April 1 – 30, 2021
Presented at Kathryn Schultz Gallery & Online
Click here for the virtual tour
Appointments are required, click here to schedule your visit
Curated by Kathryn Geismar and Alexandra Sheldon
Featuring artwork by Deborah Baskin, Kathryn Geismar, Margaret Scoppa, Alexandra Sheldon, Kim Triedman
Virtual Opening Reception | Friday, April 9, 6:30-7:30pm on ZOOM – Click here to watch the recording
Give and Take In Action: Making Collages from Scratch | Saturday, April 10, 10am-11am on ZOOM
About | Collage is about sticking things together. It is also about taking things apart. Paint over, tear off, nail on: this is the give and the take.
We are five artists who find a fascination in the poetic energy of things: Colors, old surfaces, blocks of wood, expired books, rusty objects, painted newsprint, discarded ephemera. Stories are suggested and found in the meeting place where objects come together and find a new community and identity. There is a huge respect for the serendipitous and the synergy of meeting the materials in the middle.
We might work on several pieces at once in the studio. There is a sense of following, exploring, listening, combining, simplifying and pushing. A found object might suggest a story, the color of a flower engender a day’s worth of color studies, a burnt piece of wood convey an elegiac narrative.
Artists are often scavengers but collage artists are even more so. Old newspapers and packaging, tossed out window frames and disparate planks of wood on a curb become our treasures. They speak to us and invite us to collaborate. What is discarded and the overlooked by many is more than a fascination; for us it is rich and evocative source material.
While these explorations are often solitary endeavors in our studios, they combine to create a whimsical and deeply serious statement about the wisdom of unity and the power of give and take.
CLICK HERE TO SEE THE EXHIBIT ONLINE
About Deborah | Deborah Baskin is a Somerville-based Architect/Designer and Artist. After more than two decades of residential design, renovation, and home-building in the Boston-area and beyond, Deborah has in recent years turned her focus to more artistic pursuits; creating collections of Abstract paintings and sculptures as well as leading the Cambridge Art Association (CAA) Art Rental Program.
With a background in residential design, and an enduring interest in Japanese Architecture and Aesthetics, wood has been the primary material of choice for her artwork. She also incorporates common construction materials such as metal, wire, hardware, and paint as well as other cast-off, everyday objects. Embracing a more simple and streamlined “Modernist” approach to design, Deborah’s work explores the ideas of transient and stark beauty, aging and natural patina, grace and subtlety.
Deborah holds a degree in Architecture from the University of Maryland-College Park and a M.A. in Historic Preservation of Architecture from Boston University. Deborah is an active member of CAA and Concord Art and her award-winning works have been displayed in local exhibitions. Deborah has also curated and managed numerous art installations and recently chaired an online Cambridge Art Association exhibit called “Transparency”.
Visit Deborah’s website, here: deborahbaskindesign.com
About Kathryn | Kathryn Geismar is an artist and psychologist based in Somerville, Massachusetts. Her work encompasses different modalities, but is always interested in questions of identity and change. Geismar’s collages explore these themes through a process of continual creation and destruction and a delight in the interplay between control and chance. She is intrigued by the intuitive and flexible nature of the collage medium and the freedom that the expendable materials provide. Her collage work is inspired by the teaching and generative mentorship of Alexandra Sheldon. Geismar is also known for her figurative paintings and portrait work
Kathryn Geismar received a BA with Honors in Studio Art from Brown University where she studied under Wendy V. Edwards, Walter Feldman, and Kermit Champa. She is the recipient of a Somerville Arts Council Visual Art Fellowship Grant, a merit grant and residency at the Vermont Studio Center, and the recipient of numerous awards for her artwork, including the Nancy T. Baldwin prize for drawing and the Roddy Prize for painting. Her work was featured in the New Talent, New England exhibit at the St. Botolph Club in Boston in 2013. Geismar’s artwork is in numerous private collections in the United States and Europe. She is represented by the Bromfield Gallery in Boston.
