Just Looking: New England Art from YankeeMagazine.com

Glorious Tim Clorius

rss@ypi.com (Edgar Allen Beem) — Wed, 25 May 2011 04:00:00 +0100

Tim Clorius: Conversation Pieces at Aucocisco Galleries in Portland, Maine (through June 11) presents one side of one of the most interesting young artists to surface in Maine in a long time. Using the tagger name Subone, Clorius is an internationally known aerosol artist, using graffiti or street art as a way to inspire young people to find creative ways to express themselves and engage their communities. As a studio artist, however, Clorius paints strange little oils that seem part Magritte surrealism and part 18th century British genre painting, while remaining resolutely contemporary.

The Aucocisco show features 30 of the mostly small oil paintings Clorius calls "conversation pieces" in the British tradition of informal group portraits and scenes of daily life.

"Generally my paintings depict staged scenarios reminiscent of theatrical sets," Clorius wrote a few years ago on the occasion of another Portland show. "Often times I include the stage curtains or some other type of framework into the scene, using it as a prop or to remind the viewer that he/she is looking at a purposefully 'constructed' reality."

A larger-than-life aerosol painting of an eye hangs in the Aucocisco window on Exchange St., offering a glimpse of the street artist, but the 30 oils inside the gallery evidence the peculiar sensibility of a painter with a strange sense of color (various hues of fire come to mind), an active sense of art history, an ascerbic sense of humor, and a passionate engagement with the social and personal aspects of life.

Most of the paintings present cryptic, enigmatic little scenarios and dramas, the meanings of which might easily elude a viewer. Some are easily solvable, such as "Josef Albers Painting a Landscape," a kind of visual one-liner in which the painter stands in a verdant natural landscape and paints a square.

I don't think I would have ever gotten close to intent of my favorite painting in the show, however, had not the artist explained a bit about it to me. "Kuerbis Kreuzung" ("Pumpkin Crossing" in German) depicts a man standing on a railroad bridge leaning on a pumpkin that is bigger than he is. Clorius told me that when he painted this arresting little image he was thinking about Monsanto and the implications of the genetic engineering of plants.

Given the ideosyncratic nature of Clorius' ideas and images, it's probably enough just to say that in some paintings, such as a portrait of his family, he is expressing personal loves, concerns and fears, while in others, such as a picture of a lighthouse, the light beam of which is bent unnaturally, he is expressing concerns, fears, and oblique criticisms of modern life. The lighthouse painting is entitled "Offshore Banking."

Another of my personal favorites is "Artist At Work," a small oil of what look to be a pair of Spanish conquistadors on horseback (horses feature prominently in Clorius's fictive imagination)being lead through the wilds by a third, dismounted man. Whether anyone would view this as an allegory of the artist, the art dealer, and the art collector is qustionable, but that's what Clorius intends. Whether you get the implied meaning or not, all of Tim Clorius's paintings are glorious little objects, investigations of existence by an agile mind.

Tim Clorius grew up in Heidelberg, Germany, and came to this country in 1998 to study first at the School of Visual Art in New York and then at Maine College of Art.He says the little studio paintings force him to slow down and contemplate after the big, broad gestures of his street art.

"The action is in the fingers not the arms," he says of the difference between easel paintig and street painting.

Despite his unconventional approach to maintaining a public and a private art practice, Tim Clorius actually embraces a perfectly conventional view of painting.

"I believe a good painting is a beautiful, handcrafted, one of a kind object, which in some ways has a life of its own and holds within it a story, like a safe does valuable."

Get to Aucocisco and see if you can unlock some of the secrets of Tim Clorius's offbeat allegories.

[Aucocisco Galleries, 89 Exchange St., Portland ME, 207-775-222.]

Graffiti, Street Art or Vandalism?

rss@ypi.com (Edgar Allen Beem) — Tue, 10 May 2011 04:00:00 +0100

First, let me confess that I am not a big fan of graffiti art. The trains that roll slowly behind my house are covered up as high as a person can reach with aerosol tags that all look pretty much the same to me in their use of loopy, block letters. There must be something about the furtive use of spray cans and big arm gestures that results in the canned look of urban graffiti.

That said, I appreciate that graffiti has been an art form since the first prehistoric man/woman made his/her mark in a cave. The impulse to make one's mark in society is primitive and powerful. To make one's mark without permission is an even more powerful, taboo adding thrill to self-expression.

