CT Feature

We are happy to announce Donnamaria Bruton's exhibition at the Newport Art Museum entitled From Sense to Soul, on view through October 16, 2022

From Newport Art Museum: During her twenty-year career as an artist and educator, Donnamaria Bruton (1954-2012) created many evocative works of art from her memories and experiences. Combining and collaging canvas, board, paper, and paint, Bruton created colorful and textured dreamscapes where recognizable objects and abstract forms coalesce and intermingle. Focusing on a selection of Bruton’s work from the 1990s-2000s, which includes objects from the Museum’s permanent collection and loans, this exhibition celebrates Bruton’s career and her contributions to American art.

 Bruton began her artistic career by making compelling works of art that were dark and emotional until she began making frequent visits to The Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia with her uncle and mentor, artist Edward L. Loper, Sr. Inspired by the artists she saw there, such as Pierre Bonnard and Henri Matisse, Bruton brightened her palette and began depicting dreamy interiors sometimes referencing domesticity. Bruton focused on interiors during the 1990s shifting to exteriors in the 2000s. Embarking on a series of landscapes, Bruton created otherworldly scenes imbued with the same feelings and sensations as her earlier works. In an artist statement submitted to RISD in 1991 the Bruton wrote, “Rising above the human condition has truly been a journey from sense to soul. A pilgrimage to a holy or secret place of refuge. My body of work is a reflection of my ongoing search for truth and poetry of that experience.” Featuring key works from the artist’s career, this exhibition reveals the artist’s passage from “sense to soul.”

Artist Biography

Donnamaria Bruton was born in 1954 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. She was raised in Detroit, where her father played for the Detroit Tigers in the early 1960s. She earned a BFA in graphic design from Michigan State, went on to earn a certificate in painting from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and worked as a color and fabric stylist for interiors at the Chrysler Corporation from 1983-1987. After earning an M.F.A. in painting from Yale University in 1991, she taught at the University of Texas, Austin. Her artwork is in the collection there at The Art Galleries at Black Studies. Bruton joined the Rhode Island School of Design as a painting professor in 1992. During her nearly twenty years at RISD, she served as the Department Head of Painting (2001–2003) and as the  Interim Dean of Graduate Studies (2003–2005). Donnamaria Bruton’s work has been included in one-person and group exhibitions in the United States, Canada, Japan, France, and in the Korean Biennial. In addition to the Newport Art Museum and The Art Galleries at Black Studies, Bruton’s work is included in the permanent collections of the RISD Museum; Yale University Art Gallery; and the Gwanju Museum in Korea. Bruton’s  legacy is felt not only through the many powerful works of art she left behind, but also through the rare distinction of being the first African American professor at RISD.

Kirstin Lamb’s magnificent work entitled Woods Painting 2021 depicts a detailed scene that one can imagine walking right into the painting and meandering through the forest. Each spot of paint is laid down on printed grid underscoring the path the artist takes to create the work. Kirstin explains, "I call the gridded high-detail paintings on transparent acetate embroidery paintings. I began creating these paintings primarily for inclusion in my textile-influenced installations and the practice has grown to include stand alone artworks and works influenced by my studio and installation. Many of the embroidery paintings I have placed in installations are images of floral wallpaper cropped from French wallpaper of the 17th, 18th and 19th century. Much of the other paintings in this group were made using vintage embroidery patterns from the 50s, 60s and 70s or generated from my own photography, primarily of landscapes and portraits."

Kirstin Lamb received an MFA (2005) from the Rhode Island School of Design, and an AB (2001) in Visual Art and Literatures in English from Brown Univeristy. Lamb's work has been shown SPRING/BREAK Art Show, NY; the Wassaic Project, Amenia, NY; the Fruitlands Museum, Harvard, MA; and Providence College Galleries, Providence, RI; among others.

Cade Tompkins presents Daniel Heyman's painting, Summons, installed at the RISD Museum, Providence, Rhode Island during the Faculty Biennial, 2021.

Daniel Heyman is an artist whose work in drawing, printmaking and painting directs the viewer's attention to contemporary social and political issues. Deeply interested in narrative, he uses images to tell stories that combine a love of history and myth in an effort to provoke discussion and empathy. In his recent Summons series, Heyman emphatically returns to images without words.

