Spotlight in the Northern Valley Press

Check out this great article published by the Northern Valley Press about the successful Uncommon Craft Show held last month in Closter! With special appearances by Hank Gans and his photography students, and ceramic students Gail Rutigliano and Karen Snyder. We had a great time, and hope you did too!

From the Studio Classes...

The Art School is pleased to present the annual student show From the Studio Classes. The exhibition is on view through July 26, 2014. This highly anticipated exhibition fills the galleries to capacity with a vibrant installation of over 200 works of art in the school's Mikhail Zakin and Café galleries. Exhibiting student art is an important part of the creative learning process. It builds community and gives each student a chance to share their progress with the public in a professional gallery. We are proud to showcase the work of Art School students in a fantastic, floor to ceiling, salon-style show!

Cafe Gallery: Summer Workshop Sampler

Susan Kasson Sloan

Every summer, The Art School at Old Church offers a variety of workshops taught by visiting artists and faculty. These workshops provide one or two day instruction ranging in different art mediums.  Samples of work for each workshop can be viewed in a new exhibition in the Café Gallery through June 15th. The workshop sampler exhibition will include work in painting, ceramics, jewelry, crochet, and photography. With a selection of student work and the instructors own art, the exhibition encourages students to see work that will be made in each workshop.

This exhibition includes works by the Art School’s talented instructors; Susan Beecher (ceramics), Harriet Barlaran Finck (mixed media/collage), Hank Gans (photography), Gary Godbee (drawing), Maud Guilfoyle (painting), Sharon Klass (photography), Janet Kohler (drawing/color theory), Paula Madawick (drawing), Stephanie Maddalena (jewelry), Beryl Maddalena (mixed media), Karen O’Neil (painting), Karen Pekelney (jewelry), David Shirey (ceramics), Susan Kasson Sloan (jewelry), Stacy Synder (ceramics), and Joe Terrone (painting).

Susan Beecher

The Art School is pleased to present these opportunities for artistic growth in new materials. Samples of work will be on display in the Café Gallery through June 15^th.  Come by the Art School to view the summer workshop samplers and make sure to register for one of our exciting summer workshops! 

25th Annual NJ Small Works Show

This year, the Mikhail Zakin Gallery at the Art School at Old Church is celebrating the 25^th Annual New Jersey Small Works Show with 61 works by 47 artists whose lives are connected in some way to the state of New Jersey.  The exhibition runs through June 6, 2014. The show is wheelchair accessible and free to the public.

This year's juror is Wes Sherman, Exhibition Chair at the Center for Contemporary Art in Bedminster, NJ. Sherman is a professor of art at many New Jersey universities and an accomplished painter who received an MFA from Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University.

Artists from all over NJ are invited to submit their work and take part in the open competition. Wes Sherman juried the show based on the individual merits of each work of art. The artist’s identity is not known at the time the selections are made. The single criteria for submitting work to this juried show is to have an autobiographical connection of some kind to the state of New Jersey. Submissions are received from Jersey ex-pats in places as far afield as Texas and California as well as from North, South and Central Jersey. The show becomes an artistic portrait of New Jersey by some of the many creative individuals who have called it home.

The only limitation for the artists is that the work cannot exceed eighteen inches in any direction.  With size as the only restriction, the diversity and range of artwork becomes an exciting feature of the show. Works include photography, ceramics, printmaking, sculpture, drawing, painting, papermaking and collage. Functional and decorative works in clay, fiber and mixed media represent a range of treatments of familiar materials.  Sculptural pieces achieve a kind of moodiness and grace that brings ceramics to a new level. Works in the show from the vast field of photography are printed in traditional black, white and color, digitally manipulated and printed using alternative processes. Paintings and drawings depict scenes from backyards, world travels and great imaginations. The juror selected works that shared an edgy quality, while taking care to present a range of styles and techniques. The selections make for a well-rounded exhibition of works representing a range of artists living and working in NJ.

In some respects the show reflects the immediate surroundings of the exhibition, with several artists included who are also students of the Art School at Old Church that houses the Mikhail Zakin Gallery.  The Art School offers over 90 classes each semester in many artistic disciplines, encouraging and challenging its students to tackle new techniques, practices and concepts, through cross-discipline explorations in art.

