The New York Times reviews Knitted, Knotted, Netted.
Read what the New York Times has to say about Knitted, Knotted, Netted.
Art Party Fundraiser Sponsors
Help us thank our Art Party Sponsors by visiting their websites below:
PNC Bank
Gebhardt & Kiefer, P.C.
Girl Mogul
Clinton Business Group
Extraordinary Beads
Palumo Clothiers
Metro Seafood
By Invitation Only : The New York Times
Click here to read the New York Times' review of Up and Coming: New Printmakers Make Their Mark
Strange Sculptures Are a Surrealist Mystery : The New York Times
Click here to read the New York Times' review of Marion Held: Material Traces.
2009 Members Exhibition
The deadline to enter the annual Members Exhibition is August 1, 2009. Click here for more information.
Beatrice Bork Workshop
Hunterdon Art Museum
is extremely proud to offer
"Sketching with Watercolor"
A workshop with wildlife artist
Beatrice Bork
Beatrice will demonstrate and discuss the fine points of how to study a subject while outdoors. Students are invited to participate and will be instructed on different techniques, skills and overcoming some of the obstacles of working outdoors. Participants should have basic drawing skills.
Saturday, August 1, 10:00am - 1:00pm
Tuition: $50; members: $40
Materials list will be provided
To register for this workshop, please call the museum at 908.735.8415 and ask for the education department.
WNYC's Salute The Arts *STAR* Initiative
The Hunterdon Art Museum is pleased to be selected for WNYC's Salute The Arts *STAR* Initiative. From February 2nd through March 9th listen for mentions of the Museum on 93.9 FM and 820 AM.
Jersey ceramics, from 6 different angles
By: Dan Bischoff, The Star-Ledger, April 9, 2008.
Spotlight on Cuba.
By: Benjamin Genocchio, The New York Times, February 10, 2008.
Embracing the imagery of childhood
By: Benjamin Genocchio
The New York Times
12/23/07
Down to earth
Courier News
11/16/07
By: Ralph J. Bellantoni
"Shellie Jacobson's ceramic pieces tell a story.
'I consider them my daily journal writing,' says Jacobson who has worked in ceramics for more than three decadees. 'They are spontaneous markings--a stream of consciousness, like talking to yourself. I start with my immediate reactions and it grows as I work.'
The Skillman potter's exhibit 'Shellie Jacobson: Clay and Paper,' which features 25 of her ceramic forms, figures, books and other objects, opens Sunday at the Hunterdon Museum of Art with a reception from 2 to 4 p.m. and an artist's talk at 3 p.m.
Jacobson frequently creates works in series, organizing related pieces into narrative sequences. She furthers the storytelling nature of her oeuvre in her ceramic books, which she issues through her own RockBookPress, and has developed a personal script that she incises onto the clay pages of her books. Based somewhat on her studies of ancient Semitic languages, she terms it 'graffiti.'
Jacobson says she enjoys working with clay slabs, which she tears, cuts, pins, crimps and pieces together when forming sculptures and vessels. Through muted glazes and slips she imparts a worn, archaeological appearance to her pieces.
The surfaces of Shellie's work often have an aged, eroded quality with darkening of seams and apertures, as if they had been long buried,' says co-curator Hildreth York.
Along with her ceramics, wall installations and clay books, the exhibit also includes some of the artist's works on paper, plus a most unusual garment. The article of clothing is a vest comprised entirely of used tea bags. The cozy connotations of a companionable tea-time becomes provoked by the addition of graffiti texts printed on each tea bag. Jacobson collected the texts from walls in Israel during her visits there, and they range in tone from humorous to violent to heartbreaking.
Jacobson is very active teaching and exhibiting at home and abroad. She recently presented her work in Seoul, Korea, with the East/West Ceramics Artists Association, and gave a workshop and slide presentation at the Seoul National University of Technology. Closer to home, Jacobson will present an interactive workshop at the museum from 2 to 4 p.m. on Dec. 2, where she will demonstrate her ceramic techniques, particularly her signature monoprinting on clay. Pre-registration is required."