Currently, Portland, Maine, is in the midst of a public debate about the pros and cons of graffiti, aka tagging or street art. In April, the Portland Arts & Cultural Alliance held a panel discussion that pitted taggers against property owners in a city that has its fair share of graffiti. In fact, the local non-profit LearningWorks has sponsored Portland Graffiti Busters since 1994, during which time youth groups have removed close to a half million square feet of unwanted graffiti, 392 tags in 2010 alone.

The upshot of the Portland panel discussion seemed to be that, just as weeds are plants growing where you don't want them, graffiti where it is not wanted is vandalism, while graffiti were it is permitted and designated in street art. The resolve seemed to be to direct the youthful impulse to tag everything in sight toward places amenable to the more artful of aerosol art.

That's what's going on in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, at the moment. The adventurous Portsmouth Museum of Art has organized Street a.k.a. Museum, an indoor/outdoor celebration of graffiti art (May 11 to September 11) curated by Beau Basse of LeBasse Project in Los Angeles. The "exhibition" brings a group of internationally-known street artists - Bumblebee, Andreas von Chrzanowski, Herakut, Shark Toof, and Alexandros Vasmoulakis - to Portsmouth to exhibit their work in the museum and create site-specific street art on buildings and bridges around town. It's kind of too bad that Tim Clorius, another internationally-known street artist who lives in Portland, wasn't included, but Street a.k.a. Museum seems to have the city well covered from Harbopur Place to Prescott Park, the Pan Am Railway trestle to Granite State Minerals salt pile.

"With its roots in popular culture artists like Andy Warhol, Keith Haring and Jean-Michael Basquiat, street art has been with us for more than 30 years," notes the Portsmouth museum press release. "Once considered an underground artform, it is now 'mainstream' and is a genre that has gained acceptance and popularity in the art community and by the general public, playing an increasingly prominent role as an artform and cultural influence."

Except maybe in Portland.

"Portsmouth has had the same discussion," says Portsmouth Museum of Art director Cathy Sununu of the art versus vandalism debate. "This show is a way to show that street art can be used in a positive way."

[Portsmouth Museum of Art, One Harbour Place, Portsmouth NH, 603-436-0332.]

Critters Overrun UNE Gallery

rss@ypi.com (Edgar Allen Beem) — Wed, 27 Apr 2011 04:00:00 +0100

Though I am a Maine native and Maine resident, I try not to be too much of a homer when it comes to covering art in New England. But if you will indulge me on this my third Maine blog in a row, I promise to start getting out and about more now that spring has arrived.

Critters is just too much fun to pass up. The overflow exhibition of animals in art at the University of New England Art Gallery in Portland (through July 20)is the eighth "critters" show curator Nancy Davidson has organized in a long career owning and managing art galleries in Maine and Florida. Nancy says she likes to curate animal shows because, whatever one's level of art appreciation, everyone loves animals in art, from primitive humans doing cave paintings to contemporary artists trying to get back in touch with their primitive side.

Nancy Davidson calls the UNE exhibition her "grande Critters show" as it features 100 artist from all over new England and the Northeast, their artworks filling all three floors of the the college's little cubist gallery and spilling outside onto the grounds. To keep her ark of art somewhat in order, Davidson has installed farm animals in the basement gallery, pets on the ground floor, and wild animals on the second floor.

Visitors to the gallery are greeted outside by fanciful creatures such as a great stone bird by Andreas Von Huene and a pair of tree branch moose, one by Nantz Comyns, the other by Andy Moerlein and Donna Dodson.

"My artwork celebrates the mystical relationship between human beings and the animal kingdom," writes Donna Dodson, articulating what might well be the overarching theme of the exhibition.

Children and the young at heart will love Critters for its lively, colorful, and diverse manifestation of the animal world. Lions, and tigers, and bears, oh my! There are iconic works by artists well-known for their depiction of animals, such as a wooden tiger by the late Bernard Langlais and a signature fantasy painting of leopard and antelope by Dahlov Ipcar. And there are wonderfully strange creations such as a wheeled rabbit by Andy Rosen.

