Photo by Amanda Hale
It was an amazing experience to work with the Philadelphia Museum of Art and Mural Arts to create a painting in response to Matisse in the 1930s exhibit from 2022-2023. My painting was made into a vinyl mural that can be seen at 7th and Willow street in Philadelphia.
You can see the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s project website HERE
And below are just two of the videos we made for this project.
Here is my interview with my TA from Spring 2023 at Tyler School of Art during the TUGSA strike at Temple University. We had a great conversation about her work - I hope you’ll read it.
Molly Burt-Westvig, I Only Tell Ghost Stories, Printed voile on linen, 2022
I have had the privilege of writing for Artblog on occasion. In December 2022 I wrote a review for Eleanor Conover’s solo show at Swarthmore College’s List Gallery
You can find the review here
Gallery view of Eleanor Conover’s show “Side Angle Tide” at Swarthmore’s List Gallery. Image courtesy of List Gallery.
Do or Don’t Do It Yourself: A Paint by Number Show
February 23rd - March 30th, 2023
Dorrance H Hamilton Gallery, Salve Regina University, Newport CT
Kate Bae, Jenny Brown, Katie Commodore, Teresa Cox, Marjorie Hellman, Lori Larusso, Ghost of A Dream, Will Hutnick, Jodie Mim Goodnough, Karl LaRocca, J Myszka Lewis, Jerry Mischak, Kristen Schiele, Jen Shepard, Michelle Weinberg, Lauren Whearty, Jamie Vasta, Visiting Adjunct Curator Kirstin Lamb
Opening Reception February 23rd 5-7pm
The Dorrance H. Hamilton Gallery is pleased to announce the opening of our group show “Do or Don’t Do It Yourself: A Paint by Number Show”. An opening reception with short conversations with several of the included artists is scheduled for Thursday, February 23rd, at 5:30 p.m. If anyone can make it, why is it art? Why should an artist be interested? At once an emblem of mindless conformity, leisure time, the machine age and the possibilities of collaboration with the machine, the paint by number continues to inspire artists, despite its purported bad reputation. The form of paint by number democratizes painting, heralding the moment when you too, could be a painter. This show gathers a range of artists working with painting, sculpture, textiles, and drawing and looks at the leisure activity and hard-edged readymade as it has influenced a range of contemporary American artist’s aesthetics. What is possible now that we can use computers to generate patterns once done by hand? What does a paint by number become in the digital age? What does it symbolize? Why would an artist want to use that symbolism and aesthetic? As a curator and an artist, I find myself gravitating to work that I feel is in some way influenced by the paint by number, either its high color and hard edges or its readymade order-from-the-internet art objects. One can get photographs printed as canvases of number gridded textiles, plans for embroideries, paintings and more, thanks to the advancements in printing, graphics and 3d printing.
Some of the artists in this show were initially uncomfortable with the idea of being included in a show about Paint by Number aesthetics. As an artist and curator, I love the art form, and use it in my work, but I can understand the hesitation. I am not judging the work as less than, or without skill. I am looking for evidence of the machine, the aesthetic of the edges of the form. We have easy access to photo processing programs in our computers and phones and that changes our visual lexicon, the high color and sharp edges spend a greater time in our field of view.
This is at once a celebration of a democratic art form and a salutation to that form in many different conceptual and painterly art practices.
The Dorrance H. Hamilton Gallery is located in the Antone Academic Center on the campus of Salve Regina. It is handicap accessible with parking along Lawrence Avenue and Leroy Avenue. Its exhibits are open to the public Tuesdays and Thursdays from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m.; Wednesdays and Fridays from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m.; and Saturdays and Sundays from Noon to 4 p.m. The gallery is closed on Mondays.
For the run of this show, the gallery will also be closed for Salve Regina’s Spring Break, Saturday March 11 th – Sunday March 19 th , please be aware of these hours.
The exhibition was also revied by Salve Today - Please check it out!
It was such an honor to be invited to talk about my work at Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts by the Visiting Artist Program.
