Kat O’Connor, ArtsWorcester Biennial winner

Kat O’Connor, Girl Next Door, 2021, acrylic on aluminum (ACP), image courtesy of the artist.

Best in show: Kat O’Connor, ArtsWorcester Biennial winner

July 16 – October 16, 2022

Worcester artist Kat O’Connor, winner of the Sally R. Bishop Best in Show Prize at the 2021 ArtsWorcester Biennial, will open a solo exhibition at WAM this summer. The recipient of numerous grants and awards, including a Mass Cultural Council Fellowship, O’Connor has shown her work nationwide for nearly 30 years. Her paintings and drawings are included in many private and corporate collections. In her early work, O’Connor often depicted explorations of light and shape in scenes from her frequent travels to Greece and the American southwest. For over a decade, however, water has been her primary muse and artistic focus. Her recent body of work, which includes the Biennial winner, Dreaming of Snell’s Window, delves into the world above and below the surface of swimming pools. These almost otherworldly paintings show graceful, fluid portraits of women—diving, swimming, floating—from the unusual perspective of someone underwater. The figures have a dream-like quality, gently distorted by ripples, bubbles, and reflections as they move through the water. In describing her creative approach, O’Connor says she seeks to explore the way realism can push into and through abstraction. “My paintings capture what happens in a split second of weightlessness, a momentary realism in which rip currents tear away at the abyss and produce images and shapes that were once imperceptible,” she explains. This is evident when the artist incorporates ethereal, celestial light and weightlessness into portraits. Figures swim below or in the midst of an expansive night sky of stars, planets, and galaxies—an adroit melding of the earthly experience of swimming with the infinite vastness of the universe. When announcing O’Connor as the Best in Show winner, Biennial juror Beth C. McLaughlin, Artist Director and Chief Curator at the Fuller Craft Museum, cited the artist’s skillful use of lush surfaces, a vibrant color palette, and energetic compositions. “In her paintings, light is the subject matter and in the case of her water paintings, the ancient dance of light and water take center stage,” McLaughlin said. We look forward to showing Kat O’Connor’s work this summer—and giving WAM visitors the opportunity to experience and delight in her luminous underwater worlds.

This exhibition is organized in partnership with ArtsWorcester. It is funded in part by the Don and Mary Melville Contemporary Art Fund and Spear Fund for Public Programs.

Stephen Barlow Jareckie (1929 – 2021) When Stephen Jareckie was hired for the registrar position at WAM in 1969, he brought with him a keen passion for photography. That soon landed him a role as the Museum’s first curator of photography and the job of building a collection from scratch. At that time, there were relatively few resource texts about the history of photography, so Jareckie had to be resourceful in his quest to learn about this new medium. His methodical research included meeting with several other first generation photography curators at their respective museums. Among these were Edward Steichen at the Museum of Modern Art, Hugh Edwards at the Art Institute of Chicago, and Nathan Lyons at Rochester’s International Museum of Photography. Through these encounters with curators, working with photographs and historic prints, he earned the trust and respect of his peers, while also honing his expertise and photography “eye.” Over the years, Jareckie built the Worcester Art Museum’s photography collection to over 1,800 pieces, including broad holdings in early European photographs, as well as respected mid 20th-century and contemporary photographers such as Dorothea Lange, Garry Winogrand, and Cindy Sherman. His expertise in German photography enabled the Museum to become one of the first in the country to aggressively acquire work by now canonical names like Ilse Bing, August Sander, and Albert Renger-Patzsch. During Jareckie’s tenure, a cache of 77 collotypes from Eadweard Muybridge’s Animal Locomotion series from 1877 was discovered in the WAM library. Jareckie accessioned these early photolithographs, thus adding this important body of early photography to the collection.

Stephen Barlow Jareckie A prolific curator, Jareckie organized 75 exhibitions in 33 years, researching for each with encyclopedic intensity. A Korean War veteran and ardent patriot, in 1976 he curated a large show to celebrate the United States’ bicentennial, American Photography 1840-1900, conducting scholarly research and writing an exhibition catalog. His 1986 exhibition, Photographers of the Weimar Republic, was the result of extensive research and featured works by Hugo Erfurth, August Sander, Werner Mantz, Laszlo MaholyNagy, Albert Renger-Patsch, and Dr. Erich Salomon. After opening in Worcester, the exhibition went on national tour. Stephen Jareckie passed away on September 25, 2021 at the age of 92. We are grateful for all he did for the Worcester Art Museum in his 35 years as an employee, and we, along with so many others, miss him. Through his collecting, his legacy lives on—here at WAM and beyond.

Eadweard Muybridge (American, born in Britain, 1830 – 1904), Gallop; thoroughbred bay horse Bouquet, from Animal Locomotion, 1887, collotype, 1973.157

We are grateful to photographer Peter Moriarty for providing many of these details of Stephen Jareckie’s contributions to the Worcester Art Museum.

Louise Virgin (1953 – 2021) Louise Virgin was curator of Asian Art at WAM from 2002 to 2014. Her many accomplishments included renovating the Japanese Gallery and establishing the Chinese Decorative Arts Gallery. During her tenure, Virgin also made notable acquisitions and is responsible for expanding our renowned Japanese woodblock print collection to include Louise Virgin masterpieces by the great ukiyo-e artist, Tsukioka Yoshitoshi. She also established at the Worcester Art Museum the largest collection of haiga or haiku-inspired paintings in the United States. Virgin curated numerous exhibitions of Japanese, Indian, Korean, and Chinese art, including the popular 2003 exhibition, Samurai Spirit. One of her last acquisitions—and one of her favorites—is an arresting, 18th-century silk painting, Tiger by Waterfall (2014.1189), by Japanese artist Takebe Ryotai (1719 – 1774). We are grateful for Louise Virgin’s lasting contributions to the Museum’s collection of Asian art and mourn her passing.