Garden as Muse catalog

Garden as Muse Sal ly Apfel ba u m

•

M a rk u s B a en z iger

•

S yd Car pen ter

•

Lo is D o dd

•

S arah McE neaney

1

Garden as Muse is part of Artosphere: Arkansas’ Arts & Nature Festival, presented by Walton Arts Center.

Walton Arts Center extends special thanks to Andrea Packard for her work on Garden as Muse.

Support for Artosphere is provided by:

Artosphere is an annual regional festival celebrating artists, influenced by nature, who inspire us to live more sustainable lives. Walton Arts Center, a non-profit organization, is Arkansas’ premier center for the performing arts and entertainment.

Festival Funders Arkansas Arts Council AT&T The Clorox Company Fayetteville Advertising and Promotion Commission GE Lighting Greenwood Gearhart, Inc. New England Foundation for the Arts Procter & Gamble Tyson Foods, Inc. Walmart Foundation The Walton Family Foundation, Inc. Festival Partners David & Rosamond Banks Boyce Billingsley Joel & Lynn Carver Dale & Prudy Caudle Nick & Carolyn Cole Sandy Edwards Hershey & Denise Garner Jeff & Lisa Gearhart Malcolm & Ellen Hayward Tony & Susan Hui Greg & Hannah Lee Robert & Susan Patton Mary Lynn Reese Dennis & Evelyn Shaw Mitchell & Barbara Singleton Joe Fred & Billie Starr

2

www.artospherefestival.org www.waltonartscenter.org Cover: Sally Apfelbaum, Cyan Vertical, 2003, Type C print, 40 x 30 inches.

Back cover: Syd Carpenter, Ella Mae Edwards, 2009, clay, mixed media, wood, 24 x 20 x 6 inches.

Opposite: Lois Dodd, Apple Trees and Shed, 2002, oil on linen, 42 x 84 3⁄8 inches. © Lois Dodd, courtesy Alexandre Gallery, New York.

Design: Phillip Unetic, UneticDesign.com Printing: Brilliant Graphics, Exton, PA

Garden as Muse

Sally Apfelbaum Markus Baenziger Syd Carpenter Lois Dodd Sarah McEneaney

April 22–June 4, 2011 Curated by Andrea Packard

Joy Pratt Markham Gallery Walton Arts Center Fayetteville, Arkansas

Garden as Muse: Cultivating Vision Andrea Packard

From the lush abundance of Monet’s paintings of Giverny to Jeff Koons’ gaudy topiary, modern and contemporary artists have found gardens and botanical imagery to be potent sources of inspiration. This exhibition features the work of five contemporary artists: Sally Apfelbaum, Markus Baenziger, Syd Carpenter, Lois Dodd, and Sarah McEneaney, who demonstrate a career-long fascination with the dynamism of nature. Although they work in distinct styles and media, they all investigate the way our cultivation of nature, whether formally planned or unconsciously propagated, essentially shapes human experience. Whereas much art today emphasizes the cacophony of rapid change, these artists both acknowledge contemporary issues and revel in the persistence—and necessity—of beauty in our lives. Their exceptional creative integrity, conceptual insight, analytical rigor, and technical mastery produce representations of nature that are both alluring and profound.

"”” The quintessential interpreter of gardens is, of course, Claude Monet. From 1883 until his death in 1926, he sculpted his garden at Giverny and painted its dazzling vistas. His symphonic arrangement of flowers, lily ponds, trellises, and paths has become a pilgrimage site for gardeners and artists alike. Sally Apfelbaum produced two series of photographs there: Giverny, made during a six-month residency in 1989, and Giverny, Recent, made during a return visit in 2003. The daughter of a nurseryman who developed and propagated new species and a mother who is an artist, Apfelbaum grew up on a small farm. After earning degrees in psychology and photography, she was well prepared for the problematic opportunities at Giverny.

