R E T ROS P EC T I V E
L E N D E R S TO T H E E X H I B I T I O N The Artist Dr. Murray A. Cohen and his wife, Ms. Myrna Moran Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Euclidean Capital LLC Hofstra University Museum Collections Bernard and Barbara Hyman June Kelly Gallery, New York Carol Montparker and Ernest Taub Renaissance Technologies LLC Mr. and Mrs. Arnold Rubin Richard and Judith Schultz Cynthia Schultz-Hornig Jane and Barton Shallat Sherman Tatz
C ATA L O G U E S P O N S O R S June Kelly Gallery, New York Judith Schultz Jane and Barton Shallat
Published on the occasion of the exhibition Stan Brodsky: Retrospective August 17–December 1, 2013 Curated by Lisa Chalif The Heckscher Museum of Art 2 Prime Avenue, Huntington, NY 11743-7702 www.heckscher.org Photography: Max Yawney, p. 9; All other images Thomas Decker Studio Design: Amy Berger, ABGraphics Printing: pod4print, Inc. Copyright © The Heckscher Museum of Art ISBN 978-1-879195-16-5 Covers: Santa Barbara #5, 2002, oil on canvas, 60 x 48 in. Euclidean Capital LLC
R E T ROS P EC T I V E
The Heckscher Museum of Art August 17–December 1, 2013
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Stan Brodsky in his Studio, 2013
FOREWORD
To complement Stan Brodsky’s selection as The Heckscher Museum of Art Celebrate Achievement honoree for 2013, it is with great pleasure that we present Stan Brodsky: Retrospective, focusing on the artist’s landscape-based paintings. For almost fifty years, Brodsky has made Huntington his home and, during that time, he has been included in many group exhibitions at the Museum, as well as the subject of two solo shows, the most recent more than twenty years ago. That exhibition, Transformations into Color, traced the artist’s evolution from early representational landscapes of grid-like architectonic structures through the minimalist landscapes of the mid-1970s, to the artist’s earliest exploration of flattened pictorial space in the abstract works of the early 1980s. Since then, Brodsky’s style has matured towards dense, multi-layered compositions full of animated gesture, signaling an artist who revels in the process of painting itself. From the beginning, Brodsky’s palette has revealed a sophisticated sensitivity to color that has been heightened by his frequent travels throughout the United States and Europe. His work represents a singular approach to Abstract Expressionism, distinguished by its vitality, vibrancy, and sensual aesthetic sensibility. This exhibition was realized through the coordinated efforts of many people, both inside and outside the Museum. First and foremost, I thank Stan for his tireless assistance with every aspect of the exhibition, from the selection of the works to the production of the catalogue. Through our work together, my admiration for the artist and his oeuvre has deepened significantly, and I am honored to have worked with him. My admiration for Stan is shared by his many collectors who have generously agreed to loan beloved works to the exhibition and I am grateful to each of them. Thank you to Amy Berger, of ABGraphics, who designed this elegant catalogue to document the exhibition for posterity, and to Hilarie Sheets who contextualizes Stan’s work in her perceptive and informative essay. I also thank the Museum staff, each of whom has contributed to the exhibition, in particular our registrar, Bill Titus, who coordinated the loans; our preparator, Pete Pantaleo, who installed the exhibition; and my curatorial assistant, Jessica Waldmann, who cheerfully tended to myriad details and handled every request with capable precision. Finally, I am grateful to Nina Muller, our Director of External Affairs, and the Board of Trustees for their work in acknowledging and celebrating Stan’s significant contributions to the arts on Long Island.
