NYAB Event - Grace Bakst Wapner, Olivia Beens, Angela Valeria & Quimetta Perle Exhibition

Grace Bakst Wapner, Olivia Beens, Angela Valeria & Quimetta Perle Exhibition

Carter Burden Gallery

This event has ended.

Carter Burden Gallery presents three new exhibitions: Only Connect in the east gallery featuring Grace Bakst Wapner, Earth Spirit in the west gallery featuring Olivia Beens and Angela Valeria and On the Wall featuring Quimetta Perle.

In Only Connect, Grace Bakst Wapner presents recent paintings for her first exhibition at Carter Burden Gallery. The artist’s rich palette appears subdued and calm on her distinctive surfaces of unstretched jute, canvas, and buckram. The pieces hang lightly while commanding a presence with the sizes varying from 14 inches wide to almost 10 feet wide. The title and seminal work featured in the exhibition is inspired by the phrase “only connect” from E. M. Forster’s Howards End. Wapner’s interest is first and foremost the aesthetic of the physical components and their relationship to one another. As the artist’s current body of work evolved, it became increasingly apparent that it is rooted in our connection to one another and to the world about us.

Grace Bakst Wapner was born in 1934 in Brooklyn, New York. Wapner received her B.A. from Bennington College, and attended the summer M.F.A. program at Bard College. She received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Sculpture Award for 1978-1979, a National Academy of Arts and Letters Purchase Prize Award in 2013, and an Outstanding Achievement in the Arts Award from the Byrdcliffe Guild in 2015. After being a member of 55 Mercer St. Gallery from 1973 until 1978, she joined the Bernice Steinbaum Gallery in New York City where she had six one-person shows. Wapner has had 26 one-person shows and participated in over 100 group exhibitions. Her work is in public and private collections.

In Earth Spirit, Olivia Beens presents recent ceramic sculpture for her second exhibition at Carter Burden Gallery. The artist merges figuration and abstraction drawing on her interest in the sacred and profane. Through observation and memory, the artist explores puzzling facial expressions while commemorating human interactions. Beens’ uses metallic glazes on the clay’s surface to reference alchemy and historical iconography. The metallic glaze honors the subject and adds value, preciousness and luminosity to the work. Through clay, Beens explores issues of identity, sexuality, feminism, and religion using the lens of personal experience.

Sculptor/educator Olivia Beens, born in 1948 in Holland of Czech and Dutch parents, lived in Portugal until age 7. After receiving a BFA from Pratt Institute in 1977 and an MFA from Hunter College in 1982, she moved to the Lower East Side of Manhattan. During the 1980’s, she exhibited installation and performance work in many alternative art galleries including Franklin Furnace, ABC No Rio, PS 122 and was a member of political art groups. In 2014 and 2015, she was an Artist In Residence (SPARC) at Sirovich Senior Center and completed a series of ceramic murals that are permanently installed. She has taught through many arts organizations, worked for the New York City Department of Education, Brooklyn College and Pratt Institute. Beens has received commissions for public art works through Public Art for Public School and has been awarded a New York State Council on the Arts fellowship.

In Earth Spirit, Angela Valeria presents recent drawings and paintings for her third show at Carter Burden Gallery. The images Valeria composes, whether dyed, painted or printed, explore the inseparable link between the human race and nature, and our reciprocal evolution with all the other life forms. Inspired by deities of ancient religions, myths, and folklores, particularly the bird women and goddesses of pre-historic fertility cults, her work combines animal and human features to let the spirits, often obscured from our eyes, emerge into existence.

Angela Valeria was born in 1940 in Brooklyn, New York. She received her BFA at Hunter College, and studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Florence and Bologna. Among Valeria’s deepest influences are Abstract Expressionism, Jazz, the Civil Rights Movement, Women’s Liberation, the Renaissance, Surrealism, and Fellini. Valeria has exhibited extensively in New York. Her work is held by public collections, including the Library of Congress and the New York Public Library. Valeria has also spent much of her life teaching art at Parsons School of Design, Empire State College, and Hunter College.

Quimetta Perle’s large-scale installation will be featured in the gallery space On the Wall. The artist is presenting an installation comprised of large-scale portraits of women over 50. The women are from a generation determined not to become invisible, diminished or cast aside because of their gender and age. Perle has been making celebratory images of women since the 1970s.

Quimetta Perle was born in Washington, DC in 1954 to an artist and a poet. Perle received her MFA in Computer Arts from the School of Visual Arts and her BFA from Minneapolis College of Art and Design. She has had 12 solo shows in galleries, nonprofit spaces and universities. In 2013, her historic work from the 1970’s was featured in “The House We Built,” a national show of feminist art over the last 40 years at the University of Minnesota. She has been in numerous group shows in galleries and museums over the last 35 years. In the late 70’s and early 80’s, Perle was a member of WARM Gallery, a women’s cooperative in Minneapolis. Perle taught at Pratt Institute in the Digital Design and Foundation Departments from 1998-2005. She oversees an arts workshop program for people with mental disabilities and the HAI Art Studio for artists with mental illness through Healing Arts Initiative in Long Island City, NY.

Media

• Painting
• Sculpture
• Installation

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