Exhibitions - 2011


On Their Own: Richard Brady

December 11 - February 12, 2012
Reception - December 11, 1:30 - 3:30PM



Richard Brady, Faun, 2009, oil on linen


Richard Brady is the third artist in the museum’s On Their Own series for 2011. His paintings focus on the interaction of human and natural environments. Each image is drawn from life but not meant to be a mirror image. Brady strives for representation of exuberant reality in an intimate dialogue. His are quiet images with unspoken and elusive meanings.

“Executed in oil, my paintings require layers of color to achieve the surface quality I desire,” he points out. “Texture, line, color and form are developed and refined until the composition works. Building structure as I paint, it is crucial that every element feels right in relation to every other.” The lush renditions take weeks or months to complete. It is a challenging process, yet, he feels it is essential to bring the beauty of life experiences to fruition.



Exhibitions - 2012


Duxbury Art Association Annual Winter Juried Show

February 5 - April 29, 2012
Reception - February 4, 2012



Diana Barker Price, Defending the Woods, 2010, photography


This year marks the thirty-eighth anniversary of the Duxbury Art Association (DAA) Annual Winter Juried Show. The show encompasses artwork in all mediums by New England artists, predominantly from the Metropolitan Boston, South Shore and Cape Cod areas. A five-judge panel of working artists and art educators reviews the entries and selects approximately one hundred pieces for exhibition. Cash awards are given in each category for First Place and for "Best in Show." Ribbons are awarded for “Second”, “Third” and “ Honorable Mention”. Over one hundred volunteers orchestrate the process of bringing the show to the public under the direction of an event coordinator, the DAA and museum staff. Over the years, a number of the artists who have come to our attention by way of the Winter Juried Show have gone on to solo exhibitions at The Art Complex Museum including; Rob Millard, Lance Keimig, Vincent Crotty and both of this year’s solo exhibitors, Stephan Haley and Carol O’Malia.


Rotations: The World of Ceramics

February 5 - April 29, 2012



From left to right: Josiah Wedgwood (1730-1795), England, Syrup Jug, jasper ware (stoneware) Margaret Tafoya (1904-2001), United States, Santa Clara Pueblo, Jar, carved blackware Iran, Jorjan, Ewer, early thirteenth century, glazed fritware


Ceramics are the first examples of art created in civilizations around the world. This exhibition explores the incredible range produced from as early as approximately 4,000 B.C.E. until the twenty-first century. It includes ceramics made in Egypt, Japan, Thailand, Korea, China, Germany, Great Britain, Holland, Austria, France, Hungary, Mexico and the United States. The bodies were made from earthenware, stoneware, fritware, faience and porcelain. They were decorated with painting, incising, sculpting, carving and glazing. Some ceramic traditions influenced others. Most potters were anonymous craftsmen. However, we know the identities of a few artist-potters. Ceramics were made for various purposes. The difference in construction, decorations, influences and identity are the concepts we will explore in these fine examples.

Earthenware is ordinary clay fired between 850 and 1,000 degrees centigrade. It is porous (like the pots used for plants) because the body has not vitrified (become glassy). Stoneware has additional ingredients in the clay, feldspar (an igneous rock material containing alumina and silica with fluxing elements) in particular, which permits it to be fired at a higher temperature, between 1000 and 1250 degrees centigrade. Its body is not porous because it has vitrified during firing. Fritware incorporates quartz powder into the clay which makes it white. It is usually found in the Near East. Faience is soft-paste porcelain, actually refined earthenware, which resembles porcelain. Earthenware and stoneware can vary in their color depending on the mineral content of the clay. Porcelain contains kaolin, a white substance, and petuntse, a feldspathic material which gives elasticity. It is fired above 1250 degrees centigrade and is vitreous, normally white and translucent.

The three earliest pieces in this exhibition come from Egypt, Thailand and Japan. The Egyptian and Thai pots are buff-colored earthenware with abstract designs painted in red slip which is liquid clay. The Japanese Vessel has a red earthenware body embellished with curvilinear coils applied to the surface as well as incised lines. All three were hand built. Hopi potters in the early twentieth century also used these materials and techniques to create the shallow Bowl.

