New Bedford Art Museum/ArtWorks! Members Exhibition highlights local talent
Institutional member art exhibitions — be they in museums, galleries or educational settings — can often seem to be an exercise in disarray.
Without a connective thread, motif or rationale to exhibit the work of a group of artists beyond the commonality of membership, it can feel like the visual arts equivalent of a potluck dinner. Everyone will find something they like and an offering of something they’ll they rather not indulge in. One might leave sated but it is more akin to the experience of hitting the strip mall buffet than enjoying a perfectly planned seven course dinner.
That said, the recently opened Members Exhibition at the New Bedford Art Museum/ArtWorks!, curated by Stephanie Haboush Plunkett, the Deputy Director and Chief Curator of the Norman Rockwell Museum, works rather well, for the most part. It features nearly two dozen artists working in a wide variety of disciplines and styles.
Among the exhibiting artists are some of the South Coast’s most dependable stalwarts. Local favorite Milton Brightman displays one of his familiar luminous landscape paintings featuring his trademark man and his canine companion. Susan Gilmore offers up “Blustery,” rich with an intense purple, that simplifies sky, sea and land into a harmonious merger of shapes that recede and then reassert themselves.
“Oil, Earth, Water, Air: The Silent Spring” by Jane Bregoli is a handsome still life of books that manages to reference Georgia O’Keeffe, Monet, John Lennon and Rachel Carson, as well as her medium of choice.
Ron Fortier, a onetime non-objective painter, has in the recent past created series of paintings based on the theft of children to be sold into slavery in the 1800s and on the Tulsa race massacre of 1921. In this show, he presents “New Bedford Arctic Whaling Disaster #3,” with its brown masts against a frigid blue expanse of sky, and ice as the great destroyer.
Fortier, not long ago an abstractionist who painted “about nothing”, has become an unabashed chronicler of unimaginable tragedies.
Corinna Razhikov’s “Harry on the Cliff’” is a monochromatic photographic portrait of a semi-Goth youth in a calf-length black jacket and Nikes. The image is sharp and crisp, except where it is not as the background softens into something fuzzy and dreamlike. The image itself is classically composed and seems “old-fashioned” while being absolutely of the moment.
“Twisting Dragon Fruit,” an acrylic painting by Kim Barry, with its vivid pinks and deeper reds and curves and depths and crevices, smolders with a quiet eroticism. There is nothing soft spoken about Carol Scavatto’s “Sexting”. The round fabric work is blatantly sexual, with flowers erupting from within a woman but it gets uncomfortably close to becoming a geisha girl trope.
Among the other works of note are “Abstract 6” by Allen Constant, “Daedal” by Jill Law, “Trees from Cabin Window, Kezar Lake” by JP Powel, and “Waiting on Citrus to Ripen” by Elizabeth Stanton.
Two other works in the exhibition can be understood as a kind of political commentary and they resonate with a very different kind of vibe, bordering on something that is almost non-aesthetic but instead is message driven.
“Border Nation” by Keith M. Francis is a mixed-media work that uses LEDs and neon. But this work is more akin to Jenny Holzer than Dan Flavin. On a dark wall, the neon tubing spells “openopenopenopen.” But the first threes letter and the last letter are blacked out so that it reads “nopenopenope.” The message is eloquent and simple and harsh. The border isn’t open: nope, nope, nope.
Referencing a front page article from The New York Times, published on May 24, 2020, artist Mary N. Hurwitz created “Covid-19 Pandemic Puzzle.” The story noted the names, ages and gave brief descriptions of 1000 people who had died from the coronavirus. Hurwitz transcribed (some of) that information onto blank white jigsaw puzzle pieces and assembled them into valentine heart shape. It is a subtle yet moving work displayed under glass.
An old credit card slogan said “membership has its privileges.” Membership also has its proclivities. The museum and the curator respect those proclivities and it makes for a fine exhibition…with little disarray.
“Members Exhibition” is on display at the New Bedford Art Museum /ArtWorks!, 608 Pleasant St., New Bedford until May 8.
This article originally appeared on The Herald News: New Bedford Art Museum/ArtWorks! exhibit highlights local artists
