October 9 - November 1 2015

Judy Kermis Blotnick | Jeanne-Marie Crede | Dana | Dana Ellyn | Mimi Gross | Susan Krause | Jennifer Moller | Amy Solomon

Opening Reception: Friday, October 16, 6-9 pm (during Women's Week)

Judy Kermis Blotnick

Counting Women

With a BFA from Pratt Institute Judy Blotnick had no choice but to become a fashion designer for 20+ years (so she could eat) before realizing that she really just wanted to make art ABOUT women’s voices, the fashion world and consumerism. She wound up at Boston's School of the Museum of Fine Arts/Tufts University where she now teaches, what else.... a course about art and the business of fashion. A native New Yorker, she happily lives in Boston where she indulges her other passions: drumming, improv and Ticonderoga pencils.

Judy Blotnick is a graduate of the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, and has attended Pratt Institute, School of Visual Arts, Art Students League, and Columbia University. She is the recipient of several prestigious awards for her work, including a Mass Cultural Council Award Finalist for Painting, Open Studios Press – New American Paintings #50, SMFA Traveling Scholars Award Winner, and the 91st Ruth A. Sturdivant Scholarship, along with residencies at the Vermont Studio Center and Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown.

Blotnick has participated in numerous solo and group shows in New York and Boston over the years. She is currently an associate faculty professor at the SMFA/Tufts University, “Art as Fashion, Fashion as Art”, as well as having been a visiting lecturer at Harvard University and contributing editor to various arts publications such as Big, Red and Shiny and Beacon Hill Times. In addition, she was the Executive Director of Beacon Hill Seminars, Women in Film & Video (New England), and Hill House in Boston, along with a career in fashion design at Halston, Schrader Sport and Manhattan Industries in New York that spanned from 1970 to 1985.

Jeanne-Marie Crede

In the Middle of Everything

“My art reflects my fascination with how the threads of existence weave together to form a whole. Like particles creating matter, debris from the streets and lost objects from second hand stores tell a new story of chance and creation. Using imagery and metaphor from Pop Culture, World Mythology and the material reality we all live, I glue together the various objects, papers and other ephemera, and I have a sense that I am retelling or possibly telling for the first time, a story of a life. I envisage ancestors dreaming of their descendants, of bloodlines breathing their old stories into new lives. Every thread that is cast out into the universe binds with others into new existence. And, for me, that new existence is the magic I work devotedly to express in a piece of art.”

Jeanne-Marie Crede is a self-taught mixed medium artist who has lived in the Boston area for the past 39 years. She has shown in galleries, museums and other venues all over New England. In trying to promote the idea that everyone can benefit from being creative, she has developed a series of workshops entitled “Adults at Play”. She currently works out of the Vernon Street Studios in Somerville, MA.

Dana

Imagined Memories

"My inspiration came directly from images I found inviting and wistful as a young woman – childhood thoughts imagined and stories told on canvas by Grandma Moses. I hoped to be able to create my own imagined scenes one day. I was helped along the way by my daughter who said: “just take the brush and paint, Mom, and it will come to you”. Debbie urged me to keep at it and, well, that is what happened. Living in New Hampshire at the time, I found an art teacher who helped with the basics and found acrylic paint to be the best medium for my “stories” on canvas.

My greatest wish is that if someone looks into one of my pieces, they find their own imagined memory and embrace that. We each still have that child in ourselves........and memories."

Dana is a self-taught and intuitive painter. Her approach to a work, though deceptively primitive, inventively captures a weave of time that is immune to conventional perspective opting instead for a visual narrative that makes sense.

Dana Ellyn

19 Clowns

Dana Ellyn is a full-time painter who lives and paints in her studio in Washington, DC. She committed herself fully to painting in 2002 when she decided to leave her corporate job and pursue her art. Ellyn’s style sits on the fence between social realism and expressionism. Having spent her childhood and college years honing her skills and striving to be technically correct, she now constantly tasks herself with unlearning those restrictive habits. Dana Ellyn has recently had solo exhibits in Barcelona, Spain, and Gold Coast Australia, an upcoming solo in Rehoboth, DE and several two-person exhibits with her husband (Matt Sesow) in Washington, DC, Boston, MA, Spain and France. www.danaellyn.com

Mimi Gross

Charm of the Many

“Charm of the Many, such a derangement, does not mean that many were charming, nor does it mean that many have a charm. It alludes to a surprise: in the act of painting many a different one lies a charm, single, inborn, and the painter is exposed. Is acted. It has to do with unexpectable sameness, it is serendipitous as well as recalcitrant and alarming. It lurks, very real, not behind but in front of the surfaces. It amounts to a lonesome surface, the surface of portraiture, and deals with an absence, because one does not portray life, death is the subject. Death is the component and the span, the deeper one portrays the more it dawns on us. A sameness, not opaque, with a great variety of resonances, a repeated syncope. Charm of the Many is to be sensed, obviously, under the light of Mimi’s own Coptic ways, Fayoumesque, on the arduous path of appearance.” -Dominique Fourcade

Mimi Gross is a painter, set and costume designer for dance, and maker of interior and exterior installations. She has had several international exhibitions, including work at the Salander O’ Reilly Galleries, and the Ruth Siegel Gallery, New York City, the Inax Gallery, in Ginza, Tokyo, and Galerie Lara Vincey, in Paris. She has also shown work at the Municipal Art Society and at the Port Authority Bus Terminal in New York. Her anatomically-themed artwork is on permanent display, courtesy the New York City Parks Department, at the Robert Venable Park in East New York.

Her work is included in numerous public collections, including those of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Hirschhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, The Brooklyn Museum, the Jewish Museum, le Musee des Art Decoratifs in Paris, the Nagoya Museum of Art, the Onasch Collection in Berlin and the Lannon Foundation, as well as the Fukuoko Bank in Japan and New York’s Bellevue Hospital.

