Art That Makes a Forever Mark

The best defense system I have found for surviving these dark times is twofold: hold on to what gives you joy, and make community whenever possible. That’s Heather Cox Richardson’s homemade remedy for how to fight against fascism. It’s the best kind of recipe because anyone can make it, and the ingredients are all at hand.

I felt both joy and community when the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater came through Boston recently. I brought a young friend with me, someone who has never seen them perform. Her own initiation was immersive enough that I don’t think she noticed I was teary through most of the performance and especially during Revelations, a dance choreographed in 1960 that has never been retired from the repertoire.

I had my first experience of Revelations when I was a teenager living through the Civil Rights era. Its theme of slavery and freedom embodied my ‘60s optimism that a better and more equitable world was coming. And yes, it left its forever mark on me.

I would guess I have seen Revelations performed at least 30 times over the course of my lifetime. All these years later, long after Judith Jamison and Alvin Ailey have passed, that work still holds an electric charge. And what a sense of community it was to be in an enthusiastic sold out crowd at the Wang Theater, one that was as eclectic as a grocery store checkout line. This is a work that came from a deep source, and the power of that sourcing is what makes it magical and timeless.

Just like a sense of community that doesn’t require an auditorium, that next EAE—exceptional art experience–can take place anywhere. Many happen outside the designated art viewing travel lanes of museums and institutions, in venues that are unexpected and non-pedigree.

Elijah Wheat Showroom

I ran into a great one on a recent trip to the Hudson Valley. This was the report I posted on my Instagram page:

“I remember how it felt the first time I walked into the KulturBrauerei in Berlin, MassMOCA in North Adams, Mattress Factory in Pittsburgh, the exhibit Intuition (curated by Daniela Ferretti and Axel Vervoordt) at the Palazzo Fortuny in Venice.

These provisional venues enable art to resonate in a way that does not happen as easily in more traditional venues. The work expands and then becomes kin with these nontraditional environments. While I value the preservationist capacity of museums, alternative spaces ventilate energy in a way that is not as easy in purpose-built spaces.

The Elijah Wheat Showroom in Newburgh, New York is a hidden 19th century raw industrial space. It is located right next to the Hudson River, down a private road with a locked gate. You need a code to enter.

This is a pilgrimage. And there, in the front gallery, is Millicent Young’s latest works, tenderly delicate and doggedly fierce. For many years she has been a gifted articulator of ecological consciousness and the human condition. This show, Compact, Relaxed & Intact, also includes a video installation by Virginia L Montgomery that is uncannily in flux with Young’s work.

Millicent stopped by. She spoke about how her exhibit has taken on the energies of this particular environment. Wind passes through an upper window and gently motions sculptural elements. Beds of clay have slowly cracked and hardened. Each entity is settling into its rightful angle of repose. That is a good description of what happens to a visiting pilgrim as well.”

Another provisional but carefully considered EAE happened to me this week: Thereabouts, a show by Cathleen Daley, on view for just a few days in the hallway gallery at Waltham Mills, Gallery 8.

Yes, Cathleen Daley is one of my friends. She is also my favorite kind of artist: a devoted practitioner who quietly mines from deep sources. I remember the day we met, and it felt like a meant to be moment.

Over the last few years Cathleen has found herself pulled into a new flight pattern, one that has taken her far afield from the abstraction that defined her work for many years. In her words:

“In 2023, I began work in a new studio in a new state. The experience has brought me full circle back to working from observation, needing to internalize and document my surroundings and in doing so disclose the source of inspiration for my previous abstract work of many years. I am a nature girl.

A rural art practice has impressed upon me a new form of attention and utility. With simple tools, a slender stick with a few soft hairs, oily pigments and cloth, I measure time and let it go. Place has taught me this.”

This small gallery in Waltham Mills is the first time she has publicly exhibited these new works, and they are breathtaking. A tree. A landscape. Nature is being responded to through its energetics rather than just its forms. The paintings on display are nestled in conversation with everyday objects from her family home—a well-worn work bench, segments of weathered gingerbread trim from her house. These elements come together to speak to Cathleen’s devoted exploration of place, to the everyday sublime, to the “mystical mingled with the mundane.”

A passage from her show statement speaks so directly to what this work is intended to address:

“Perceiving the land as legible, my attention became riveted to nature’s indwelling intelligence both of and beyond the immediate. I credit Charles Burchfield as the one who early on gave me permission to revel in these animated forces of nature. His influence was natural and given. My hometown outside of Buffalo, NY was his town, his grandchildren, my schoolmates, and my earliest art teacher was Burchfield’s student.”

For many of us, this lineage is a sacred one. Cathleen is a rightful heir, along with the late Tom Nozkowski, to Charles Burchfield’s extraordinary attunement to what is “underseen” in nature. Burchfield lovingly lays the natural world out for us to see, its forms as well as its esoteric energies. Like Nozkowski, Cathleen works in a manner that is deeply aligned with Burchfield’s vision but not derived from it.

Cathleen described this Waltham show as a “prolonged pop up”—its duration was just three days. But in a few weeks more paintings from this new body of work will be included in an exhibit at Gallery b in Castine Maine. And that show will be up throughout the summer.