The danger of such a residency is that one’s art might become cliché or derivative of Monet’s vision. However, as Apfelbaum studied the gardens, she elaborated a strategy she had developed the previous year during a residency at Ellis Island, N.Y. At Ellis Island, she noted that the historic buildings were aligned with the points of the compass and photographed them from those distinct viewpoints, layering the four exposures on a single four-by-five–inch negative to produce a composite image. The resulting photographs do not correspond to actual scenes one could view; they are convincing inventions. Unlike the ubiquitous postcard images of such sites, Apfelbaum’s process produced abrupt contrasts and ghostly visual echoes— effects that suggest shifts in perception, memory, and time.

Rather than simply document appearances, her photographs represent each site as a nexus of perceptual, geographic, and cultural change.

Sally Apfelbaum, Giverny #5, 1989/2004, Type C print, 30 x 40 inches.

2

Apfelbaum’s alluring photographs of Giverny also emphasize artificial, ephemeral, and subjective processes. Her images celebrate the abundance and variety of flowering plants, yet she moves beyond the picturesque. The arcing pathways, wealth of detail, and large scale of works such as Giverny #5 (1989/2004) invite viewers to enter the scene, meander through it, examine the flora, and imagine distant structures. Yet even those unfamiliar with the artist’s process quickly see the echoes of differing exposures that contribute to a sense of motion, transition, and peripheral knowledge. Moreover, the combination of dye layers on the same negative creates color relationships that differ from the actual scene. One also finds areas in the photographs that dissolve into overlapping detail

or fade into whiteness, like photographic pentimenti. In fact, as one more closely examines the wealth of detail in each image, we learn less about the botany represented than about the artist’s transformational process.

Apfelbaum’s compelling 14-foot–wide triptych, Trellis Giverny (1989/2004) further emphasizes the dynamic and conceptual way in which we experience nature. We associate the triptych format with Gothic and Renaissance altarpieces, images of postlapsarian suffering, and dystopic masterworks such as Hieronymous Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights (c. 1504). Apfelbaum’s image of nature is lush and inviting, but it is a paradise that we cannot physically enter. The two left panels of Trellis are identical images; the right panel is a reversed view of the first two images. As mirror images, the central and right panels form an H-shaped trellis encircled by a stone path. Although the trellis and path are enticing, the unsettling repetition of the two left panels reminds us that the images are not a picture window on the world of Giverny but the product of technological and creative artifice. Reflecting upon the marvels of interpretation as much as cultivation, Apfelbaum invites us to explore a metaphysical garden— a trellis of imagination.

“”” Lois Dodd need not travel to Giverny to find a verdant paradise or cornucopia. For more than 30 years, she has painted on her property in rural Maine. Works such as Leslie’s Garden with Alocasia (2004) depict a space she has helped water and weed each summer. The painting offers a glimpse of an arbor, lush plantings, and heart-shaped alocasia leaves—just some of the striking structures and specimens to be found in the garden of her neighbor, Leslie Land, former garden columnist for The New York Times and author of a number of books on food and gardens. In 1980, Land began creating a remarkable garden; her blend of horticultural and culinary gifts attracted a circle of artists who continue to find inspiration there. Dodd crossed the field between her studio and Land’s garden with increasing frequency, not only to pick beets and socialize, but to paint intensively.

Dodd has painted from observation for more than 5 decades, undeterred by the primacy of Abstract Expressionism and successive stylistic trends. Yet botanical subjects did not always offer a likely match for her seriousness of purpose. Dodd established her reputation as a painter’s painter primarily for her smart and spare compositions of cityscapes, window views, night views, and landscapes. She has won the admiration of artists and critics for her ability to portray these subjects with perceptual acuity, analytical rigor, and a gift for the language of abstraction.

In the early 1950s she was one of 5 founders of the legendary Tanager Gallery on Manhattan’s lower East Side.