Stoneware examples from Korea and Japan date from the sixth through twelfth centuries. They were formed using a wheel; hence have more regular forms. These Vessels have accidental ash glazes from the ashes falling on the body during firing. The Bowl has an incised plant design on the interior and is glazed with iron oxide which turned green when fired in a reduction-kiln. This eliminated the oxygen at the precise moment during firing. These all represent advances in ceramic technology. Josiah Wedgwood (1730-1795) used unglazed, fine-grained stoneware for the Pitcher and Syrup Jug. He stained the body with metallic oxides, such as cobalt, to make blue jasper ware. Classical prototypes from ancient Greece and Rome influenced the decorations.

The Ewer, from Iran during the early thirteenth century, has a fritware body with a stunning, opaque, turquoise glaze. Its spout in the form of a bull’s head adds a whimsical touch. Sculpting parts of a ceramic piece is another form of decoration. This piece was probably made in Jorjan.

Porcelain was invented in China during the Tang dynasty (618-907 C.E.). Chinese potters explored different shapes and methods of decoration from that time on. A high point was reached during the Qing dynasty (1644-1911), particularly during the reign of the Emperor Kangxi (1662-1722). This Bowl has splashes of yellow, green and aubergine enamels over the clear-glazed, white porcelain body.

In Europe, porcelain was first successfully made in Germany. A twentieth century Meissen Plate represents that tradition. Its pure white porcelain body was covered with a clear glaze, fired, then floral designs were painted over the glaze and it was fired again. Prior to that, German ceramics were heavily potted stonewares, painted and glazed like the Tankard from the late eighteenth century.

Porcelains made in China and Japan inspired ceramics in other European countries and Great Britain. The blue and white color scheme, as well as the landscape design on the Delft Plate, are based on Chinese blue and white porcelains. The colorful overglaze enamel and gilded pattern on the Royal Crown Derby Shell Dish recalls Japanese Imari porcelains.

Although most of these examples were made by unknown craftsmen, some are the creation of identifiable potters. Japan has had a strong artist-potter tradition for centuries. Otagaki Rengetsu (1791-1875) hand built a Tea Bowl and incised it with a poem composed in the ninth century. In the Austrian town of Znaim, Joseph Steidl (1819-1901), made a Ewer out of faience with reticulated openwork, cobalt glaze and gilding. In the United States, Margaret Tafoya (1904-2001) at the Santa Clara pueblo, specialized in blackware carved with a bold geometric pattern.

The Pucker Gallery in Boston has championed the work of contemporary potters, some of whom work in the Asian tradition. Brother Thomas Bezanson (1929-2007) was a Benedictine monk at Weston Priory in Vermont for twenty-five years. In 1985, he moved to Erie, Pennsylvania to work as an artist-in-residence in ceramics with the Benedictine Sisters there. He traveled to Japan and Taiwan to experience, firsthand, traditional Japanese and Chinese ceramics, particularly their glazes. The porcelain Tea Bowl with copper-red glaze is one of the last pieces he made before he died. Phil Rogers, born in 1951, works in Wales making unassuming functional stoneware pieces. Squared Bottle has a robustly curving silhouette enlivened by a quickly painted plant motif. Sung Jae Choi was born in Korea in 1962 and still resides there. His stoneware, Rectangular Vase, is a creative re-working of the Korean punchong tradition. He coats the body with cream-colored glaze and either paints the design or scratches through the glaze to reveal the body underneath.

These stunning examples of ceramic art take us across time and space to reveal the tremendous variety and quality realized by artists working in clay.


Alice R. M. Hyland, Ph.D., Consulting Curator


On Their Own: Stephan Haley
Contemporary Miniature Project

February 19 - May 20, 2012



Stephan Haley, Pink, 2011, archival ink on paper


Occasionally artists approach the museum with proposals to create new work involving our collection. Mark Cooper, Jesseca Ferguson and Dorothy Simpson Krause are three Boston area artists who developed their solo exhibitions in this way. Rockland artist, Stephan Haley, approached us in 2009 with an original idea that incorporated our Indian miniatures. The idea was to photograph the paintings, enlarge them to many times their original size and manipulate them with what Haley calls his “devolution technique.” Haley would then put the works up for display in his studio and invite the public to interact with them at an event in the fall of 2011. The interaction, which Haley would photograph, would become the exhibition.

