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July 14, 2025

Chestertown Spy

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Review: “Food” at Kent Cultural Alliance By Mary McCoy

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Food is about as basic a topic as you can get, ranking just below Life and Death, both of which are intimately connected with food. Since Colonial days, food production and distribution have shaped the landscape, heritage and culture of Kent County and the greater Eastern Shore, so it was a brilliant move for Kent Cultural Alliance to choose “Food” as the theme for its latest artist residency.

Stop by KCA’s gallery now through May 31 and you’ll find an antique scythe that can be played like an upright bass, a precise, sepia-toned drawing of a strawberry plant with ghost writing barely visible underneath, and hundreds of photographs exploring local food production and distribution.

The three artists chosen for this residency arrived with no knowledge of the area but in keeping with KCA’s focus on arts education and community engagement, they were immediately immersed in visiting local farms, kitchens, food pantries, schools, and historical sites to learn about food production and distribution and to work directly with the people involved. The fact that the artists themselves are as different from one another as possible speaks volumes about the breadth of the subject. A European man who draws traditional still lifes with pastels, a Black woman from Harlem who gives voice to underrepresented individuals through her photographs and videos, and a Midwestern white man who creates large public sculptures that are actually gardens could hardly be more unlike, yet each of them found ways to engage with our community and make art about food.

“Ripples” by Tory Tepp

Tory Tepp, who divides his time between working on rural land art projects in Wisconsin and two “food forests” at a college in Florida, is the only one of the artists whose work was already focused on food. A veteran of creating artworks that double as food gardens, he worked with Kent County Middle School students to create raised beds for growing their own vegetables, but since an indoor gallery lacks sunlight and soil, for this show he created sculptures from detritus he found on the farms he visited as part of the residency.

Swooping floor-to-ceiling, a sculpture made with the curved sections of a silo roof speaks of a vanished era when small farms grew and stored grains for their own livestock, while an impromptu forest made with several slim tree trunks gnawed by beavers lends a bit of magic as well as irony. Even as tens of thousands of acres of wetlands are lost to farming and development each year, beavers are busily using their inborn engineering skills to create the ponds and wetlands so vital to healthy ecosystems and carbon sequestration. Concerned with how industrial-scale farming has altered our landscapes, often in ways destructive to local ecology, Tepp explores our changing environment and the hints of history found everywhere in our rural landscapes while also suggesting that with some open, creative thinking, we may be able to find healthier, more sustainable ways to produce our food.

Sheba Legend took a very different and very direct approach by documenting the people and places she encountered during the weeks she was here. Something in the stark

Untitled food pantry by Sheba Legend

black-and-white drama of her photographs turns familiar sights—a long farm lane, seas of lettuce stretching into the distance, oven-fresh baguettes standing at attention in a wicker basket—into iconic representatives of the day-to-day production and distribution of the food which sustains us all. Along with such quintessentially rural scenes as clusters of farm buildings and fields of grazing cattle are less expected shots showing a deli menu, a basket of reduced price “ugly fruit,” and a teenager biting into a sweet roll freshly baked by students in the Kent County High School’s Culinary Arts Program.

Drawing on her own experience of hunger and homelessness during a difficult period of her life, she explored issues of food scarcity with a shot of a worker filling the shelves of a food pantry, a close-up of a nutrition label, seedlings growing in the garden at Minary’s Dream Alliance, and photos of several neighborhood “blessing boxes,” small outdoor cabinets filled with free offerings of food and books.

In addition to framed photos, dozens more appear on a computer screen interspersed with short paragraphs offering insights into the value of small, sustainable farms, especially in areas far from grocery stores, the sharing of food through backyard gardens and church suppers, and historical examples of African-American involvement in farming and the seafood industry, as well as in a 1962 march along High Street in what Legend calls the “complicated racial history” of the area. In keeping with her belief in art as a way of opening doors, allowing her the freedom to approach people, ask questions and learn from them, she has given visibility to people and processes that we all kind of know are there but generally ignore. In so doing, she has honored them and made their stories tangible.

Deeply inspired by artists such as Leonardo de Vinci, Radu Leon creates work that is firmly rooted in European art history making him perhaps the most unlikely “Food” artist of the trio, but he is also a world traveler who has lived and taught in Italy, England, Kenya and China and well remembers the inefficient food system in his native Romania, then under communist rule. Although his traditional still lifes and genre scenes would be at home in the pages of an art history book, his focus is less on the finished artworks than on what is behind them.

“Spunta la speranza” By Radu Leon

Like the Old Masters, he makes his own pastels and paint, sometimes including materials he finds locally. Using methods he taught to Kent County High School art students, he experiments with his “recipes” in a process he likens to cooking. Despite their realistic style, his paintings of kitchen scenes, a silver teapot and sailing ships are highly conceptual in that he chooses his materials for their origins and the meanings they convey. A charming still life of crockery and root vegetables is edged with a certain shade of deep red painted with casein tempera, a milk-based paint he made from the brick dust of a kitchen hearth in a Colonial home where enslaved women once cooked. Both the area’s history and its legacy of slavery leap to mind, just as his choice to hang several works from worn rope from the Sultana speaks of both the area’s maritime past and the ropes that once bound slaves or was used to hang them.

With informative, thought-provoking captions accompanying each work, Leon gently reminds us just how closely those of us who are of European descent are still tied to our Colonial heritage. From similarities in our diet, architecture and systems of government to European models and even to the way the word “art” makes us first think of  Western art, discounting the art of other cultures, these tendencies hint at the shadows of ingrained prejudices against non-European peoples still very much alive in our culture.

Perhaps the most telling thing about this show is how each of these artists is so strikingly focused on the potential of art to teach and enrich both artist and viewer. Each of them feels that this residency was a gift, even as their fresh and insightful visions stand as a gift to our community. Even now while National Endowment for the Arts grants, including KCA’s, are being suddenly cancelled, their work proves the power of art to move us, teach us and give us joy.

 

Contributor Mary McCoy is an artist and writer who has the good fortune to live beside an old steamboat wharf on the Chester River. She is a former art critic for the Washington Post and several art publications and has published five books including a recent poetry collection. She enjoys kayaking the river and walking her family farm where she collects ideas and materials for the environmental art she creates, often in collaboration with her husband Howard. They have exhibited their work in the U.S., Ireland, Wales and New Zealand.

 

 

 

The Spy Newspapers may periodically employ the assistance of artificial intelligence (AI) to enhance the clarity and accuracy of our content.

“Rivers” Exhibit at Kent Cultural Alliance By Mary McCoy

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There’s nothing like a fresh pair of eyes to help us see our familiar surroundings anew, and “Rivers,” a captivating show at Kent Cultural Alliance on view through September 7, provides them, times four. Ashley Minner Jones’s recording of lapping waves with occasional birdsong brings the beauty and serenity of our rivers instantly to mind, while Hilary Lorenz’s fascinating paper weavings speak of their animated complexity. William Blake’s paintings contemplate the ongoing legacy of the Civil War along their shores, and Langston Allston’s two large canvases examine rivers as paths to freedom.

In partnership with ShoreRivers, KCA sponsored a six-week residency for the four artists, all from different parts of the U.S. During the first week, they received an intensive introduction to the area. They each spent a day on a river with one of ShoreRivers’ Riverkeepers, toured Chestertown with a focus on the history and influences of the river on the community, learned about local ecology from ShoreRivers and Sultana Education Foundation staff at the Lawrence Wetlands Preserve, and visited conservation projects on a waterside farm dating back to the Colonial era.

From there, the artists were free to react to their experiences by creating art, and each one chose an entirely different approach.

“Waves at the Edges of Nowhere” by Hilary Lorenz

For Lorenz, an interdisciplinary artist whose studio is in the high desert of Arizona, weaving seemed the perfect analogy for the coming together of the myriad influences that create our rivers’ ecosystems. Stunningly complex and dynamic, her series of works created from paper hand-marbled in water from the Chester River woven together with vividly patterned stone lithography and linoleum block prints evoke the ever-changing ripples and waves, shadowed depths and sudden sparkling glints of light on a tidal river. Sometimes the weaving folds over on itself like a breaking wave or reveals a fringe of seaweed cut out of paper dangling down from behind, sometimes a shape appears—a heart or an enormous moth, a remnant of an image from one of the prints. It’s like watching a river flow—the more you look, the more you discover.

