Current Exhibitions | 2020

Rotations: Hamada Shoji at the Intersections of Culture

February 2 – April 18, 2020

In the early twentieth century, with the emergence of studio pottery movements in Japan, Britain and the United States, pottery traditions firmly established in the East were transmitted to the West, helping to define a new, contemporary era in ceramics. Individuals acting as cultural conduits, Hamada Shōji (1894-1978) being a primary example, were, in great part, responsible for such transmissions. The intersections in culture stimulated by these influencers were multi-directional and often reciprocal. Ideas and techniques from the West conversely captivated those in the East, particularly ideas born from the Arts and Crafts movement (ca. 1880-1920). To help illuminate Hamada’s impact and his context in the history of ceramics, the museum will be exhibiting, from the permanent collection, two works by this profoundly influential potter in conjunction with other examples of studio pottery relating to him and his legacy.

By 1920, Hamada Shōji had found like minds in a handful of individuals who would go on to become synonymous with his own name. Among them were Yanagi Sōetsu (1889-1961) and Kawai Kanjirō (1890-1966), persons instrumental in recognizing the mingei folk-art tradition. The best known of Hamada’s collaborators, Bernard Leach (1887-1979), is often recognized as the father of studio pottery, a twentieth century term referring to pottery conceived in short runs solely by an individual or small group of individuals. (This is in contrast to the Arts and Crafts approach to pottery making, which employed many skilled workers, each responsible for separate aspects of production.) Together, these artists and thinkers built upon the groundwork laid years earlier by the Arts & Crafts movement, helmed by William Morris (1834-1896). Hamada’s circle of like-minds shared a preference for handmade goods over mass-produced ones, reveling in their balance of form and function. Through practice they honed their style and through travel, demonstrating and lecturing along the way, they disseminated their ideas and techniques to other areas of the world that were developing their own separate but related studio pottery movements.

In addition to the two works by Hamada Shōji, the permanent collection also features work by both familial and non-familial predecessors of the legendary potter. Hamada Shōji at the Intersections of Culture, on view in Rotation Gallery (dates), will include works by Hamada Shōji; his predecessor, Ogata Kenzan; his peer and friend, Kawai Kanjirō; his son, Hamada Shinsaku; his grandson, Hamada Tomoo; students, including Shimaoka Tatsuzō as well as works by those who have felt his influence but less directly, including Peter Voulkos, Matsuzaki Ken and Phil Rogers.

Duxbury Art Association Winter Juried Show

Opening Reception, February 2, 1 – 3:30 PM

The Art Complex Museum has hosted the Duxbury Art Association’s Annual Winter Juried Show for the past forty-seven years. This juried exhibition features over 100 works created by an equal number of painters, printmakers, sculptors and photographers.

Above and Below: Stephanie Roberts-Camello & Emily Gibson

February 23 – May 10, 2020
Opening Reception, February 23, 1:30 – 3:30PM

Stephanie Roberts-Camello and Emily Gibson investigate networks of events that are detectable by exploring below the surface. One artist removes layers of color to unearth an embedded personal history. The other uses the body as an instrument of measurement to create drawings that chronicle the pressures of social, emotional, and political upheaval. Both delve into the reverberating presence of the environment and its impact on human activity.

The sculptural forms of Roberts-Camello’s paintings reveal scarring and built up strata of encaustic wax over old family letters that date back as far as 1918. Roberts-Camello says, “Reading over many of these letters, I became aware of the challenges my family faced in the panhandle of Texas during the dust bowl days and the Great Depression. They were farmers and cattlemen who struggled with droughts and dust storms making difficult decisions in order to survive. I see a metaphoric connection captured in the wax for struggle and endurance. The wax, as it cools, retains every tear, fold, and impression. I also create rusted paper and eco printing from nature beneath my work as touchstones to the past.”

Emily Gibson exhales onto drops of ink using the force of her breath to create graphic shapes that are then transferred to paper. These drawings act as a shrine to vulnerability and resilience. Other materials connected to the systems of human anatomy are often introduced including salt, water, and the oil from her fingertips. These vistas are altered through secondary additions of color as the stimuli of the environment dictate an unfolding process. The end result fluctuates between micro and macro views that suggest cellular forms and celestial bodies. Both artists excavate stories by using a vantage point provided by time, searching within the activities of human interaction and exchange.

Complex Collaboration

Duxbury Middle School and The Art Complex Museum

This exhibit showcases the talent of Duxbury Middle School art students. Their teacher, Amy Squillante, and the museum’s Education Coordinator, Sally Dean Mello, work together to choose a theme based on artwork found in the museums collection. The students then respond in paint and paper, under their teacher’s guidance, to create pieces of art that connect to what they see.