Organized by Leonora Loeb + Keisha Prioleau-Martin
October 30th – November 21st
Saturdays + Sundays 1-6pm
Opening Reception Friday, October 29th, 6-8 pm
Closing Reception, Sunday November 21, 4-6 pm
Julia Blume
Madeline Donahue
Kathleen Granados
Alison Owen
Alfredo Plot
Giancarlo Montes Santangelo
Logan t. Sibrel
Wendy Small
Lauryn Welch
Lauren Whearty
Nice to See You Again is a show dedicated to our shared longing to be embraced by the outdoors while simultaneously craving the warmth of the indoors. This year our outdoor spaces have taken on a new significance, and as we see another winter approaching we want one last backyard barbecue! We need one more hour of direct sunlight on our studio cactus! These works play with ideas of inside and outside and greet us after a long journey.
Please check out this video, generously put together by the Golden Foundation Residency in lieu of a public open studio event to share our work with the public. I’m so grateful for the time that I got to spend with all of the professionals at Golden, and my two fellow residents, Rabia Ajaz, and Ursula Gullow.
It is a pleasure to announce my inaugural exhibition, A Collective Escape, a group exhibition with Matilda Forsberg, Brittany Miller, Kevin O'Hara, Ricardo Partida, Ahna Serendren, Emma Steinkraus, Xiao Wang and Lauren Whearty. All artists were selected from a blind open call juried by Elizabeth Buhe, Alejandro Jassan and Nickola Pottinger.
Despite its many quarantines, delays and challenges, 2020 has found a way to bring us together through our collective need for escape, both mentally and physically. This unprecedented time has encouraged us to find different forms of joy in unexpected places. This group exhibition, A Collective Escape, maps out the journey from dream to liberation to destination.
Each work in this exhibition embodies different stages of escapism – through dreaming and fantasy, road trips and vacations, or finding new joy in the everyday, like creating a vegetable garden. All with the goal of uncovering simple ways to sink into your own space and mind at a time when you may not be able to physically depart.
Matilda Forsberg tells tales of family, identity, and heritage in her work. Originally from Sweden, her practice reflects on place, displacement, longing, and a search for new bonds. Laying the foundation for identity building, her paintings conflate her present experiences with narratives from the past by intermingling histories, memories, and feelings. While her work often originates from a deep personal connection to a place or an experience, the subjects are more universal, inspired by the complexities of cultural tradition carried forth by generations of families through rituals and shared experiences.
Brittany Miller paints scenes of vulnerable figures in her works, crouched and curled up in vague domestic spaces with expressions of listlessness and trepidation. Spinning cyclones and windswept landscapes press up against the windows, threatening the interiors. The bodies at rest fill the space – daydreaming and waiting for a storm that may or may not arrive.
Kevin O’Hara makes images that maintain an illusion of realism until inspected closely. The surface is deliberately inscrutable, prizing abstraction and mark making over detail as an intimate viewing experience. The eye catching depiction captures the viewer and draws them into a world of pure paint. The subject matter is a playground: chosen for symbolic meaning as well as a codified visual language that hosts an extremity of light and dark, soft and hard, saturation and texture.
Ricardo Partida has built a body of work that includes unconventional ideas of gender and sexuality as part of its value system. Partida creates power structures that dismantle and infiltrate Western ideas of gender and desire. In his practice, he paints saucy mythological avatars that embody power and desire. By combining neoclassical representations of Greek mythology and running it through a homoerotic filter, Partida creates fantasy surrogacies of seduction that include unconventional ideas of gender performance and sexuality as part of its value system.
Ahna Serendren builds up layers of oil paint and sand collected from beaches along the coast of California, where she grew up, in her paintings. Disorienting in perspective or scale, the spaces of these paintings are often difficult to place. Are they cellular or interstellar? Inside or outside the body? The shapes and forms found in these paintings could just as easily exist on the seashore or forest floor as inside the body, pointing toward our essential interconnectedness with the natural world.
Emma Steinkraus constructs saturated, fantastical paintings and installations that play with historical modes of representation to claim space for women and non-human nature. Her current project, Impossible Garden, reveals the contributions women artists made to natural history. This series layers paintings over a wallpaper installation that is collaged from depictions of flora and fauna made by women between the 16th and 19th centuries.