Visit Kathryn’s website, here: www.geismarart.com
About Margaret | Margaret Scoppa has been evolving her art for her lifetime. She has diversified interests and works with paint, mixed media, sculpture, pottery, and found objects.
Margaret’s current focus is sculpture: bricolages of found and made objects. Her work is both profound and whimsical and her pieces are thought provoking and sometimes puzzling. She is captivated and inspired by materials and how things connect and can fit together.
Margaret will catch your eye and draw you in through the use and power of mundane things and the mix of materials. Her work is often surprising in composition and how materials are used, often in very different ways.
Margaret’s development has been enhanced by studies at The Museum School in Boston, Bennington College, Boston Architectural Center, deCordova Museum, Castle Hill Center for the Arts, Fine Arts Work Center, New Art Center and with The Crit Lab led by Patricia Miranda.
Visit Margaret’s website, here: www.margaretscoppa.com
About Alexandra | Alexandra Sheldon is an artist and art teacher based in Cambridge, MA. She grew up in Cambridge and then lived in Vermont, New York, San Francisco and Paris. She attended the San Francisco Art Institute and then the Boston Museum School.
Alexandra specializes in teaching mixed media and collage workshops. She encourages play and experimentation with materials yet with an emphasis on the classical teachings of composition, color, light and movement. Intrinsic to her teaching, Alexandra believes that any form of art-making is a kind of communication with others. She believes that making art is healthy for us all: young, old, famous, unknown, the beginner or the experienced. Making things with her hands all her life has only strengthened this position: that making art is a form of joyful living, loving and celebrating.
Highlights of her of life would include Skowhegan, landscape painting for 25 years, having a family, being on Oprah, learning to speak French, becoming smitten with collage and teaching, having animals and spending time outdoors with her husband kayaking or hiking.
Alexandra is currently represented by the Bromfield Gallery in Boston.
Visit Alexandra’s website, here: www.alexandrasheldon.com
About Kim | Kim Triedman is an award-winning poet and novelist. She began working in collage as a way to further indulge her fascination with story.
Most of Triedman’s work involves old, discarded or destroyed items, which are used in the service of artistic narrative. These may include old ledgers, receipts and certificates; graphs and architectural plans; newsprint and chicken-wire and laundry line, even antique wooden windows, which serve as frame and template but also conceptual springboard. She almost always includes photography in her pieces, sometimes digitally manipulated, often her own but also black-and-white images from the early- and mid-20th century. Compositions are drawn from places she has known, sometimes through memory but also through her own photography. Her palette is often muted, though — like life — shot through with small urgencies of color.
Much of Triedman’s work focuses on issues of gender expectations and historical and evolving perceptions of femininity and sexuality. She is especially interested in the how these perceptions/expectations intersect with and undermine current societal realities. In this context Triedman’s imagination tilts to the provocative – the visually arresting pairing or detail. A dapper business executive side-eyes a 16th-century Dutch girl, her left hand nested neatly over her belly. A deconstructed Eve in the garden brandishes a perfect, tiny, silver nipple ring.
Triedman’s pieces have been shown widely in small and large group shows throughout the northeastern United States and earned her numerous juror’s awards and mentions. In 2018, she curated and participated in the show “Waste Not,” which was featured as the cover story for ArtScope Magazine (Nov. 2018). Her work can be found at http://www.kimtriedman.com and in numerous private collections here and abroad. She is also the author of three poetry collections and a novel: Hadestown (WordTech, 2013); Plum(b) (Main Street Rag Press, 2013); Bathe in It or Sleep (Main Street Rag Press, 2008); and the novel The Other Room (Owl Canyon Press, 2013), a finalist for the James Jones First Novel Award.
Visit Kim’s website, here: www.kimtriedman.com
Have questions? Email us at info@cambridgeart.org, or call us at 617-876-0246