Among my personal favorites are a peculiar jungle tabealu by Philip Carlo Paratore, a school of ceramic trout by Sharon Townshend, a wacky cat lady painted by Peyton Higgison, pastoral portraits of cows by Sharon Yates, a folk art rendering of a cat in a garden by Charles Wilder Oakes, and a serious of fabulous fabulist paintings by Fleur Palau.

I think I'd give the Critters blue ribbon, however, to New Hampshire painter Katherine Doyle for her five-part bvertical self-portrait with a small bird perched atop her head. The bird, a thrush, was inspired by a wild bird that Doyle once cared for and nursed back to health.

"The bird is a sort of crown," Doyle writes, "a reminder of my wild nature and animal origin, a stand-in for the finer part of my self whose feet have been set down in the tangled fibers of phsyical experience, and whose perfect eye looks out unabashed at the world."

Lighter fare with a serious subtext.

[UNE Art Gallery, 716 Stevens Ave., Portland ME, 207-221-4499.]

Paintings, Photographs, and Projects Galore

rss@ypi.com (Edgar Allen Beem) — Tue, 12 Apr 2011 04:00:00 +0100

The seventh edition of the Portland Museum of Art Biennial, which began in 1998, features 65 works by 47 artists selected from some 3,600 works submitted to a three-person jury by 902 artists. The resultant exhibition, selected by New York art dealer Jim Kempner, painter David Row, and Smithsonian American Art Museum curator Joanna Marsh, is divided roughly equally into paintings, photographs, and installation projects and comes across as an entertaining if not very coherent art sampler.

To my eye and taste, the most memorable works in this year's biennial are the installations. Their playfulness, inventiveness, and sheer size overpower the paintings and photographs. My favorite is an elegant and sublime ink on transparent polyester film installation by Avy Claire entitled For the Trees. Bare, ghostly trees are "drawn" on the hanging sheets of plastic. Only upon close inspection do you notice that the lines are actually words, Claire having used a fine-point Rapidograph to transcribe radio news she was hearing in her studio into the form of trees.

Someone is doing something right in the art department at Kennebunk High School, because two of the biennial installation artists are KHS grads, Natasha Bowdoin and Alisha Gould. Bowdoin, who now lives in Houston, Texas, fills a two-story gallery wall with a cut paper pencil and gouache "drawing" in the form of a bed of seaweed. Again, upon closer inspection, the text of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland are hand-printed on the branches. Gould blows figurative holes in the wall of the museum's Great Hall with her clay and ink installation Ejecta.

Across from Gould's eruption is an installation by University of Southern Maine professor Michael Shaughnessy that climbs all three stories of the Great Hall in a cascade of bound hay. Inside the main exhibition gallery, visitors are greeted by Kim Bernard's kinetic Synergy 17, a line of 17 orbs of orange encaustic suspended on wires from wall-mounted brackets such that, when activated by a gallery attendant, bob and dance.

To enter the gallery, visitors literally walk on Carly Glovinsky's work, a ramp made of phonebooks. And Lauren O'Neal contributes a pile of 60-plus chairs stacked willy-nilly against a gallery wall that struck me as comic Cubism for some reason.

For those with more conventional tastes in art, there is a plenty of a very solid conventional painting by painters Mary Aro, Carol Aronson-Shore, Thomas Connolly, Sarah Faragher, Kathleen Galligan, Marissa Girard, Sarah Knock, Rebecca Rivers, Robert Shillady, and Suzanne Sinclair. The jurors seem to have bent over backwards to accommodate the prevalence of the Maine landscape.

Photographers account for almost one-third of the exhibition, far too many in my humble opinion. There are some very fine photographs, however, chief among them Siri Kaur's portait of female high school wrestler and Liv Kristin Robinson's quartet of distant views of New York City.

Lest one think Portland provincial, the biennial includes artists from Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New York, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Texas and California, albeit with Maine connections. The 2011 Portland Museum of Art Biennial is on view until June 5.

[Portland Museum of Art, Seven Congress Square, Portland ME, 207-775-6148.]

Governor Orders Maine Labor Mural Removed

rss@ypi.com (Edgar Allen Beem) — Tue, 29 Mar 2011 04:00:00 +0100

An anonymous "Secret Admirer" contacted Maine Gov. Paul LePage to complain that the history of Maine labor mural in the waiting room of the Department of Labor in Augusta made him/her feel as though he/she were in North Korea. In keeping with his penchant for kowtowing to business interests, the governor issued an order to have the offending mural removed on the grounds that it did not balance the interests of employers with those of employees.

