Kent Place Gallery

“Preparing the Girl” | November 30–December 21, 2023
At the Metropolitan Museum’s Gustave Courbet retrospective in 2008, Mary Simpson saw an artwork that stopped her in her tracks. The painting, unfinished but dated to the 1850s, depicts a room filled with young women surrounding an adolescent girl slumped in a chair. 

In the 1920s the painting was purchased by Smith College with the title Preparing the Bride. Five decades later, however, art historians uncovered a letter in which Courbet used the title Preparing the Girl for Her Wake. Smith College X-rayed the painting and concluded that, indeed, the central figure was originally painted naked with her head slumped forward. Only later did Courbet add the white dress and reposition the head.  

A full scale, high-resolution reproduction of Courbet’s painting covers the back wall of the gallery. On the surrounding walls, a suite of abstract paintings by Simpson grapple with messages that Courbet’s work seems to send. These oil paintings on wood panels contain expressive, gestural marks that contest and play against their internal geometries and their outer frames.

Gallery Director Ken Weathersby says about this exhibition, “This is a show that is both conceptually meaningful and full of visual poetry. Simpson locates an intense and poignant area for thought in her response to the Courbet work. Her interest in creating this show for us was especially energized by her understanding of the context Kent Place School and the identities of the students who will see the show and live with the exhibition.”

In his exhibition, “Staring into the Sun”, O’Brien shares a constellation of new works, rich, shaped paintings placed in eccentric relation to each other around the gallery’s walls. The works are dense, colorful, and supported by unique, hand-made stretcher frames, often in the shape of an ellipse. These oval paintings suggest human eyes, looking back at viewers, as well as art-historical forms, like the curved images in the apse of a cathedral. Other paintings contain inserted objects, like books, and in one case, a representation of a different painting. 

The artist grew up in the Philippines, and the title of the show, “Puno”, is the Filipino word for “tree”. It is also the word for “full”, “filled” and “complete”. Working in a variety of media, including charcoal and graphite on heavy paper, Bello examines and interprets trees and forests, sometimes looking at surfaces from inches away and sometimes stepping back to take in a larger scene. The works are large in scale (most of the drawings are 100 inches wide).  A horizontally placed thirty-eight-foot-long scroll drawing laid out on a platform in the gallery, partially still rolled up so that while much is visible, it also retains its mystery. This exhibition spans the development of her artistic practice from the year 2011 to the present.

This show marks the first exhibition at Kent Place Gallery by a Kent Place graduate who is now a practicing professional artist. Devaney’s exhibition includes a selection of paintings from the last two years. Each work embodies a condensed, layered visual and emotional statement. Images of nature and human-made environments entwine in ways that are both dream-like and reflective of the complicated realities of the present and recent past.

Devaney states that she is an artist “who works primarily in paint to make spirits visible," and that “using animals, gravestones, and angels as avatars for subjective experiences, the paintings provide narratives to describe unresolved emotional plots and plot holes.”

Esperanza Mayobre’s exhibit maps the space of the gallery with stacks of gold bricks and elegant shimmering paintings of golden grids. A photograph of a public ceremony is propped against a wall, and a thin pane of glass balances precariously between two bars of gold. Mayobre’s exhibition creates beautiful effects. At the same time, real events are the subject. The artist, who grew up in Venezuela, addresses ongoing problems in her home country, specifically, gold and mineral extraction by other nations, criminal groups and multinational corporations, a practice that is illicit, unplanned, and irresponsible to the ecosystem.

Juno Zago’s rich and intensely colored works on canvas combine drawn and painted figures, abstract forms, and found and collaged materials. Their surfaces weave in mass-produced product labels, printed photos, and elements of self-portraiture. There is a sense of constant movement, flickering color, and surprising details; a painting titled “An Authentic Brazilian Experience” includes an actual pair of the artist’s shoes.

“Wings to Fly,” coinciding with Kent Place School’s fall 2019 Latinx Celebration, presents an overview of some of the cultural richness and diversity of Mexican art. Featured artists Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera are touchstones of 20th-century art. This exhibition also presents examples of Black Pottery, Day of the Dead art, Amate drawings, Huichol art, and Alebrijes, and the work of Francisco Toledo, as well as other important, if less well-known, individual artists. Each piece in this show was curated exclusively from the collections of Kent Place families who wish to remain anonymous. 

Lara Atallah’s show, “A Moratorium on Looking,” presents unique, hand-worked polaroid photographs, a narrative video installation, and delicate blue cyanotype prints. Using the Mediterranean as a point of focus, her work explores the political nature of landscape through photography. 