Daniel Heyman received his MFA from the University of Pennsylvania (1991) and his AB from Dartmouth College (1985). In 2010 Heyman was awarded the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship in Fine Arts. In 2009, Heyman received the Pew Fellowship in the Arts. Heyman's work is in over 50 collections including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore, MD; the Getty Museum, Los Angeles, CA; Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, VA; Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, TX; Hood Museum of Art and Rauner Special Collections Library, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH; Library of Congress, Washington, DC; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA; Minneapolis Institute of Art, Minneapolis, MN; The New York Public Library, New York, NY; Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, PA; Princeton University Art Museum, Princeton, NJ; RISD Museum, Providence, RI; Saint Louis Art Museum, Saint Louis, MO; and Yale University Art Gallery and Beinecke Library, New Haven, CT; among others.

We invite you to our newest installment of Conversations with Artists, Collectors & Curators with Nafis M. White.

Sophiya Khwaja is a Pakistani artist living and working in Dubai.  Her images often picture a solitary female figure, the artist herself, navigating the strange world. Fantastic landscapes and interior and exterior views diverge from reality and the atmosphere is marked with symbols - twitter birds, thread, tape, chairs, walls and masked faces, balloons - that indicate the emotion of the work. Khwaja's pieces use her familiar iconography throughout her work whether they are encased in embroidery hoops not only for their obvious association with women's work, or her large scale wall installations. The scale of the work may change but the figure is forever depicted in a never ending bind, intricate and measured.  One feels for the protagonist and her predicaments. One asks who is this comic and sardonic solitary woman navigating forces beyond her control and are we joining her on this quest in a dream-like state of mind.

"This work - Temporary Space, Permanent Place, a series of questions, observations, opinions and passions - interrogates and challenges the concept of the transient status of long-term residents in the UAE. Those that call it home yet are forever called expats. It explores the depth of the personal claims these residents lay on their surroundings, both space and place deep as my non-white, upper-middle class, female body tries to lay down roots in these temporary spaces - its color, status and curves complicating them even further."  Sophiya Khwaja

We are pleased to announce the representation of artist Bob Dilworth! To celebrate we are launching our new video series:  Conversations with Artists, Collectors & Curators

DEAN RICHARDSON

(American 1931-2020)

Black All Stars 1939, 1996, oil on linen, 20 x 24 inches

Dean Richardson painted this work 25 years ago.  Richardson loved baseball and this rare work depicts the Homestead Grays, a Pittsburgh Negro League team, as they may have appeared in an official photograph; however, the composition is solely from the artist's imagination. Richardson gave the players a regal background and illuminated their figures with subtle colors of blue, peach, white and red.  Viewing this painting, and knowing that this team was recently recognized by Major League Baseball, is a reminder to all of us that painting (and other art forms) is a form of remembrance.

Our guest critic and Native American artist/educator, Ari Montford, contributed a wonderful essay about many of the works in the exhibition and a portion is here: 

Dean Richardson's work sits squarely in the tradition of contemporary art making and this exhibition is a tribute to his legacy as an artist with a deep dedication to craft  and spiritual narrative. As a cultural commentator who demonstrates his academic agency through form and subject, it is evident in such works as Chief Gall 1989, that there is a reference to the democratization of a cultural competency that seeks to celebrate indigenous culture by recognizing the spirituality of his subjects. Dean's aesthetic is not that of the colonizer but one of cultural reverence. - Ari Montford, Mashantucket Pequot and Assistant Professor at Montserrat College of Art.

Please see exhibition page for full essay

Dean Richardson's work has been exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American Art, The Butler Institute of American Art, the Boston Institute of Contemporary Art, and the National Academy of Arts and Letters. Notable collections include the Whitney Museum of American Art, DeCordova Museum, Fuller Craft Museum, the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum, and the Farnsworth Art Museum.

Makin’ it Snow in HI is a unique work, comprised of screen print and hand drawing with pencil, Caran d’ache crayon, and gouache. Based on a mountain view looking toward the Nu’uanu Pali lookout on the Windward side of the island, this work highlights Allison Bianco’s affinity for combining disparate places and moments of time into a single image. She created this work after moving back home to the wintry East coast after living in tropical Hawai’i for four years.

Allison Bianco received her MFA in Printmaking (2010) from the University of Hawai'i at Manoa, Honolulu, HI and her BA in Studio Art (2001) from Mount Holyoke College, South Hadley, MA. Bianco has recently been awarded a public art commission for New York City public school 671K in Brooklyn for a new, permanent site-specific artwork. Bianco is the recipient of a Visual Arts Sea Grant from the University of Rhode Island and her work was selected for a solo exhibition at The Print Center in Philadelphia as part of their 88th International Competition. Her work is in the collections of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA; Philadelphia Museum of Art, PA; The New York Public Library, NY; RISD Museum, RI; Yale University Art Gallery, CT; the University of San Diego, CA; and the Hawai'i State Foundation on Culture and the Arts, HI; among others.

