Image in header courtesy of Lorraine Sullivan
January 6 – 29, 2021
Presented at Kathryn Schultz Gallery & Online
Appointments are required, click here to schedule your visit
Click here to see the virtual tour
Curated by Edwina Rissland & Lorraine Sullivan
Featuring artwork by Nancy Beams, David Lee Black, Edwina Rissland and Lorraine Sullivan
Virtual Reception | Hosted on January 8, 6:30-7:30pm on ZOOM Click here to view the recording
Program | Virtual Studio Visit, with David Lee Black, Thursday, January 14, 12:30-1:00pm on ZOOM Click here to register
About | Attention to Detail is a curatorial exhibit featuring the work of four Massachusetts artists: Nancy Beams, David Lee Black, Edwina Rissland, and Lorraine Sullivan. They delve deeply into rich visual details of their subjects: the scroll of a shaving on a carpenter’s bench, the delicate petals and curling leaves of sunflowers, the worn toe on a ballerina’s satin pointe shoe, and the wheels and gears of an old-fashioned roller skate. This group of artists invites us to inspect such essential details.
In their art, this quartet brings to bear their wide experience as teachers, musicians, and explorers. All four are close observers of detail: the tight focus in the photography of Rissland and Black, the careful intertwining of artifacts, great and small, in the sculptures of Sullivan, and the fine-grained rendition of structure in the etchings of Beams. With their up-close compositional perspective, all four explore both the surface and hidden facets of their subjects that often escape notice. All seek to uncover the possibilities intrinsic in them, even the most mundane or overlooked. This exhibit presents a synthesis across a variety of media and subjects to explore this approach of paying close attention to details.
CLICK HERE TO VIEW THE EXHIBITION ONLINE
About Nancy | Nancy Beams is a Cambridge-based printmaker known for her detailed etchings of sunflowers made primarily with the aquatint technique. In her prints she depicts emotional expressions of human struggles and joys. A close observer of nature – particularly the natural cycle of growth and decay – she finds that tones of black and white can be used to depict emotional responses while maintaining simplicity, truth, and elegance. Mark making with acid and etching tools enhances the expression and poignancy of what she wants to say in her images. She loves the hours spent thinking about how to express a concept and the time posing and photographing sunflowers in various states once she has established her idea.
Critical to her printmaking are decisions about how the space and shape in and around the copper plate print can be used and how the detailed organic lines in the sunflowers can be emphasized or subdued in the print. She feels such a print offers the viewer a point of reflection and conversation.
Nancy Beams received her bachelor’s degree from Ohio Wesleyan University and her M.Ed from the University of Maryland. She earned her Studio Diploma at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. In 2017 she was one of nine artists in Cambridge to receive a grant from the Cambridge Community Supported Arts program. Beams frequently exhibits in the Boston area and is an active member of the CAA, Boston Printmaker’s, the North Cambridge Artist Association, and the Martha’s Vineyard Art Association. She has also exhibited at the Featherstone Center for the Arts on the Vineyard. She received the juror’s choice award in the 2019 Members’ Show at the Attleboro Art Museum and was chosen to be one of eight exhibiting artists featured in its 8-Visions show during the summer of 2020.
Visit Nancy’s website: www.beamsdesigns.com
About David | David Lee Black, a photographer, sculptor and musician, regards photography not just as a way of seeing but as a way of living, a search, or a journey worth making. His journeys of image creation uncover both the simple and the sublime. From the places, people and events he meets en route, his images – in black and white as well as color – are meant to evoke emotional and spiritual interactions with the moment at hand. Out on his motorcycle, he often rides to places close to home, like an old, abandoned mill. Other treks have taken him further afield, like County Clare on Ireland’s west coast.
Black earned his bachelor’s degree in music education at the University of Missouri/Columbia. He was Artist in Residence at the David A. Lang Studios from 2013-2017 and was in residence as a Tullaloughaun Fellow in County Clare, Ireland on three separate occasions.
