| The Brattleboro Museum & Art Center opened its doors in August to five new exhibitions in the museum’s galleries, running through November 16. The spotlight is on prints this fall in three of BMAC’s five new shows. Featured is a major retrospective of the prints of Jules Olitski, one of the 20th century’s foremost American artists. Jules Olitski: An Inside View fills the two main galleries. A new suite of woodblock prints, The Pandora Suite, by iconic Vermont artist Sabra Field, and Highlights and Darks, an exhibit of photographer Robert Flynt’s almost surreal figurative images, fill out the print shows. In addition, sculptor Walter Collier Nicolai’s installation gives viewers a glimpse into an artist’s life, and painter and animator Kaori Hamura’s bright, engaging illustrations are on view in the Activity Gallery. | 
|
Teta Hilsdon on the Brattleboro Museum & Art Center
Robert Flynt, Untitled Diptych, 2004. Chromogenic and gelatin silver photographs. Courtesy of the artist.The Brattleboro Museum & Art Center opened its doors in August to five new exhibitions in the museum’s galleries, running through November 16. The spotlight is on prints this fall in three of BMAC’s five new shows. Featured is a major retrospective of the prints of Jules Olitski, one of the 20th century’s foremost American artists. Jules Olitski: An Inside View fills the two main galleries. A new suite of woodblock prints, The Pandora Suite, by iconic Vermont artist Sabra Field, and Highlights and Darks, an exhibit of photographer Robert Flynt’s almost surreal figurative images, fill out the print shows. In addition, sculptor Walter Collier Nicolai’s installation gives viewers a glimpse into an artist’s life, and painter and animator Kaori Hamura’s bright, engaging illustrations are on view in the Activity Gallery.
Jules Olitski was a celebrated Color Field painter when he began making prints in the mid-1950s. An Inside View is a survey of his prints from 1954 to 2007. On view are some of his early, rarely exhibited prints, including several self-portraits of the artist as a young man. In 2004 Olitski returned to self-portraiture, and it’s easy to see him as an old man, perhaps meditating on mortality.
Over time Olitski worked in woodcut, intaglio, silkscreen, lithography, and monotype, which he embraced in his final years. The 45 works in the exhibition reveal how his creative style evolved, with his last monotype completed two weeks before his death.
Jules Olitski: An Inside View was made possible in part by generous gifts from Jan and Rick Cohen, Genie and Jeff Shields, and BMAC trustee Margaret Anne Everitt in memory of Robert Montgomery Scott. Beginning in 2009, the exhibit will travel to five other venues.
With The Pandora Suite, Sabra Field turns in a new direction. Interested in addressing “the persistence of cruelty and violence in our world,” she chose the Greek myth of Pandora to illustrate aspects of human experience, both “those skills and qualities…we cherish as well as those that have caused us so much grief.” Among the 12 prints, warfare, wisdom, and farming are represented, with hope concluding the suite. The exhibit is sponsored by Vermont Artisan Designs.
In Highlights and Darks, photographer Robert Flynt combines old photographs of spiritualists, medical examiners, and hypnotists with contemporary ones of male nudes in ways that suggest interactions between the two. Deliberately obscure and ambiguous, Flynt’s images undermine our perceptions of context, and raise questions of mortality, dislocation, past, and present.
Vermont artist Kaori Hamura’s Dream Seasons is a picture book for all ages, with no words. Her colorful acrylic paintings depict fanciful landscapes and playful characters, both human and animal. Born in Japan, Hamura incorporates familiar shapes and styles from Japanese art, both traditional and modern, into her work. Fox Mountain, especially, looks like a manga version of a Japanese scroll painting.
What Remains in an Artist’s Life is Walter Collier Nicolai’s sculptural installation representing an artist’s studio. Nicolai invites viewers to contemplate how relationships between form, material, space, and memory create a context for meaning. The exhibit is sponsored by Berkley & Veller Greenwood Country Realtors.
