Abraham Walkowitz, "Women," 1904, graphite and gouache on paper, 14-1/4 x 11-1/2 inches
Lisa N. Peters
We are lending thirty-two works from American Works on Paper, 1800 to the Present to the Arno Maris Gallery, Ely Hall, Westfield State College, Massachusetts (June 26-September 15). This show is part of the Masters Festival of the Arts, a summer-long festival that includes art exhibitions as well as lectures, theater productions, and concerts.
Among the many wonderful images, I have a few favorites. Alfred T. Bricher’s Sails on the Horizon, Cape Ann, Massachusetts (1870s-80) captures a desolate coastline where ships in the distance heighten our sense of being alone. Abraham Walkowitz’s Women (1904) conveys the way that women crowded together, probably in an urban environment, are acutely aware of each other while pretending they’re minding their own business. The sidelong glances are very subtle! Eda Sterchi expresses a different aspect of women’s experience. In her sensitively rendered pastel of ca. 1916, Two Women in an Interior, one woman reads while the other sews, the two comfortably enjoying just being in each others’ company. The crowded bustle of street vendors on New York’s Lower East Side of an earlier time is characterized in the dense forms of James Daugherty’s Hester Street (New York) (1933). Read the rest of this entry »