Immediately, the red flag of censorship went up in both the art community and the organized labor community. Rob Shetterly, president of the Union of Maine Visual Artists, and Natasha Mayers, one of Maine's most active political artists, jumped into action rallying artists and union members to a Friday, March 25, noon press conference to express opposition to LePage's attempt to bowdlerize Maine history.

Close to 300 people jammed the long narrow hallway of what must surely be the most dismal and Kafkaesque public building in Maine, a vast warehouse of office cubicles on the outskirts of town that is home to the Department of Labor and Department of Public Safety. Protestors, many wearing 61% decals identifying them as among the majority of Maine voters who did not vote for Paul LePage, strained to hear as Shetterly and labor historian Charlie Scontras defended the mural.

The focus of all the furor was the future of the 11-panel, 36-foot mural painted in 2008 by artist Judy Taylor of Tremont. The mural fills the windowless Labor Department waiting room wall-to-wall and floor-to-ceiling with scenes from the history of labor in Maine. Judy Taylor is a very traditional painter, not a political artist at all. She simply created panels depicting and commemorating historical facts - child labor, labor strikes, the formation of unions, women in the workforce.

The Department of Labor itself was created at the urging of labor unions. But Gov. LePage thinks the murals should have represented the owners and the bosses as well, so he ordered the mural removed. The controversy that has ensued is a reminder that art still has the power to provoke and disturb. The fact that the mural made a few businessmen uncomfortable is a good thing. We have largely overcome the history of the exploitation of the health and safety of workers for the profit of the few, but we do not want to forget that it happened.

Even as the artists and unionists were expressing their disapproval of the removal order, the governor was announcing that arrangements had been made to send the mural to Portland City Hall. Rep. Ben Chipman (U-Portland) has been instrumental in trying to arrange for the mural to go into Portland exile, but most of the folks opposed to the mural's removal are therefore opposed to its relocation. Maine Arts Commission director Donna McNeil and Maine State Museum director Joseph R. Phillips, probably fearing the funding wrath of Boss Paul, were both a little too quick for many artists' tastes to distance their agencies from the mural. McNeil pointed out that it was not a Percent for Art project and that it could easily be removed if need be. Phillips dropped the mural like a hot potato, arguing that the museum does not collect contemporary art.

No Maine museum with a serious investment in contemporary art and artists' moral rights is apt to aid and abet the governor by taking custody of the mural. Despite having said that the mural would not be removed until a new home was found for it, Gov. LePage had the mural removed to storage over the weekend. Legal challenges are now being mounted to LePage's authority to order the mural removed in the first place. Another protest is being planned for April Fool's Day.

For her part, artist Judy Taylor says, "I would like it to stay where it was intended to be. The mural does not belong to me but to the people of the State of Maine. I always hope they will have free and easy access to view it."

[For more information and updates, visit the Saving Maine's Labor History Mural website.]

Give 'Em the Old Razzle Dazzle

rss@ypi.com (Edgar Allen Beem) — Wed, 16 Mar 2011 04:00:00 +0100

Google "famous glass artist" and the first entry that comes up is "Dale Chihuly." The second lists seven "famous glass masters," Chihuly and six artists you may never have heard of. Personally, the only other glass artist I can name is Harvey Littleton, the father of the modern glass movement and Chihuly's mentor.

Dale Chihuly has pretty much cornered the market as far as glass art goes. Since the late 1960s and early 1970s when he studied with Littleton at the University of Wisconsin, apprenticed in Venice, and established both the glass program at Rhode Island School of Design and the Pilchuck Glass School in Stanwood, Washington, Chihuly's fame has expanded fabulously, leaving the burly, curly-haired, piratically eye-patched impresario of razzle-dazzle atop the world of glass art all by himself.

Well, not quite by himself. Chihuly hasn't blown glass himself since 1979 when he injured himself bodysurfing. He employs a staff of hundreds, travels with a huge entourage, and has his ideas executed by assistants. And those ideas tend to boil down to one predominant aesthetic - be flamboyant!

Chihuly: Through the Looking Glass at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston (April 10 to August 7) will be like an early 70th birthday celebration for the great man, filling the museum's new Shapiro Family Courtyard and Ann and Graham Gund Gallery with a dazzling display of a wild array of colored glass, most inspired by flowers and plant life and calculated to outshine Mother Nature in terms of sparkle and gaudiness.