This is how Haley described the project to us. This is an opportunity to give my community a chance to actively partake in an interactive art project and to become part of the exhibition entitled, the 'Contemporary Miniature Project'. This is a multi-stage event involving the community, the museum's historical collection, and the use of technology in redefining ourselves in today's world. The ‘Contemporary Miniature Project’ will also consider the social aspect of the art opening.

I was given permission to photograph The Art Complex Museum's Persian Miniature Collection as inspiration for my exhibition with the museum in February 2012. I will enlarge the small paintings with my printer using my devolution technique of printing on paper which resists the ink, which remains wet. This enables me to manipulate and alter each of the oversized images over a prolonged period, providing a very painterly result. The six foot or larger images will be 'devolved' and installed on the walls of my studio giving a sense of stage setting for the second phase of the project.

The second phase of the ‘Contemporary Miniature Project’ will involve the social aspect of the art opening at my studio in Rockland, Massachusetts during the fall, 2011. I will invite all who are interested in joining in the festivities of good food, wine, and Persian Miniatures. Viewers will be encouraged to wear vivid dress or costumes and the use of smartphone devices will be suggested so that the viewer may individually photograph, share, observe, and document the ‘Contemporary Miniature Project’. In this way, they will become a part of my exhibit in 2012, through both my photographic observations of the participants and the art and photography of the interaction between viewer and art.

The final phase will include taking the hundreds of images from the studio art opening event and identifying interesting relational qualities within the photograph, such as color, texture, or resemblance of viewer and subject to the painting on the wall. I will seek to orchestrate a synergy between art and observer by making them interactive and contextual to one another. All my devolutions begin by intelligently and emotionally capturing a person's essence allowing for a psychological reality rather than a photographic reality. Over the next several months, I will choose the images and devolve twelve to twenty, three foot square or larger images of people and the art they surround. The ‘Contemporary Miniature Project’ will be comprised of my photo-based images of viewers capturing and documenting the Persian Miniatures and themselves with their twenty-first century documenting devices.


Galvanized Truth - A Tribute to George Nick

May 20 – September 9, 2012




George Nick, Haus Khas Village, Delhi-India, oil on canvas (photo credit: Nick Haus)


What moves men of genius, or rather what inspires their work, is not new ideas, but their obsession with the idea that what has already been said is still not enough. - Eugene Delacroix