Xiao Wang is a figurative oil painter working with dramatic colors and thin glazes to render realistic landscapes and figures. His work meditates and reimagines the tradition of romanticism and the dynamics between landscape, power and expression. Wang examines the Romanticist views of nature and their ties to Enlightenment ideologies. In his paintings, depictions of nature are not a means to an end. He paints vegetation with distorted forms and colors, depicting plants as uncanny, sublime, and supernatural beings. Simultaneously, he portrays human figures with feelings of confusion and resignation, putting them at the mercy of the landscape.
Lauren Whearty investigates personal narratives through the shared cultural, and often domestic, lens of objects and scenes. These still life paintings set the stage for stories that are not fully told in a single image, and hint at more beyond the edge of the canvas. Lauren sees the practice of painting as an important form of active observation, which calls on us to consider the everyday in new and critical ways.
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In the fall of 2020, artists were invited to apply for a blind open call for Deanna Evans Projects’ first exhibition in a new commercial space in January 2021. After years of exhibitions in pop-up spaces and Deanna’s apartment, we are excited to open our first commercial space and open up the opportunity to be a part of the inaugural exhibition, but with a twist. There are so many layers of bias that are involved in putting together an exhibition. By making this a blind open call, we are aiming to strip back some of the layers of prejudice including but not limited to race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, age, experience, familiarity and/or notoriety. For this open call, there will be no CV, bio or details about the work included in the proposal, only 5 images. Our 3 guest jurors, Elizabeth Buhe, an art historian and critic, Alejandro Jassan, Associate Director of Press Relations at Lehmann Maupin, independent curator, writer and collector, and Nickola Pottinger, an artist and curator, will be presented with 5 images of each artist's work without any additional information. They will each be asked to pick their top 5, and from these 15 artists, Deanna Evans will curate her inaugural commercial space exhibition in January 2021. Not all 15 artists will be included, allowing for a more cohesive exhibition. It is an imperfect process, but attempts to dismantle the barriers to entry for artists by focusing solely on the work.
I’m excited to announce that I’m included in this group exhibition at Delaware Contemporary. Farthest From the Ordinary - Juried & Curated by Rick Hidalgo. The exhibition is on view until January 8, 2021.
Grant Recipient
I’m so excited to announce that I have been awarded the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Grant. Based in Québec, Canada, the Foundation “provides financial assistance, by way of grants, to young artists who are pursuing their studies or are in the early or developmental stage of their career, are working in a representational style of painting, drawing, sculpture or printmaking, and demonstrate the determination and talent to pursue a lifetime career in their art practice.”
AUBREY LEVINTHAL: Velvet Moon, oil on canvas, 22" x 18"
The act of painting a window-view is an unabashed celebration of the best of painting. Time, materiality, subjectivity, are all present within the narratives. There are few subjects more traditional to painting, and yet it has endless possibilities. A painting of a view outwards can carry with it a multitude of meaning, emotion, and visual/tactile pleasures. Most of all it is a dialogue with the practice of painting, image making, and our practice of painting on (for the most part) a window frame stretched with canvas.
Leon Battista Alberti asked his audience to perceive the painting, and its underlying structure, as a window itself. This 15th Century metaphor may seem antiquated, yet these artists show us that within this concept there is so much potential. Within Frame Work these settings range from those based on memory, to those directly observed, to inventions and reconstructions of ideal or imagined spaces.
Each artist works through this motif in order to dig deeper into their own practice. Kelly McRaven’s employs physical divisions as a way to use many styles or variations within one painting, while Jennifer Packer’s careful insertion of breath into each painting displays her touch and hints of air movement. Jennifer Packer employs narration in a figurative way, while George Rush implies it through much more subtle means. Dustin Metz and Aubrey Levinthal flirt with more gestural abstraction through their use of tactile experimentation and Eleanor K. Ray navigates memory through use of the grid and color to evoke light’s ethereal, emotional and temperature qualities.
When we approach a window and its frame, we look through rather than “at” it. The experience of a painting is a look into and through the surface, beyond the obvious, which allows for painterly metaphor, for any number of our experiences and reflections. These opportunities are what allow painting to transport us as artists and viewers. When looking “at” a painting one does not just look at the image, but into the painting – the surface, the actions and gestures of the painter – and into the content of the image and materials. The layers of space, textures, and framing are undeniably a painter’s language.