style show, the exhibition includes many highlights which find inspiration locally and further afield.

Featuring one hundred and seventy-five artworks by seventy-five SCA artists, the group’s Spring Invitational Exhibition is an opportunity for viewers based in the South Coast area to explore a survey of artworks by their neighbors. Works on view boast a wide range of media, from paintings and photographs to metal, ceramics, and mixed media. The styles employed are equally diverse and run the gamut from intense photorealism to gauzy abstraction. The show fills the generous exhibition space nearly from floor to ceiling and merits a lengthy visit.

Nearly two hundred works are on view in the exhibition at DeDee Shattuck Gallery in Westport.

Among the highlights in the show, many draw on themes specific to the South Coast region, which SCA defines roughly as the towns of Westport and Dartmouth in Massachusetts and Tiverton and Little Compton in Rhode Island. The scenic localities have close ties to both the farming and maritime communities, which both show up repeatedly throughout the exhibition. 

In Road Kill, a super illustrative painting by JP Powel, a gnarled and leafless tree takes up the foreground of a landscape sliced through by the sun-dappled asphalt of a country road and the stone walls which characterize the area. Carolyn Baker’s, Toven, a multi-part work executed in painted wood and vinyl, hints at compasses and nautical maps in an inventive format.

The coastal connection shows up in many artworks in the exhibition. Ron Fortier probes whaling history in his paintings, one of which features a ghostly sailing ship with flames rising from the deck under moonlight. Barbara Healy’s painting, Waiting, focuses on the prow of a sailboat within the context of the marbled surface of water. Not all of the artists look outdoors for their subjects, though. Jim Wright’s Austere Interior is a pensive meditation on domestic space.

A variety of media and stylistic approaches abound in the Spring Invitational Exhibition.

While some of the favorites pull from local places, other strong works in the show find inspiration elsewhere. A collection of three portraits by Dina Doyle utilize punchy primary colors to set off their subjects in highly refined oil paintings. Nearby, a large-scale image of a cactus by Elizabeth Larrimore invites viewers to look more closely at an abstracted view of a familiar botanical subject. 

Abstraction is the basis for yet another subset of works on view. Alongside a staircase in the center of the gallery, a series of works by Marjorie Jensen, William Kendall, Beth Russo, and Cindy Sachs explore varying aspects of non-obective art making. Jensen’s mixed media work, which includes a rough-edged canvas surface, is particularly appealing.

The range of media in the show is wonderful. A series of wool felt paintings by Stephanie Stroud have a fantastically tactile quality. Serena Parente Charlebois exhibits an image of a piazza using another novel method: a gilded photograph on vellum. The result is a modern day illuminated manuscript.

The architecture of DeDee Shattuck Gallery encourages visitors to look to the landscape beyond the artwork.

DeDee Shattuck Gallery, which is playing host to the SCA Spring Invitational, is one of the region’s premiere exhibition venues. Housed in a spare and barn-like building within a pastoral setting, the gallery is a place where any artist would be delighted to see their work. The main exhibition space is soaring and light, and windows and the four corners of the structure look out onto the bucolic landscape of Westport. The quality of the gallery elevates this exhibition of artists connected with and dedicated to their locale.

In a show packed with local inflection, perhaps those most celebratory of the South Coast are submissions by Josie Richmond. Employing intaglio printmaking combined with velvety encaustic, Richmond layers imagery of nearby flora and fauna on maps detailing the intricate contours of the many coves and inlets that define the South Coast. Inventive and enjoyable, they are full of community pride.

The South Coast Artists Spring Invitational Exhibition is a celebration of local art made in and around a series of charming towns nestled by the sea. The show at DeDee Shattuck Gallery invites visitors to travel to Westport to experience a fine array of artworks as well as the environment that inspired their authors. With its walls piled high with art of the region, the exhibition is an ideal opportunity to discover art made on the South Coast. 

The South Coast Artists Spring Invitational Exhibition is on view at DeDee Shattuck Gallery at 1 Partners Lane in Westport, Massachusetts, through May 29, 2022. Gallery hours are are Wednesday - Saturday from 10am - 5pm each day and Sunday from 12 - 5pm. Learn more at www.dedeeshattuckgallery.com, or at www.southcoastartists.org.

DeDee Shattuck Gallery is located at 1 Partners Lane in Westport, MA, and will host the South Coast Artists Spring Invitational Exhibition through May 29, 2022.

Mabel Dwight's American Scene

Looking back at American art in the twentieth century, some of the most valuable visual resources are those produced by printmakers. From the urban explorations of John Sloan or Edward Hopper to the more nuanced and human-focused prints of artists like Elizabeth Catlett or Sister Corita Kent, printmaking experienced something of a long golden age. Mabel Dwight is a seminal figure of the American printmaking scene, and an artist whose works are full of trenchant observations of American life. In looking at just four examples of her work, one can find insights into Dwight’s perceptive views of her time and place through the eyes of an artist.