More gentle but hardly less complex, Lorenz’s row of hand-marbled cloths are graceful studies of the movements of wind and water. Working outdoors, mostly in Wilmer Park, Lorenz used the traditional Japanese suminagashi method of dabbing colored ink rhythmically onto water she had scooped from the river. As with her hand-marbled paper, she allowed the wind to swirl the ink into natural patterns, capturing the whirls of color by laying cotton cloths on the water’s surface. Multiple layers of marbling yielded bafflingly complex waves and whirlpools as intricate as the ripples, eddies and flow of the river itself.

“River Brought Me to You” by Langston Allston

Minner Jones also took a hands-on approach to “Rivers” gathering both native and invasive plants from the Chester River watershed and grinding them into powders that she mixed with vodka to create a photosensitive emulsion of each species. To make her “Chestertown Anthotypes,” she laid a sprig of each plant on paper brushed its particular emulsion and exposed it to sunlight for 14 days. The resulting prints have a subtle, touch-your-heart beauty that can’t help but draw you in to study their graceful leaves, flowers and berries, forging an intimate connection with the individuality of each plant.

A community-based artist and folklorist, Minner Jones has lived her life in a Baltimore neighborhood settled by members of the Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina, of which she is a registered member. While looking through the Kent County Historical Society’s archives, she came across a headline from a 1995 issue of The Cecil Whig asking “What happened to the Shore’s Indians?” The question appears three times, pointedly unanswered, as empty white lettering hovering in a field of brushy color, either the deep blue of cyanotype, the rich gold of the powdered remains of black-eyed Susan plants (the state flower of Maryland), or the sandy brown of Chestertown soil.

Blake, a painter who lives and teaches near Chicago, has carved out a curious niche for himself as a Civil War reenactor who paints other reenactors. Purposefully echoing Winslow Homer’s documentation of the war during his service as an artist-correspondent, his skillfully rendered subjects conjure a hauntingly engaging sense of introspection about a conflict that continues to reverberate down to the present day.

In a striking trio of ink and wash paintings, Blake casts the fiery abolitionist John Brown as “Father Time,” inviting consideration of the morality and repercussions of Brown’s actions as seen from our 21st century perspective. In contrast, the river appears a magical place in three oil paintings of a pair of reenactors dancing together on its shores under a full moon, a sprinkling of glittering stars, or a comet (in reference to the comet of 1861 which some saw as a kind of portent relating to the war). Full of hope and joy, these scenes exude a strong optimism about our progress in understanding equality and inclusion.

It’s in another oil painting, “A Sense of History Comes Not by Sight,” that Blake’s message comes most to the fore. In loose brushwork coalescing into robust flesh tones, a man clad in a Civil War uniform is painted eyes closed, clearly contemplating the lessons of history, something we all would do well to emulate. With a bristling gray and white beard, he is of an age to have gained perspective, and in a mischievous play on the idea of reflection, Blake paints light glinting off his forehead and from under his glasses. Clearly, it’s the light that shines with the dawning of understanding.

Allston’s two large canvases casually hung on grommets have a bold, visionary energy that  recalls the directness of folk art. A painter and muralist who works in both New Orleans and Chicago, he used the river as the setting for both works. In “Fourth of July,” the faces of two young African Americans are lit by the glow of fireworks so strongly that the light becomes stars blooming on their dark skin as if to say, “This is our country, too!”, a potent reminder of those whose forced labor was crucial in building the country from Colonial times onward. In his second painting, “The River Brought Me to You,” the two faces of a figure in a small boat look both forward and back as he paddles furiously on a dark river surrounded by shadowy, foreboding woods. Swooping in from above in a rush of green flames, three winged women, like the Greek Furies, urge him onward.

Framing these arresting images are small drawings and handwritten notes scrawled in urgent capital letters that serve as a journal of Allston’s encounters, thoughts, emotions and discoveries during his residency. In an off-hand, stream of consciousness style, they range widely, describing encounters with a local elderly white woman who apologized for her ancestor’s involvement in the Ku Klux Klan, his musings at the sight of a stately historic home across the Choptank River, and his wandering homesick thoughts about the effects of the Mississippi River on his home in New Orleans. Integrating personal experiences with the influences of history and geography, his ponderings suggest a tapestry of interlocking stories.

Typically, artist’s residencies allow artists to immerse themselves in their work in a supportive, inspiring environment where they can connect with other creative individuals, but KCA’s residency has added purpose. The artists were called to explore rivers in ways that informed them and constantly engaged them with the community. They worked with young people in RiverArts’ summer camps, painted a mural at Worton Community Center, collaborated with local craftsmen, hosted open studios, gave talks about their work, and built new relationships.

The ripple effect is clear—in the process of creating art in response to what they learned through the residency, the artists have gifted our community with new and richer ways to understand our rivers and experience a firmer sense of place. And in a further benefit, as they return to their own homes, these artists will continue to disseminate their insights in their future work, benefitting people in many other communities and helping us all to better understand one another.

For more about Kent Cultural Alliance, go here.

The Spy Newspapers may periodically employ the assistance of artificial intelligence (AI) to enhance the clarity and accuracy of our content.

“Watershed” – Grace Mitchell’s Paintings at the Massoni by Mary McCoy

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The deep, rich colors and textures of Grace Mitchell’s oil paintings will draw you in, but it’s often the title that sets you thinking. Interweaving layers of color glow through the marsh grasses in her newest series “Watershed Assessment.” You could get lost in the sheer beauty of these paintings with their glints of tidal water and shadowy mountains looming in the distance, all saturated with a moist, misty atmosphere that seems to glow with fecundity.

But the title gives pause. These lush, luminous landscapes are meant to be “assessed,” and careful observation finds them full of scars and flaws. Their layers of luscious colors have been scraped raw and sanded almost to nothingness, drips and coagulations of paint stain the surface like rain on a window, everything seems in a state of flux. This marsh that Mitchell has chosen to paint is a transitional place where life is born of water and each element is held in an ever-changing fragile balance.

“Watershed” is an inspired title for this show and carries a double meaning. Every mountain, forest, marsh and sea that Grace Mitchell paints is part of a watershed. Most of us don’t tend to think of that when we look at a landscape, but these paintings make it clear that water connects all things in nature, from the massive clouds Mitchell paints towering over verdant plains and forests to the mists and rain that feed her flowing streams, brooding marshes and restless seas. Time after time, she traces the cycling of water from earth to sky and back again and in so doing, conjures a potent analogy for the complex interconnections that make life on earth possible.

Here, the other meaning of “watershed” comes to the fore. As temperatures warm, wildfires rage and massive storms sweep across the land, there’s no denying we are in a watershed moment. There is no longer any doubt that climate change is happening and happening fast thanks to our continuing use of fossil fuels. Where we go from here is our collective choice.

An art gallery may seem an unlikely place to be confronted with this issue, but Mitchell’s show inspires its consideration. Heart-wrenchingly beautiful, her paintings invite you into a haunting mixture of darkness and luminosity that permeates these scenes so deeply that the vitality of the living land is palpable. Mountains both soar and crumble before your eyes as light filters through the mists swirling around them. Trees simultaneously form and dematerialize in strokes and smears of paint while the marsh grasses surrounding them dissolve into drips of paint that melt into the water of a tidal pool. All is in flux and every detail is related to what’s happening around it.

The artist’s hand is everywhere in evidence in her sweeping gestures, daubs and broken strokes of paint, yet these paintings are smooth as glass and have an inner radiance akin to polished marble. Borrowing her technique from traditional landscape painters, Mitchell repeatedly applies thin layers of paint, sanding each one back then painting again. Fields of color and fascinating details are exposed, then half hidden, then exposed again so that the paintings reveal their own history of making, much as landscapes reveal the effects of weather and geological time.

There is no doubt about the aliveness of every aspect of these landscapes and the seamlessness of the interdependence of each element. With a bracing sense of awe, each of these paintings tells a story of earth and its predicament. They pull on your heartstrings and make you long for the vitality of the ecosystems that form our landscapes to survive and flourish.

Recalling the atmospheric depth and majesty of traditional landscape paintings, particularly of 19th-century Romanticism, as well as the deeply spiritual qualities of Chinese mountain and water tradition, Mitchell makes geological time palpable, yet there’s also a sense of the momentary, a feeling that you are witnessing something in the process of continual change.

Art is always at the forefront of cultural change. From Goya to the Impressionists, and from Picasso to Rauschenberg to Keith Haring, artists have opened our eyes to new ways of seeing and understanding. Perhaps because artists must develop keen skills of observation and awareness in order to do their work, they are more attuned to sensing change long before others do. Certainly, with her flair for capturing both the beauty and distress of the earth, Mitchell falls into this category.

