Darlene Charneco's artwork and portraits of East End artists as young men and otherwise will be the focus of two new exhibitions opening at Guild Hall on Saturday.
Ms. Charneco's contribution to the 2020 Artist Members Exhibition was named best in show by Susan Thompson, a former associate curator at the Guggenheim Museum, in those predawn days of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Aside from bragging rights, one of the perquisites of the honor is a solo show for that artist during Guild Hall's off-season. It's been a while, but the museum and the artist can be forgiven for pandemic-related delays. Ms. Charneco's title for her show is "Field Mappings -- Weaves and Touchmaps."
The series has evolved out of her dreams, visions, and nature studies, as well as rituals in different cultures and religions. Throughout her career, the artist has created a visual language of certain materials and a mapping system that hints at memory, connection, and evolution.
Her mixed-media wall pieces are a conglomeration of hammered nails that symbolize positive visualizations for Earth, in both the present and the future. For her, the nails become a system of writing, objects representing hope, determination, and faith. As individual units, they join the others to become topographical fields of microcosms that aggregate to be part of a greater and complex whole. By highlighting the interconnectedness of these complex organisms, Ms. Charneco underlines how individual acts can be compounded to allow change.
From the Guild Hall collection, "A Creative Retreat -- Portraits of Artists" will have photographs of artists who have lived and worked on the East End. As long as Guild Hall has been open, it has attracted the participation of the many artists -- literary, performing, and visual -- who have called the region home, or their home away from home.
The selection of images on view honoring that legacy includes photographs by Bernard Gotfryd, John Jonas Gruen, Jill Krementz, Laurie Lambrecht, and Fred W. McDarrah, among others. Some will be familiar as well-published and oft-displayed emblems of the midcentury creative community here; others will be less known, and surprising.
Both exhibitions, organized by Melanie Crader, the museum's director of visual arts, will close on May 6. Museum admission is free.