I began my studies with George Nick at Massachusetts College of Art in the mid 1980’s. After taking his painting elective class, I was hooked.
Students clamored to gain entry to George Nick’s painting major and elective classes. Not only were his classes always filled, the majority of students were present at every session - mentally and physically. Important criticism or advice about seeing, values, color relationships, inventive interpretations of color, composition - a myriad of constructive comments - peppered each class. The energy level was high with students rigorously focused on their subject. In Nick’s class, painting was a very serious business. He didn’t teach a specific method or formula of painting. He taught an attitude, a way of thinking about painting - a way of seeing. Once class was over and Nick left for the day to paint his own paintings, his students continued to work on projects outside of class time. We were galvanized by George Nick.
Nick demanded a lot from his students - and he got it. The “Review Day” critiques at the end of each semester were famous. Nick invited two guests to join him in the review process. These were generally other professional artists and teachers although writers were also invited. Lunch breaks were graced with delectable offerings brought in by students, during which there was plenty of opportunity for discussion with the distinguished guests.
On “Review Day”, nervous energy permeated the air as students helped each other set up their work in one class room while a critique ensued in the next. Bodies of work consisting of twenty to thirty paintings of various sizes were produced. Seniors were expected to meet the 40 x 60 inch challenge. Though not all of the works were successful, they were passionately constructed.
Nick could identify a problem in a painting so succinctly that it became immediately obvious. As one student said, It was like an unveiling, he would draw the curtain back to expose a point. Critiques were a crucial part of the class, at once invigorating, frustrating, humbling and inspirational. Lengthy notes and recordings of the reviewers’ statements were taken and discussed in depth, afterward. Occasionally, there was a student who couldn’t hear beyond the bare, direct, brutally honest criticism - that student would not be seen again. Those who stayed the course pushed themselves to higher limits.
Nick taught by example. He expected the same level of hard work and integrity from his students as he did for himself. There was no tolerance or patience for laziness or excuses. You did the work or you were out.
Over the years, Nick has remained interested in his students’ progress. He will often attend their openings or participate in shows they curate. If they are having a particular problem in their paintings, he invites them to bring the work to his studio where, together, they will investigate the paintings. In this, his generosity and spirit of giving is unmatched.
Not long ago, I curated an exhibition called Confluence: Mentor • Inspiration • Influence, asking George if he would participate as my mentor in the exhibition. I was thrilled when he agreed and invited me to his studio to select a work for the exhibition. It was important to him that we both like the chosen work.
Concord, 30 x 40 inches, painted in December of 2009, was the one we selected. As I admired the painting, it struck me that over the years, his paintings had just become better and better. In May of 2009, his show of new paintings at the Gallery NAGA, George Nick - The Coded Process, was astounding. His endless enthusiasm and energy for painting at eighty-three is surely something at which to marvel. Degas had once said, Everyone has talent at twenty-five. The difficulty is to have it at fifty. George’s achievement is then quite significant. That he still teaches and makes time for his former students, many having become longtime friends, is deeply moving. This has spurred me to want to give back, and in a moment of clarity, a path was clearly laid out before me. The conception of a catalog/exhibition to honor George took form.
I thought of the exhibition that Artist Christopher Chippendale organized as a tribute to George Nick, Seeing the Object. It took place in the Alumni Gallery at Massachusetts College of Art and ran concurrently with George’s retrospective in January, 1993. Christopher generously forwarded some of the information he had gathered to give me a starting point for the project. He and Artist Chawky Frenn have written essays for this project and are helping to find additional venues to host the exhibition.
George and I met to discuss the project in late spring and, again, in September of 2009. I described it as including images of each artist’s work along with a photograph of the artist and a statement on how he influenced them. They were also to include information about what, after all these years, they still reflect on as a result of study and interaction with him. He selected artists he has kept in touch with over the years, working artists who continue producing their art.
As I searched for phone numbers and email addresses of the artists, I grew to learn about them and their work before contacting them. I have been amazed at the enthusiastic response of these artists. It has been a pleasure to communicate with them, see images of their work and read through their poignant statements.

Kim Alemian, Guest Curator


Rotations: Duxbury Artists in the Collection

May 20 – September 9, 2012





The collection of The Art Complex Museum includes a number of works from Duxbury artists. As part of a town- wide celebration of Duxbury’s 375th Anniversary, we are exhibiting a number of these pieces including work by Printmaker and Painter Ture Bengtz, the museum’s first director, sculptors, Jean Tock and Robert St. Pierre and painter and physician, Rufus Hathaway. These works cover a period of almost three hundred years of art-making in Duxbury. Rufus Hathaway (1770-1822), United States, Judith Winsor, 1795, oil on canvas


Stoked: Five Artists of Fire and Clay

May 27 – August 19, 2012




Richard Bresnahan, Mizusashi with Lacquered Gold, 2004, stoneware with navy-bean straw ash glaze


Stoked is a nationally touring exhibition celebrating thirty years of the Saint John’s Pottery, located on the campus of Saint John’s University in central Minnesota. It features ceramic work by Artist-in-Residence, Richard Bresnahan and four former apprentices; Kevin Flicker, Stephen Earp, Samuel Johnson and Anne Meyer. Dr. Matthew Welch, Assistant Director and Curator of Japanese and Korean art at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, curated the exhibition.

In the thirty years since its inception, the Saint John's Pottery has evolved as a dynamic collaboration between Saint John's University and Artist-in-Residence, Richard Bresnahan. The Pottery Studio embodies the Benedictine values of community, hospitality and self-sufficiency as well as the university's commitment to the integration of art and life; the preservation of the environment; the linkage between work and worship; and the celebration of diverse cultures.

