Museums

Defining Women: Seven Artists from Delaware
Carole Bieber & Marc Ham Gallery
DCCA celebrates women’s creative visual arts achievements with Defining Women: Seven Artists from Delaware, an exhibition of painting, photography, sculpture, and craft. The DCCA is showing the work of seven women who live in Delaware and have been active professionally in the contemporary arts on a local, regional, national and in some cases, international level.

The artists include: Virginia Abrams, quilt artist; Alida Fish, photographer; Helen Mason, sculptor and jeweler; Mia Muratori, sculptor; Rebecca Raubacher, painter; Roberta Tucci, painter and Toni Vandegrift, sculptor. Each artist in this exhibition symbolizes the significant contribution that women have made to the cultural life of Delaware.

Jennifer Schmidt: Suddenly
Constance S. and Robert J. Hennessy Project Space
Jennifer Schmidt’s (Boston, MA) installation of popcorn clouds is a burst of unexpected recognition. The Project Space becomes a brainstorm of forms, not unlike kernels of corn that have burst in the dry heat of summer. This sculptural installation consists of abstracted objects and characters made out of popcorn inspired by individual subliminal contemplation of the sky. Suspended from the ceiling and covering the floor, popcorn clouds fill the gallery to create a fantastic environment activated by the viewer’s imagination and the sounds of popping corn cooking in a microwave oven.

Judith Taylor: inside out
Beckler Family Members’ Gallery
Judith Taylor (Philadelphia, PA) experiments with unusual and interesting means for making photographic images, including hand-applied emulsions, the camera-less photogram, and homemade cameras, techniques that harken back to the early days of photography. However, Taylor explores these methods and materials with a contemporary voice. A photogram is the result of an opaque object placed on the surface of light-sensitive paper, which is then exposed to light so that a silhouette of the object emerges on the paper. The resulting shape is an immediate recording that demonstrates a kind of memory of the object that was once there. Taylor creates another body of work using the pinhole camera. Pinhole cameras are often homemade boxes with black interiors featuring a tiny hole at the center of one end. Revealing the hole for a short period allows light to enter boxes, exposing the photographic paper within the container, creating an image. Experimenting with the shape and size of the cameras, the pinholes, and the length of time the paper is exposed to light can vary the distortion, focus and size of the images produced. The use of gold toned paper for many of her pieces allows Taylor to produce a range of rich colors.

Susanna Speirs: Proximity
E. Avery Draper Showcase
Susanna Speirs (California) works in metal and glass creating hollow forms and vessels that, according to the artist, refer to the human form. Certainly her biomorphic shapes reference body parts in a non-specific way. They are also quite beautiful with tremendous attention paid to texture and surface. Mixing glass, copper, steel and cable, the artist experiments with materials and weights. She explores the way that gravity acts as a force upon objects, often setting up an oppositional relationship between elegant surface and the heaviness of the earth’s pull.

Judith Godwin: Paintings
DuPont Gallery I
Judith Godwin, internationally known, with work in major museum collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, has made important contributions to American Art. She continues to be a working artist whose ideas and vocabulary build upon her initial explorations into abstract painting. Two important influences have affected her art process throughout her career: a close association with nature and gardening and the ideas of Hans Hofmann with whom she studied from 1953-1955. Godwin desires her paintings to appear strong, not delicate, and to have a real presence and power, which she achieves through an interest in balance and movement, realized through manipulation of color values, shapes, and hues. She sees the new work, the pieces in this show, as more emotive than her earlier images, and describes the act of painting as a spiritual experience. Godwin’s works are powerful paintings whose gestural forms also have a lyrical elegance with allusions to nature. Her paintings make reference to the vastness of the universe. This understanding, a belief in the spiritual aspects of painting, especially as connected to nature, underlies much of American Abstract painting.

Delaware Art Museum Purchase Awards: A Selection From the Biennial
DuPont Gallery II
In response to the Delaware Art Museum’s moving to our neighborhood for the next 24 months, the DCCA has mounted a show of works that examines the purchase awards from the DAM’s Biennial exhibitions, the oldest existing exhibition devoted to a regular presentation of contemporary art by artists of our region. These works are in the permanent collection of the DAM, purchased by funds furnished by the museum’s founders specifically for the purpose of acquiring work by local artists. The exhibition can trace its history back to the 1912 founding of the museum, but it became a biennial in 1989. Today the Biennial exhibition includes work by artists in four states from 22 counties in DE, PA, NJ and MD and has become a forum for showing new art of the region. We welcome the Delaware Art Museum to the Wilmington Riverfront!

Artists in this show include: Norinne Betjemann, Robert Straight, Brent Carothers, Alan Greenberg, Carson T. Zullinger, Gretchen Hupfel, Nicholas Kripal,Gretchen Hupfel, David Wickland, Thomas Chimes, Alida Fish, David Graham, and William Smith.

See the DCCA's previous exhibitions

	Rebecca Raubacher, The Gossip (2001)		Defining Women: Seven Artists from Delaware July 12 - October 6, 2002 Carole Bieber & Marc Ham Gallery
			Jennifer Schmidt: Suddenly July 12 - October 20, 2002 Constance S. and Robert J. Hennessy Project Space
	Judith Taylor, Window, studio on Mitchell Street (detail)		Judith Taylor: inside out September 6 - October 27, 2002 Beckler Family Members’ Gallery
	Susanna Speirs, Untitled		Susanna Speirs: Proximity September 6 - November 24, 2002 E. Avery Draper Showcase
	Judith Godwin, Sea Squall (1998)		Judith Godwin: Paintings June 30 - September 29, 2002 DuPont Gallery I
	Carson Zullinger, untitled		Delaware Art Museum Purchase Awards: A Selection From the Biennial August 27 - January 23, 2003 DuPont Gallery II