Gross has been the recipient of countless awards and grants including from the New York State Council on the Arts, twice from the National Endowment for Visual Arts, the American Academy & Institute of Arts and Letters, and a “Bessie” for sets and costumes.

She held the McMillan/Stewart Endowed Chair in Painting at the Maryland College of Art in 2010-2011, and has taught at the Art Institute of Chicago, the Rhode Island School of Design, the Penland School of Crafts, Syracuse University, SUNY Purchase, as well as other universities and educational institutions, giving workshops and advising students, as a visiting artist.

From 1960-1976 Gross collaborated with Red Grooms on many large, multidimensional installations, including the fabled “Ruckus Manhattan”.

Since 1979, she has collaborated in a fruitful and on-going partnership with the dancer Douglas Dunn and his company, designing sets and costumes for his performances. She also collaborated with the poet Charles Bernstein. Her on-site drawings of the World Trade Center from 9/11 and after are included in the volume, “Some of These Daze”, published by Granary Books. www.mimigross.com

Susan Krause

Ghosts and Others

“I didn’t really know what these portraits meant to me as an artist until I started to delve into language to talk about them. I joked about the dead people gallery, referring to them as ghosts, but didn’t truly get their significance.

It wasn’t until I had finished 4 of the portraits that I became conscious of the fact that I was portraying each person as if they were apparitions existing in a liminal state somewhere between order and chaos or mythology and reality. They were ghostly and monochromatic like old sepia photographs.

Although each painting is of an actual family member or friend, they exist not only in the realm of portraiture, but as archetypes or as representatives from another country that we will all visit someday. They are our guides, but leave us with more questions than answers about what comes after this life, who are we in relation to each other, what effect do we have on this world and how will we be remembered or who will remember us. I am exploring our tenuous connection to each other and our desire to hold onto those who have gone before us. I am remembering.”

Susan Krause is a painter working in many mediums. She was born in Cleveland, OH. Her family moved to Michigan when she was 10 years old; thus began a migratory journey that would unwittingly trace the steps of her ancestors both paternal and maternal in reverse.

As a child, Susan was interested in everything. She began to read at the age of 4 and by 6 she was writing stories and plays, corralling the neighborhood kids to act in them. She has an MFA in creative writing from Sarah Lawrence College.

She came to painting later in life in response to needing a way to be creative that would get her out of her head. Watercolor was her first foray into painting. It was love at first brushstroke. Susan now paints using oil, watercolor, gouache, oil sticks, chalk pastels and oil pastels, sometimes singularly and other times mixing mediums.

Susan has painted with Michael Dowling, founder of Medicine Wheel Productions for many years. She teaches watercolor at The Boston Home, a full care residence for people with neurological diseases. She also teaches adults fifty-five and older in an aging creatively program through the Boston Public Library.

Jennifer Moller

Unbidden

“I have been sketching and drawing since childhood. Since the death of my father in 2008, I have been more intentional in my drawing practice and I have wanted to make drawings that come from somewhere outside my conscious thought. A started a blog and titled the drawing series “unbidden” because of these origins. Later, when the images start to repeat themselves I become more intentional and I can see connections. Meaning floats out of the insistent forms and deep meaning always finds a way to expression.

I am an interdisciplinary artist working in both traditional and digital mediums. I especially like to make drawings and photographs and then animate them. My childhood love of drawing has continued to this day. While working as a professional photographer and later as a videographer, I have continued to pursue personal work and exhibit when possible. I created several video festivals including installation, video projection, and public engagement. I exhibited an installation video work entitled Seas in multiple solo shows including one at the Cynthia Reeves Gallery, Chelsea, NY in 2009, and most recently at AMP Gallery earlier this year. Currentl Seas is in the permanent collection of the Hood Museum at Dartmouth University.

After graduating from Maine College of Art in 2003 I started teaching as an adjunct professor at the Art Institute of Boston. My own interdisciplinary nature allowed me to teach in three departments; illustration, animation, and foundations. In my role of art educator I have been able to share knowledge, including the creative use of digital tools and some of my interest in philosophy concepts that ground art. I continue to teach at various schools and universities today.

I have been fortunate in winning a few awards for my artwork including, an MCC grant in film and video in 2005. Other honors include an invitation to teach as an Artist in Residence for a semester at the Institute for American Indian Art in Santa Fe, New Mexico in 2010.

Born a twin, I continue to enjoy working in a collaborative framework and I have partnered with the sculptor and woodworker Beth Ireland. We have joined in on multiple adventures, with a special love for social art action projects. We co-founded Turning Around America and have worked together to share our interest in what is hand-made and our belief that art empowers people. This collaborative work has taken us to Guatemala and across the United States. We had a successful fundraising project in January of 2013 to raise money to build a mobile art studio. We built Sanctuary this summer and plan to finish it this fall. We hope to travel to art centers, museums, and to the places where people do not get exposure to art. Beth will be pulling my 2D studio, Sanctuary with her 3D studio van." www.jennifermoller.com

Amy Solomon

Altered + Missing You

Employing a variety of mediums including acrylic, medium, watercolors, sharpies, and pencils, a new context begins to appear in Amy Solomon's work that is initiated by found discarded photographs. The works are scratched with razors, rubbed with sponges, immersed in water and then sewn together to create a sense of age, place, romantic imagery, relativity, and change.

Amy Solomon is a painter and mixed media artist who has been scratching with razors on canvas and building on painted surfaces with wax and various mediums found around the studio. She has a BFA from Mass College of Art and Design. She has been teaching art in and around the Boston area for the last twelve years.