Bob Dilworth’s painting Maria 2019-2020 wraps and enshrines a Black female figure which appears in double exposure with just her head coming through the layers of swirling paint, glitter and fabric. Is she a form of the Virgin Mary with her knowing gaze looking down upon the viewer?

“My paintings employ an aesthetic gesture towards moments in history that run parallel to current times, often intersecting and exploring hidden and deeper meanings of my experience as an African American male.”

Janus: Kuya-Shonin 2020

gouache and pencil on handmade Mulberry paper

75 x 57.5 inches

Myths are important to us because they are a lasting and meaningful way to establish a time frame. It is a framework that helps us to understand existence. We do not consider myths at face value - no one believes in the Roman god Janus today - but we understand that life looks forward with innocence and backward with experience and hopefully with wisdom. --Daniel Heyman

Providence, Rhode Island, January 30, 2021 - Cade Tompkins Projects is pleased to present Paradise, a group exhibition of paintings, drawings and prints by Allison Bianco, Bob Dilworth, Donnamaria Bruton, Nancy Friese, Lois Harada, Daniel Heyman, Orit Hofshi, Justin Kim, Michael Krueger, Serena Perrone, and Thomas Sgouros.

Each week, a new artwork from the exhibition will be highlighted here.

The entire world, as of late, feels like a state of suspended animation due to the pandemic.  The pause and warping of time is deeply felt and has affected every person on the planet earth.  For many, nature has been critical to our very happiness and well being. During this cycle of renewal, regeneration, and repair, paradise is preserved in nature and in art in the hands of these outstanding artists.

The process of creating art is a way of remembering and preserving.  Paradise in landscape typically shows us the outstanding bounty and beauty of nature as in the case of Nancy Friese’s monumental en plein air painting Long Light of Summer 2020.  Lush green pastures, large majestic trees and glowing wheat fields all combine to create a sense of grandeur and delight.  Michael Krueger’s The Owl and the Orchid and The Optimism of Trees 2020 refresh our weary psyche with vibrancy and hopefulness. Justin Kim’s The Garden, Deep Springs, CA 2020 employs bold strokes of color that illuminate and reflect the intense sunshine washing over barn buildings, chickens, rows of plants, with a view of a majestic tree and the California mountains.  Thomas Sgouros’ Remembered Landscape 2009 reminds us to look up at the vast arc of the sky.

As counterpoint, Paradise can also be of the past and forgotten, albeit intensely felt by the humans that occupy that space. Works such as Orit Hofshi’s monumental woodcut Time…thou ceaseless lackey to eternity 2018 depict the historic nature of humans on the land where figures traverse wide expanses amid crumbling ruins and yellow lakes.  Bob Dilworth’s painting Maria 2019-2020 wraps and enshrines a Black female figure which appears in double exposure with just her head coming through the layers of swirling paint, glitter and fabric. Is she a form of the Virgin Mary with her knowing gaze looking down upon the viewer?  Daniel Heyman approaches the mythic figure in Janus Kuya-Shonin 2020, a large gouache and pencil drawing on handmade mulberry paper.  Heyman reflects upon his interest in Japanese sculpture from sacred Buddhist temples, specifically the Kuya-Shonin of Kyoto, and has combined ideas with the double-headed Janus. Janus, of Roman mythological realm, is both looking back in time and forward to the future.  Donnamaria Bruton’s long horizontal painting Memorial for Edward II 1995, lays out a decorative and festooned coffin-shaped painting and collage with one arm or leg appearing in the bottom portion while a table is laid out for tea and eating pleasures. Serena Perrone presents gum-bichromate prints set up in a circle on a wood structure in the work entitled Something is About to Happen 2016.  Symbols of trees, a human hand, and star forms all collide in dream-like colors. Allison Bianco’s melancholy Golden Hour 2020 captures the beauty of the sun on the rocks at the end of the day and the impending darkness of night fall in her new etching. Lois Harada monotype, entitled Meandering 2021, with hot foil stamped dragonflies speaks to the delicate nature of life.

In Paradise, we remember that art is here to show us beauty and to preserve our memories of the most fleeting moments. 

What you find coming through, 2020

gouache, India ink, walnut ink, soft pastel, coffee, colored pencil, graphite, watercolor Rives BFK paper, acrylic ink and paint

35.5 x 53.75 inches

In one of Max Van Pelt's most recent paintings, What you find coming through, the viewer encounters an ode to fractal geometry, landscape, and architecture.  The line work varies by intensity, color, medium, and perspective -  causing the painting to seemingly expand and contract simultaneously, shifting from a bird's eye view to a collapse of dimensional space.