In August, she and I carried on an almost daily email conversation about her work, our shared concerns about environmental degradation and climate change and how art might function to stimulate creative ways of adapting. Here are some excerpts:

MM: From the start I want you to know how glad I am for this opportunity to focus on your work. For some time now, I’ve been struggling with the role of art in reawakening people to a sense of awe and wonder, and how to kindle curiosity about what creative possibilities may be available for healing our relationship with the earth. These are ideas I see you developing in your paintings.

GM: Most of my work has an implied message, that of interdependence in the natural world and threats to that and to the future of life on earth. The future prospects of sustainability depend, in part at least, upon comprehending these relationships and adapting human behavior to them.  Recently, I did several paintings of gardens, an idea that was inspired by the work of entomologist Doug Tallamy, so the gardens I choose are the gardens of the wild with their mix of native plants and trees, rather than our standard suburban flower patches. 

MM: Tallamy’s warnings that wildlife populations are in decline largely because the native plants they depend on are disappearing are something I first learned about from Adkins Arboretum here on the Eastern Shore. Many of my garden plants came from its native plants sales, and it seems there’s a surge in people working to restore habitats by gardening with native plants.

GM: Yes, many people are practicing a form of home gardening which endeavors to replicate native conditions and incorporate some ancient wisdom into the practice of gardening to encourage, rather than kill vital insect, bird and animal populations which are rapidly declining due to agribusiness, development pressures and yes, even suburban gardens.

MM: You’ve written that you see the garden as a source of hope and regeneration. I think that’s so true, both in terms of grassroots conservation and for individual gardeners like you and me. Last winter, I had a bout of Covid with fatigue and inflammation that went on and on. It only let up when I started to work in the garden for at least a little while every day. That felt to me like a direct experience of the healing power of earth.

GM: I certainly agree that gardening helps, but I must admit that the increasing heat and humidity of our summers added to the rampant increase in invasive plants, as well as the ongoing problem with tick-borne diseases have made it harder to enjoy! But even all of that does help put things into some perspective, right? One is forced to confront serious issues even whilst pulling the weeds!

MM: It’s a paradox! On one side, gardening always lifts my spirits but on the other, I’m constantly noticing worrying changes. We used to have swarms of butterflies and bees in our garden rather than the few we see now. The huge decreases in bird and insect populations scientists are warning of are obvious right in our garden beds. These are all issues stemming from the effects of climate change. 

GM: A great many origin stories tell of folks once living happily in a primordial paradise, a lush garden of peace and plenty where toil, want and conflict were unknown. But, as with the Garden of Eden, the stories often report the end of this paradisal existence due to human folly.

MM: The great beauty of your paintings does conjure a sense of paradise, even a sense of the sacred. 

GM: How beauty is defined has changed with time and place, but the elusive concept has been with us, and closely associated with ideas of art, for thousands of years. The artist/activist Theaster Gates has written that “At every level of the human experience, we are looking for the beautiful, something that gives priority to our souls…. We drink in nature, we yearn to commune with the beautiful, we crave the sublime….” He feels that being around beautiful things can actually alter the way humans act.

MM: It seems to me that a great part of beauty’s power is to give people joy and a sense of harmony and well-being. In your paintings, it offers an enticing invitation to look more and more closely and discover the surprising colors, textures and plays of opacity and translucence. Looking closely reveals all this evidence of time and change, injury and adaptation that shows through the many layers of paint.

GM: I think that visual art, or at least what I do, aims to create objects of beauty that enrich human lives in some way, that when successful perhaps enlighten, inspire, uplift, or otherwise point to something “beyond” the quotidian cares of the world.

MM: Years ago, I reviewed Ellen Dissanayake’s book What Is Art For? for an art magazine. Her premise is that art denotes particular things as special, as socially important and thus serves an important cultural and evolutionary function. I think that the intense beauty of the landscapes in your paintings denotes them as special.

GM: The beauty of nature/land has inspired so much art through the ages, up to and including some of the modern abstract painters who still claimed nature as their muse. I grew up with that love of the land and continue to cherish its beauty and hope to be able to share the feeling with others. So many today are separated from the natural world to the point that they can lose touch with it. The paintings ask people to stop, look and reconnect—and hopefully to really see and feel.

MM: That’s so important! We’re usually too busy (or at least think we are) to look around, to be aware of the environment we’re living in. It’s a cultural failing, and I think it’s part of why young people are experiencing so much depression and desperation. Between the rigid schedules of activities kids are required to keep and the fear of allowing them to go outside unsupervised, they rarely get a chance to connect directly with nature.

GM: I think the lack of contact with the natural world is bound to have an impact on the minds of kids today, especially since it comes together with increased exposure to virtual media. Certainly that close contact with the sights, sounds, feeling of being in the natural world in the early years can be formative—the brain programmed in a certain way that stays with you as you wander on through life!

MM: Although I wouldn’t categorize you as a “climate artist” in the sense of creating activist art, I think that experiencing art such as yours encourages people to pay attention to the natural world, maybe even with a sense of reverence, and to develop a deeper understanding of the environmental crisis and hopefully, a stronger commitment to addressing it.

GM: Right, we need to open both hearts and minds. And actually, I also see both as interconnected parts of the same system which can be touched by art.

MM: You brought my attention to another book, Conversations Before the End of Time, in which the art critic and teacher Suzi Gablik has a conversation with Dissanayake about the function of art in these times of ecological and spiritual crisis. They discuss Dissanayake’s theory about art as a behavior that helps define us as human, a biological urge that actually contributes to survival. At least in traditional societies, it’s a way of defining what’s special, what people need to care about. Defining and affirming those values helps to make a strong, resilient culture. She sees that as antithetical to the contemporary Western understanding of art as a kind of luxury item subject to capitalist values.

GM: Although our culture has thought of art as a “frill,” or as just another commodity, I hope there’s still space for art as a means of communication, inspiration and enhancement of human life.

MM: I see your work as being full of hope, even while it’s saturated with pathos and sorrow both for humanity and the earth. It seems to me that each of your paintings is a call to focus on what we need to care about, just as Dissanayake says. Your mountains may be weathering away but they still soar and inspire, and your waterfalls, pools and streams run with life-giving water. There’s a feeling of the sacred that tempers the pathos. So, facing both cultural malaise and ecological disaster, how do we maintain hope? You and I are both being confronted with the reality of rising sea level. I’m seeing it here on Maryland’s Eastern Shore and you’re it seeing around your home in a Hudson River village adjacent to the large estuarine Piermont Marsh and the source of inspiration for many of your paintings.

GM;  Well, in terms of hope, I think we choose. And in so many ways, our marsh provides a metaphor for the times. It is a liminal space, a place in constant flux between land and water, fertile, full of life and potential, the breeding ground for many species and vital to the life of river and ocean. There’s a beauty and a mysterious quality here, but also somehow a sense of portent.  For ages, people considered marshes to be wasteland and a great many of our marshes have been destroyed, lost to landfill and development. Science has since shown us the error in those ways and is taking positive steps to mitigate the damage. The Hudson River National Estuarine Research Reserve was formed to help protect and preserve remaining marshes of significance, including Piermont Marsh, and reserve them for research as well, finally recognizing their importance to the environment. Today, of course, the whole area is under a new threat from human-induced sea level rise, and we actually can’t be sure it will even survive. But a state-funded pilot project is now underway to stabilize the eroding shoreline and help preserve the marsh, so we hope for the best!

MM: That’s a great project, though as you say, sea level rise is already a given. The side of our yard here on the Chester River is bordered by a marsh that’s creeping slowly into our lawn as the river is getting higher. Our house, like many close to the water, was flooded by Hurricane Isabel 20 years ago. Ever since, my husband and I have talked about elevating the house above the floodplain. We just went through a long process of conferring with architects, contractors and county officials about the possibility, only to find out the cost is prohibitive.

GM: On the face of it, that’s very bad news about the house. But it might turn out to be for the best. That process is complicated and obviously horrendously expensive, and who’s to say what level of protection it ultimately offers. If current science is correct and the rate of warming and sea level rise  is accelerating, then all the estimates of what the levels will be and when are going to have to be looked at yet again.

MM: One of the paintings in the show is called “Solastalgia,” which is a term coined by the Australian philosopher, Glenn Albrecht that refers to an increasingly common psychological distress suffered by those whose familiar environment has been dramatically changed, all too often by our changing climate. That’s the kind of distress I’m feeling as we see flood tides coming closer and closer to our house.