In a 1936 lithograph, titled Ninth Avenue Church, Dwight’s wry sense of humor is on display. A white church stands in the middle of the frame, with the rising city behind and a park in the foreground. What might be a bucolic scene of a New England town common is disrupted by an elevated rail line that brings a train car rattling across the center of the image, obliterating the view of the church’s charming steeple. One imagines what the scene looked like before progress brought train tracks. The image has an auditory quality too. The church bells chiming, the murmurous chatter of park goers, and the clatter that fills any urban space. Other works throughout Dwight’s production lean heavier into the funny. Quotidien images of nuns in libraries or fish in aquariums or audiences in movie theatres are transformed into delightful narrative forays.

Mabel Dwight, Ninth Ave. Church, 1936, lithograph on paper mounted on paperboard, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Transfer from the Evander Childs High School, Bronx, New York through the General Services Administration, 1975.83.46

Dwight’s sensibility for people is another through line in her prints. In her Summer Evening, a lithograph from around 1945, a group of figures gather on a street corner lit by a singular streetlamp. The light source dangles to the side of a tilting telephone pole whose wires bleed into the dark skyscape. Under the glare below, men sit on a stoop and characters chat, presumably in the cool air of early night. The image picks up on a tradition of narrative evident in other prints, perhaps most famously in Edward Hopper or Martin Lewis. Where Lewis or Hopper may have shown the scene from above, Dwight brings the viewer eye to eye with the people on the ground. For her the corner represents a nexus of community life and conversation and connectedness. Many of her artworks are ultimately about people and the lives they lead.

Mabel Dwight, Summer Evening, ca. 1945, lithograph on paper, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Bequest of Frank McClure, 1979.98.74

As much as examinations of the American scene or Americans themselves, though, Dwight was also an extremely active artist who ran in the bohemian circles shaping the nation’s art during an exciting time. In a number of images throughout her oeuvre she examines what it means to be an artist. In her Life Class, from 1931, she shows a group of students at the Whitney Studio Club drawing from a nude model. While any art student will recognize the context of the image, Dwight also captures an art historical moment. Edward Hopper and other luminaries, which Dwight counted among her peers, are present. The image is about the art of making art and it makes one want to pick up a pad and pencil.

Mabel Dwight, Life Class, lithograph, 1931, via Swann Auction Galleries

One of Dwight’s most poignant images turns from the busy excitement of a group life class to the more solitudinous feeling of the studio. Executed in the same year as Life Class, Dwight’s Night Work probes the more solitary aspects of the art practice. Possibly a Greenwich Village scene, the image captures a sort of rear window view through the grand open windows of a neighboring studio across the way. As the hazy moon shines through the clouds above, a lamp illuminates the artist’s drawing board. The scene tells both the story of bustling urban life in the early decades of the century, but also frames the artist’s experience as one that is fundamentally a lone journey in making things.

Mabel Dwight, Night Work, lithograph, 1931, via Swann Auction Galleries

Mabel Dwight’s work is well respected in print circles and held in numerous collections including those of the Smithsonian, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and others. Her prints also appear regularly at the market and at a variety of price points. Looking at just these few examples of her work, one can appreciate Dwight’s remarkable eye and her singular contributions to the epic world of printmaking in the United States of the last century.

Attleboro Arts Museum Presents Eight Compelling Visions

Through August 28, an exhibition at the Attleboro Arts Museum explores the remarkable variety one can find within the work of just eight artists. The show, titled 8 Visions, features photographic collages by Monica DeSalvo, drawings by Craig Elliott, ceramics by Lindsey Epstein, textile-based work by Virginia Mahoney, paintings by Kat Masella and Alexander Morris, photographs by Lisa Redburn and jewelry by Chuck Tramontana. The process for selecting these eight artists began with sixty applications, first juried down to twenty finalists by Jennifer Jean Okumura, with exhibitors selected by Anne Corso and Lauren Riviello. The result is an impressive group that speaks to the richness of style and technique that can be found in the New England art community.

The show is wonderfully varied and viewers will find captivating details around every corner of the museum’s generous gallery located in the heart of downtown Attleboro. Across a spectrum of media, the exhibition brings out the individuality of the featured artists. The connecting thread is often a distinct interest in texture and surface, be it real or illusion. Particular standouts in the exhibition include the highly tactile drawings and paintings of Craig Elliott and Alexander Morris, the poignant mixed media works of Monica DeSalvo, and quiet photographic triptychs executed by Lisa Redburn.

Craig Elliott, an artist who trained as an architect, exhibits a series of charcoal drawings undergirded with thoughtful design. Included in the exhibition, one finds a collection of diminutive preparatory sketches for Totemic, one of Elliott’s large scale drawings. This gives a deep sense of the artist’s knack for craftsmanship and informs a better appreciation for the completed works on view. The little drawings, though preliminary, are actually quite exquisite and hold their own against the more “finished” works on offer.

A wall of Craig Elliott’s large charcoal drawings invites close inspection.