Carlo D’Anselmi’s expressive oil on linen paintings in “The Deep End” show men and women in metaphorically charged encounters with water. They dive, float, swim or sink, moving in two worlds, above and below the water’s surface. The actual, physical surfaces of the paintings also provide a range of interpretation, offering lush and earthy marks that open into allusions to deep, sometimes complex spaces.

Melissa Staiger’s exhibition, “Open the Door,” fills the gallery with vibrant, powerful assemblages and collages, creating an atmosphere of harmony and surprise through color and texture. The artist has had solo shows at Trestle Projects and at Janet Kurnatowski Gallery, both in NYC. She has participated in many group exhibitions in New York, nationally and internationally. Her multiple grants and residencies include stays at the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, The Wassaic Project, Trestle Projects, and the Puffin Foundation. She has curated exhibitions at a variety of NYC venues and has often participated in artist panels. Staiger holds an M.F.A. from Pratt Institute and a B.F.A. from Maryland Institute, College of Art.

Ken Weathersby is an internationally exhibited artist as well as a faculty member of Kent Place School. For this show of paintings, “Inside Job,” he has employed available content: photographs he took of his colleagues, who agreed to pose for the camera. The paintings are abstract, presenting shapes, colors, surfaces, and patterns that vividly evoke historical precedents: medieval floor tiles, vintage textile patterns, or twentieth-century geometric paintings or monochromes. In a disjunctive turn, a photograph of a person is inset into each painting. These human images cut into the paintings and encounter the abstractions.

Eleanna Anagnos’ striking works hover between two and three dimensions. They hang like paintings, but their colored and textured hydrocal-plaster surfaces undulate in space like relief sculptures. Eleanna Anagnos (born Evanston, IL 1980) is a New York-based artist and curator. Anagnos holds an MFA in Painting from the Tyler School of Art (2005) and a BA with honors and distinction from Kenyon College with a concentration in Women’s and Gender Studies (2002). She has received awards from Yaddo; BAU Institute; The Anderson Ranch, The Atlantic Center for the Arts and The Joan Mitchell Foundation, and has been exhibited nationally and internationally. For the past four years Anagnos has been a Co-Director at Ortega y Gasset Projects, an artist-run gallery and curatorial collective located in Brooklyn, NY. Anagnos’ work was covered in the New York Times for her participation in dOGUMENTA, a NYC public exhibition for dogs.

Emmalea Russo’s work is an installation of sensitively arranged objects, brought together to make a unique, expressive composition of the gallery space itself. The objects include shimmering glass blocks, reflective tape, painted canvases, sewn elements and long strands of thread, all forming a large constellation across the gallery floor.

E.E. Ikeler’s works in this show are, in a sense, both signs and paintings. Their visually lively surfaces are embedded with words, simultaneously provoking different ways of seeing.

Seth Adelsberger’s abstract paintings in “Compression Artifacts” present intense, impacted and colorful surfaces. They offer both pleasure and surprise at their visual richness. They obviously are painterly things, emphasizing surface and the gesture of the hand, yet they also evoke other aspects of contemporary experience.

For his solo exhibition, “Help a Stone Clock,” artist Max Warsh pieced together images of Kent Place School to create striking, complex collages. The photos he used were taken by current Kent Place art students, in a unique collaboration with a professional exhibiting artist.

In Kristen Rego's solo exhibition, "Ubiquity and Produce," representations of ripe fruits and vegetables exist within a patterned matrix spawned by commercial packaging. The paintings and collages are abstractly seductive and open questions about our relationships to what we buy and eat. 

Michele Alpern and Ken Weathersby are married and have been partners in art for almost 20 years, but this is their first two-person exhibition together. Their artwork is quite different, but shares certain interests, including montage, a condensed economy of form, and complicated relations among figure, ground, and support.

In her exhibition “Sun Salutation,” Alex Ebstein’s arrangements of beaming color and hovering forms evoke pure modernist abstract painting. Close attention to the material facts of these canvases opens the door to a conceptual twist, however; the works are composed of carefully dissected and reassembled yoga mats.

Cristina de Miguel’s paintings are powerful, formally surprising figurative works. She uses expressive brushwork and bold color in her large canvases to form images both humorous and touching.

Visual Arts Department Chair Gates’s works in this show are based on study of the visible world. He approaches subjects from landscape to still life with clarity and directness, apprehending proportion, placement and the effects of light using paint on canvas or charcoal on paper.

“Boggy Soggy Squitchy Pictures” | October 17 – November 21, 2014
Lauren Portada’s works in this show are large scale, brilliantly colored paintings. What appear to be challenging abstractions are also deeply tied to specific thoughts about nature. She uses both sides of the canvas to create specific visual effects and evoke geological metaphors.