GM: This has been the hottest summer on record, and people are more widely acknowledging that climate change is real, but still we have no real solutions in the works. My daughter and I have had this conversation about Homo sapiens as a flawed/failed species—one that has irreversibly fouled its own nest and is destined for extinction. 

MM: This is something that Gablik and Dissanayake discuss, and it both shocked me and made so much sense when Dissanayake talked about how we’ve created an unnatural “supermechanistic” environment that we simply can’t adapt to. We know in our hearts that our ways of living are unsustainable both in terms of our own psychological wellbeing and for the earth. When I fall into despair about the crisis that is already unfolding, I think of a stone I found along the river. It has tiny fossils of scallop shells and must date back to a time when the land where I live was part of the ocean floor. It comforts me to think that the earth is always changing and adapting, and that even if humans disappear, it will ultimately survive us, as it has survived countless cataclysms in the distant past.

GM: Homo sapiens have been around for the tiniest blink of the eye in terms of the existence of life on earth. The fossils you found convey a sense of the deep time of that existence and do help put things into perspective, don’t they? I have a slab of stone about a foot square I pulled out of a woodland stream in the Catskills that’s full of fossilized shells. I love looking at it and thinking about the time involved with the formation of that stone, the shells, the mountains.

MM: You sent me an article about Piermont Marsh titled “Why a Marsh” from the journal Places. It details the vital functions of the marsh for a host of species and gives a wonderful chronology of how it was formed and continues to change both through natural processes and human activity. What’s fascinating is how it’s all about interconnection. It reminds me so much of your paintings, that sense of being able to trace the many stages of creation both in the marsh and the painting process. And although it posits that the marsh may eventually be swallowed by the water again, it closes with the thought that that will change, too, and at in some distant time, green plants will again sprout from its mudflats. Of course, there’s no knowing whether humans will still be around by then.

GM: It is almost beyond our capacity to imagine, but it is possible that the species will become extinct if unable to evolve quickly enough to correct its ways. I think my paintings look at that underlying world which supports us and will quite possibly survive us and continue to exist for whatever follows us. So in that there is some hope.

MM: Yes, the thought that earth will continue to evolve is heartening, but it’s human nature to hope for more and I can’t help hoping that a collective survival mechanism will kick in and the sooner the better! And maybe art can be part of that. The biological urge to make art that Dissanayake talks about is something you and I have both felt from childhood. Being artists, it’s our way to explore the world and make sense of it. The more art shows us what we need to care about and the more it pulls on our heartstrings, the more chance there is that we’ll make the necessary changes to allow humanity and all the other threatened species to survive.

GM: Living here at Piermont, though I never do plein air painting and almost never even sketch, I do store up something from frequent walks around the village, including the changing effects of light, and carry it back to the studio. I guess it all goes into some kind of big stew that I access via a mysterious process that I’m not sure anyone can really explain! But the main thing is that at times it can be accessed and shared. And if and when that succeeds, perhaps there is passed along something of the enormous importance of that sense of being in nature that contemporary people have lost and must regain if we are to make it to the next level! I found a quote from William James that I’m going with for now: “I will act as if what I do makes a difference.” I think that answers the question about maintaining hope in these difficult times!!

“Watershed” will be on exhibit in the 203 High Street gallery.  Hours at both the High Street and Cross Street galleries are Thursday, Friday – 11-4; Saturday 10-5. In addition, the Cross Street gallery is open Sunday 12-3. Private appointments may be scheduled at any time by contacting Carla Massoni. 410-708-4512 

Mary McCoy is an artist and writer who has the good fortune to live beside an old steamboat wharf on the Chester River. She is a former art critic for the Washington Post and several art publications. She enjoys kayaking the river and walking her family farm where she collects ideas and materials for her writing and for the environmental art she creates, often in collaboration with her husband Howard. They have exhibited their work in the U.S., Ireland, Wales and New Zealand.

For additional information please visit www.massoniart.com.

 

 

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Spy Review: Artists Fellowship Exhibit in Chestertown by Mary McCoy

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There’s a powerful sense of place and history in the stories that weave through the Artists Fellowship exhibit on view at Emmanuel Church Parish Hall through April 1. Allen Johnson’s colorful oil paintings of Black watermen oystering on the Chester, the very river that brought their enslaved ancestors, set the scene, while history unfolds in Mike Pugh’s stunning retelling of the nearly forgotten story of a white Quaker abolitionist wrenched from his home, an 18th-century house where Pugh himself now lives, to be tarred and feathered by an angry mob. In another remarkable coincidence of location, Jason Patterson created a portrait of a man enslaved at the Spring Street building that is currently being renovated to be the home of the Kent Cultural Alliance. Set in Kent County’s familiar landscapes, these artworks tell stories that literally bring home the anguish and heartbreak wrought by slavery and the lingering consequences of racism.

Chesapeake Heartland Community Historian Carolyn Brooks touches Mike Pugh’s mural

Cosponsored by the Kent Cultural Alliance and Washington College’s Chesapeake Heartland project, what might seem a small, unassuming show of work by five local artists (all African Americans except Pugh) in a church parish hall, turns out to be startlingly moving and profound. Quiet and rural as it may be, Kent County is revealed as a microcosm of the African-American story and these artists are here to tell it.

You can read about Chesapeake Heartland online or in the brochure provided at the show, but suffice to say that it grew from the recognition of Kent County as the locus of four centuries of African American history and culture from the earliest days of slavery through the Civil War and the Civil Rights Movement and on to the painting of the Black Lives Matter mural on High Street. Drawing on materials from the CH Digital Archive and the personal experiences of its artists, this show personifies what art really is for—the searching out, understanding and communication of the heart-deep stories that are the reality behind our everyday lives.

Two major themes run throughout the show—the painful persistence of racism and the limited options for employment for African Americans in Kent County. Each of Johnson’s paintings uses specific details and the engaging candor of his folk art style to tell the stories of the everyday lives of his watermen and oyster shuckers, while Gordon Wallace’s series of paired photographs document factory employment in Chestertown.

A trio of photos Wallace discovered in the CH Digital Archive were taken at Vita Foods, once the town’s largest employer. Paired with each is one of his own photos of the present-day site presented in a similar snapshot style. Again the threads are interwoven. His own grandmother appears in a group of women in Vita Food uniforms and caught in a similar position as a worker unloading products at Vita Foods, his cousin performs a task in his job at Dixon Valve, which took over the location from Vita Foods and after recently moving to its new home on the edge of town, donated the site to Washington College.

Yumi Hogan, Allen Johnson and Ruby Johnson with Johnson’s paintings at the exhibit’s opening reception

The sense of place that Johnson and Wallace evoke expands in Pugh’s two-panel sculptural ceramic relief. With a drawing of James Lamb Bowers’s home, now Pugh’s, in one corner, the righthand panel is incised with an account by Bowers detailing the terrifying night in 1858 when he was attacked. It includes a list of his attackers, whose surnames are still familiar in this area. On the other panel, the head and muscular arms of a Black woman brimming with indomitable spirit burst out from a disk of feathers ringed with lettering that tells her story. She is Harriet Tillison, a free Black woman, who was also tarred and feathered on the same night before disappearing from history. Powerful in its modelling and jampacked with evocative symbolism, this artwork was conceived by Pugh to ultimately become a public mural somewhere in Chestertown.

That the violence of racist behavior is still with us takes gut-wrenching form in Bogey Brown’s series of altered photographs. Beginning with a few notes scrawled on what is essentially a documentary photo of a young African American man holding a sign telling the story of Anton Black, killed by police in Greensboro in 2018, the series moves in four successive steps to a ghost image of the protester virtually swallowed by a head-spinning swirl of clashing colors. In the wordplay of its title, “Losslostlose,” and in the progression of images from documentary to almost hallucinatory, the artist tells another story—how the whirlwind of emotional confusion caused by this tragedy and too many similar incidents causes profound wounds to the psyche.

This exhibit speaks of the knotty truth that too little has changed in the more than a century and a half between the two incidents, but it also offers healing, through supporting these artists in their exploration of African American history in Kent County and making their works available to the community, as well as in giving the subject matter the prominence and dignity it deserves.

It’s particularly in Patterson’s portraits that the strength and humanity of local African Americans comes to the fore. Like Wallace, he turned to the CH Digital Archive for source material, searching out photos of Black members of this community. Working from these, he created nuanced portraits in soft pastel on raw canvas mounted on linen. Finished with a gel glaze that gives them depth, elegance and an aura of significance, these sensitive portraits are further enhanced by substantial, well-crafted wooden frames, endowing them with a memorable, monumental presence.