Lisa Chalif Curator The Heckscher Museum of Art
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STA N B R O D S KY : R ET R O S P EC T I V E Hilarie M. Sheets As a young man from Brooklyn in the Army, deployed for combat in France during World War II, Stan Brodsky made a life-changing discovery when his platoon came upon a deserted farmhouse. As other infantrymen ransacked its contents for valuables, Brodsky found a small box of watercolors with a tiny brush that he tucked into his gas mask. He had always had a talent and interest in drawing but had never painted. During periods of relief from the battlefront, Brodsky taught himself at night, by candlelight, to manipulate fluid watercolors, illuminating his letters back home with impressions of new vistas he was experiencing across France and Germany. It was the beginning of what would become a long, productive career in painting and teaching. Something of the excitement and freshness of response to shifting environments and emotions that characterized Brodsky’s novice experiments has remained consistent in his painting over the decades, even as his work has evolved from depicting the exterior world to more interior territory. This retrospective, focusing on the development of Brodsky’s landscape paintings from 1970 to the present, underscores the artist’s acute sensitivity to his physical surroundings—whether the sense of color and light on Long Island, where he has long been based, or in Greece, Israel, Italy, France, New Mexico, or California, where he has traveled extensively over the years. Brodsky, born in 1925, took his first formal art classes at the University of Missouri after the war and then received his MFA in painting in 1950 at the University of Iowa, where he was introduced to modern art. Over the next decade, he completed his doctorate in art education at Columbia University’s Teachers College. In 1959, he began teaching at C.W. Post, Long Island University, where he worked for the next three decades while pursuing his own painting. Brodsky’s move from Manhattan to Huntington, on the north shore of Long Island, in 1965 precipitated his series of minimal landscapes painted throughout the 1970s. In the city, influenced by the lessons of structure he absorbed from studying Paul Cézanne, Brodsky had painted the crowded, constructed world around him—buildings, rooftops, playgrounds—with a kind of spare geometry. These early works echoed the reductive simplicity of Milton Avery and the wistful tenor of Edward Hopper. After coming to Long Island, Brodsky’s focus gradually shifted toward the vast, open, horizontal orientation of water and sky. Fascinated by the low tides and mud flats, Brodsky worked in pastel, acrylic, gouache, or watercolor on site and in oils at his studio, capturing the changing light conditions and reducing the scene to soft horizontal bands of color that blur distinctions between foreground, middle ground, and sky. Such abstracted landscapes include Low Tide #1 (1975), where Brodsky played with reflections of tranquil, muted tones, and Green Flow (1976), where he pushed the ambiguous sense of space further with his almost monochromatic use of high-keyed green inflected with streaks of pale yellow and blue. Green Flow is evocative of Mark Rothko’s paintings in its push-pull between depth and flatness and its diaphanous use of color.
7 If the serenity and distant vantage point of these seamless seascapes appealed to Brodsky during this period, when he was dealing with the emotional aftermath of a divorce, by the 1980s he had begun to experiment with the expressive possibilities of moving in closer and working with more texture and gesture. The vantage point becomes tightly cropped in Dead Sea Green (1983), a pool of luminous phosphorescent green that seems to suspend loose, murky shapes. Brodsky began to use his internalized memories of nature, such as this acidic color that had stayed with him from his experience of the Dead Sea in Israel, as a springboard for paintings suggestive of landscape, yet highly abstracted. In