Subsequently, she began regularly summering in Maine where she was part of a distinguished circle of painters that included Rackstraw Downes, Yvonne Jacquette, Alex Katz, and Neil Welliver. Of these representational painters drawn to the remarkable light and wilderness of the rural Northeast, Dodd has communed most closely with the intimacy and the transcendental vision of early American modernists such as Marsden Hartley and Charles Burchfield.

Lois Dodd, View from the Corner of Chicken House (small), 1983, oil on Masonite, 17 x 18 7⁄8 inches. © Lois Dodd, courtesy Alexandre Gallery, New York.

As Land’s garden evolved and the art world transitioned to a pluralist milieu, Dodd increasingly turned to gardens and botanical themes to nourish her art. Works such as View from Corner of Chicken House (1983) show how her disciplined observation, insight, and unaffected response transforms familiar subjects into extraordinary ones.

Starting paintings with a deeply felt visual response (rather than a conceptual or narrative premise), she usually works with focused intent to complete paintings in sessions of one to three hours. Works such as Spider Web Grass (2004) and Cow Parsnip (2003) are imbued with the energy and urgency that come with the need to capture fleeting phenomena of weather, light, and botanical subjects. Dodd’s perfect pitch for detail, proportion, and expressive brushwork results in a vibrancy that surpasses their intimate scale.

Larger works such as Apple Trees and Shed (2002), which are reinvented and completed in the studio, also convey tremendous immediacy and verve. Dodd’s bold contrasts and loose gestures synthesize something essential about both the appearance and 3

spirit resonance of each scene. The shadowy sobriety of the shed stands in counterpoint to the apple trees’ elliptical ebullience. Dodd does not describe the apple blossoms so much as react to them with a rapturous dance of color, shape, and line. The specificity of the scene gives way to an animating spirit. In the dazzling light of a blue sky, the blossoms surround and dwarf the darkened building as if transcending all human enclosures, be they physical or emotional.

“”” Syd Carpenter demonstrates a kindred fascination with gardening both as an avocation, an ambitious subject for her art, and a form of spiritual engagement. Sculpting in her studio in West Mount Airy, Philadelphia, near Fairmount Park, she takes inspiration from a variety of sources: from the botanical forms and relationships in her own garden to clothespins, cages, wheels, and fencing–symbols of human intervention in nature. Leavened by her experience as a gardener as well as her study of art, history, and sociology, Carpenter’s works masterfully choreograph rigorous research and improvisatory experimentation.

Syd Carpenter, Mind of its Own, 2006, clay and oxide, 14 x 26 x 14 inches.

For more than two decades, her works have variously expressed dualities: the organic and inorganic, order and entropy, the natural and manufactured, the individual and universal. Control of Nature (2005) is one of a series of hybrid forms that manifest and probe such oppositions. A vertical branch gives rise to a closed and drooping pod on the left while a bud appears to open on the right. Tilted like a jaunty cap, a form at the top suggests a wheel or button and prompts an anthropomorphic reading. Whereas the organic forms, rich textures, and red, gold, and green surfaces are sensually appealing, the work is deeply unsettling.

Control of Nature wryly visualizes both the desire to master evolution and the problematic nature of such an impetus. Suggesting a broken branch that is disconnected from its habitat or an invention that has no discernible purpose, this disruption of nature is simultaneously beautiful and dissonant.

Mind of its Own (2006) and Two Birds Dancing (2007) offer examples of another ongoing body of work: organic forms that suggest both flora and fauna. These hybrid forms synthesize discerning observation, lyricism, and an animating spirit. Like bulbs about to bloom or nestling fecund creatures, these works seem to twist, shift, and scuttle. Even the rich texture and coloring of their surfaces changes, emphasizing metamorphosis. Circling Mind of its Own, one sees that one side is a richly textured green and maroon, whereas the opposite side is a deep reddish brown punctuated by mottled patches of ivory. Like Apfelbaum, Carpenter reminds us that the notion of wholeness is itself a temporary construct—a composite of diverse forms and perspectives experienced over time.