Chesapeake Heartland and Kent Cultural Alliance are to be applauded for conceiving of the Artists Fellowships that supported these artists in their work, making this exhibit, with its interwoven tapestry of stories, possible. Artists are the first to work for positive change in any community, and here they have unfolded a host of potent truths rooted firmly in our very own landscape and community and ready for our consideration.

CUTLINES:

 

Yumi Hogan, Allen Johnson and Ruby Johnson with Johnson’s paintings at the exhibit’s opening reception

 

Chesapeake Heartland Community Historian Carolyn Brooks touches Mike Pugh’s mural

 

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Stephanie Garon at Kohl Gallery by Mary McCoy

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Entering Stephanie Garon’s exhibit, “Pry,” on view at Washington College’s Kohl gallery through March 4, you are confronted with an eerie sight. Dangling from the ceiling nearly to the floor of the darkened gallery, giant reeds cast a looming presence that feels both aggressive and almost feral. Forming two curving “walls” of vegetation with an open aisle in between, they seem to compel you to venture inside for closer investigation of both the tall grasses and the video playing on the wall beyond.

Towering more than twice human height, there’s a raw physicality about these imposing grasses. They are ominous and they are beautiful. Lit from above, their long stems and slender leaves throw intricate radiating shadows across the floor and onto the walls. But the feeling of something alien falters when you realize these grasses are all too familiar. It’s a sculpture made with phragmites, complete with fluffy seed heads and hairy roots, that Garon dug from along the banks of our own Chester River. The accompanying video confirms this with closeups of dense walls of phragmites viewed from a kayak and clunking, gurgling and swooshing sounds suggesting an encounter with the jungle-thick growth.

You need to know some background (which a printed handout provides) in order to appreciate this project. A multi-disciplinary artist whose work includes sculpture, drawing, public art installations, performance, and writing, Garon works primarily with environmental issues. Not content to cloister herself in her studio, she is happiest when she’s outdoors exploring nature and working directly with it. For this project, she made frequent trips to Chestertown from her home in Baltimore over the past year, to learn about our local environment and the challenges it faces. Working with Michael Hardesty, the Director of the college’s River and Field campus, she researched the many invasive species that impact Eastern Shore ecology and decided to focus on one of the most problematic and ubiquitous: phragmites.

The River and Field campus was one of two places where Garon harvested phragmites for the installation in the Kohl Gallery. The other was outside the Center for Environment and Society’s Semans-Griswold Environmental Hall just downriver from the College’s boathouse. This is also the site of a sister sculpture to the one in the Kohl. In an inverse gesture to digging up the phragmites for the indoor piece, the artist “planted” a circle of hundreds of thin steel rods upright in the ground along a walking path near the building.

Mimicking phragmites right down to the way the rods bend and sway in the breeze, it brings industrial materials into the landscape, while the indoor version brings natural materials into the manmade environment of the gallery. Like the gallery version, an open aisle runs through the middle of the rods, providing a chance to actually enter the sculpture. While a steel sculpture in a natural setting might seem like an imposition, yet another example of humans imposing on the natural landscape, these slender rods have a playful, light presence and there’s a lovely counterpoint between their cool tones of silver and white and the warm natural browns of the surrounding winter landscape.

Stephanie Garon, “Pry,” phragmites, steel, single channel video

The exhibit’s title, “Pry,” came from the first thing Garon learned when she began to gather this problematic plant—it doesn’t dig up easily. The mat of rhizomes that forms as it spreads is dense and tenacious. You literally have to pry it up and it’s a slow, labor-intensive process. Garon spent months at the task and also hosted a workshop in which participants learned about phragmites, then were handed shovels so they could add to her harvest.

Phragmites australis is a non-native invasive plant which probably arrived in ballast carried by ships from Eurasia in the 19th century. It spreads aggressively, choking out native grasses and limiting the biodiversity of plants, insects, birds and animals. It’s now so widespread on the Eastern Shore (and worldwide) that we hardly even notice it. That is, unless you’re a farmer trying to keep it out of your fields or a riverfront homeowner who’s finding it encroaching on your lawn due to sea level rise. Our counties have weed management programs to battle its spread, as do organizations such as Chesapeake Wildlife Heritage. But it’s an endless struggle, as Garon’s project illustrates.

There are many layers to “Pry.” It’s a pair of sculptures which contrast natural and manmade materials and environments, stirring questions about their interconnecting influences. It’s also the documentation in miniature of the massive effort it would take to eradicate phragmites. Speaking to the difficulties in restoring and maintaining the environmental health of our landscapes, it stands as a metaphor for the challenges facing us as we recognize the growing number of ecological threats to the earth.

Adding to the depth and richness of Garon’s investigation is the backstory that the now idyllic River and Field campus was formerly a petroleum and agricultural chemical storage and distribution site which the college decontaminated and restored with clean soil and native plantings. Happily, although phragmites remains an issue, this bit of shoreline is regenerating and has become a haven for education and research in environmental science and wetlands ecology.

Inscribed on the wall of the Kohl Gallery, one of Garon’s poems conjures our beloved yet threatened shorelines. In part, it reads “a harmonized confessional at low tide lapping loss after loss after loss.” With loss so widespread throughout our environment, healthy restoration seems an impossible task, overwhelming in its scope and complexity. Yet with our world so out of balance, there is no other choice. As is becoming increasing clear, humanity’s survival and nature’s depends on it.

Mary McCoy is an artist and writer who has the good fortune to live beside an old steamboat wharf on the Chester River. She is a former art critic for the Washington Post and several art publications. She enjoys kayaking the river and walking her family farm where she collects ideas and materials for her writing and for the environmental art she creates, often in collaboration with her husband Howard. They have exhibited their work in the U.S., Ireland, Wales and New Zealand.

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At the Academy: “The Moveable Image” by Mary McCoy

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Allow time for your visit to “The Moveable Image,” on view at the Academy Art Museum through March 6. Captivating and enigmatic, each of its three video installations will draw you into a different aspect of interrelationship whether personal or with the world at large.

Shala Miller, “Mrs. Lovely”

Shala Miller’s video “Mrs. Lovely” is so simple, so spare of means and so powerful, that it will linger in your thoughts for days to come. In the dark window of an antique wooden door, the figure of a black woman begins to appear. First, there’s a soft gleam across her hairline, almost like a crescent moon, then her face and the feminine ruffle at the neck of her dress gradually materialize from the shadows. Life-sized and directly in front of you, it feels like a personal encounter as she begins to speak, hesitatingly musing on the difficult, perhaps dangerous feelings she has for her lover and herself. It’s excruciatingly intimate as if you’re being allowed to venture into her very mind.

In the midst of the Omicron surge, headphones pose a health threat, so the soundtracks of the three installations interfere somewhat with one another. It’s tricky to hear everything Mrs. Lovely is saying, but you can catch enough to understand the ambiguity of her desires and the potential of her latent personal power.

As she speaks, she chews her lip, looks off to the side, sniffs. Her eyes grow wet and the light brushing across her skin reveals it as flawed, a landscape that hints at a history of sadness and tragedy. At one point she declares, “…you know I hate poetry and think it’s the language of the weak,” yet her words, even at their darkest, have the bare honesty and brutal integrity associated with powerful poetry. The very ambiguity of her uncertain words is a kind of revelation into the openness of her search to understand.

While Miller explores the ambiguities experienced in self-identity and personal relationships, the collaborative duo, Collis/Donadio, take on the paradoxical ways we view our physical environment. During the early days of the pandemic, when our towns and cities were eerily quiet, empty of traffic and pedestrians, there was a strange shift in perspective. Instead of constant human activity, the stillness of unlit office buildings, vacant sidewalks and lonely roads prevailed. And there was time to go outside, to watch the wind in the trees and the clouds gliding across the sky.

The built environment looked and felt so different without the usual distractions that nature suddenly took on a powerful presence, shifting our awareness in unexpected ways. Curious about this phenomenon, Shannon Collis and Liz Donadio shot footage of monolithic office buildings, utility equipment, rippling water, wind-blown grasses and trees, and huge cumulous clouds for their video installation “Moving Still.” Projected in geometric patterns onto sculpture plinths and movable walls (standard museum equipment repurposed) as well as the gallery walls behind, they fill the room with an exquisite dance of architecture and nature entwining as partners, the natural movement of water, wind and clouds contrasting with and accentuating the stillness of the manmade environment.