Black actively exhibits widely around New England. During the summer of 2020 alone he was juried into shows in Providence, Poughkeepsie, Pittsfield and Plymouth. This past summer he also exhibited in a group show presented in Congressman Joe Kennedy’s office in the Cannon House Office Building in Washington, D.C. Black consistently garners First Prize and Juror’s Choice awards for both his black and white and color photography. He has served as a guest curator at the Boston Camera Club and recently as Juror for the winter photography exhibit and competition at the Plymouth Center for the Arts. He is represented by Galatea Fine Arts in Boston where he recently mounted a solo show Outside the Box. He regularly offers workshops entitled Creating Your Vision where he leads photographers of all skill levels in collaborative and experiential exercises to explore the art of image making. He is also a practicing art therapist.
Visit David’s website: www.davidleeblack.com
About Edwina | Edwina Rissland is a fine art photographer who seeks out the painterly possibilities in her subjects. Based in the Cambridge area and on Martha’s Vineyard, she is known for tightly composed, color-intense images – often abstract in nature – from favorite haunts like boatyards and marketplaces. By visually editing down reality through the lens, she frequently focuses on minute details, often without including cues to indicate their source or context.
For instance, close examination of the crevices and surfaces of the blanched skull of a beached whale can suggest fantastical mountains and secret coves. Even something as mundane as crusty paint on an old hull can present a vibrant universe of its own to explore with the eye and lens.
In this show she presents abstract images of hulls and other finds from a working shipyard; a group of studies of the bleached skull of a whale known as “Picasso,” the seventeenth North Atlantic right whale to have perished in 2017; images about Capt. William Martin, one of a handful of 19thc black whaling captains from Martha’s Vineyard; and images from her Mécanique series that explores mechanical objects like well-used tools and rusting metal.
Rissland is regularly juried into shows at the CAA and other Massachusetts venues such as the Provincetown Art Association and Museum. She has mounted several solo shows on the Vineyard as well as participating in group exhibits there. Rissland is Professor Emerita of Computer Science at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. She received her undergraduate degree from Brown University and her Ph.D. in Mathematics from MIT. She also earned a graduate Performance Diploma in Voice from the Longy School of Music. In 2017, she published Morning Shore: A Turn of the Year on Chappaquiddick, a book capturing the landscapes and moods of this intriguing island over the course of an entire year.
Visit Edwina’s website: www.rissarts.com
About Lorraine | Lorraine Sullivan is a teacher and sculptor based in the Boston area. She has a compulsion to collect and she drags home all manner of things to her studio where she reveals their innate possibilities and eloquent, unknown histories and hidden character. Like the art process itself, she finds the hunting, gathering and ordering of her discoveries to be deeply personal. She loves rust and things found by the side of the road; she collects, sorts, arranges, plays, and fits artifacts together like a puzzle; she re-arranges them to create a story worth telling about a place she once was or a person she once knew; she amalgamates objects of unknown provenance. Thus she is both archivist and alchemist. With her sculptures she creates new narratives and remembrances that span distances of time and context.
Lorraine Sullivan received her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in Graphic Design from Massachusetts College of Art and Design. She taught Graphic Design and Computer Graphics at Burlington High School, Burlington, MA and at Massachusetts College of Art and Design in Boston and supervised student teachers at Tufts University and for the School of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston. Her awards include the Distinguished Teacher Award for Excellence in Education by the Massachusetts College of Art and Design and the Massachusetts High School Art Educator of the Year by the Massachusetts Art Education Association. She has twice been named CAA Artist of the Year: once in mixed media and again in sculpture. Her award-winning work is consistently juried into local, national, and small group shows at art associations and museums. She has exhibited widely throughout New England and has been featured in solo exhibits at the Carney Gallery Fine Arts Center at Regis College and the de Menil Gallery at The Groton School. Sullivan’s work can be found in many private collections.
Visit Lorraine’s website: https://lorrainemsullivan.com