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ELLIE BROWN
HOLDING ON TO A DEAR LIFE

Artist Spotlight: Ellie Brown
Sundown

AS220 Main Gallery
115 Empire Street Providence, Rhode Island
December 1-29, 2018

by Meredith Cutler

Article excerpt:

Alzheimer’s. A word that conjures up images of fear, isolation, confusion, and loss. In the United States today, 5.7 million Americans are living with Alzheimer’s. By 2050, this number is projected to rise to nearly 14 million.

Terminal illness is a painful topic — but this one strikes home for me. My father was recently, finally diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, after years of ambiguous labels assigned to his memory loss and declining capacity to care for himself. I sat down with photographer and mixed media artist Ellie Brown to talk about Alzheimer’s, fathers and daughters, and art as a means of documenting, unpacking and transforming this disease.

Brown’s upcoming show “Sundown,” at AS220 in Providence, encompasses all of these things. Brown’s own father, a tall, friendly and robust guy known for his love of music and acting, was diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer’s in 2015 after years of ambiguous dementia. Then based in Philadelphia, she soon thereafter moved her life to Rhode Island in order to be closer to him and to make the most of the time they had left.

“When I found out my father had early onset Alzheimer’s disease, it was my first instinct to photograph and document everything — as I do — partly to document the disease, but also to have my own personal record of my father,” recounted Brown.

“It [soon] became clear to me that my father wasn’t comfortable with having his straight photographic image on my website, and that other members of my family weren’t comfortable [either]. So, I took a step back and stopped photographing him. I started making gel medium transfers with the images I had already taken. My instincts told me to start drawing into them. And what happened was, I was able to get at the nuances of the disease that I wasn’t able to with straight photographs.”

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Image caption: Ellie Brown, Garage, 2016, mixed media on paper, 9” x 12”.

WIND AND WATER: Mary Spencer and Anne Sargent Walker

Fountain Street Fine Art
59 Fountain Street
Framingham, Massachusetts
October 13-November 16, 2016

by Meredith Cutler

AT THE INTERSECTION OF ART AND NATURE

MUSEUM OF THE MASSACHUSETTS LANDSCAPE
 The Trustees’ Public Art Initiative
 
by Meredith Cutler for Artscope Magazine
 
Article Excerpt
 
World’s End … The Old Manse … names that ring of landmarks on a fictional map. Look at a map of Massachusetts, and you’ll discover that these are very real destinations. Located in seaside Hingham and historic Concord, respectively, World’s End and The Old Manse are just two of 116 properties managed by the not-for-profit conservation and preservation group, The Trustees of Reservations.
 
In celebration of 125 years of land conservancy and historical site stewardship, The Trustees have launched a two-year public art initiative titled “Art and the Landscape.” The project is curated by Boston-based independent curator Pedro Alonzo in the “museum of the Massachusetts landscape — wild nature herself,” as described by Trustees President and CEO Barbara Erickson at a launch event and public art forum held in early June.
 
Best known for curatorial projects involving street artists and the urban landscape, Alonzo’s public art sensations in the Commonwealth include French artist JR’s 86-foot high, black and white image of man on a dock pasted on the windows of the iconic former Hancock Tower (200 Clarendon Street) in Back Bay; and Brazilian duo Os Gêmeos’ controversial mural of a cartoonish, hooded figure in Dewey Square (created in conjunction with their 2012 exhibition at Boston’s ICA where Alonzo was adjunct curator from 2011-2013).
 
“I’ve had access to walls, buildings, maximum security prisons … but not the landscape,” said Alonzo of this sea change from urban to “beyond” suburban sites. “I thank the Trustees for taking that risk.”
 
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Image Caption: Sam Durant, "The Meeting House (rendering by Jota Samper), on view at The Old Manse in Concord, Mass.

BUNNY HARVEY: FOUR DECADES

Wellesley College Davis Museum

Wellesley, MA

September 16, 2015 – December 13, 2015

Exploring The Seen and Unseen

by Meredith Cutler

Article Excerpt

Bunny Harvey can locate the very place and moment in time that cemented her knowledge that she was, and would always be, an artist. Trailing her fashionable mother through the streets of mid-town Manhattan, the smell of oil paint wafting from the Art Students League of New York drew her in like a siren’s song. Always a creative child with a love of drawing, “that sensory experience was really the beginning of my art,” Harvey recounted.

Through this fall semester at Wellesley College, visitors to the institution’s Davis Museum can view an ambitious retrospective of work by Harvey, Elizabeth Christy Kopf Professor of Art from 1976-2015. This exhibition was one of the first assignments for curator Meredith Fluke, who marks the completion of her first year at Wellesley as Harvey celebrates her last.

As the two began to peel back the layers of Harvey’s prolific back-catalog for the retrospective, Fluke decided to stick to the years that the artist was at Wellesley and to “give [the audience] something that they hadn’t necessarily seen before … not just large-scale, but also small works on paper.”

With a constraint of “just” 40 years, the resulting exhibition is understandably still extensive. Approximately 70 paintings, plus works on paper, are organized into three sections: “Dream Archeology,” “Scientific Observation & Discovery” and “The Natural World: discerned, absorbed, disrupted.”

”Dream Archeology” rewinds to 1980 and Harvey’s first exhibition of paintings at the Davis. The young professor was still reveling in visions of artifacts and history from her time at the American Academy in Rome. A Rome Prize fellowship award enabled Harvey to join a cohort of multidisciplinary deep thinkers there from 1974-76; it was the stew of discovery that kicked her active observational and analytic mind into high gear.

The painting “Many False Doors” pulls in the colors of sand, terracotta and kiln-fired brick evoked by the mystique of the archeological field, of Egyptology and the layers of Rome, itself an entity described by Harvey as appearing “in my paintings – it is the city of layers.”

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Image Caption: Bunny Harvey, Particular View, 1999, oil on canvas, 76” x 66”.