Jennifer Amadeo-Holl / Amy Arbus/ David Hilliard/ Paul Stopforth/ Nona Hershey
The gallery is pleased to present an exhibition featuring new work from five of our gallery artists. The exhibition offers paintings, photography, and mixed media/ works on paper.
JENNIFER AMADEO-HOLL presents a suite of four new oil paintings in our project room. Amadeo-Holl’s work explores the relationships between mind and matter and the interplay of fact and value. She is a master colorist and an expert with the application of paint – the surfaces of her large and small works offer a surefootedness with lift, drag, gesture, and just how long to linger in a gesture or mark. Working at the intersection of figuration and abstraction her works seem to move on a matrix where subject, story, and the non-objective are both intuitive and muscular, alive in time and made apparent with our gaze.
I am drawn by the mystery of why the inanimate, including painting itself, should so often and so urgently feel sensate. I find the world simultaneously mundane and fantastical. JAH
Amadeo-Holl lives and works in the Fort Point Neighborhood of Boston. Her roots bridge an immersive arts household on Cape Cod and the island of Puerto Rico. She has received a NEFA award, a NEFA-Benton award, the Benjamin A. Trustman Fellowship, the Harvard University McCord Prize in the Creative Arts, and a Swedish Institute Fellowship. Her work is represented in public and private collections, including AFA Konstförening, Addison NY, Biogen, Cristal CCU, Fidelity, Excel, Harvard Management, The London School of Economics, Meditech, Oxfam International,
Jennifer Amadeo-Holl 'Storming the Castle' 51 x 40"
We are pleased to present a suite of eight new photographs by AMY ARBUS titled, ‘The Enchanted Forest’. For over thirty years Arbus has been known as a portrait photographer, but recently, she turned her attention to the nature of trees. Arbus greets her new subjects with a frank vulnerability and a kind of awe, as though the trees were characters in a tale that were going to teach her the lessons of life. Her new subject has not changed her style or approach. The photographs contain subtle symbols and references to memories and fairytales Amy read as a child. In her hands nature feels dependable and familiar, as if we have walked out of her pictures to see the world we’ve made, and then turned back and to see the place from which we’ve come. Looking at them is an admission of the power of vulnerability and the joy of allegorical storytelling.
These images are rendered in Arbus’ signature warm black and white, and printed with rich, complex mid-tones, a slivery world of elegant textures and light. They have the same technical and formal expertise we have come to expect from her. Like in Arbus’s portraits of people, she is searching out what makes each tree unique. The
photographs are lyrical and articulate, and open for interpretation. The viewer is offered the time, place and images with which to create their own narrative.
Photographer AMY ARBUS has had thirty-six solo exhibitions worldwide. Her photographs are a part of the collection of The National Theater in Norway, The New York Public Library and The Museum of Modern Art in New York. Arbus has taught portraiture at The International Center of Photography, The Maine Media Workshops, NORDphotography, Anderson Ranch Arts Center and The Fine Arts Work Center. Her photographs have appeared in over one hundred periodicals around the world, including New York Magazine, People, Aperture and The New York Times
Magazine. She has published five books, including the award winning On the Street 1980-1990 and The Inconvenience of Being Born. The New Yorker called The Fourth
Wall her masterpiece. After Images, her most recent, is an homage to modernism’s most iconic avant-garde paintings.
We are thrilled to present an exhibition of photographs from DAVID HILLIARD. The six multi-paneled color photographs in this exhibit partner with two photographs on view at Provincetown’s Mary Heaton Vorse House. Both exhibits take place during Hilliard’s time teaching at Provincetown’s Fine Arts Work Center where he will speak about his work on July 3.
For this exhibition we present photographs that touch on important themes in Hilliard’s work, masculinity, familial relations, memory, and place. The large triptych, ‘Toiles’ is from Hilliard’s well-known series ‘The Tale is True’ about a Provincetown home being emptied for dissolution after generations of family life facing the sea. ‘Fixing Jody’ is a riveting portrait of a man facing Hilliard’s lens directly with confident sexuality, but
with longer looking we are given access to a world of complexities. His diptych, ‘The Shortest Day’ shows the beauty and elegance available in sparse simplicity.
DAVID HILLIARD creates large-scale multi-paneled color photographs, often based on his life or the lives of people around him. His panoramas direct the viewer’s gaze across the image surface allowing narrative, time and space to unfold. The images take cues from storytelling, theater/performance and cinema. David received his BFA from the Massachusetts College of Art & Design and MFA from the Yale University School of Art. He worked for many years as an assistant professor at Yale University where he also directed the undergraduate photo department. He is a regular visiting faculty at Harvard University, the School of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Massachusetts College of Art & Design and Lesley University College of Art & Design. David also leads a variety of summer photography workshops throughout the country.