Saratoga Springs #19 (1996), the eye of the viewer roams through a dense, dreamy field of plant forms with no horizon line, evocative of the immersive experience of Monet’s water lily paintings. Over the last two decades, Brodsky has pushed further into the physical and psychological terrain of Abstract Expressionism. He made a conscious decision to shift his paintings to a vertical orientation, further playing against any suggestion of a horizon line. While his experience of nature remains a catalyst—the particular quality of sparkling sun and water in Santa Barbara, the violet of the native flowers in Abiquiu, the greens of the olive and cypress trees of Tuscany—it is distilled into a fluid choreography of tonal relationships, shapes, and gestures. He fights against forms becoming too referential, using overlays of color and activating the surface with accent marks applied with paintstick that are a kind of drawing. Brodsky first experimented with such abstracted characters in a series from the late 1990s called Hebraic Fragments, inspired by a trip to Prague. He has since come to think of these glyphs as an extension of the movement of his arm that help orchestrate the flow of energy through a painting. He has also enjoyed the serendipity of the monotype process, in which he paints on Plexiglas and makes impressions on moistened archival paper. While a sheet is still wet with color, he’ll often run it through the printing press again to make additional impressions with freshly painted Plexiglas, realizing unforeseen color mixes and translucent layers suggesting great depth, as in Around Yellow (2000). For Brodsky, the sheet of paper and the canvas have become an arena to test and contain conflicting impulses. It is a continual balancing act between his natural inclination toward structure and his desire for looser movement, between refinement and roughness, between equanimity and agitation. He hits all the notes in a painting like Descending Light #1(2009), with a swath of golden yellow streaking vertically through a terrain of dark purplish hues, like a moment of achingly vivid light sinking into mercurial shadows. Brodsky then destabilizes the quality of advancing or receding light with his dance of accent marks—arced, scribbled, shifting in color and width and texture across the surface—that assert the flatness of the picture plane. The eye gets lost in the painting’s rhythms and its melancholic beauty that suggests the end of a brilliant day, as much as the mystery and sweetness of a long life. His newest canvas, finished this year, Green Moves, feels like his most improvisational and freely executed painting to date, with its vivid green accents skidding through a roiling surface of purple and burgundy pigments. Today, at 88, Brodsky is as engaged and excited by his struggles and breakthroughs in the studio as he was as a young man seeing the world for the first time and learning how to communicate through a new medium.
Hilarie M. Sheets is a contributing editor to ARTnews and writes regularly for The New York Times.
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Towards the Shore, 1970 Oil on linen, 26 x 34 in. Collection of the Artist
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Low Tide #1, 1975 Oil on canvas, 42 x 52 in. The Heckscher Museum of Art
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Green Flow, 1976 Oil on canvas, 60 x 40 in. Collection of the Artist
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Dead Sea Green, 1983 Oil on paper, 28 x 40 in. Collection of the Artist
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Paumanok Places #8, 1994 Oil on canvas, 38 x 48 in. Collection of the Artist
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Saratoga Springs #19, 1996 Casein on paper, 38 x 41 in. Renaissance Technologies LLC
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Hebraic Fragments #23, 1996 Oil and paintstick on paper, 42 x 30 in. Collection of Jane and Barton Shallat