Such works suggest that our imagination, like nature, is essentially chameleon-like, hybrid, equivocal, and restless.

Carpenter’s newest body of work, the Garden series, further demonstrates that an exploration of beauty, whether in the realm of gardening or art, need not be merely decorous. Disciplined, analytical, and inventive works such as Ella Mae Edwards (2009) probe the connections between art, gardening, history, and identity. This and more than a dozen related works were inspired by Richard Westmacott’s book African-American Gardens and Yards in the Rural South (1992), a study of the connections between gardening, agriculture, aesthetics, and cultural traditions among African Americans in the deep South during the first half of the 20th century. Carpenter has long been fascinated by the type of garden she might have cultivated had her family not migrated from Georgia to Pennsylvania—gardens that blend thrift and ingenuity, reassign worn materials to new purposes, and harmonize the handmade with the homegrown.

4

Carpenter was especially intrigued by Westmacott’s maps documenting the garden designs of the individuals he interviewed. The maps’ abstract lines and patterns representing different types of land use provided a starting point for her improvisations in clay. Named after specific gardeners in Westmacott’s study, works such as Buddy and Rosena Burgess (2009) affirm each subject’s aesthetic and practical ingenuity. Carpenter transforms Westmacott’s schematic maps back into three dimensions like jazz improvisations riffing on traditional themes.

Buddy and Rosena Burgess suggests multiple readings. Its rounded, segmented, and compressed forms recall both internal anatomy and the undulating contours of cultivated land. Diverse textures and striations suggest diverse land allocation from rough grass to furrowed fields. Criss-crossed by undulating lines, the works integrate descriptive representations of landscape (such as hedges, fences and pathways) with playful references to rolled clay coils—an essential element of hand-building. These varied fields are bounded at their perimeter by strips of densely aligned textures. Viewed from the side rather than straight on, these textures and patterns become less abstract and refer more directly to fencing, animal enclosures, or arrangements of recycled objects.

Although clearly referring to specific gardens, Carpenter’s vibrant transformation and rearrangement of myriad elements embodies the kind of improvisational adaptability that Westmacott admired in his subjects. Not only does she invent credible yet anthropomorphic forms, but each composition in its entirety conveys an organic, even human dynamism and vitality. Animated by Carpenter’s transformations and unified by her dark brown and umber surfaces, each relief attains the resonance of symbolic portraiture, expressing something of the dignity and resourcefulness of their namesakes.

“”” Sarah McEneaney has spent more than three decades painting autobiographical works that explore the interdependence of art, nature, community, and identity. Successive paintings have chronicled her home, pets, surrounding neighborhood, and life-changing events. She portrays a wide variety of both public and private gardens—spaces that are intertwined with her creative, interpretive, and socially engaged activities. Throughout her career, her own garden has been a touchstone in her life and art—an enclave of natural beauty and creative possibility amid a patchwork of highways, power transfer stations, overpasses, and abandoned buildings.

My House, Summer 1998 (1999) and 10 years (2008), portray her garden from dramatically different vantage points. In both works, the garden is integral to her sense of self. The first painting—made after she was raped in her house—portrays her garden as both a vulnerable place and a source of healing. Sitting at her patio table, protected only by a hammer and a phone, she reads a newspaper on which sexual assault statistics and the rapist’s threats are scrawled. McEneaney paints spider webs on the paving as a symbol of protection. The stone-edged flower beds barely soften the austerity of the brick and cement walls or the black paving, which seems to merge with her shirt. She faces the far wall, which her assailant scaled, where a climbing rose begins to form an arch, framing the faintly inscribed names of friends who have supported her. The garden is tenderly portrayed, but the buds appear sparse and fragile.

Sarah McEneany, 10 Years, 2008, egg tempera on linen, 48 x 48 inches.

Private Collection.

