The Art Scene 04.21.16
Earth Day in Springs
Sustainable is the name of the game this weekend at Ashawagh Hall in Springs, where “Earth Day Art and Design” will feature painting, sculpture, furniture, music, presentations, and other activities on Saturday from 10 a.m. to 9 p.m. and Sunday from 10 to 5. A reception will take place Saturday from 6 to 9.
Organized by Anahi DeCanio, the event will include presentations by Edwina von Gal, the Springs landscape designer whose Azuero Earth Project in Panama is devoted to healthier farming methods and preservation of biodiversity, and Dan Welden, the Noyac artist who developed the nonhazardous Solarplate printmaking process.
Furniture made from reclaimed lumber by ZCI Woodworks and repurposed magazines by Nuala will be on view along with artwork by Josh Hadar, Jim Gemake, Christine D’Addario, Lori Horowitz, Geralyne Lewandowski, Michele Dragonetti, Mary Milne, Idoline Duke, Mr. Welden, and Ms. DeCanio.
On Saturday afternoon, earth-friendly vendors will hold forth on the Ashawagh lawn, where Job Potter will provide the music.
Members Show Is Here
Guild Hall’s 78th annual Artist Members Exhibition will open Saturday with a reception from 4 to 6 p.m. and continue through June 4. The show is the oldest non-juried museum exhibition on Long Island and one of the few non-juried exhibitions still offered. This year’s awards juror is JiaJia Fei, digital director at the Jewish Museum in Manhattan.
The winner of the top honor will receive a solo show in Guild Hall’s Spiga Gallery. Prizes will also be awarded in the following categories: best abstract, best mixed media, best representational, best work on paper, best photographs, best sculpture, and best new member, which is given to an artist new to the exhibition. In addition, the $250 Catherine and Theo Hios award honors the best landscape.
Lee Krasner Survey
A survey of five decades of Lee Krasner’s work will open today at the Robert Miller Gallery in Manhattan and remain on view through June 4. The exhibition celebrates the 30th anniversary of the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, which was established under Krasner’s will to support artists of merit with demonstrated financial need.
The show focuses on the artist’s recurring themes and obsessions, including her belief that she was “never free of the past” and that “the past is part of the present, which becomes part of the future.” The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalog, which includes an homage by Patti Smith.
Syd Solomon in Florida
“Syd Solomon: Concealed and Revealed,” an exhibition of more than 30 works organized by the estate of Syd Solomon and the Berry Campbell Gallery of New York City, will open Friday, April 29, at the Museum of Art in Deland, Fla., with a reception from 5 to 7 p.m. It will run through July 10.
While Solomon, who divided his time between East Hampton and Sarasota, Fla., from 1950 to 1999, has been cited for infusing the spirit of Romanticism into the processes, scale, and concepts of Abstract Expressionism, the exhibition adds to an understanding of his art by focusing in part on his work as a camouflage artist during World War II and on his early training in lettering. It will include historical documents relating to those endeavors as well as artworks.
A catalog with essays by Michael Auping, chief curator of the Modern Art Museum in Forth Worth; George Bolge, director of the Museum of Art in Deland, and Gail Levin, an art historian and artists’ biographer, will accompany the exhibition, which will travel to the Greenville County Museum of Art in Greenville, S.C., in August.
Ray Parker’s “Simple” Paintings
An exhibition of paintings by Ray Parker, who had a house in East Hampton from 1974 until his death in 1990, will open next Thursday at the Washburn Gallery in Manhattan and remain on view through June 24.
The works in the show, which Parker referred to as his “simple” paintings, are generally composed of two or three areas in two or three colors on canvases ranging in size from 8 by 10 inches to 85 by 100 inches. According to a 1965 essay on Parker’s work by Priscilla Colt of the Dayton Art Institute, “Parker has been engaged in a pursuit of far-reaching implications: He is renovating the art of painting and, through it, visual history.