Collis/Donadio “Moving Still.”

Aptly titled “Moving Still,” both for this contrast and for our slow and cautious movements as we adapt to the continuing effects of the pandemic, this installation is a bit like film noir—mysterious and largely unpeopled. A droning soundtrack layering resonant tones with ambient sounds of passing traffic and children’s voices, just as the images are layered, adds to the aura of familiarity and strangeness.

Gradually, you begin to sort it out. It’s an overlay of windy trees that makes a steel and glass tower seem almost on fire and the angular shadows flashing by at one point are glimpses of the superstructure seen while crossing the Bay Bridge. In a palette limited to shades of gray, white, watery blue, and (like a promise of returning life) a tiny touch of green, small segments of video appear simultaneously in two or three different places setting up repeating rhythms and a certain sense of unity. The effect is mesmerizing. The more you watch, the more you see and the more you are aware of the hugeness of the forces of nature. There’s a sense that, no matter what, their ageless dance continues, Covid or no, and even (in a tacit reference to climate change) with or without our human presence.

In Rachel Schmidt’s installation “Vanishing Points,” the damaging effects of  human presence are repeatedly referenced. Although its three ornate frames resemble fancy full-length mirrors, instead of presenting images of ourselves, they show videos of landscapes.

Rachel Schmidt, “Vanishing Points”

There’s nothing like an ostentatious gold frame to proclaim that something is art, but in contrast to traditional landscape paintings, her mountains, moors and windblown grassy fields are never picturesque. Interspersed with sequences of rushing flood waters where a road should be, a mountainous landscape scarred by quarrying and closeups of discarded tires, a ruined stone chapel, litter, and a dead fish, an atmosphere of barren desolation prevails. Very occasionally, a person walks through one of the landscapes, but each one of them is digitally altered in some way, set apart from the scene as if humans don’t actually belong there.

Schmidt’s message continues to unfold when you realize the gilded frames are fakes, constructed of dozens of discarded bottles and carryout trays sheathed in printouts of closeups of the pretentious frames they mimic. It’s a comic but stinging comment on our throwaway society but even more significantly, on our penchant for trying to make things look good even if it’s only a surface impression.

This theme crops up again as the camera pans across a wooded hillside where clothing is tied on every available tree. The scene is not explained, but intuition is enough to suggest some kind of ritual activity. Clothing is like the frames—it’s meant to make a certain impression, to convey a hoped for self-identity. So to leave articles of clothing in a forest is to offer something of ourselves to nature, whether as a gift or a request. To give a little background, this is the site of a sacred spring (not shown in the videos) at Black Isle on the northeast coast of Scotland. It’s one of many centuries-old holy or healing wells in the British Isles and Ireland where people come to dip a piece of clothing in the water, say a prayer for healing, and hang the cloth in a nearby bush or tree to weather away, presumably taking the illness with it.

Curiously, the number of visitors to these pilgrimage sites has increased exponentially in recent years, as has the amount of clothing and other objects they leave. The result is an appalling mess, but it’s also indicative of our largely suppressed need to connect with nature, a kind of plea for help for something beyond the human world to save us.

There’s an innate wisdom in the urge to seek interrelationship, to understand how we fit into this complex and contradictory world. Through their work, these artists suggest that it is only through diligent self-reflection that we can open our minds and vision to our situations, whether personal or environmental, in order to live fully and wisely.

Mary McCoy is an artist and writer who has the good fortune to live beside an old steamboat wharf on the Chester River. She is a former art critic for the Washington Post and several art publications. She enjoys the kayaking the river and walking her family farm where she collects ideas and materials for the environmental art she creates, often in collaboration with her husband Howard. They have exhibited their work in the U.S., Ireland, Wales and New Zealand.

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Meeting Rebecca Hoffberger by Mary McCoy

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Imagine the thrill for an artist like me when the director of a major museum made a point of congratulating me on one of my sculptures. I can still see her back then in 2011, a small, sparkly woman with long blond hair and an oversized glittering necklace looking up at the shiny, tattered, slightly muddy, beribboned string of stray balloons I had draped back and forth across the corner of the gallery. That was how I first met Rebecca Hoffberger, of the American Visionary Art Museum.

The truth was, however, that meeting her at a reception for an art show at Howard County Center for the Arts wasn’t exactly going to advance my career. Her museum exhibits the work of people who, unlike me, haven’t been to art school and don’t show their work in galleries. Instead, they make art because of a burning need in their spirit.

On February 21, the Spy partnered with the Academy Art Museum to present a talk by Hoffberger. In this overview of the AVAM’s history and mission, she made it clear that she feels there’s more to art than what we normally see in white-walled galleries and urged us to think less about the finished product and more about art as an open-ended, no-holds-barred investigation and celebration of what our world is all about. You can find out more in these two articles here and here on the Spy, but what I want to do here is tell you more about Hoffberger herself.

She’s a visionary. There are plenty of articles online that will tell you about her colorful life and how her response to the paintings and drawings of institutionalized psychiatric patients sparked her ideas for the museum. Deeply moved by the passion behind their raw creativity, she felt a compulsion to establish a venue where art born of an intuitive need for creative expression could be seen and considered. Recognizing art as a basic human need, the AVAM has dedicated itself to art that follows “the intuitive path of learning to listen to the small, soft voice within.”

I’m an art critic, as well as an artist, and in spending many years looking at art and talking with artists, I’ve been continually reminded that almost all artists do begin by listening to that “small, soft voice,” but too often, we’re pulled off track. In our culture, to earn your stripes as a “real” artist, you pretty much have to attend art school and be indoctrinated in (mostly Western) art history, then build a substantial resume of gallery exhibits, grants, awards and residencies, and remember to use words like “ontology,” “visceral” and “deconstruction” whenever possible. These expectations have made contemporary art into an insular, privileged activity. There’s too much background knowledge required for most people to appreciate gallery art, much less enjoy it.

Hoffberger doesn’t bother with that kind of stuff. She keeps a very active eye out for people who just plain need to make art, whether they call it art or not, and this is what sets the AVAM apart from most art museums. For example, my friend, Trams Hollingsworth, who is a gardener and rescuer of eagles, raccoons and crows, is a featured artist in the AVAM’s current exhibit, “The Secret Life of Earth: Alive! Awake! (and Possibly Really Angry!). When I asked her how Hoffberger knew about the pigeon skeleton she lent for the exhibit, she said she had made it her business to befriend Hoffberger after a trip to the AVAM bowled her over.

“I stalked her,” she explained. “I started writing these love notes, like ‘You taught me so much in one day and I can’t teach you anything except how to do nothing and I’m pretty sure you’re not very good at that.’ Then we started corresponding and then maybe five years ago there was this really big snow storm. I got a call and she said, ‘This is Rebecca and I’m really tired and I want to take your Master’s course in doing nothing. I’m gonna get snowed in with you.’ And she did—five days snowed in.”

Rebecca Hoffberger has that effect on people. She makes you look at things differently, and like any good teacher, she is not aloof and never hesitates to ask whatever she likes. So at a small party at Trams’s house the evening before Hoffberger’s talk, when she overheard me say something to Trams about the aftereffects of having had brain surgery, she broke off her own conversation to ask, from across the room, how the experience had changed me. A brief conversation and a few days later, I found myself having lunch with Pat Bernstein, who had also undergone brain surgery. We had a fascinating talk comparing notes about how my experience had led me to lose my fear of spiders, heightened my appreciation of being alive, and made me hate sugary food, while hers had caused her to suddenly start seeing faces in trees and rocks. Impelled to document them, she had gone to Hoffberger for suggestions on how to share the resulting series of photographs with the public and ended up with her photos included in the AVAM’s “Earth” show.

Hoffberger’s talk at the Academy Art Museum was titled “Welcome to Wonder,” as apt a description of her outlook as of the AVAM’s infectious celebration of awe, outrageousness, pathos, obsession, and joy. Quick of mind and full of enthusiasm, she’s also full of stories. Spurred by her warmth and openness, I overcame my shyness and invited her to visit our studio the next day on her way back to Baltimore. It was a quick visit, but before it was over, she had shared anecdotes about the children’s train at the Wanamaker store in Philadelphia, Ronald Reagan’s psychic, Ohio’s Serpent Mound, how corn developed from a grass-like plant bearing a row of tiny pyramid-shaped kernels, and how pawlonia trees absorb eleven times more carbon dioxide than other trees.