In contrast, the garden in 10 Years is verdant and serene. Again she reads at the patio table, but instead of a litany of hate, she gazes at a list of the prestigious museum exhibitions, residencies, and awards she has earned over the past decade. The painting is much more full of life. Leafy trees now soar overhead, a cat perches on the table, and her dog is attentive to her. Flowers and grasses replace the black paving and roses cover the walls. She 5

elevates her viewpoint, making the space seem more expansive. Even the hose sinuously forms in cursive 10 Years, a triumphant milestone. There is no suggestion of the surrounding city or its dangers. Instead, she equates her flourishing garden with her personal and artistic determination.

McEneaney’s urban milieu is much more visible in two other works that represent the same site in very different states. Ham Ridge Before (2001) depicts a trashed lot in Philadelphia’s Callowhill neighborhood—the antithesis of a garden. Even the weeds that are growing appear as devoid of color as the cement sidewalk and whitewashed buildings. Weedy tendrils curl like the coils of abandoned bedsprings and nearby concertina wire. The street, surrounding buildings, and utility poles compress the space. Documenting and remediating such urban blight has been integral to McEneaney’s art and civic activism. As a founding member of the Callowhill Neighborhood Association, McEneaney helped secure permission to transform the Hamilton Ridge lot with a community garden.

Ham Ridge Garden (2001) shows the improvements wrought through community activism. Flower and vegetable beds radiate from the edge of the lot, the trash has been removed, and a picnic table invites us to meander through the picture. Where trash abounded, there is now order. Although no people are in view, we see clear evidence of collective efforts. In the foreground, a dog rolls on the soft grass, exposing its underbelly as if begging to be petted. It is a gesture that embodies the comfort, safety, and joy that has been made possible by the garden. McEneaney also zooms in on the scene, eliminating the road that dominates the foreground in Ham Ridge, Before. She also de-emphasizes the surrounding buildings and billboard. The left edge of the garden now recedes sharply back into space, and our heightened viewpoint allows for a more expansive view. It is as if the care and cultivation that went into creating the garden has essentially enlarged the possibility of perception, broadening our capacity for both beauty and understanding.

In Dog Heaven (2008), McEneaney offers an even more elevated view and dramatic use of perspective as she portrays a proposed park on an abandoned elevated train line that runs through her neighborhood. A co-founder of the Reading Viaduct Project, McEneaney has been working with other activists to remediate the viaduct’s brownfields. Envisioning a river of green that would pour through the city and link different neighborhoods, McEneaney equates such a structure with greater harmony. Although the animals in the park are both unleashed and unfettered by human companions, we see only peaceful socializing and play. In the picture, which is dedicated to her deceased dog Birdy, McEneaney represents individual dogs she has known that have gone to “Dog Heaven.”

Through inscribing each dog’s name in the grass, McEneaney affirms her connection to specific individuals and relationships rather than to programmatic ideas or archetypes. Integrating this wry vision of heaven with her present day life and advocacy for urban renewal, McEneaney moves beyond the process of commemoration. Blending urban planning, social activism, and the lessons of gardening, her visionary art expresses a concern for all creation.

“”” Markus Baenziger also creates art that integrates his love of nature with his immersion in a gritty, imperfect, and industrialized world. Collectively, his recent works can be seen to comprise a virtual arboretum of invented botanical forms. For example, Blades (2007) consists of clusters of leaves of grass. Although made of resin and wire, the forms appear naturalistic from a distance. Wildly sprouting above our eye level and spreading across a 10’ wide span, these blades transform the gallery wall into virtual soil. Looking slightly upward, we see what we would normally ignore underfoot. Blades’ vibrant and rhythmic pattern is like a musical score for nature’s vitality.