The signature piece of the Boston MFA show is the latest iteration of Chihuly's Lime Green Icicle Tower, a 42-foot high stalk of glass spikes that is essentially one of Chihuly's familiar, Medusa-like chandeliers mounted upside down. There are also several of Chihuly's spectacular chandeliers and the 58-foot long Mille Fiori installation last seen at the RISD Museum three years ago.

Glass artists have often been dismissed by fine artists for creating "eye candy," beautiful objects that are all show and no meaning. Dale Chihuly seems to have taken on this challenge with a vengeance, pushing the decorative qualities of glass to the max, making it as garish, glittering, and flowery as possible. And it works.

If you just want to make your retinas dance, get to the MFA this spring.

[Museum of Fine Arts, 465 Huntington Ave., Boston MA, 617-267-9300.]

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iImages and eMirrors

rss@ypi.com (Edgar Allen Beem) — Wed, 02 Mar 2011 05:00:00 +0100

In a nice coincidences of exhibitions, the Portsmouth Museum of Art and the Institute of Contemporary Art at Maine College of Art in Portland are currently featuring shows in which contemporary artists use 21st century technologies to wonderful aesthetic effect.

In iImage: The Uncommon Portrait (through April 24), the Portsmouth Museum of Art presents yet another in its challenging series of exhibitions, this one curated by Stephanie Holt and featuring 14 artists who, in various hi tech ways, redefine the concept of portraiture for the 21st century.

In Fracturing the Burning Glass: Between Mirror and Meaning at MECA's ICA (through April 10), curator Linda Lambertson brings together the works of four artists who use digital and mechanical media to expand the nature of reflection and identity. sculptural installation, photography, video, and

The one artist iImage and Mirror have in common is Daniel Rozin, an interactive art star who teaches at New York University. Born in Jerusalem and trained as an industrial designer, Rozin creates on the cutting edge of art and technology.

In Portsmouth, Rozin is represented by his 2004 "Time Scan," one of his series of "software mirrors" that respond in various ways to the physical presence of people. In "Time Scan," one vertical line of pixels of a person's likeness is scanned and continuously copied sideways, creating a wavy log of person from a variety of angles over the course of 30 seconds.

In Portland, Rozin shows three of his hi tech mirrors, my favorite being his 2006 "Snow Mirror," a mesmerizing installation that uses a computer, custom-designed software, a video camera and a silk screen to create "mirror" images of the viewers. Stand in a darkened room in front the screen and the "snow" that seems to be falling on the screen coalesces around your likeness. I saw people spend more time in front of Daniel Rozin's "Snow Mirror" than any work of art I have ever seen except maybe the Mona Lisa.

Photography made the art of portraiture more or less obsolete except for memorializing retired college presidents, governors, and corporate CEOs. But, as iImage illustrates, what becomes obsolete also becomes liberated, freed to be something entirely different than a mere likeness. In "Uniform/s:Self-Portrait/s: My 39 Years," for example, Korean artist Do Ho Suh offers a clothes rack upon which he has hung the 10 different uniforms he has worn in his life.

New Yorker artist R. Luke Dubois used algorithms to create "portraits" of U.S. presidents out of the words used most frequently in their State of the Union Addresses. The words are then mounted on light boxes like optical acuity eye test charts.

You get the idea? Need I go on? Both iImage in Portsmouth and Fracturing the Burning Glass in Portland present complex, sometimes mystifying, always compelling works of art that challenge the very definition of what a work of art is or can be, which is what most great art did in its day.

[Portsmouth Museum of Art, One Harbour Place, Portsmouth NH, 603-436-0332. Institute of Contemporary Art, Maine College of Art, 522 Congress St., Portland ME, 207-699-5040.]

Let's Hear It for Local Yokels!

rss@ypi.com (Edgar Allen Beem) — Wed, 16 Feb 2011 05:00:00 +0100

Three years ago, on March 6, 2008, I called your attention to Boston Phoenix art critic Greg Cook's art blog, New England Journal of Aesthetic Research. Two years ago, February 4, 2009, I reported on the Boston Art Awards Cook had created in order to recognize local art and artists. On December 22, 2009, I discussed Cook's campaign championing Yokelism, roughly translated as paying attention to local art.