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Sense of Erin #10, 1999 Oil on canvas, 54 x 44 in. Collection of the Artist
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Abiquiu #13, 2006 Oil on canvas, 58 x 55 in. Richard and Judith Schultz
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Tuscan Series #11, 2008 Oil on canvas, 50 x 40 in. Collection of the Artist
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Accent Violet #2, 2009 Oil on canvas, 46 x 40 in. Courtesy of the Artist and the June Kelly Gallery, New York
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Descending Light #1, 2009 Oil and paintstick on canvas, 40 x 30 in. Courtesy of the Artist and the June Kelly Gallery, New York
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Green Moves, 2013 Oil on canvas, 40 x 30 in. Collection of the Artist
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CHECKLIST OF THE EXHIBITION Construction, 1970 Charcoal on paper, 8 5⁄ 8 x 117⁄ 8 in. The Heckscher Museum of Art, Gift of Mr. Alfred Van Loen,1986.4.2
Ionian Blue #3, 1989 Oil on canvas, 48 x 60 in. Collection of Bernard and Barbara Hyman
East End #2, 1970 Oil on canvas, 20 x 24 in. Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Arnold Rubin
Oak Creek #15, 1990 Casein on paper, 22 x 29½ in. Richard and Judith Schultz
Towards the Shore, 1970 (p. 8) Oil on linen, 26 x 34 in. Collection of the Artist
Sedona Orange #2, 1990 Oil on canvas, 44 x 54 in. Renaissance Technologies LLC
Tillie & Eddie, 1972 Oil on canvas, 34 x 44 in. Collection of Dr. Murray A. Cohen and his wife, Ms. Myrna Moran
Paumanok Places #8, 1994 (p.12) Oil on canvas, 38 x 48 in. Collection of the Artist
Taos , 1973 Oil on canvas, 14 x 18 in. Richard and Judith Schultz
Hebraic Fragments #23, 1996 (p.14) Oil and paintstick on paper, 42 x 30 in. Collection of Jane and Barton Shallat
Low Tide #1, 1975 (p. 9) Oil on canvas, 42 x 52 in. The Heckscher Museum of Art, Museum Purchase, 1975.4
Hebraic Fragments #26, 1996 Oil on canvas, 60 x 48 in. Hofstra University Museum Collections, Gift of the artist, HU2012.45
Green Flow, 1976 (p. 10) Oil on canvas, 60 x 40 in. Collection of the Artist
Saratoga Springs #19, 1996 (p. 13) Casein on paper, 38 x 41 in. Renaissance Technologies LLC
West Shore #13, 1979 Oil on masonite, 12 x 12 in. On loan from Sherman Tatz
Naucelle #21, 1998 Oil and paintstick on board, 14 x 12½ in. Collection of Jane and Barton Shallat
Blue Moves , 1980 Oil on canvas, 39½ x 49½ in. Collection of Cynthia Schultz-Hornig
Red over Green #2, 1998 Monotype on paper, 17 5⁄ 8 x 23 3⁄ 4 in. Collection of the Artist
Blue Scape, 2000 Oil on canvas, 15 x 12 in. Collection of Jane and Barton Shallat Blue Shift , 2000 Monotype on paper, 17 ¾ x 24 in. Collection of the Artist Santa Barbara #5, 2002 (covers) Oil on canvas, 60 x 48 in. Euclidean Capital LLC Abiquiu #9, 2004 Oil on canvas, 50 x 40 in. Collection of the Artist Abiquiu #13, 2006 (p.16) Oil on canvas, 58 x 55 inches Richard and Judith Schultz Lecchi, 2007 Acrylic on paper, 28 x 22 in. Collection of the Artist Tuscan Series #1, 2007 Oil on canvas, 44 x 34 in. Collection of the Artist Tuscan Series #11, 2008 (p.17) Oil on canvas, 50 x 40 in. Collection of the Artist Accent Violet #2, 2009 (p.18) Oil on canvas, 46 x 40 in. Courtesy of the Artist and the June Kelly Gallery, New York Descending Light #1, 2009 (p.19) Oil and paintstick on canvas, 40 x 30 in. Courtesy of the Artist and the June Kelly Gallery, New York
Amagansett Orange #1, 1981 Casein on paper, 20½ x 28¼ in. Private Collection of Carol Montparker and Ernest Taub
Le Midi, Pyrenees #6, 1999 Gouache on paper, 30 x 22 in. Collection of Jane and Barton Shallat
Dead Sea Green , 1983 (p. 11) Oil on paper, 28 x 40 in. Collection of the Artist
Sense of Erin #10, 1999 (p. 15) Oil on canvas, 54 x 44 in. Collection of the Artist
Near and Deep #1, 2009 Oil on linen, 60 x 48 in. Courtesy of the Artist and the June Kelly Gallery, New York
Blue Harbor, 1985 Gouache on paper, 18½ x 26½ in. On loan from Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
Around Yellow, 2000 Monotype on paper, 41 x 33 in. Collection of the Artist