We did a thorough tour of the studio as we talked, but we didn’t look at the sculpture she liked back in 2011. It’s currently stuffed into a big bag, but it has doubled in length since Hoffberger saw it. I feel kind of like one of her visionary artists who are impelled to make art because I can’t help but continue working on it. It irks me that I’m forever finding wayward balloons caught in the stubble in the fields of my family’s farm and tangled in the marsh grass along the river, so I tidy them up, carry them back to the studio, and incorporate them into what is now a nearly 50-foot-long sculpture. I’ve exhibited it four times so far and hope to do so again because, as Hoffberger and her museum have reminded me, we need to follow that urge to make art.

My personal soapbox is for the environment, but as a trip to the AVAM will bear out, there are myriad ways that art can help us examine the realities of life. More than simply a means of celebrating beauty and creative skills, art is a process through which we can explore, clarify and inspire a sense of value in shared social and spiritual significances. In our age of fractured relationships, confused priorities, hate-mongering, population pressure, and environmental degradation, we need plenty of art. We need to do what Hoffberger and the AVAM advocate and tune our senses so that the “small, soft voice” can be heard.

Mary McCoy is an artist and writer who has the good fortune to live beside an old steamboat wharf on the Chester River. She is a former art critic for the Washington Post and several art publications. She enjoys the kayaking the river and walking her family farm where she collects ideas and materials for the environmental art she creates, often in collaboration with her husband Howard. They have exhibited their work in the U.S., Ireland, Wales and New Zealand.

The Spy Newspapers may periodically employ the assistance of artificial intelligence (AI) to enhance the clarity and accuracy of our content.

Review: “Intimate Generations” at the Kohl By Mary McCoy

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True to its title, “Intimate Generations,” is achingly intimate, personal and moving. Curated by Tara Gladden, the Kohl Gallery’s new Director and Curator, and on view at the Kohl through February 29, this exhibit kindles a multitude of emotions, deep memories and realizations about how family influences and profoundly affects our personal identity and view of life, yet it also ranges far beyond personal stories into the hidden bonds that connect us all.

Kalen Na’il Roach, “My Mother, My Father and I”

There’s a wonderful fusion of generations in “My Mother, My Father and I” by Prince George’s County artist Kalen Na’il Roach. Spliced from old family photos, parents and child are merged into one warm brown and black form with the child (the artist as a toddler) snug in the center. In another reworked photo, radiating lines scratched into the surface of a snapshot of his mother intensify the lively energy in her smile, while patches of color swiped on with paint markers make the space around his father hum as he poses for the camera. Shot in the family’s home, these are casual images, comfortable and brimming with familiarity, yet Roach’s abrupt cropping and slashing gestures indicate that there’s more. These photos can’t tell the whole story—there are mysteries present. Certainly, family is the bedrock of existence, yet it is full of unknowns, things about our closest relatives that we may never know or understand.

The bonds of parent and child are explored on an even more intimate level in Philadelphia artist Aimee Gilmore’s “Sleep Series” and “Milkscapes.” Using her own breast milk, she poured luxurious, stunningly intricate forms onto paper or photos. They call to mind primordial patterns of creation, whether swirling galaxies, surging lava flows or meandering streams and rivers. While some are digital prints capturing the spectacular details of these spills of the nutritious milk, in others, actual breast milk spreads across the surface of a shadowy images where infant and mother slumber in a milky dream, the physicality of their bond underscored by the puckering of the paper under the flowing liquid.

Khánk H. Lê, “His Brave New World”

One of the strengths of this show is that it views family relationships from many angles. While Roach and Gilmore explore the closeness and trust between parents and children, chanan delivuk, of Baltimore, documents the inevitable truth that love begets pain. While still in her teens, delivuk was startled by her own lack of understanding of her mother’s emotional and mental state when she read the journal her mother wrote to cope with her deep sadness, uncertainties and vulnerability. Touched by her grandmother’s suffering and decline, the loss of her father, and her own guilt over inadequacies as a parent, delivuk’s mother had been internalizing her pain. Pages of the journal are reproduced for this show, interspersed with ghostly medical imaging of her mother’s heart from a hospital stay for surgery. Strikingly reminiscent of Gilmore’s milk spills, these images are haunting proof that while technology allows us to actually see the heart, it can’t tell us what that heart is feeling. It’s a shrewd metaphor that seconds Roach’s intimation of the impossibility of knowing the full truth about our families.

Every family habitually conceals its secret pain by developing unspoken rules. For Roxana Alger Geffen, a Washington artist with WASP roots, objects found in her family’s attic and her grandmother’s junk drawer were the starting point for “The Binding Ties.” Employing these materials in unexpected combinations, she created a comical but telling series of sculptures that explore personal identity within the tacit expectations of the family. Illustrating the proper interests of a perfect father figure, “The Robe of Rote Masculinity” resembles an elegant dressing gown, but it is stitched from fabric printed with images of a golfer practicing his swing and its hem is weighted with a row of old wrenches. The robe’s well-tempered mate shows up in “The Genteel Role of Feminine Blindness,” featuring a life-size, immaculately white figure with tassels dangling where its eyes should be above a dress fashioned from embroidered dish towels and trimmed with hundreds of the annoying plastic tabs used to attach price tags. One can easily imagine polite conversations at the dinner table where no one would dare to rock the boat, let alone reveal personal passions or gnawing woes.

A common theme throughout this show is that from photos to attic clutter, every object has strings of meaning attached. Whether these are joyful, nourishing or painful, they are almost always poignant in their fragmentary nature. By rifling through his family’s old photos and documents, Aaron Wax, of Brooklyn, was able to create a halting reconstruction of his grandfather’s arrival in America, including a passport-like photo of his grandfather, stamped with official-looking seals, that shows him neatly dressed in a suit and tie with an anxious, faraway look in his youthful eyes. A Polish Jew who tragically lost his first family in World War II, his identity has been reduced to a few teasing artifacts that sketch his story but tell little of the man himself. Wax never knew his grandfather, but as he notes in some explanatory text on the wall, “If not for his great loss I would not be alive.” In this thought, he acknowledges that family not only shapes identity, but is, on the most basic level, the material reason for one’s existence.

Immigration is a vexed topic these days with effects that resound down through the generations. For Washington artist Khánk H. Lê, whose family brought him to America from Vietnam when he was a small child, immigration and its consequences are immediate and ever-present. Encrusted with patterns of rhinestones and glitter, his images are as instantly alluring as a display in a candy store yet so unremittingly busy that they are almost hard to look at. Like Roach, Lê began with family photos that offer glimpses of tenderness and mutual support. Reproducing them as stark, high-contrast paintings, he spotlights each family member or group by positioning them in an alien world of flat, shimmering patterning. Contrasted with these chilly stand-ins for the jazzy, jittery hyperactivity of contemporary American culture, their humanity and vulnerability take center stage.

There is arguably no stronger influence on personal identity than the family, whatever its history. Whether considering the stories evoked by this exhibit or tracing our own family’s examples, we find threads that lead in countless directions. However much we can discern the connections they make, there are multitudes more lost to memory and time that nonetheless exert profound effects on our character and understanding. These are the mysteries that shape us as individuals, as families and as a culture. Look deeply enough and we find the whole world is our influence.

Mary McCoy is an artist and writer who has the good fortune to live beside an old steamboat wharf on the Chester River. She is a former art critic for the Washington Post and several art publications. She enjoys the kayaking the river and walking her family farm where she collects ideas and materials for the environmental art she creates, often in collaboration with her husband Howard. They have exhibited their work in the U.S., Ireland, Wales and New Zealand.

The Spy Newspapers may periodically employ the assistance of artificial intelligence (AI) to enhance the clarity and accuracy of our content.

Spy Review: Lee D’Zmura & Anna Harding by Mary McCoy

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There’s a surprisingly intimate and uplifting show at the Talbot County Public Library. On view through January 29. the botanical art of Lee B. D’Zmura and Anna G. Harding unfolds with portrait after portrait of native plants, garden flowers, fungi, butterflies, bees, and an array of fruits and vegetables.

Entitled “An Art for All Seasons,” this extensive show includes meticulous colored pencil drawings and watercolors so colorful, detailed and deliciously lush that you can get lost in each and every one. From its explosions of intricately striped red and white petals to its papery dried sepals, D’Zmura’s “Amaryllis” is a jaw dropper, while across the room, Harding presents a quintessentially elegant depiction of our native trumpet vine, complete with vivid orange tubular blossoms and graceful, deep green leaves nibbled here and there by insects.