It engages students, apprentices and visiting artists in the work of artistic creation, discipline, and research and preparation of natural materials.

Richard Bresnahan has operated the Saint John’s Pottery since 1980. He graduated from that university in 1976, having studied under Potter Bill Smith and the renowned scholar of Japanese ceramics, Johanna Becker, OSB. He spent his final year of college, and three years after that, in Japan as an apprentice to Nakazato Takashi, a thirteenth-generation scion of a pottery-making family whose father was a “living national treasure.” The formidable knowledge Richard gained from the experience earned him the title of “master potter.” In the Japanese tradition, he produces wood-fired pottery from locally excavated clay, some of which bears glazes also formulated from local materials. Deeply influenced by the intergenerational teaching traditions of Pacific Rim countries, Richard has trained scores of apprentices in the last thirty years. The four other artists represented in Stoked: Five Artists of Clay and Fire all apprenticed under him - though at different times. While at Saint John’s, Richard has constructed two climbing kilns (noborigama), the second of which is the largest of its type in North America with an interior capacity of sixteen hundred cubic feet.

Deep respect for material and the environment characterize Bresnahan’s approach to pottery production. Iinnovation and experimentation inform his ongoing dialogue with clay and fire. Throughout his career, he has consistently challenged himself to undertake new firing techniques to test potential glaze materials, and to devise new and uniquely functional ceramic shapes. The powerful and dynamic pottery that he produces embodies both the nature of his locality - through the use of local materials - and his own inimitably Midwestern artistic vision.


Twenty-One in Truro
Bridges: Expanding the Image

August 26 – November 10, 2012


Twenty-One in Truro is an exhibition by a group of professional women artists who come together for an annual week-long retreat in Truro at the tip of Cape Cod. They are bonded by their talent in and love for the visual arts, and also a deep respect for each other and for the natural environment of Cape Cod where most of them live. However, they are distinct individuals with unique artistic styles.

The theme, chosen by a representative committee from the group, was selected to showcase the diversity within this group of artists. The word “bridge” may be either a noun or a verb meaning a link, conjunction or connection between separate entities. It may be physical, visual, evolutionary, spiritual, intellectual or emotional. Each artist finds bridges within the realm of individual artistic expression. Representation, abstraction, illustration, process-orientation and conceptualism may be found within this group of twenty-one artworks. Artists explore physical bridges either man-made or natural, visual bridges between colors or light and shadow, or conceptual bridges between spans of time.

Having a theme for an exhibit serves two purposes; the first being that that viewer has an entry into the works, a frame of reference to assist in the enjoyment of the exhibit. The second is a challenge for the artist who may have many practiced years of making successful artworks. Creating with a theme in mind may provide new insights into an established process or imagery or stimulate a new process or imagery.

There is a place for beauty, praise, humor, strength, pathos, irony, joy, wonder and conundrums with soft to loud voices within the exhibit of Bridges: Expanding the Image.


Self/Fabricated

September 23 – January 13, 2013



Candice Smith-Corby, Pretending to Know, 2008, gouche on found napkin


The artists in Self/Fabricated - Ilona Anderson, David Curcio, Wylie Garcia, Jan Johnson, Joetta Maue, Leslie Schomp, and Candice Smith Corby - re-examine the use of cloth originally used for craft and domestic activity as a new means to paint or “draw” on or from. Each artist explores autobiography through themes of home, the body, self-portraiture, and relations. In addition to painting, drawing, and printmaking, the exhibition artwork incorporates a range of needlework techniques such as beading, embroidery, sewing, quilting, and stitching, including punch work, pulled thread and a variety of historical stitching techniques.

All the artists pay tribute to acts of domesticity. Each are indebted to the countless and often anonymous women who embellished cloth at home and quietly commemorated and recorded aspects of their lives throughout history. The artists empathize with these women and are aware of the inherent trappings involved in domestic duty. They work on or directly reference surfaces both functional and decorative such as found handkerchiefs, tea-towels, table-runners, doilies, quilts, and samplers.

