Climate Conversations at Easton’s PA Nurture Nature Center

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Susan Hoffman Fishman, In the Beginning There Was Only Water, 30 in. x 50 ft., acrylic, oil pigment stick and mixed media on paper, 2021, Installation view at Janice Charach Gallery, West Bloomfield, Michigan

During the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, from 2020 through 2021, eight women artists from the Midwest and the East Coast of the United States came together via Zoom to read and discuss All We Can Save: Truth, Courage and Solutions for the Climate Crisis, edited by Ayana Elizabeth Johnson, Ph.D. and Katharine K. Wilkinson, Ph.D. The book contains essays and poetry by a cadre of diverse women policy wonks, scientists, writers, journalists, lawyers, activists, and others who address the most critical existential issue of our time with the intention of offering different ways to effect change and mend the significant damage that we have caused to the Earth. The artists’ responses to the essays form the exhibition Climate Conversations: All We Can Save. The exhibition runs through June 30th, 2022.

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Amanda Thackray: Surface Tension at NJCU

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Amanda Thackray with A Tangle; A Swarm; A Precondition of the Plastisphere, 2021

In her solo exhibition at the Lemmerman Gallery in NJCU curated by Doris Cacoilo, Amanda Thackray presents her handmade paper installations, prints and sculpture which altogether comment on plastic pollution and the fragility of marine environment. The artist creates an allegorical environment which both reflects and distorts an aquatic world.

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Lisa Pressman and Jim Napierala at Susan Eley Fine Art

In Dialogue with Lisa Pressman


Lisa Pressman, Things That Were Never Said, 2021, Drawing and encaustic, 48” x 38”. Photo courtesy of Lisa Pressman and Susan Eley Fine Art, Hudson

The current exhibition at Susan Eley Fine Art, Hudson features Lisa Pressman’s newest encaustic paintings and works on paper. One of the primary series on view in this show is entitled Messages, a recent and ongoing series of mixed media works on various handmade papers. Pressman collects handmade paper, including Japanese Shikishi board, which is edged with gold, as well as Letraset—the rub-on letters employed by graphic designers before the computer era. Onto these unique handmade paper, she employs the press-on letters of the Letraset, as a mark-making tool to create a symbolic language—hieroglyphic and intuitive.

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Brandon Graving: Honing Viscosity and Air Currents


Brandon Graving, Mother: Earth 2 detail, 2021, embossed monoprint, 41”x 108”, photo by artist

Brandon Graving aims to transfer and translate a sense of wonder in her artworks. She describes her process of making as exploring the connectedness of all things with ongoing “delight, immediacy and a sense of virginal untamed discovery with a nod towards Humbolt.” Some of her sculptural works are kinetic and turn, revealing elaborate intricacy and shadow play, while other works, including monoprints with handmade inks and semiprecious stones, alter dramatically in different light. She does not intend to depict nature but rather hone ideas and objects into simplified essential forms, some with elaborate treatment. Through her extensive attention to detail, she reflects on how the micro and macro within the work suggest a system that is both diverse and similar, how these dualities interrelate or even duplicate in nature.      

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Beth Dary at The Front Room Gallery

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The Front room Gallery hosts an online tour of “Aqua/Terra”, the beautiful and evocative solo exhibition of sculpture, installation, photograms, layered egg tempera and encaustic drawings by New York Artist, Beth Dary. The artworks in “Aqua/Terra” explore the power of water throughout natural forms and forces of nature, as a force to shape the land, sustain life, and destroy it. Beth Dary’s work also responds to the effect of human activity on land and water – bubbles of ancient carbon dioxide captured in Arctic ice, the rising tides due to the climate crisis, and fractal patterns formed by the liquid contaminants in urban runoff – in transition due to our culture’s impact on the environment.  

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Michele Brody – Embodying Daily Flux


Michele Brody, working in home studio in The Bronx on handmade paper body sculpture for Annual Earth Celebrations Eco Pageant, paper made from recycled linen table cloths and caning, 2020.
Photo by Olivier Marcaud

A fourth generation NY builder, artist Michele Brody loves working with materials. She recalls how her father groomed her early on to become an architect so that she could continue the family tradition of builders and land developers. Although she excelled in the study of Architecture, she was not attracted to pursue it as career. ” I prefer building with my own hands,” she says. So in 1994, instead of getting a degree in Architecture, she graduated with an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago from the Fiber and Material Studies Department.

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Paulette Myers-Rich – Eyes with a Sense of Touch 

Soft Black Petal, silver gelatin print, 20×24”, 1985

Paulette Myers-Rich ‘s photography-based art books and prints reference abstracted landscapes where industry and nature intersect. Paulette Myers-Rich has consistently focused her gaze on the very moment of transformation in both interior and exterior spaces, when a place, nature, history, altogether shift. The artist shares with Art Spiel how she has developed her practice, her notions on book making, and how she sees her role as an artist today.

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Artists on Coping: Suzan Shutan

During the Coronavirus pandemic, Art Spiel is reaching out to artists to learn how they are coping.

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FLOW, 2016, Tar paper, handmade dyed paper, industrial glue, plexi rods, steel wire, KANEKO Org, NE, photo courtesy of KANEKO

Suzan Shutan is a sculptor and installation artist who creates room sized environments and smaller hybrid objects that explore the architecture of nature and organic growth. Paper and fiber are her main materials, forming patterns through repetition. Her work represents cellular structures, pathogens and toxins. She has been in solo and group shows in Germany, France, Poland, Ukraine, Sweden, Argentina, Australia, Canada and nationally at the Aldrich Museum, KANEKO and Bank of America. Her work is in private and public collections, featured in Smithsonian and Sculpture Magazines and NY Times. ODETTA Gallery exhibits her work. She lives and works in New Haven, Connecticut. 

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Artists on Coping: Nancy Cohen

During the Coronavirus pandemic, Art Spiel is reaching out to artists to learn how they are coping.

Nancy Cohen in her studio, photo courtesy of the artist

Nancy Cohen’s work examines resiliency in relation to the environment and the human body. Recent exhibitions include Force: Observations from the Interior, a solo show at Kathryn Markel Fine Arts in NYC, and group exhibitions at Accola Griefen and BioBat Art Space in Brooklyn, Dorsky Gallery in Long Island City, Heller Gallery in Manhattan and The Montclair Art Museum, Montclair, NJ. Her current work has been featured in the blogs Artists and Climate Change, Art Spiel, Less than Half and Delicious Line, in the anthology the Body in Language edited by Edwin Torres and in ArtTable’s Artist Perspective Podcast.

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Intermediate Geochromatic Studies at Nars

In dialogue with Jason Urban & Leslie Mutchler on their collaborative project at Nars Foundation

Jason Urban & Leslie Mutchler, Intermediate Geochromatic Studies at NARS Foundation, installation view, 2020. Photo courtesy of the artists.

Artists Jason Urban and Leslie Muchler who have been collaborating on art projects since 2012, share with Art Spiel their ideas, process, and ways of collaborating on their current exhibition, Geochromatic Studies, at NARS.

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