Lee B. D’Zmura, “Tomatillos,” watercolor

The two artists have included some short bits of text that reveal the thoughts behind their approach. One, a quote from Georgia O’Keefe, says “No one sees a flower really; it’s so small. We haven’t time, and to see takes time—like to have a friend takes time.”

D’Zmura and Harding approach their plants with considerable fondness and often with humor. Historically, botanical art is a method of plant identification and classification that requires a knowledge of botany, disciplined pencil and watercolor techniques, sharp eyes, and a steady hand. But although both artists are skilled in this painstaking process, they go beyond the simply informational or decorative to explore changing seasons, invading insects, decay and new growth—in short, they tell not only about the visual characteristics of these plants, they hone in on the lives and character of their subjects.

Anna G. Harding, “Golden Bunch Gall,” graphite

D’Zmura’s “Golden Beet,” bristling with hairy rootlets and multiple sturdy stems is comically stoic, and her “Tomatillos” seem to be engaged in an animated conversation. And in the epitome of optimism, two fragile new leaves sprout directly from a half-healed wound amid labyrinthine patterns of bark in her watercolor, “Silver Maple.”

There’s something fascinatingly grotesque yet beautiful about Harding’s graphite drawing, “Goldenrod Bunch Gall,” a tour-de-force in rendering the complexity of abnormal leaf growth caused by an egg-laying insect. While much of its energy went into this compensating growth, the goldenrod still mustered the fortitude to grow a small blossom which appears like a triumphant, if tiny, flourish lifting above the gall.

Harding’s passion for botanical art began eight years ago when she was concurrently enrolled in the Maryland Master Naturalist program and a botanical art class that D’Zmura was teaching.

She explained, “The two classes were very interdependent for me in terms of awakening to the mysteries of the natural world and learning to depict them.”

D’Zmura earned a Certificate in Botanical Art in 2008 from Brookside Gardens School of Botanical Art and Illustration and went on to teach there and at Adkins Arboretum. Much of her recent work is concerned with the concept of Wabi-Sabi and the natural cycles of growth, aging and decay.

A short paragraph posted on the wall explains, “Wabi-Sabi is an ancient Japanese art aesthetic which embraces beauty as imperfect, impermanent and incomplete. It is the acceptance of the beauty found in imperfection and the natural cycle of growth and decay, of aging with dignity and grace.”

Throughout their paintings and drawings, both artists celebrate these natural changes. There’s the luscious, dead-ripe fruit in Harding’s “Paw Paw,” the bare, sweeping stems of D’Zmura’s “Single Anemone” with its cluster of dried leaves so exquisitely delicate that you can almost feel them crinkle, and the startlingly dramatic fan striped with blue, black and white in Harding’s “Blue Jay Wing.” These are not idealized nature portraits. They show the flaws and tell the stories of the lives of their subjects. Rich and thought-provoking, they will invite you to slow down, look closely and deepen your understanding of the cycles of nature.

Mary McCoy is an artist and writer who has the good fortune to live beside an old steamboat wharf on the Chester River. She is a former art critic for the Washington Post and several art publications. She enjoys the kayaking the river and walking her family farm where she collects ideas and materials for the environmental art she creates, often in collaboration with her husband Howard. They have exhibited their work in the U.S., Ireland, Wales and New Zealand.

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Art Review: Considering “Trees” at MassoniArt By Mary McCoy

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My studio is shaded by two big black walnut trees. I’m kind of in love with them. They have this huge, green, calming presence that settles my nerves and makes me want to write and make art about the beauty, intricacy and wisdom that I feel radiating from the natural world around me. Somehow, they link me into a more solid reality than my fleeting human worries and ambitions.

Living on a riverside farm and working on the art program at Adkins Arboretum, I think I can safely claim that I know something of the power that nature has on creative work. After all, nature is all about creativity. We who work in the arts do well when we follow its lead.

I also know something about climate change. While politicians stupidly argue about whether it’s real, I see the river rippling up into the marsh beside our house every new moon and full moon and too often, watch it creep around the trees at the edge of our yard and lap across the lawn ever closer to the corner of our house. And I cringe at how the top leaves of our coral bark maple, which a friend of ours raised from a seed, have turned crinkly brown each of these past three Augusts, and I grieved last year when the red bud we planted at the edge of the yard succumbed to saltwater intrusion.

Grace Mitchell – Forest Series #1

Like nearly everyone else these days, I’m gazing at a glowing screen as I type these words. But through incredible good luck (and many years of hard work), I’m sitting not in an air-conditioned cubicle or even a carpeted living room, but beside a screen door where the sound of cicadas blows in with the breeze and the dappled light filtering through the black walnut leaves dances across the floor.

Most people these days live in the artificial light and air and sound of indoors. Most people know climate change as a news story, another “issue” on the long list we should be addressing. Those of us who spend a lot of time outdoors feel it in our bones.

Generations ago, people lived on the land and were attuned to its daily and seasonal changes. Every indigenous culture had stories about their land, stories which told them when the winter would come and the spring thaw, how to conjure the stealth to stalk deer, and which trees to go to for food and medicine.

Emily Kalwaitis, “Encapsulated Forest”

The old stories are lost and forgotten along with an instinctive love for the land and the innate need to honor it. Watching what’s happening to this good earth, I’ve often wondered whether I could’ve served better by going into the sciences—ecology leaps to mind—in order to help stem the tide of environmental degradation. But while we need science to help us comprehend the complexities of our ecological systems, we also need art. It’s the artists who are searching out the stories, tapping into archetypal truths, and working to recover a deep understanding of our relationship with the earth.

Ecoart is a rapidly expanding genre. Look it up in Wikipedia and you’ll find citations dating back more than half a century, but these days, you find it everywhere. More and more artists are concentrating on environmental issues, more and more galleries and museums are presenting shows focused on their work. Throughout history, artists have been in the vanguard of change, and what we need now is a thorough change in our outlook toward how to live harmoniously on this fragile earth.

It’s really smart of MassoniArt to focus this show on trees. Climate change is a huge subject encompassing literally all aspects of life on earth. It’s daunting to even think about it. But a tree, that’s something we can relate to. Trees stand upright, like we do. They grow and change with the seasons. They give us shade and make our landscape beautiful, and they are potent symbols in our mythologies and our religions. Possibly more than any other living being, trees give us a visceral, one-on-one sense of the presence of the natural world.

It’s that visceral feeling that engages us, that makes a towering tree, a swooping osprey or a sunlit landscape real to us, that pulls at the heartstrings. If you’re sitting in front of a glowing screen ensconced in the virtual world, how will you know that the natural balance is so far off-kilter? And why would you care? 

If you’re not physically present in the natural world, if you don’t go outside, it’s easy to ignore the changes in our environment and to live in complacency. But step out the door and feel the stifling heat. Notice the dying trees at the river’s edge where rising water has undercut their roots.

Let me make a seemingly simplistic statement: Our problem is that too many people these days don’t have friends who are trees. Trees teach us about growth and patience, about the cycle of the seasons, about cooperation (have you ever noticed how trees growing in close proximity will make space for one another’s branches?), about being intimate with the physical earth. Spend a little time with the artworks in this exhibit. Feel the fecund innocence of the leaves and flowers growing along Emily Kalwaitis’s young girl’s thigh, let the impenetrable black of Grace Mitchell’s primordial forest send prickles of fear up your spine, see your own face mirrored in the heart of Ken Schiano’s leafy tree.

It’s important to be aware of the accumulating facts about rising water, changing weather patterns and soaring extinction rates, but these teach the rational mind what’s happening. It’s equally vital to open the heart and the soul to the challenges we must face. When we do this, we embrace something deeper than data-crunching, we dip into the creative depths of nature itself. And there we may indeed find the impetus and the wisdom to address this catastrophic situation.

“Trees” is on view at MassoniArt September 6 through October 13. For more information, visit www.massoniart.com.

Mary McCoy is an artist and writer who has the good fortune to live beside an old steamboat wharf on the Chester River. She is a former art critic for the Washington Post and several art publications. She enjoys the kayaking the river and walking her family farm where she collects ideas and materials for the environmental art she creates, often in collaboration with her husband Howard. They have exhibited their work in the U.S., Ireland, Wales and New Zealand.

 

 

 

 

The Spy Newspapers may periodically employ the assistance of artificial intelligence (AI) to enhance the clarity and accuracy of our content.