CLICK THE IMAGE ABOVE TO VIEW THE SHOW IN 3D:

ARTWORKS IN THE EXHIBITION:

AMY ARBUS:

BREON DUNIGAN:

LYNNE KORTENHAUS:

JEANNIE MOTHERWELL:

OTHER WORKS – STEPHANIE SASSOON, RICHARD SAJA & ANNE SMITH:

INSTALLATION VIEWS:

AMY ARBUS/ BREON DUNIGAN/

LYNNE KORTENHAUS/JEANNIE MOTHERWELL

July 24 – August 10, 2020

Instagram Live Walkthrough/ Friday July 24, 2020 7 PM

For this exhibition we are thrilled to present four powerful women artists.

AMY ARBUS: ICONIC is an exhibition of ten carefully selected photographs that reach back to encompass the career of this important artist whose has created and continues to define photography as we know it. From portraiture to street photography to more experimental projects Amy’s contribution to photography as a legacy art form and her innovations and distillations of its possibilities for our generation is undeniable. Each print in her cache and in our exhibition takes the technical, the formal, and the subjective to a more perfect place while nodding to the shoulders of those on which every photographer stands when the next moment is handed to them by its prior custodian.

The works in this important show come from: The Inconvenience of Being Born, On the Street, Rites and Rituals, Prostitutes, The Fourth Wall, and After Images.   

AMY ARBUS has had thirty-six solo exhibitions worldwide, and 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. She has exhibited at the Schoolhouse Gallery for 20 years where she is also represented.

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. Her most recent, After Images, is an homage to modernism’s most iconic avant-garde paintings.

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 taught portraiture at Maine Media Workshops, the International Center of Photography, NORDphotography, Anderson Ranch Arts Center and The Fine Arts Work Center.

BREON DUNIGAN is a sculptor living and working in Truro, Massachusetts. Dunigan studied at The North Carolina School of the Arts, Atlanta College of Art, The Massachusetts College of Art and holds an MFA from The Mason Gross School of Arts at Rutgers University. In her words, “Much of my recent work as focused on my perception and interpretation of our attachment to objects of all kinds. The sculptures are created using items I have collected both conceptually and literally, as well as items that have been handed down through generations of my family.” Integrating her familial items into her work bodes well for her collectors; Dunigan hails from a family that boasts four generations of beloved Provincetown artists, giving her deep-rooted connections to the Art Colony in Provincetown.

Dunigan will present a suite of new wall mounted sculptures, animal head forms made with wood and fabric. She works formally, beginning with materials and ideas culled from the world of memory and the familiar. Next an interjection is made; something unexpected is introduced that shifts the viewer’s point of view and opens us up to new joy, curiosities, and sly humor.

LYNNE KORTENHAUS presents a new suite of mixed media works on paper that offer a response to her recent exploration of “home” and “ancestry”.  For these large-scale paper pieces Lynne worked in her new studio unpacking decades of work along with mementos, family photographs and scrapbooks. She began to interweave memories of her family home and early life as the term “shelter in place” became the world’s call to action this spring.  “I found original blueprints of my grandparents’ beachfront property in New Jersey and began remembering the family’s times along the shore.”  Integrating those elements with recent etchings and lithographs into larger scale pieces, Lynne employed a number of mediums and materials to create images that seek to find balance and a new sense of a safe haven in our lives.

Lynne Kortenhaus lives and works close to the sea – she has residences in Boston and Provincetown, MA, and Clearwater, FL—and her art is deeply influenced by the changing moods of the shoreline. She earned a BFA in 1973 and an MFA in 1975 at the Rhode Island School of Design and spent her final year studying drawing and printmaking in Florence, Italy. The technical, process-driven demands of printmaking satisfy her obsessive nature; she has been dedicated to refining her craft ever since.

Lynne is a member of the Provincetown Art Association and Museum; a Director’s Circle member of the Institute of Contemporary Art; and a trustee of the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. She is currently the chair of the Public Art Commission for the City of Boston. She is a contributing artist to the annual FAWC Monoprint Project, originally established by Michael Mazur, and is a member of the Boston Printmakers.

We are thrilled to present MULTIPLES, our first exhibition with JEANNIE MOTHERWELL. MULTIPLES consists of new work on wood panels that the artist has painted, considered, arranged and then joined, employing the newly claimed associations, intervals, interjections and chance relationships to make paintings with multiple simultaneous actions originating with the motionful beauty of Motherwell’s gestures and the rhythms of the arranged panels interacting.   

I like to think of each of these “Multiples” as an event or an occurrence; that is, an action that emerges in the here and now. I am on a journey – endlessly searching and exploring. There are things that happen that I cannot explain. I may try to control them, but I am really searching for answers to make the unexpected work for me. It is about exploring the unknown and then refining it to reflect a visceral memory or experience – for me and for the viewer. The multiple panels I created for this show are a new way of seeing for me, similar to collaging which was significant in much of my earlier painting career. It has captured new ways for me to draw by moving the boards around and reassembling them to create the final product.                                           ~ JM

Born and raised in New York City, JEANNIE MOTHERWELL inherited a love of painting from her father, Robert Motherwell, and stepmother, Helen Frankenthaler, two pillars of mid-century abstraction. She studied painting at Bard College and the Art Students League in New York. Continuing with her art after college, she became active in arts education at the Bruce Museum in Greenwich, CT, until relocating to Cambridge, MA, where she worked at Boston University for the graduate program in Arts Administration until 2015. She served on the Cambridge Arts Council Public Art Commission from 2004 – 2007 and serves on the Board of Directors for Provincetown Arts Magazine Her work has been featured in public and private collections throughout the US and abroad.

In the 1960s, our family’s drive from New York to Provincetown took 12 hours.  My sister Jeannie and I entertained ourselves with 20 Questions and spotting out-of-state license plates.  As we got closer to the Canal our father would challenge us: “First person to spot the Sagamore Bridge gets a nickel!”  Our noses pressed against the windows we strained to see the steel structure.  The landscape had changed.  Sand shoulders instead of dirt.  Scrub pines and beeches replaced maples and oaks.  “There it is!” Jeannie yelled as she pointed to the barely visible arches. We rolled down our windows and breathed in the salt air.  Cape Cod!  Freedom!  Summer!  Three hours later, we crested the hill in North Truro to see the landscape unfold: Pilgrim Lake surrounded by grass-tufted sand dunes, Days’ Cottages dotted like sugar cubes against a deep blue bay, the Pilgrim Monument standing majestically on the horizon, flocks of terns screeching overhead.  These images were etched in our psyches forever, and later would be reflected in Jeannie’s palette and abstracted imagery.

Jeannie spent two winters painting in Provincetown after college.  The sleepy fishing village was boarded up in winter and seemed a ghost town, yet there was a vibrant local scene where artists, fishermen, and tradespeople gathered at the end of the work day to share stories of the town’s goings on.  Literally dependent on each other for survival, artists and the fishermen developed deep friendships.  When the scallop boat Patricia Marie sank in 1976, the locals came together over plates of fried scallops to say good-bye and to raise money for the grieving families.  A deep connection to the people inspired Jeannie to create a series of abstracted paintings referencing the tragedy.  45 years later, Jeannie, inspired by images from the Hubbell telescope, is still “searching for answers to make the unexpected work” for her.  Her palette is brighter and more intense, and she pours and pushes paint, which adds a further element of surprise to her work.  In exploring space, she makes space.  And while inspired these days more by sky than sea, the undulating, bleeding and layered paint still evokes the mysteries of the changing Provincetown environment. 

Lise Motherwell

May, 2020