Now I'm back to report that the Third Annual New England Art Awards (Greg having expanded the name to reflect the regional reality) were a huge success. Some 123 individuals nominated close to 900 artists, curators, writers, art works, and exhibitions in 19 categories and 2,205 art lovers and 10 art writers cast votes. The winners were announced on the evening of February 9 at the New England Art Awards Ball held in the back room of the Burren, a tavern on Davis Square in Somerville, Massachusetts.

As Greg Cook explained, "The New England Art Awards are a Yokelist project. The Awards are focused on exhibits organized here, and writing done here, and especially on art made here in New England. They are an argument about what we value here."

Being a Maine provincialist of sorts, I was pleased that once again one of the big winners was a Maine-based artist.

In 2009, sculptor John Bisbee's solo exhibition at the Portland Museum of Art won Best Solo Show by a Local Artist. This year the intimitable Bisbee served as emcee of the awards night. In 2010, painter Mark Wethli, Bisbee's colleague on the Bowdoin College art faculty, won the award for painting. And this year, installation artist Anna Hepler, who has also taught at Bowdoin, was both people's choice and critics' pick in Sculpture, her "Makeshift" exhibition at Portland Museum of Art was the critics' pick for Best Solo Show by a Local Artist, and Hepler was the concensus selection to win the Maud Morgan Prize for midcareer woman artist.

The New England Art Awards do not actually select the Maud Morgan Prize winner, that responsibility falls to Boston's Museum of Fine Arts, which awards the Maud Morgan Purchase Prize to celebrate under-appreciated, mid-career Massachusetts women artists. The MFA hasn't awarded the $5,000 Maud Morgan Prize, named for the late abstract artist, since 2006 and, as one of his Yokelist projects, Greg Cook has been lobbying it to do so.

The Boston MFA has announced that it will revive the moribund Maud Morgan Prize, but I'm not sure Anna Hepler will actually be in the running for it. I suppose it depends on how one defines a "Massachusetts artist." Hepler is a Massachusetts native, but she is based now in Portland and couldn't be on hand to accept her New England Art Awards because she is doing a year-long artist residency program in New Mexico. The message of thanks she sent to the awards also makes me wonder whether Hepler would accept the Maud Morgan Prize if she did win it.

"I am obliged to speak this evening from the austerity of southeastern New Mexico where I am living and working this year," Anne Hepler wrote. "It is of course very flattering for my artwork to be recognized in this way - work which is ongoing with or without recognition. And it is humbling to be involved with this event at a time in my life when I am seriously questioning my relationship to the art world. I suppose I find it all more and more difficult to explain - to myself, I mean - the deeply rooted reflex to make, then the obligation to name, show, discuss, and perchance sell. This work which seems to want to come into being with or without these outlets and commentaries. For me I fear it will be increasingly hard to rationalize as time goes on. But I am glad for this chance to pause and consider these thoughts, though indirectly, with you. I send along these words with my heartfelt gratitude and warm regards."

For an artist who is being recognized in ever-expanding art circles to question her relationship to the art world strikes me as simultaneously ironic and appropriate.

I will leave you to visit the New England Journal of Aesthetic Research website to see all the nominees and winners, but I would just call your attention to the people's choice award in the category, Performance or Spectacle. That honor went to the Casilio triplets, Alicia, Kelly and Sara, and photographer Cary Wolinsky who perform together as Triiibe. The identical triplets use their startling similarity to make social and political commentary, both in performance pieces and in photographs. For the New England Art Awards, the Caslio triplets appears as beauty queens wearing sahes reading Miss Represent, Miss Lead, and Miss Apprehension. Great stuff!

The Feathered Hand

rss@ypi.com (Edgar Allen Beem) — Wed, 02 Feb 2011 05:00:00 +0100

Alison Hildreth has one of the finest literary imaginations of any artist I know. Her deeply personal, intuitive paintings, prints, drawings, and installations are often informed by her readings of visionary writers such as Jorge Luis Borges, Octavio Paz, and W.G. Sebald.

So it does not surprise me that The Feathered Hand, Hildreth's wondrous exhibition at the University of New England Art Gallery in Portland (through April 3) takes its title from a poem by Polish poet Zbigniew Herbert entitled "Chosen By The Stars."