The Blue Notebooks

May 3 – September 6, 2020
Opening Reception, May 17, 1:30 – 3:30PM

“We need joy as we need air
We need love as we need water
We need each other as we need the earth we share”
Maya Angelou

Artist and Guest Curator Anne Plaisance has assembled a group of artists who are working with what she calls, “their vision of the day after tomorrow.” Responding to contemporary issues and siting research reports from both the United Nations and Harvard University on looming problems like climate change, rising sea levels and extreme weather, Plaisance believes artists can focus on leaving the best legacy they possibly can, through art and culture for whatever comes next. She says, “this exhibition is a requiem for humanity, an homage to creativity and beauty, a chapeau bas to love and generosity, an adieu to memories, a last embrace of our cherished ones”. Artists in the exhibition include; Susan Denniston, Ashley M. Freeby, Kelly Knight, Sarah Pettitt, Anne Plaisance, Stephanie Todhunter and Robin Whiteman.

Complex Conversations: Lisa Houck and Judy Ziegler

May 17 – August 16, 2020
Opening Reception, May 17, 1:30 – 3:30PM

In past Complex Conversations we have paired artists who share a connection in their lives and/or in their work. With Lisa Houck and Judy Ziegler, the connection is a lifetime of making art within each other’s shadows – in the same print making cooperatives, artist studios. They shared a studio on Albany Street for many years.) and even worked for a while together in the same graphics design firm. Their long and rich art making history has produced for each of them a vibrant and diversified body of work with unmistakable connections. This exhibition is an attempt to show those connections through their printmaking, painting and collage. It is both an exhibition and a tribute to a lifetime of creativity and the friendship that connected it. (Judy passed away unexpectedly in 2017). The exhibition will include work from the Tudor Street Etching Studio, which they founded in Cambridge with six other artists as well as posters that both artists designed for the Endangered Animal series published by the Graphic Workshop.

Rotations: That 70’s Print Show

May 17 – August 16, 2020

To celebrate the fiftieth anniversary since its founding in the 1970s, a decade defined by expanded perspectives, The Art Complex Museum will exhibit works on paper drawn from the permanent collection from this dynamic period. These prints were some of the first objects acquired for the collection in 1971. Prints created by former curator, Ture Bengtz (1907-1973), who was an instrumental figure in the founding of the museum as well as The Boston Printmakers, will be featured along with other printmakers from that organization. The museum has hosted exhibits of work by The Boston Printmakers since its inception. The Boston Printmakers was founded by a small group of senior students and faculty from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and Massachusetts College of Art in 1947.

Among these selected works, aesthetic correlations can be readily observed including the relatively large scale of the prints and the artists’ use of saturated colors. New methods of printmaking that artists were exploring during the 1970s included serigraphy and collagraphy, to name a few. Silkscreen printing was primarily associated with commercial use, which changed due to the promotion and re-branding of the medium by Carl Zigrosser (1891-1975), Curator of Prints and Drawings for the Philadelphia Museum of Art from 1943-1960. He coined the term serigraphy in 1941 (another term for silkscreening). Artists hoped a new name for the silk screen prints they were creating might help classify the work as fine art and lead to greater success. The medium worked well for Pop artists who sought to question the autographic language of Abstract Expressionism and it also neatly fit the goals of Op Art, a style that utilized optical illusion.

Another fresh technique called collagraphy (the integration of collage and printmaking), which was introduced in the 1950s, was also being explored by artists in the 1970s. Artists who created collagraphs and are represented in the collection such as Vivian Berman and Donald Stoltenberg, will be on view. Additional artists in the exhibit will include: Judith Brodsky, Jan Ehrenworth, Arthur Secunda, John Wesley.

Aaron Norfolk: Full Sonic

August 23 – November 8, 2020
Opening Reception, September 20, 1:30 – 3:30PM

In this exhibition, Boston painter Aaron Norfolk’s large, color rich paintings begin with what he hears, not with what he sees. He says, “These paintings interpret the characteristics of ‘sonic’ events – events brief and nameable like a thunderclap, or prolonged like music. Sound effects and various noises, game to be represented. Rhythm transcribed by line; echoes transfigured; forms mimick melodies; the rapid flow of a song floating through space, no longer invisible. And color, as sound waves, distributes and coalesces. The sensations jump the barrier to become form and space.”

“At times the subject is imagined, or interlinked with an ancient tale. Night Song is only fantasy, the dreamed music bounding from the night sky. Otherworks amplify the unfurling burst of a flower in bloom, or reproduce the peal that tickles heartstrings”.

“Sight and sound run parallel in our perception, and these works do not intend to confound the two. Rather, the interest is for the viewer to switch back and forth across subjectivity, allowing sound its visual memory. As a word becomes a sound’s visual placeholder, so these paintings become their portrait.”

Norfolk began painting as a teenager and earned a BFA from the College of William and Mary before coming to Boston University for his MFA where he has been a School of Visual Arts Lecturer and Painting Fellow.

TAG – Contemporary New England Painters

September 20, 2020 – January 17, 2021
Opening Reception, September 20, 1:30 – 3:30PM

Creating a contemporary exhibition can sometimes start with one simple idea, or one single artist. From there, you find a second, then maybe a third and so on as you build your exhibition so it tells the story in the way that you’ve envisioned. The artist’s role is creative, but their creativity is confined to their own work. The direction and control of the show remains with the curator. For this exhibition we decided to let the artist go beyond the creation of their own work and into the creation of the exhibition. We wanted them to steer the direction of the show. We let the artists choose the other artists and we set it up like a game of Tag. The only rule was that you had to tag a painter.