One of Baenziger’s formative memories is of the dramatic spring wildflowers spreading across the rugged hills and mountains of the Engadin region in his native Switzerland—a riot of ephemeral color and detail that transforms the immense landscape. Such memories directly inform Me and I (2007– 08), a symbolic self-portrait comprised of tiny wildflowers made from brightly colored and translucent resin. Collectively, the myriad blossoms form a downward tilting branch or slope from which tiny flowers seem to drip much as a viscous liquid would attenuate and then coalesce until it falls. Thus, Me and I emphasizes not only his identification with botanical beauty in nature but also with underlying and transformative processes of growth, division, and recombination.

6

As with Applebaum’s photographs, closer inspection of Me and I does not provide more specific botanical information but insight into the artist’s creative process and thematic concerns. Baenziger’s flowers are not replicas of actual species but invented abstractions, formed by pouring colored acrylic resin into molds of varying sizes. He does not strive for naturalism but revels in the tension between his natural inspirations, processes of fabrication, and the craft required to integrate such delicate components.

Similarly, works such as Jul (2008) celebrate nature with a frank acceptance of industrial and abstract languages.

On first impression, the leaf form seems utterly familiar—a ubiquitous scrap of nature wrought large. However, one quickly sees that its amber coloring darkens where the transparent resin is thickest. Clear ovals of thinner resin create an abstract pattern across the form and suggest raindrops rather than observed morphology. Tiny gas bubbles embedded in the resin recall the imperfections caused by aging, fungus, or insects as well as the by-products of chemical fabrication. Similarly, because the metal veins stop short of the leaf ’s perimeter (and naturalism), and the stem is painted silver, the work is paradoxically familiar, schematic, and surprising.

Turn Around (2008), another hybrid of natural and synthetic sources, goes even further to represent nature as inseparable from the built environment. Seemingly levitating above the floor, fragments of fencing and upended stones hover high above the viewer. Growing through this metal, acrylic, and stone amalgam, a slender vine rises and interweaves with the fence links so that the disparate forms seem to merge. It is as if the power of heliotropism and the plants’ impetus for selfpropagation both infuse and overturn all human machinations. Like Carpenter’s Control of Nature, this hybrid creation questions the social and natural environments from which it has been isolated. The vine’s strong vertical thrust combined with its delicacy contributes to the work’s poetic resonance Spring (2007) also appears to defy gravity. An 8-foot tall tree seems to levitate with only its delicate roots touching the surrounding circle of earth. Baenziger was inspired by images of hydroponic farming in which root systems are exposed. In keeping with his interest in making art that is paradoxically naturalistic and distinct from nature, he combined different species of trees when making molds for the bark and leaves.

He unified the whole by casting the work in white resin. The resulting image is beautiful yet disturbing. Precariously poised, the work heralds our ingenuity, fragility, and interdependence. For Baenziger, beauty does not reside in an idealized view of nature. Instead, he finds beauty in the frisson between our desire to master nature and nature’s power to interpenetrate and transcend the built environment.

Beauty is something we can’t easily describe or quantify. Too often, it is confused with a lack of analytical rigor. Like a remarkable garden, art can offer comfort, nourishment, and respite from the stress of everyday life. Yet exemplary artists like those selected for Garden as Muse achieve a beauty that is also intellectually complex. They challenge expectations and reward extended viewing. Unlike most paintings, photographs, and sculptures, gardens surround us, offer journeys of discovery, and change dramatically over time. Yet these selected artworks, like the gardens that inspire them, also engage us in a sustained process of inquiry and reflection about nature, culture, and the passage of time. In varying ways, Lois Dodd, Sally Apfelbaum, Syd Carpenter, Markus Baenziger, and Sarah McEneaney present surprising and complex perspectives that challenge our own. Engaging us more deeply with nature, their art questions our perceptions and embodies our dreams.

Markus Baenziger, Jul, 2008, synthetic resin and metal, 33 x 23 x 3 inches.

Courtesy of the artist and Edward Thorp Gallery, New York City.