As Van Pelt explains, these abstractions are deliberately open windows by which each viewer may come to acknowledge simultaneity - in caution and accidents, tension and tenderness, polishing and incompletion, joyfulness and gravity, conflict and finding a way through. 

Max Van Pelt graduated summa cum laude from Dartmouth College in 2011, where his work in sculpture and drawing was awarded the Jonathan B. Rintels Prize for the outstanding undergraduate thesis in the Humanities and Social Sciences.  Prior to discovering his artistic intentions, Max was an archer - a thirteen-time national champion and athlete on the United States World Team.  His interests are deeply rooted in our built environment, the human condition, and regularly exploring the outdoors as an experienced whitewater kayaker, oarsman, and avid mountain bicyclist.  His work has been featured in Art in America's The Lookout, Big Red & Shiny, and on National Public Radio.

Dan Talbot, Janitor 2020, oil on board, 40 x 60 inches

In this painting, Dan Talbot pictures a neighborhood urban view and then applies an overlay of abstraction that blends and fractures the scene.  The painterly application conflates the street, house, yard, cars, flagpole with a cosmic tangle of images of body parts, cartoon-like heads, birds and pure abstraction. Janitor is named after the song by the 80s post-punk band Suburban Lawns and acts as a visual response to the internal rhyming, with both sound and meaning. 

"I'm just intuitively recording bits of information, how objects can be broken down into little bits of very specifically colored shapes, and how those shapes intersect and line up with each other. After a dozen or so sittings a scene emerges with much of the white underpainting left untouched." Dan Talbot

Dan Talbot holds a BFA in Painting from the Rhode Island School of Design (1996) and received the prestigious Rome Prize for painting. Talbot attended the prestigious Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Skowhegan, Maine (1995). He is the recipient of a Rhode Island State Council for the Arts Fellowship Award in Painting and Merit Award in Painting. Residencies include Lijiang Studio Residency, Yunnan, China; Ucross Foundation, Wyoming; Virginia Center for the Creative Arts; and the MacDowell Colony Residency, Peterborough, NH.

Cartier Christmas Window is our feature this week, an exquisite screen print on Japanese paper made with no less than 36 ink colors. During its debut, it was selected for feature in the now retired print publication Art in Print for their Prix de Print series.

We would like to share some of the writing of Faye Hirsch as she describes the successes of this work:

"Before us is a shop window with a jewelry display. To either side, festoons of pine or tinsel hint at Christmas. Above is the brand: a logo unmistakably readable as Cartier, despite its being cut off at the top. Like any fancy Christmas window on Madison, this one includes a gimmick: a video, one presumes, of snow leopards - tinged with pink, like a glacier under the winter sun-bounding through an ice-blue background…Turquoise and violet shadows enhance the fluidity of the leopard action, as slightly off-register shadows and cartoon like sparkles give the jewels before them vivacity and allure….For its part Cartier Window brings to mind early lithographs by James Rosenquist or works in various mediums by Wayne Thiebaud-especially his woodcuts of a cake and candy apples produced in the 1980s at Crown Point Press in Kyoto with Tadashi Toda, a master of Ukiyo-e… Ebner pays homage to numerous art historical sources, but there is something quite contemporary in theses scenes  - all combining, the artist informs me, the flawed memory of real things seen and pure invention."

Stella Ebner is Associate Professor of Art and Design and the Chair of the Printmaking Department at Purchase College SUNY, NY.  She earned her BFA from the University of Minnesota (1998) and her MFA in Printmaking from the Rhode Island School of Design (2006). Ebner recently received a MI-LAB residency at Lake Kawaguchi, Japan, and has held residencies at Tamarind Institute, NM; the Lower East Side Printshop, NYC; Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts Studio Program, NYC; and Kala Art Institute, Berkeley, CA. Her work is in the collections of The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH; Minnesota Museum of American Art, St. Paul, MN; the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN; Minnesota Historical Society, St. Paul, MN; University of St. Thomas, MN; and the Kala Art Institute, Berkeley, CA, among others.

Golden Hour is Allison Bianco's most recent work, completed in October of this year - an image that captures the magical time near sunset at the beach. The left part of the print is covered in a deep teal etching ink which is broken by the sun's low glow over First Beach in Middletown, Rhode Island. Waves crash by the rocks, and seagulls with shiny treasures, fly off to their nesting spots.

