By Marisa Nadolny
Times Managing Editor
It’s the season of changing colors here in Connecticut, and the Lyme Academy College of Fine Arts is following suit with its recently installed 2008 Fall Exhibition.
Launched Sept. 19, the exhibition includes A Slice of America: Selections from the New Britain Museum of American Art in the Chauncey Stillman Gallery, featuring more than 30 works by American artists, and the Excellence in Painting and Sculpture Exhibition, with works by 2006 LACFA alumni Samantha Weber and David Krevolin in the Sill House Gallery. Both exhibits will remain on view until Nov. 22.
Slices of America
A Slice of America reflects a recent partnership with LACFA and the New Britain Museum of American Art. Founded in 1903, NBMAA houses a collection of more than 5,000 pieces in various media, spanning three centuries that “focus on American art and its panoramic view of American artistic achievement,” according to the museum’s Web site. Its permanent collection includes works by Thomas Cole, Winslow Homer, Mary Cassatt, Childe Hassam, Maurice Prendergast, Georgia O’Keeffe, Edward Hopper, Thomas Hart Benton, Sol LeWitt, and Andy Warhol.
NBMAA Director Douglas Hyland juried a student show at LACFA last year, and over lunch one day with LACFA professors Susan Stephenson and Nancy Peel Gladwell, an exhibition was born. As they discussed NBMAA’s collection and the educational value therein for LACFA’s students, Hyland offered to loan LACFA a selection of works from New Britain.
“This town is rich with art…but we’re not New York, we’re not Boston, so to get as much strong art here—to get real masterworks—is a wonderful opportunity,” said Gladwell, full-time associate professor of painting and drawing and chair of the Painting Department.
It took Stephenson and Gladwell a few months and several trips to New Britain to pore through NBMAA’s collection—“staggering” in size according to Gladwell and “astounding” in Stephenson’s estimation—and draw up a wish list of pieces to bring to Old Lyme. Portability ruled out some of their top choices—a portrait of Prudence Crandall one of them—but the pieces they managed to borrow reflect several periods, media, and American artists, including William Merritt Chase, Mary Cassatt, Deane Keller Sr., Thomas Hart Benton, Peter Milton, Jacob Lawrence, Grant Wood, Nancy Hagin, and Arthur Getz.
But finding pieces that met one important underlying criterion was particularly fun.
“We basically responded, I think, on an aesthetic level. Work that we felt [had that] ‘wow’ [factor],” Gladwell noted. “Some of them are actually artists that we don’t know, but the quality of the work was so great we selected it anyway…you know we always have in mind—you’re forever the teacher—what would be a healthy diet for a student’s eyes.”
“There was a sort of an immediate, visceral, kind of response,” said Stephenson, full-time associate professor of painting and drawing and chairman of LACFA’s Foundation Program. “There was an immediate sort of clarity, and also quality…and sometimes works might be a little bit rougher, and they have more impact on contemplation; they just have such power and grace, but it takes a little while to unfold, so I think it’s going to be a very interesting pairing to see works that are so diverse, hung.”
From landscapes of farms to contemporary pieces, still-lifes, portraits, sculptures, and lithographs, the exhibition offers still another unifying theme.
“As formalists, you can’t help but think if you have good quality work, there’s going to be a common line of quality, of visual impact, and also an earnestness…in the artists’ intent,” Stephenson stated.
“When I think about the most extremes, the polar extremes of types of work…it’s almost dizzying to think about having it all together in one spot,” she added, “but it’s going to be so exciting to see these and know they all belong together and be able to figure out why.”
As important as the aesthetic value of the exhibition, however, is the educational potential it holds for LACFA. Partnerships like this one not only bring great art to the college, they also create the potential for a wider network of mutual support for art students and galleries in Connecticut.
“The thing is to keep that dialogue going between that art institution and us,” Gladwell said. “We don’t want to be islands—we shouldn’t be, and it’s not good for any of us. We wanted to create a discourse, a conversation.”
Douglas Hyland, director of the New Britain Museum, will discuss A Slice of America: Selections from the New Britain Museum of American Art on Friday, Oct. 3, at 5:30 p.m. in the Stillman Gallery at LACFA. For details, call 860-434-5232.
Excellence in Painting and Sculpture
Works by LACFA alumni Samantha Weber and David Krevolin—members of the class of 2006—are on view now at LACFA’s Sill House Gallery. Both winners of the college’s awards for excellence, this special exhibition of the artists’ latest works post-graduation comes with the excellence award.
Stephenson and Gladwell recall Weber as a stand-out artist, even in her freshman year.
“She did these monumental images that were so brave. They were all about childbirth; they were really life affirming, and I think that the use of color, and the precision, and the great skill of the mind was a perfect union,” Stephenson stated. “She’s a powerhouse.”
Krevolin’s work, according to Gladwell, developed a discernible “panache,” especially his senior-year sculptures.
“His sculptures were dynamic as much for the abstracted human figure as for the interesting way in which they were displayed—he placed sculptures atop bases of different heights, adding drama to his work,” Stephenson noted.
His architecturally driven drawings, almost mathematical in execution, will accompany paintings by Weber in the exhibition.
Excellence in Painting and Sculpture Exhibition, Samantha Weber and David Krevolin, Award Recipients from the Class of 2006 will remain on view until Nov. 22.
The Chauncey Stillman Gallery and the Sill House Gallery are free and open to the public, Monday through Saturday, from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.