Childish things: Hunterdon exhibit remembers innocence
The Sunday Star-Ledger
10/14/07
By: Dan Bischoff
"Not all poison toys come from China. Through the holiday season the Hunterdon Musem of Art in Clinton is hosting an exhibition devoted to artists' memories of childhood, 'Inner Child: Good and Evil in the Garden of Memories,' a subject so fraught it has been carefully broken into two parts, 'Innocence' and 'Innocence Lost.'
Organized by Kristen Accola, a longtime curator at the Hunterdon who assembled this exhibit as her last show before leaving the staff, 'Inner Child' had a vast body of artwork to troll through. Cartoons, toys, candy and children's book illustrations seem to inspire an increasingly large proportion orf contemporary art, just as they seem to occupy a larger and larger portion of the planet's commercial space. Why, exactly?
There's no one reason, of course. We're not talking about art by children, the sort that inspired Pablo Picasso and his fellows after World War II (along with art by indigenous peoples and madmen locked up in asylums), with its freedom from learned forms of representation and liberated, illogical color. Nor do we mean adult portraits of children, like John Singer Sargent's sentimentally lovely 'Lily, Lily, Carnation, Rose.'
Rather, most of the artists in the Hunterdon show, which sprawls over two floors, consciously evoke a childish point of view, whether ironically or not, as if they have somehow managed to occupy a child's mind and made images of what a child loves and sees.
So that can range from Savako's 'Portico Popilyn No. 1,' a shiny red Jetsonian creature with three anime eyes made from fiberglass, to Ray Caesar's giclee print of girl, titled 'Sanctuary,' dressed as a lamb with a lascivious expression (the costume slips off one shoulder, revealing a bra strap and at least one supposition about the look on her face). Well, you get the picture.
In a way, much of this show is really about marketing, since so many of the artists have simply lifted graphic forms from toy packaging and cartoons. Laurina Paperina's little 5-inch wood cut-outs (like 'Superfake') come straight from the Cartoon Network ('Superfake' looks a lot like Bloo, the star of 'Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends'). Crazy spirals for eyes and a zigzag pumpkin mouth are part of the universal symbology of cartoons, which have carefully refined the common conventions of childish drawing to make them part of the standard kit of contemporary ad design, like primary colors.
The ubiquity of childhood here in the world's consumer paradise probably has to do with the cultural infantilization promoted by a life of shopping, but artists are wielding childishness in a much more sharply defined way than that. The division into 'Innocence' and 'Innocence Lost' seems almost inevitable, in part because much of what artists do with childish imagery is mock the sanctimonious veil of 'innocence' adults try to cover it with. Artists are young enough, or at least sensitive enough, to remember just how red in tooth and claw childhood is, and they hate the polite fiction.
Accola points out in her essay, published in a clever'n'cute spiral-bound catalogue, that for the past 20 years society has been obsessed with childhood as both the ideal escape and as the point of our greatest psychic vulnerability, lending the visual language of children 'an unexpected potency precisely because of our now loaded relationship to our childhoods.'
But it's also true that our society has gone to great lengths to ensure that childhood never ends. We're not just talking about guys in their 40s playing baseball, but our whole collective consciousness fooling around all day long with video games, fantasy sports, superhero dreams, and an almost desperate longing for never-ending immediate gratification. You gotta make yourself into a kid to even accept this stuff for a moment, just like the way you make yourself regress in order to enjoy a big-budget spandex flick like 'X-Men' or 'Spiderman.'
The tsunami of toyness swamping us all is the subject of Megan Marlatt's paintings, the largest of which is 'Under the Watchful Eye of the Elephant,' painted in a mixture of acrylics and oils, Juicily done, in a rainbow of hues and filled with marvelous detal, it makes its point every well: Toys'R'Us.
There are two other shows at Hunterdon now, counting the 2007 Members' Show, which boasts some wonderful pieces by Agnes Lafaille, Valerie Von Betyen and the redoubtable beader/weaver Donna Lish. The modulated modernism of Anne Cooper's portraits is definitely worth your time.
In the smaller second floor gallery, curated by Heidi York, is 'Kerr Grabowski: Art to Wear,' a collection of silk-printed and hand-painted fabrics by the artist who devised her own inks, brushes and techniques to create hand-fashioned designs of gestural fluidity. Very Japanese in feel."
