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Authfirstname, Authlastname. "Article Name" Publication, December 7, 1984, sec. 7, p. 11. |
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artscope Capsule Previews
OUR FAVORITE SHOWS OF 2007
artscope staff
(artscope magazine asked some of its writers to share their memories of their favorite exhibition of the past year. Hopefully, instead of kicking yourself for missing these shows, you’ll keep an eye out for future chance to see these artists’ work.)
Fine Arts Work Center MFA Thesis Exhibition by Rena Lindstrom
I had been anticipating this exhibition since the first class of MFA students arrived in Provincetown in September 2005. Founded in 1968, the Fine Arts Work Center (FAWC) is a truly extraordinary institution. It has become an internationally renowned, premier residency fellowship supporting talented individuals at the outset of their careers.
Now, through a new collaboration between the FAWC and the Massachusetts College of Art and Design, an MFA in Visual Arts is being offered. The eight students in the class of 2007 were an adventurous group, enthusiastically engaging in the challenge of a small, new, low-residency program, and deeply committed to their development as artists.
This was no vacation on the Cape. With only two months each year to work on site with resident instructors and visiting artists, it was all about the studio, critique and work. I got to know several of the artists as they took their coffee breaks at a nearby cafe where I am a barista, serving up caffeine and sweets late night and early morning, seeing on a daily basis who is dragging, who has a cold, circles under her eyes, who has made a breakthrough in the studio. The other 10 months are long-distance in students’ hometowns, guided by a local mentor in communication with resident faculty.
Except for Nathalie Ferrier, whose fascinating thread constructions captures and release light and space in labyrinthine constellations, this class of MFA students is all painters. The Class of 2007 returned for a third September last month to present their thesis exhibition.
The exhibition took place in two parts; smaller work hung in the Hudson Walker Gallery at the FAWC, and larger pieces were installed in two beautiful spaces at the Provincetown Art Association and Museum. The smaller works sparked my appetite and that excitement grew in my first quick pass through PAAM’s spacious galleries. The high ceilings, the larger size of the work, the light, the color - there was an exponential expansion of sensation. And more than that, there was something visceral about the collection, something akin to the instinctual, some elemental emotional charge. This was strong work.
From the dramatic presence of Carole Ann Danner’s figures; to the movement in Kay Knight Clarke’s heavy-hanging clouds and changeling skies; the reductive, intimate and elegiac abstractions of Cathleen Daley; Alice Denison’s extravagant and romantic English flower compositions; the controlled, murmuring verdance of suburbia in Liza Bingham’s paintings; and finally, to Sandra Deacon Robinson’s floor to ceiling mysterious, humid, beckoning, swamp forests - this group of artists found something together here that enriched their individual work. And exhibited together, that work speaks to the collaborative success of an inventive new MFA program.
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