7

Sally Apfelbaum Born in Pennsylvania, 1954

Apfelbaum received an M.F.A. in photography from Tyler School of Art, a B.A. in psychology from Connecticut College and a Certificate in landscape design from New York Botanical Gardens. She has been awarded one-person exhibitions and commissions from distinguished institutions including Delaware Museum of Art, DE; Bennington Museum, Bennington, VT; Rhode Island School of Design, RI; P.S. 122, New York City; Hirschl and Adler Modern, New York City; Julie Saul Gallery, New York City; and Galerie Philippe Boulakia in Paris. Her works have also been included in group exhibitions at Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, PA; Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris; Galerie Van Kranendonk, The Hague,

Horizontal Garden, 2003, Type C print, 30 x 40 inches.

8

Netherlands; Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, NH; Katonah Museum of Art, Katonah, NY; Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art, Boulder, CO; Center for Photography, Woodstock, NY; Austin Museum of Art, Austin TX; and Mississippi Museum of Art, Jackson, MI. She has received numerous residencies including fellowships from Middlebury College, Hudson River Museum/Wave Hill, NY; Bennington College; Metro, St. Louis, MO; Yaddo Art Colony, La CitĂŠ Internationale des Arts, Paris, Ucross Foundation, MacDowell Colony, and the Edna St. Vincent Millay Colony.

Trellis Triptych (detail: one of three panels), 1989/2004, Type C print, each panel 60 x 48 inches.

9

Markus Baenziger Born in Zurich, Switzerland, 1959

Markus Baenziger received an M.F.A. in sculpture from Yale University School of Art and a B.F.A. from Parsons School of Design. His work has been presented in one-person shows at Louise Jones Brown Gallery, Duke University and Edward Thorp Gallery, Bonakdar Jancou Gallery, Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, and Cohen Gallery in New York City. His work has also been featured in select group exhibitions at the Rose Art Museum; the Walker Art Center; the Yale University Art Gallery; the Contemporary Art Museum, Tampa, FL; the Hillwood Art Museum, Brookville, NY; the Florida Atlantic University Gallery; the Swiss Institute, New York City and Zabriskie Gallery in New York City; and C/O Gallery, Oslo.

Spring, 2007, synthetic resin, metal, earth, 89 inches, diameter variable. Collection of Doren and Sheldon Pinnell.

10

Baenziger is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and awards from the Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, the State of Connecticut Commission on the Arts, and Yale University. His work has been reviewed in diverse publications including The New York Times, The New York Sun, Art Newspaper, The Village Voice, Artforum, Art in America, Arts & Antiques, and Sculpture Magazine. His work can be found in the collections of the Walker Art Center, the Agnes Gund Collection, and numerous private collections. He is represented by Edward Thorp Gallery, New York City.

Turn Around, 2008, mixed media, 110 x 47 x 22 inches. Courtesy of the artist and Edward Thorp Gallery, New York City.

11

Syd Carpenter Born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, 1953

Carpenter received a B.F.A. and an M.F.A. from Tyler School of Art and has been a respected leader in the Philadelphia art scene for 30 years. She has had solo exhibitions at distinguished institutions such as Hampton University Museum, John Jay College, New York City and the Delaware Center for the Contemporary Arts. Her work has also been featured in themed exhibitions at such as the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Columbia Museum of Art, and the Museum of Texas Tech University.

Her numerous awards include fellowships from the Pew Fellowship in the Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts (Mid-Atlantic Regional Grant); Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, the Leeway Foundation, and Awards in the Visual Arts. Her work is included in the collections of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Bell Atlantic Corporation, Atlantic Richfield Corporation, the Renwick Gallery

Two Birds Dancing, 2007, clay, slip, oxide, 26 x 24 x 12 inches.

12

of the Smithsonian Museum; the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, the Philadelphia Afro-American Historical and Cultural Museum; the Muriel Newman Collection; Art in General, NY; and the Pennsylvania Convention Center, Philadelphia.