It is not an angel it is a poet

He has no wings only a right hand covered by feathers

he beats the air with his hand flies up three inches and immediately falls again

When he has fallen all the way he kicks with his legs Hangs for a moment Waving his feathered hand

Alison Hildreth is not an angel. She is an artist. The Feathered Hand is a finely conceived and elegantly articulated exhibition in which she employs prints, drawings, and hanging glass and paper puppets in her own attempt to fly back to her childhood imagination.

"The installation is based on an interest I have had for a long time in puppets," Hildreth writes. "They are not presented as marionettes so much as inanimate objects that I remember investing much imagination in as a child. The time in our lives when the real and the imaginary are so intertwined."

Portland glass artist Ernie Paterno helped Hildreth fashion the puppets and other glass ampules and vials that are suspended from the gallery ceiling by fine wires.Some of the puppets sprouts feathered wings, while others seem to have slipped into bat wings. The puppet installation resonates in its imagery and its aspirations with past bodies of Hildreth's work which have been filled with bats and insects, airplanes and angels. Indeed, the torsos of some of the little glass figures are filled with dead bees.

"An important part of being human," Alison told me a few years ago, "is that our reach exceeds our grasp. We fly. We know we may crash, but we do it anyway."

With The Feathered Hand one of Maine's most serious and accomplished artists takes off and takes the viewer with her. Absolutely not to be missed.

[University of New England Art Gallery, 716 Stevens Ave., Portland ME, 207-221-4499]

Women of Pop Art

rss@ypi.com (Edgar Allen Beem) — Wed, 19 Jan 2011 05:00:00 +0100

The Pop Artists of the 1960s used the materials and imagery of popular culture (advertising, comic books, consumer products, etc) in the service of a fine art that at once reflected and commented upon 20th century materialism. Most of the famous Pop Artists were men - Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Claes Oldenburg, Robert Indiana, James Rosenquist, Tom Wesselman. We tend to forget, if we ever knew, that there were women among the Pop Art brigade as well.

Seductive Subversion: Women Pop Artists, 1958-1968 at the Tufts University Art Gallery in Medford, Massachusetts, is an exhibition of 68 artworks by 22 artists meant to address this oversight. Originally organized by the Rosenwald-Wolf Gallery of The University of the Arts, Philadelphia, Seductive Subversion (at Tufts January 27 to April 3) recently won the Best Thematic Show Nationally from the U.S. chapter of the International Art Critics Association.

"In recovering important female artists," states the exhibition press release, "the show expands the canon to reflect more accurately the women working internationally during this period."

Seductive Subversion features some very well-known artists such as Vija Celmins, Chryssa, Rosalyn Drexler, Niki de Saint Phalle, Marisol, and Faith Ringgold, though Celmins and Ringgold are not ordinarily thought of as Pop Artists. Most of the artists featured are far less well known. I have never, for instance, heard of artist Eveyline Axell, Letty Eidenhauer, Dorothy Grebenak, Dorothy Iannone, Kay Kurt, and Barbro Ostlihn. But then that's the point, right?

What Seductive Subversion asks viewers to consider is both what women artists contributed to Pop Art and which women artists might justifiably be labeled Pop Artists. Because of male domination, it is difficult not to see the Pop Art of most of these women as derivative of their more famous male counterparts. Nor is it likely that any of the women of Pop will ever enjoy the iconic status of an Andy Warhol or a James Rosenquist.

Seductive Subversion curator Sid Sachs made the charge of sexism explicit in quoting artist Carolee Schneeman (not included in the exhibition) as saying the New York art scene of the 1950s and 1960s, "You had to shut up and affiliate yourself with interesting men and you had to be good looking."

"Vacuuming Pop Art" by Martha Rosler pretty much tells the sad Seductive Subversion story. The 1967-72 photomontage is a satiric comment on the subservient role of women in the art world of the time. No wonder that a whole new wave of Feminist art arose in the wake of Pop.

The exhibition traveled from Philadelphia to Lincoln, Nebraska, and Brooklyn, New York, before arriving in Medford. This barnstorming will surely help with the revisionist mission of the exhibition.

[Tufts University Art Gallery, Aidekman Arts Center, 40 Talbot Ave., Medford, MA, 617-627-3518]

http://www.ase.tufts.edu/gallery/