Helen Marie Farrant, Alpaca, stoneware, 1x3x5.5"

Cafe Gallery: Chinese Brush Painting, Students of Jane Chang

The Art School at Old Church in Demarest, NJ is pleased to present an exhibition of student work in the Café Gallery, on view through May 9^th 2014. Chinese Brush Painting: Students of Jane Chang is a group exhibition of Chinese brush paintings. Participating students have one semester of experience while others have studied this art for six years or more.  

Barbara Landberg, Blue Abstract , 2014

In this class, students are taught every aspect of Chinese brush painting from the techniques of smooth brush strokes and delicate movements to the history of this thousand year old tradition. While beginners start with brushwork in flowers, birds, and other animals, intermediate and advanced students explore their craft with landscape and abstraction. Capturing both the imagery and color is an important part of Chinese brush painting; learning the spirit and rhythm of the subject matter as well as finding your Chi is equally important. Artist Gisela Zerykier has been a student of Ms. Chang’s for six years and says that learning how to use the inks with their gradations of color and intensities was an important skill to master.  Beginner Maryanne Nealon has not taken a painting class before and says she enjoyed learning how to use the various unique brushes.

Gisela Zerykier, Water Horses, 2013

The artists in this exhibition include Amy Dudash Robinson,

Marge Kirschenbaum, Barbara Landberg, Maryanne Nealon,

Barbara Potack, Robin Robinson, Toni Semar, 

Sam Visvikis, and Gisela Zerykier. 

Chinese Brush Painting: Students of Jane Chang

is on view through May 9^th, 2014 Stop by the Cafe Gallery

to check it out!

Narrative Strain, on view through April 23, 2014

This essay was recently posted in the Mikhail Zakin Gallery:

Artwork often tells a story. It can pluck a story from external reality, render homage to a tale that is commonly known, or even give life to an internal reality, as yet unknown to anyone save the artist. Works in this show celebrate narrative of all kinds, from the timelessness of moral struggle in the works of Henry Diebel III to the story of an object passing through flame in the work of abstract photographer Mike DiFeo. Even the quiet story of a street in Rome can unfold as witnessed by a patient observer in the work of Allison Remy Hall.

Aliza Augustine presents her chimerical photographs from the series “Is it Safe?”, where personal, historical and invented narratives collide. Behind the dollhouse vignettes of her photographs loom a foreboding backdrop of images, some found, some from family history, of those who survived or were murdered in the Holocaust. The unclear line is highlighted between scenes of socio-political commentary, personal history and events staged to deal with the confluence of the two.

Vesper Stamper is perhaps most literally a story teller, with original illustrations on view from her upcoming book. While part of a composite text-illustration work, the images include a story of a mute mother who introduces the world to her daughter through sound, touch, and movement. Part of the message is that information comes to us through many senses. The unconscious mind experiences the world in secret, awakening to mysterious insights that are known deep down.

These insights are shared through many avenues, as in the video works of Saya Woolfalk. Woolfalk describes a world of intuitive aesthetic choices, in which a journey takes place that leads to a point of personal and communal understanding. Such is the goal of her ongoing Institute of the Empathics project. This endeavor is undertaken on another scale by presenting a collective visual experience of work by multiple contemporary artists in the Mikhail Zakin Gallery.

Works in this show push and pull on the narrative limits of image making, telling a more subtle and nuanced tale than text alone can convey. I challenge you to look at the images and devise your own story before reading the accompanying texts.

-      Mary Gagler, Curator

April, 2014

Stories we Tell: A Visual Narrative

An exhibition of narrative art curated by Marilyn Deitchman is now on view at the 73 See Gallery in Montclair, NJ. The exhibition explores narrative as a vehicle for reflection on the wider world of human behavior and individual expression. Read the curator's essay below!

The exhibit is a must see, featuring several current and former members of the Art School at Old Church's creative community. Stay tuned for Artist Talks on April 13 & 20 at 3:00 PM.