As they respond to the stitching and marks found on these cloths, each wonders about the women who made them and attempts to find a universal resonance through their new embellishments. This is reflected in the content of each artist. For Anderson, her intricate embroidery becomes a delicate tension with taboo topics. The repetitive act of stitching that navigates through Curcio’s work affords him moments of introspection and inspiration, not unlike prior women who kept idle hands busy while daydreaming and reflecting upon their own lives. Garcia pieces together various fabrics through sewing and quilting so that the form often references the body and the changes it goes through over one’s life. Through embroidery Johnson collages metaphorical images such as ships, hearts, and the body to reference female generational ties. Maue interweaves image and diaristic text to create poignant reminders of unheard thoughts. Smith Corby combines images of furniture, the human body, and household objects that deal with conflicted feelings of domestic celebration and potential entrapment and disillusionment. Schomp’s interests lie in her work as memoir that could describe any woman's doubts, hopes, and relationships.


Rotations: To the Sea!




As in any realistic approach toward art, subject matter is commonly taken from the artist’s or patron’s surroundings. This is reflected in the number of sea-related artworks in the museum’s permanent collection, of which Dutch and English art is most pronounced. Selecting paintings and prints of the sea is a reminder of the cultural and economic importance the sea has held over the centuries, particularly in Europe and America. Several of the works in the exhibition reflect maritime history with its sailing ships or boats. Furthermore, these works also remind one of the influence artists have on each other.

In the case of the seventeenth-century Dutch, proud of their powerful seafaring heritage with its countless navy and merchant ships, marine art was prominent, hence; the Dutch Golden Age. From the Netherlands’ rival, England, patrons called on pre-eminent Dutch painters of the time for the same reason - to document their country’s maritime prowess.

The earliest artist on exhibit, Simon de Vlieger (1600-1653), was a Dutch master of the realist school of marine painting. His focus on the effects of weather and atmosphere can be seen in Seascape of Ship on Troubled Seas. De Vlieger instructed Willem van de Velde the Younger (1633-1707), who with his father, Willem the Elder (1611-1693) became premier marine painters of their time.

Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775-1851), one of the most successful English artists of the nineteenth century and arguably of all time, was strongly influenced by sixteenth and seventeenth-century Dutch artists. Although most widely known for his paintings, Turner displays his versatility in an early acquired skill of printmaking, with Calm, an 1812 etching and engraving. His status in history continued to rise because he was a precursor to the nineteenth-century Impressionists.

Two other British artists, David Lucas (1802-1881) and Seymour Haden (1818-1910), also present scenes of masted ships, but from a later period of seafaring history. Lucas’ Sea Beach, Brighton, England is annotated “after Constable”, signifying employment by the prominent English marine and landscape painter, John Constable (1776-1837).

Artists from France and the United States exhibit a realistic but more romantic approach to works of the seacoast. Louis Timmermans (1846-1910) of France depicted scenes of various European ports. His harbor scene on exhibit, untitled, has a tell-tale windmill, suggesting the Netherlands or other Low Country. American, Clarence Monfont Gihon (1871-1929), painted in France. The Waterfront at Sables is an impressionistic example of his work. Wreck on the Italian Coast by American, Albert Bierstadt (1830-1902), offers an atypical, yet still dramatic subject for an artist best known for sweeping views of the American West.

New England printmakers on exhibition offer a local viewpoint of their coastal subjects in Low Tide - New Harbor, Maine by Herbert Waters (1903-1996) and Old Harbor, Rockport, Massachusetts, by Stow Wengenroth (1906-1978). Clement Drew (1806-1889) of Boston painted the dramatic View of Minot’s Light, Cohasset. Acclaimed artist-educator, Charles Woodbury (1864-1940), who worked in Boston and Ogunquit, Maine, depicted rugged texture and subtle seaside color in Sunken Ledges.

From historic documentation to picturesque impressions, these works in various mediums reflect the drama that attracts man to the sea!

Maureen Wengler, Collections Manager






Art Complex Home


The Art Complex Museum / 189 Alden Street / Box 2814 / Duxbury, MA 02331