Green Moves, 2013 (p. 20) Oil on canvas, 40 x 30 in. Collection of the Artist
Harbor #2, 1986 Oil on paper, 25¾ x 39¾ in. Richard and Judith Schultz
BIOGRAPHY Born 1925, Brooklyn Education 1959 1950 1949
Ed.D., Columbia University M.F. A., Painting, University of Iowa B.J., Photojournalism, University of Missouri
Honors & Awards 2013 Celebrate Achievement Honoree, Heckscher Museum of Art Honoree, Art League of Long Island 2009 2004, 1996, 87 Fellowship, Yaddo: A Retreat for Artists 1991 Trustees Award, Long Island University, C.W. Post Campus Professor Emeritus of Art, Long Island University, C.W. Post Campus 1989, 86, 85 Fellowship, Virginia Center for Creative Arts 1978 Huntington Township Art League 1971 Fellowship, The MacDowell Colony 1970 North Shore Community Art Center 1959 The Wilmington Society of the Fine Arts, Delaware Art Center Selected Solo Exhibitions 2011 The Impact of Color: Recent Paintings, June Kelly Gallery, New York 2008 Stan Brodsky, The Figure: 1951–2006, Hofstra University Art Museum, Hempstead, NY, catalogue Visions & Vibrations, June Kelly Gallery, New York Between Art and Nature: Works on Paper, Gallery North, Setauket, NY 2006 Evidence of Things: New Mexico Landscapes, June Kelly Gallery, New York Stan Brodsky: Paintings, Gallery Merz, Sag Harbor, NY 2003 Synthesis: Redefining the Landscape, June Kelly Gallery, New York, catalogue 2000 Because: Paintings, Elaine Benson Gallery, Bridgehampton, NY 1999 Layered Light: New Paintings, June Kelly Gallery, New York/concurrent with Stan Brodsky: Seeing Through, Seeing Beyond: A Retrospective of Work from the 70s, 80s, and 90s, The University Gallery, University of Bridgeport, catalogue 1994 Landscape as Memory, June Kelly Gallery, New York 1991 New Paintings, June Kelly Gallery, New York/concurrent with Transformations into Color: The Art of Stan Brodsky, Heckscher Museum of Art, Huntington, NY, catalogue 1989 Recent Paintings, June Kelly Gallery, New York 1986 Paintings, Gallery North, Setauket, NY 1978 Lubin Alumni House, Syracuse University, NY 1978, 77, 75 Lerner-Heller Gallery, New York 1977 Elaine Benson Gallery, Bridgehampton, NY 1975 Stan Brodsky, Heckscher Museum of Art, Huntington, NY 1973, 71, 68 Roko Gallery, NY Selected Group Exhibitions 2009 Long Island Moderns, Heckscher Museum of Art, Huntington, NY, catalogue 2007 Picturing Long Island, Heckscher Museum of Art, Huntington, NY 2006 Recent Acquisitions, Telfair Museum of Art, Savannah, GA 2005 Ten Artists Defining Abstraction, The Pfizer Corporate Art Program, New York About Paint, Westport Art Center, CT Abstraction Forty, Gallery North, Setauket, NY 2003 Figure II and Variations on Abstraction, Gallery North, Setauket, NY 2002 Re/Opening, Alpan Gallery, Huntington, NY 2001 Long Island Morning, Noon & Night, The Long Island Museum, Stony Brook, NY Local Color, Gallery North, Setauket, NY 2000 Affinities and Influences, Gallery North, Setauket, NY Labscapes 2000, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, Cold Spring Harbor, NY 1999 Abstraction: New Directions for a New Millennium, Robert Kidd Gallery, Birmingham, MI Re-viewing Nature: Long Island Landscape Painting Today, Sidney Mishkin Gallery, Baruch College, New York 1998 The Centennial Open, Parrish Art Museum, Southampton, NY 173rd Annual Exhibition, National Academy of Design, New York Long Island Artists: Focus on Materials, University Art Gallery, State University of New York at Stony Brook
1998 1995 1994 1990 1989 1988 1987 1985 1984 1982 1981 1978 1970 1968 1962 1959 1958 1957