David Hilliard exhibits his photographs both nationally and internationally and has won numerous awards such as the Fulbright and Guggenheim. His photographs can be found in many important collections including the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles the Philadelphia Museum of Art. His work is represented in galleries in New York, Boston, Atlanta, and at The Schoolhouse Gallery in Provincetown, MA. In 2005 a collection of his photographs was published in a monograph by Aperture Press. In 2014, ‘What Could Be’, a monograph was published by Minor Matters Books
PAUL STOPFORTH presents a new series of paintings made with gouache on wood panels. ‘BODIES OF MEN’ consists of twelve paintings, each 16 x 16” that depicts male figures in everyday positions and places, cropped to remain anonymous. All source the
history of photography, using images taken in the late 1800’s to the present for inspiration and information. Stopforth remove evidence of individual histories via the translation from photography to paint. The specifics of each painting, the mystery of these subject’s lives, their character or spirit, is made manifest in the shape, weight, and position of their bodies. In their isolated states these figures suggest monumental quality using Stopforth’s strong sculptural modeling of the clothing that wraps around and enfolds them each figure. The clothing functions as an extension of the skin and offers clues as to the subjects’ possible identity and what action he might be performing, but his face, the color of his skin and his nationality, are not revealed. In their isolation each figure contains a core of sensuality and self-hood. They stretch, lean, tilt, move, breathe, and comfort us with their presence. Strength, tenderness, and compassion infuse these bodies with the awareness of inhabiting a physical body in all its fluidity and inherent mortality.
PAUL STOPFORTH is originally from South Africa. He emigrated to the United States thirty-two years ago where he has since lived, worked and taught in Boston, Cambridge and Provincetown. Throughout his life as an artist Paul Stopforth has created meaning using fragments of the world that reflect larger contexts within which they are found, making paintings and works on paper that continue to demonstrate a willingness to embrace disparate spaces and the objects that inhabit them. From drawings of the hands and feet of martyrs struggling for freedom and dignity in the face of South Africa’s apartheid regime, to painted fragments of landscapes within larger landscapes that embody the histories of individuals and their surrounding communities. He often makes use of 2 or 3 distinct pictorial systems, placing them in shared spaces that create luminous, dynamic and color filled paintings.
Stopforth studied at the Johannesburg School of Art and was awarded British Council Scholarship to attend the Royal College of Art in London; he and his wife Carol made the decision to leave South Africa in 1988, perhaps the bleakest year of the state of emergency period. Over the course of his career, he has held numerous one-person exhibitions both in South Africa and in the U.S.A. and has been the recipient of numerous awards and residencies. Public collections holding his works include the Harvard Film Archive, the Constitutional Court of South Africa, Tufts University Gallery, the National Gallery, Cape Town, the Johannesburg Art Gallery, Durban Art Museum, the Pretoria Art Gallery, and University of the Witwatersrand Art Galleries. Stopforth is especially noted for an important series of drawings based on the death of the Black Consciousness leader Steve Biko. He taught in the Visual and Environmental Studies Department at Harvard for 10 years and at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, Massachusetts College of Art & Design. Currently he works full time in his studio, teaching and speaking seasonally at Provincetown’s Fine Arts Work Center.
We are thrilled to present new work from NONA HERSHEY. Hershey’s work is included in public collections around the world, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY; Library of Congress, Harvard Museum; Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Yale University Art Gallery; Minnesota Museum of Art; Crakow National Museum; and the Calcografia Nazionale, Rome. She has participated in over 200 Group Exhibitions internationally. Numerous solo exhibitions include those at Mary Ryan Gallery, New York, NY; Dolan/Maxwell Gallery, Philadelphia, PA; Galleria Il Ponte, Rome, Italy; Miller Block Gallery and Soprafina Gallery, Boston, and Schoolhouse Gallery, Provincetown. For this exhibition we will present new works on paper made with graphite, gouache paint, and collage.
Hershey has had residency grants at the Asillah Forum Foundation, Morocco; Ballinglen Arts Foundation, Ireland; Ucross Foundation, WY; Virginia Center for the Creative Arts; Vermont Studio Center, and twice at the MacDowell Colony, NH. She was a recipient of a Massachusetts Cultural Grant in 2004 and 2018 and a Somerville Arts Council Grant in 2008.
She taught at Temple Abroad, Tyler School of Art in Rome, Italy for 12 years and in Tokyo for one year. From 1993 to 2018 she was Professor of Printmaking at Massachusetts College of Art and Design in Boston.