Allison Bianco is a printmaker who primarily employs etching and screen printing in her work. Golden Hour was created using these processes with the addition of hot foil stamping. In this case, Bianco has applied two etching inks to the plate simultaneously, teal and golden yellow, to achieve the transition of day to night, indicating the moment of twilight. The gulls, clouds, fireworks, and vibrating sun are added over the etching ink with screen printing. Finally, holographic hot foil was stamped onto the print, highlighting the seagulls' prowess for collecting.

Printed by Allison Bianco. Hot Foil Stamping by Lois Harada at DWRI Letterpress.

6 prints available from the edition of 7!

Allison Bianco received her MFA in Printmaking (2010) from the University of Hawai'i at Manoa, Honolulu, HI and her BA in Studio Art (2001) from Mount Holyoke College, South Hadley, MA. Bianco has recently been awarded a public art commission for New York City public school 671K in Brooklyn for a new, permanent site-specific artwork. Bianco is the recipient of a Visual Arts Sea Grant from the University of Rhode Island and her work was selected for a solo exhibition at The Print Center in Philadelphia as part of their 88th International Competition. Her work is in the collections of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA; Philadelphia Museum of Art, PA; The New York Public Library, NY; RISD Museum, RI; Yale University Art Gallery, CT; the University of San Diego, CA; and the Hawai'i State Foundation on Culture and the Arts, HI; among others.

R-Lily 2010, acrylic and collage on board, 36 x 36 inches

We are delighted to focus on the work, R-Lily in this week's CT Feature.  The painting is a fantastical depiction of elements in nature. The central blue and white biomorphic cloud emerges from a body of delicately collaged white forms and lifts towards the green ferns in the upper part of the painting. Deeply spiritual and reverent, this painting is a beautiful gem-like work by the late Donnamaria Bruton.

Born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Donnamaria Bruton grew up in Detroit, and graduated from Michigan State University in 1976 where she earned her BFA in Graphic Design.  After graduation, Bruton continued her art career by studying art with her uncle, painter Edward Loper, Sr.  in Wilmington, Delaware.  During this time,  Bruton often visited the collection of art in the famous Barnes Foundation to study the collection. Founded by Albert C. Barnes in 1922, the collection holds some of the most seminal works by Matisse, Cézanne, Renoir and Modigliani as well as important examples of African sculpture.  Bruton's entree to the Barnes resulted in a lifelong reverence for the work of Pierre Bonnard, Henri Matisse and are among Bruton's greatest influences along with abstract painter Cy Twombly.

Bruton continued her education and earned an MFA from Yale University in Painting and Printmaking in 1991. Between her MSU education and Yale, Bruton exhibited with pioneering African American gallerist Dell Pryor in Detroit. In 1993, she joined the Painting Department as Professor at the Rhode Island School of Design.  Donnamaria Bruton's work has been included in numerous one-person and group exhibitions throughout the United States, including an early solo exhibition at Woman and Their Work, Austin, Texas as well as exhibiting abroad in Canada, Japan, France and Korean Biennial.  Donnamaria Bruton's work is in the permanent collection of the Black Studies Gallery, University of Texas, Austin, Newport Art Museum, RISD Museum, Yale University Art Gallery and many private collections.

We invite you to take a closer look at artworks by our gallery artists. Explore our CT Feature archive for videos and insights into the materials and processes behind these incomparable works of art.

Nancy Friese Fall Realm 2017, watercolor on paper, 22 x 30 inches

Color is a power which directly influences the soul - Wassily Kandinsky

During the past few weeks, at the tail end of fall leaf season in New England, intense golden yellows, deep coral reds and orange colors were intensified by the sun during the day.  Friese explores this phenomenon in her watercolor, Fall Realm. Through the view, there are hints of blue water, a few green leaves clinging to the branches, and an evergreen anchoring the right side of the scene, a reminder of  the power of nature.  Here soon, fall leaves will gather on the ground and the sculptural twists and turns of the empty tree branches will remain as a reminder of nature's incredible ability to adapt and change.  

Not one artist is a keener observer of nature than the indisputably recognized American en plein air artist: Nancy Friese (b. 1948).  Friese paints oil paintings and watercolors as well as creating etchings, woodcuts and lithographs using her trained eye and first hand observation of nature. Trees, clouds, sky, grass, estuaries, rivers, ocean, rocks, and perhaps a path or a fence indicating human inhabitants, are all created with an astounding sense of color and movement. Both the long view and closer view works bring a joyous sense of spontaneity to the intricately detailed scenes.

I am restored by being out of doors painting amid the swirling colors of fall. Nature lifts us out of the daily into the fantastic. - Nancy Friese

During the long winter, may you have time to reflect on this work and keep in mind that the seasons will change and nature is our enduring reminder of life. Thank you for you your support of our gallery artists and for your interest in contemporary art.