Three Friends, Gallery North, Setauket, NY 75th Anniversary Show, Heckscher Museum of Art, Huntington, NY 30th Anniversary Exhibition, Gallery North, Setauket, NY Sculpture, Paintings, & Prints, Gallery North, Setauket, NY 20th Century Long Island Landscape Painting, The Long Island Museum, Stony Brook, NY Art Made in USA: 37 Positionen Junger Kunst, Stadtische Galerie, Regensburg, West Germany New Paintings: Stan Brodsky/Karin Batten, June Kelly Gallery, New York Local Color, Gallery North, Setauket, NY Annual Invitational Exhibition, Nassau County Museum of Art, Roslyn, NY Waterworks, Heckscher Museum of Art, Huntington, NY 21st Biennial, University Gallery, University of Delaware, Newark America and the Sea, Pensacola Museum of Art, FL Recent Acquisitions, Guild Hall, East Hampton, NY Collection of Eva Gatling, Parrish Art Museum, Southampton, NY Artists of Suffolk County, Part IV: The New Landscape, Heckscher Museum of Art, Huntington, NY Thirty-third Annual Mid-Year Show, The Butler Institute of American Art, Youngstown, OH Young Artists of Promise, Mortimer Brandt Gallery, New York Second Philadelphia Arts Festival Regional Exhibition, Philadelphia Museum of Art 44th Annual Delaware Show, Delaware Art Museum, Wilmington Annual Delaware Show: Oils and Sculpture, Delaware Art Museum, Wilmington
Selected Publications, Articles, Films 2011 Where I Need to Go, documentary film by Alexandra Brodsky 2010 Fred Bruning, “The Paint Set,” Newsday, May1 Stan Brodsky, The Uncertainty of Experience: An Artist’s Journey. New York: Midmarch Arts Press 2008 Ann Landi, ARTnews, Summer Issue Benjamin Genocchio, “Figurative Works That Reveal a Landscapist’s Little-Known Side,” The New York Times, May 4 2007 Benjamin Genocchio, “ Nature in an Untouched State, Before Suburbia Called,” The New York Times, February 18 2003 Ariella Budick, “A Brush Stroke of Bold to Balance the Beauty,” Newsday, September 5 1998 Helen A. Harrison, “ Three Friends,” The New York Times, June 7 1996 Helen A. Harrison, “ Stan Brodsky: Works from the 90’s,” The New York Times, December 22 1994 Helen A. Harrison, “Stan Brodsky and Robert White,“ The New York Times, June 12 Steve Parks, “ The Eyes of Two Artists Turn Toward Home Shores,” Newsday, May 11 Claire Nicolas White, Riding at Anchor, with drawings by Stan Brodsky. Great Falls, VA: Waterline Books 1990 Ronald G. Pisano, Long Island Landscape Painting in the 20th Century. Boston: Bulfinch Press 1987 Helen A. Harrison, “More Than a Scenery Show,” The New York Times, September 13 Helen A. Harrison, “Nine Shows Combined in One,” The New York Times, March 15 1985 Allen Planz, Influences of the Landscape, with illustrations by Stan Brodsky. Port Jefferson, NY: Backstreet Press Phyllis Braff, “Beckoned by L.I.’s Waters,” The New York Times, October 6 1982 Infusion, Portrait, Stan Brodsky, film by Peter Scheer 1981 Paumanok Rising, an Anthology of Long Island Aesthetics. Port Jefferson, NY: Street Press 1977 Hilton Kramer, “Stan Brodsky,” The New York Times, June 10 David L. Shirey, “Color as a Mindscape,” The New York Times, June 5 1975 Hilton Kramer, “Stan Brodsky and Jean Olds,” The New York Times, September 20 Public & Corporate Collections AT&T, Chicago Baltimore Museum of Art Campbell-Mithun-Esty Co., Southfield, MI Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, Cold Spring Harbor, NY Dayton Art Institute Euclidean Capital LLC, New York Farnsworth Art Museum, Rockland, ME Guild Hall, East Hampton, NY Joel and Lila Harnett Museum, University of Richmond, VA Heckscher Museum of Art, Huntington, NY Hofstra University Museum of Art, Hempstead, NY Housatonic Museum of Art, Housatonic Community College, Bridgeport, CT Hyde Collection, Glens Falls, NY The Long Island Museum, Stony Brook, NY Hillwood Art Museum, Long Island University, Brookville, NY
Lowe Art Museum, University of Miami, Coral Gables, FL Mobile Museum of Art, AL Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg, FL Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase College, State University of New York Grey Art Gallery, New York University Newsday, Melville, NY Parrish Museum of Art, Southampton, NY Pensacola Museum of Art, FL Port Authority, New York Renaissance Technologies LLC, New York Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, MA Telfair Museum of Art, Telfair Academy, Savannah, GA University Gallery, University of Delaware, Newark Vero Beach Museum of Art, FL Zimmerli Art Museum, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ
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