Despite growing up in the Jim Crow era, Malley was unaware of the racial divide between herself and her tenant farmer and migrant playmates. As an adult, she addresses racial inequality through compelling figurative paintings. As a child, she was immersed in nature on her grandparents’ farm. Today, she expresses her concerns for the environment through intriguing abstracts and advocating for climate change legislation.
Read moreTake a Closer, Deeper Look at the Urban Landscape
Claudia Samper explores our relationships with each other in the urban community and the urban community’s relationship with nature in Urban Nest, her October 2019 mixed-media show. The delightful hide-and-seek images challenge the viewer to consider modern issues, such as gentrification and isolation.
Read moreJill Brantley: Creating Fresh Surroundings
Jill Brantley
The experience of playing freely during childhood must imprint itself indelibly in one’s psyche. So many artists and writers who grew up in small towns across America seem to have been fueled by these long lazy periods of spontaneity as children. I put Jill Brantley among those so endowed. She was fortunate to live in a small town in New England. No stoplights. Church steeples rising above oaks and maples. The whole nine yards. She remembers walking to school, riding bikes in the dark on summer nights, roaming with friends from yard to yard inventing games as they went along. Imagination sparking imagination. And a mother ringing a special bell at dusk.
Read moreRosemary Luckett: Uncovering the Unseen
Rosemary Luckett
Rosemary Luckett has been on good terms with the earth since she was a young girl weeding sugar beets and caring for the animals on her family’s farm in the desert plateau of south central Idaho. These earliest experiences of taking care of the environment that then, in turn, took care of her, were the seeds of Rosemary’s sense of this relationship as vital and mutual. Over time, she has developed a visual language--plastic ducky's, bones, tree forms, maps, and birds to express her love and worry for the earth through her artwork. The techniques used varies with what she is exploring. Sometimes collage. Sometimes sculpture. And more recently photography.
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