We started with Carol O’Malia who has shown here before in both the Winter Juried Show and a solo exhibition in 2012. If she agreed to take part she would have to tag another artist and that artist would then tag someone else. The exhibition would be quickly out of ours hands and then just as quickly out of hers. Carol tagged New York artist Kevin Kearns, a painter who shows with her at the Julie Nester Gallery in Park City, Utah. Kevin then tagged Connecticut artist and Wesleyan College professor, Tula Telfair. Tula tagged Peter Waite who in turn tagged Angela Godnoy who tagged Jack Hollant and on it went. Artists were tagging friends, classmates, or just painters whose work they admired. The tagging is still going on.

Rotations: The Legacy of George Bellows

September 20, 2020 – January 17, 2021

Dear Mr. Weyerhaeuser, Shipyard has always been a great favorite of mine –with its prow flung against the blue sky like a racehorse tossing its head –rearing to go. Hope you and your family will enjoy it as much as I have.
I am most cordially – Emma S. Bellows

American artist, George Bellows (1882-1925), focused almost half of his oeuvre of approximately five hundred and fifty paintings on the sea. They are far removed from the urban scenes of New York City for which he is most celebrated. Created primarily in the summer during trips to the coast of Maine and its offshore islands in 1911, 1913, 1914 and 1916, the canvases reflect the artist’s success exploring ideas and trends emerging in modern painting. The brilliant palettes displayed in the Armory Show of 1913 gave Bellows license to replace the somber palette of his earlier works with spontaneous, pure color. Bellows then painted bold, immediate strokes in vibrant hues of blue, green and purple, likely mixed right on the painting surfaces.

The shipyard in Camden, Maine, drew in Bellows like a magnet, for in that location a huge wooden skeleton was being erected, “pushing its great curved timbers to the sky,” (exhibit label). This furnished the theme for six major canvases including museum’s painting, Shipyard, created in August, 1916. The artist said of these pictures:

When I paint the beginning of a ship at Camden, I feel the reverence the ship builder has for his handiwork. He is creating something splendid, to master wind and wave, something as fine and powerful as nature’s own forces…

It is likely that collector Carl Weyerhaeuser’s attraction to the canvas harkened back to the family lumber business and reverence for wooden structures. However, he was also intrigued by how many hands came together in order to create a seaworthy vessel. In his collections of poems, Just Fragments, Weyerhaeuser further described his interest:

In George Bellows Shipyard I see the dignity of labor, the beauty of labor, the zest of labor, the camaraderie of working together, of sharing a job together.
-Carl Weyerhaeuser

In the fall, 2020, an exhibition of Bellows canvases from museum’s collection will be on view in Rotations, featuring Shipyard (1916), Green Sea (1913), The Farm of John Tom (1916), Gulls (1913) and other paintings. In addition, a selection of lithographs created by the artist will also be on exhibit, including one of the most important prints of the early twentieth century, The Stag at Sharkey’s, 1917.

Unsettled Pieces – A Mosaic Exploration of Our Environment

November 15, 2020 – February 14, 2021
Opening Reception, November 15, 1:30 – 3:30PM

Our planet’s geology and ecosystems were formed over millennia. Ice ages followed warming periods. Big and small changes took hundreds of years to take place, giving the species time to adapt, to evolve. The effects now taking place are happening much faster, in decades as opposed to centuries. More has happened in the last fifty years than in hundreds of centuries prior.

It can be argued that mosaic art is also undergoing a similar evolution. For millennia, mosaics were made from pebbles, stone and smalti. For the most part, they followed a set of principles related to lines of tesserae formed called andamento. In Europe and the Middle East, the tradition remained largely unchanged for centuries, but in the last few decades, the art form has changed rapidly, especially in the Americas. Making lines and forming shapes is a slow process, cutting and fitting materials to fit a space. Contemporary artists must decide whether to adhere to the ancient principles; bend them to give lines a different flavor, or whether to abandon them altogether and use other methods to give the composition shape and order. The mosaicist must decide whether to use traditional materials or include non-traditional materials, such as scraped paint, metal detritus, found objects, pieces of wood or bits of plastic, and other recycled materials, to make the pieces that form the whole.

This exhibit is a collection of contemporary mosaics centered around the themes of our evolving planet and the changes in our environment. Four artists have chosen mosaic as the common language to explore issues affecting the planet, each in her own style. Debora Aldo uses her signature material, pebbles, along with up-cycled contemporary materials, to infuse her lines with meaning. Nikki Sullivan and Anabella Wewer both use classical andamento to form their lines, but Nikki often uses large found object as her focal point, while Anabella breaks down uncommon materials into regularly sized tesserae. Cynthia Fisher’s use of pattern and color are focused on the transcendent beauty and wildness of Patagonia, Chile. She wonders how long will it remain this way? Each artist has embraced one or more topics within our changing world, and brought to it the unusual and uncommon set of skills that it takes to create a mosaic; the whole is a look at both the evolution of the art form and the effects of humans on the evolution of the planet.