Otto Neals and Emmett Wigglesworth Exhibition

FiveMyles

This event has ended.

Co-curators: Carl E. Hazlewood and Hanne Tierney

FiveMyles presents two artists whose work has been part of American art for the past 60 years. Although their work differs from each other in its imagery, both Otto Neals and Emmett Wigglesworth address a strong commitment to the shared African American experience.

The two artists exemplify the 18th century German philosopher Herder’s conviction that, “all art is an expression of the experiences of the person who makes it. It is also a communication with those who share the cultural values and knowledge of the group of people to whom the artist, geographically and/or intellectually belongs.” The pleasure of this exhibition is the work’s insistence to communicate these experiences.

The interconnected serpentine forms and jewel-like color-patterns in Emmett Wigglesworth paintings and constructions most frequently use images of people reaching out to those nearby or even to those in an adjacent work. For Wigglesworth this is a reminder that we need to search for, and respond, to the shared spiritual truths that bind us together.

Wigglesworth, a muralist, painter, sculptor, poet and political activist, attended the Philadelphia College of Art. He has exhibited throughout the U.S. and in Ghana. His mural commissions include those at PS 181 Elementary School in Brooklyn, NY, the NY Cultural Council, Metropolitan Transit Authority, and Kings County Hospital. In addition to the books he has illustrated for McGraw Hill, Harper and Row and Macmillan Press, he also designed the interior of the Bed Stuy Theatre in Brooklyn.

Otto Neals works in a traditional figurative mode using multi-media bronze and marble sculpture, oil and pastels. One may label the work Afro-Romanticism, but it expresses a deep belief in the possibility of a state of beauty and purity.

Otto Neals, was born 1930. He attended Westinghouse Vocational High School in NYC, and worked over 30 years at the postal services to support himself as an artist. He retired as Head Illustrator. A painter, sculptor, and illustrator, his work is featured in public and private collections around the country and abroad. His statue of a young boy, located in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park has become a well loved landmark.

Simultaneous exhibition in the Plus/Space (at FiveMyles)

(un)obscured echoes
Installation by Rachel Lee Zheng

Inspired by the Light and Space movement, spearheaded by James Turrell and Robert Irwin in the late 1960s, Rachel Zheng creates large-scale installations, re-configuring a space with hundreds of strings and light. With these installations she builds meditative, immersive environments that lure the viewer into a place of reflection. Zheng highlights a disorienting relationship between the physicality of form and the immateriality of light and space. Her installation at FiveMyles will change the intimate Plus/Space into a experiential zone.

Born in 1993 in Los Angeles, Rachel Lee Zheng is a multi-disciplinary artist living and working in Maine. Zheng received her BA as a double major in Visual Arts and Earth & Oceanographic Science from Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine. She is currently the Curatorial and Communications Assistant at the Center for Maine Contemporary Art in Rockland, Maine.