Her work has been featured in journals such as American Ceramics Magazine, American Craft Magazine, and The Studio Potter. She has been a guest or resident artist at dozens of distinguished institutions ranging from Haystack Mountain School of Crafts to Jengdezhen Ceramic Institue, Jengdezhen, China. Currently Professor of Fine Art and Chair of the Department of Art, Swarthmore College, she has been the recipient of three Eugene M. Lang Faculty Fellowships. She is represented by Sande Webster Gallery, Philadelphia.

Buddy and Rosena Bugess, 2009, clay, mixed media and wood, 28 x 24 x 6 inches.

13

Lois Dodd Born in Montclair, New Jersey, 1927

Dodd received a degree from Cooper Union, New York City, and quickly became a part of a circle of artists that continued to champion the practice of painting from observation during the heyday of abstract expressionism. In 1952, she was one of the five founding artists of Tanager Gallery, New York City. Since then, her work has been the subject of more than 50 one-person exhibitions. Currently, the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art in Kansas City is organizing a retrospective of her work. Numerous museums have exhibited her work including The Hudson River Museum, the Noyes Museum of Art, the University of Maine Museum of Art, Tucson Museum of Art, The Bronx Museum of the Arts, Albright Knox Art Gallery, Queens Museum of Art, and more. She has taught extensively over the years, including at the Vermont Studio Center, Brooklyn College (1971–1992), and Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture.

An elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the National Academy of Design, her many awards include the Benjamin West Clinedinst Medal and Artists’ Fellowship from the National Academy, the Augustus St. Gaudens Distinguished Alumni Award from Cooper Union, an honorary degree from Old Lyme Academy, the Speicher, Betts and Symons Purchase Prize from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, the Longview Foundation Purchase Award, and grants from the Ingram Merrill Foundation and the Italian government. Her work is held in major museum and corporate collections including Cooper Hewitt, National Design Museum, Dartmouth College Art Museum, Farnsworth Art Museum, National Academy of Design, Wadsworth Atheneum, Whitney Museum Print Collection, Chase Manhattan Bank of North America, Metropolitan Life Insurance, and R.J. Reynolds Industries. She is represented by Alexandre Gallery, New York City.

Leslie’s Garden with Alocasia, 2004, oil on Masonite, 12 x 20 inches. © Lois Dodd, courtesy Alexandre Gallery, New York.

14

Spider Web in Grass, 2004, oil on Masonite, 24 x 24 inches. Š Lois Dodd, courtesy Alexandre Gallery, New York.

15

Sarah McEneaney Born in Munich, Germany, 1955

McEneaney studied at the University of the Arts (formerly Philadelphia College of Art) and went on to receive a Certificate from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia. She has had solo exhibitions at distinguished venues including the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia; Mills College Art Museum, Oakland; Tibor de Nagy Gallery, NY, the List Gallery, Swarthmore College; and Locks Gallery, Philadelphia. She has been represented in more than eighty group shows throughout the Mid-Atlantic region as well as at the Kunstmuseum, Ahlen, Germany, and in Chonquing and Tianjin, China.

Ham Ridge Garden, 2001, egg tempera on panel, 24 x 36 inches. Private Collection.

16

McEneaney is the recipient of many awards including a Chianti Foundation residency, several Yaddo Fellowships (2006, 1997, 1995), the Pew Fellowship in the Arts, a Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant, an Independence Foundation Grant, and a MacDowell Colony Fellowship. Her work is featured in distinguished collections including the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Free Library of Philadelphia, Neuberger Museum, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and Rhode Island School of Design. She is represented by Tibor de Nagy Gallery, New York City.

Dog Heaven, 2008, egg tempera on linen, 36 x 48 inches. Courtesy Tibor de Nagy Gallery, New York City.

17

Walton Arts Center P.O. Box 3547 Fayetteville, AR 72702 phone // 479.443.5600 fax // 479.443.6461 www.waltonartscenter.org

18