When looking closely at the surfaces of Elliott’s images, one can find folds in the underlying paper layered over with shadowy details that have a sculptural sensibility. Elliott’s artworks elevate charcoal, often considered an elementary medium, bringing it to the same level as painting. Once completed, the artist’s intricate drawings are varnished. This technique has the effect of coalescing the surfaces of his images into velvety and satisfying wholes. 

The painter Alexander Morris, originally from Utah and now based in Rhode Island, is exhibiting a collection of highly textured works that include, among other details, great use of mysterious calligraphic line. Morris’ paintings in the exhibition are tall and columnular, a scale and format which takes on an almost architectural significance. One can return to his work again and again, constantly finding new details. It is tempting to puzzle out how exactly Morris has applied his paints but the weathered quality of his work tends to hold its secrets even to the sophisticated observer.

Like Elliott, Morris has a smaller study included in the exhibition. Although tiny by comparison to his wall-height paintings nearby, Crow’s Nest has an equal compositional power that is impressive and merits admiration.

Wall-height paintings by Alexander Morris are rich in weathered textures.

Monica DeSalvo’s contributions to 8 Visions are deeply personal and unravel issues related to her care of her late father, who experienced dementia. In layered artworks that collage and enhance photography and found objects, DeSalvo excavates her father’s archive, unearthing materials that she combines with imagery to evoke his own words near the end of his life.

An accordion book titled What Do You Think About When You’re Not Sleeping? brings a wonderful dimensionality and duality to the experience of DeSalvo’s work, which will be impactful for the many viewers who have experienced dementia first-hand in their own families.

An accordion book by Monica DeSalvo stands out alongside her two-dimensional collages.

Some of the textural complexity found in artworks on view is captured with great sensitivity by a camera lens, rather than by pencil, pen, or brush. In alluring triptychs, Lisa Redburn utilizes a well-known historical template to honor nature. While the format with which she frames her images echoes tiny altarpieces, Redburn’s subject matter is bright and botanical. In her photographs, one finds a certain meditative quality that can also be found in the solace of the natural world, on a hike, or in a garden. They are beautiful photographs with a hint of Transcendentalism. 

A collection of Lisa Redburn’s triptych photographs paired with ceramics by Lindsey Epstein.

While Redburn, DeSalvo, Morris, and Elliott have some of the strongest works on view, all of the participating artists should be lauded for the aesthetic verdancy of their contributions to this delightful show. 8 Visions is a thoughtfully assembled exhibition that invites visitors to relish in an exciting variety of art-making by talented creators living and working in New England today.

8 Visions is on view at the Attleboro Arts Museum through August 28, 2021. The Museum is open Tuesday through Saturday, 10am - 4pm each day. Masks are required for all visitors regardless of vaccination status and admission is a suggested $3 donation. Learn more at www.attleboroartsmuseum.org.

My "Inside Art" Articles from July 2021

In July, I contributed four new articles to GoLocalProv. My column, which premiered in early June, continues to focus on local exhibitions and artists, contextualizing local art for a broad audience. This month, I wrote about Rhode Island Latino Arts reopening their gallery space in Central Falls and reviewed an exhibition of photographs by Mary Beth Meehan at WaterFire Arts Center. I also reviewed an exhibition of contemporary art at Jamestown Arts Center and produced a profile of artist and arts advocate Paula Martiesian.

Below, you can find links to each of these articles. I hope you will read them and consider sharing one or more with your own network. By sharing stories of art and artists in Rhode Island, we can support our creative community, encouraging patronage of our artists and galleries.

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I hope you will consider following me on social media, where I will be announcing each new article and other ongoing projects. Joining me on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, or Pinterest is the best way to stay up to date.

I will continue to regularly share highlights from Inside Art here on my own blog, and will continue to produce articles here on the visual arts outside Rhode Island as well as interviews and other content. Your continued readership is deeply appreciated. If you have a tip for a show I should review, please feel free to email me.

-Michael

"Inside Art" Column Premiers on GoLocalProv

Arts writing and reporting is an essential element of a thriving local art community. As someone who believes in the importance of such arts journalism and crticism, I am happy to share that I was recently invited to write a regular column on the visual arts in Rhode Island for the local online news service GoLocalProv. My column, which premiered in early June, will focus on local exhibitions and artists and will contextualize local art for a broad audience. Below, I have included the announcement about this new feature as well as my first three articles from June, 2021. I hope you will follow along with this new project and consider reading and sharing my articles.

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My first piece for GoLocalProv focused on a summer exhibition at Bert Gallery in Providence that will highlight the work of local modernists Walter Feldman, Gordon Peers, and Florence Leif.

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My second article for GoLocalProv previewed the schedule for summer salons focused on a variety of contemporary artists at Coastal Contemporary Gallery in Newport, Rhode Island.

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My third column for GoLocalProv was a review of the reopened RISD Museum in Providence.

I hope you will consider following me on social media, where I will be announcing each new article and other ongoing projects. Joining me on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, or Pinterest is the best way to stay up to date.

I plan to regularly share highlights from this new project on my personal blog, and will continue to produce occasional articles here on the visual arts outside Rhode Island as well as interviews and other content. Your continued readership is appreciated!

-Michael