Claire Oliver Gallery is proud to celebrate our 28th year

Lauren Fensterstock

Lauren Fensterstock creates elaborate sculptures and installations in the material of ladies’ accomplishments. These historically devalued female crafts- such as paper quilling and shellwork- are often dismissed as mere decorations of domestic life. By freeing these traditions from the culture of the parlor, She is able to explore their capacity to speak on the complexities of the world beyond the domestic sphere.

Her research focuses on the history of nature– specifically, the garden and the grotto. Through these lenses, She explores the often-paradoxical ways man has understood his place in the world; and as a result, how these vantage points influence the ways we reshape the world around us. At a time when human activity has developed into a devastating global force, it is critical that we question the cultural and philosophical precedents shaping our understanding of the planet.

The Katonah Museum of Art announces Bisa Butler solo exhibition

March 15 – June 14, 2020

Bisa Butler’s spectacular textile portraits are a revelation, seducing the eye with colors and patterns while commenting wryly on episodes from twentieth-century black life.

— Luke A. Fidler

The Path to Paradise: Judith Schaechter’s Stained-Glass Art

he Path to Paradise is the first survey and major scholarly assessment of this groundbreaking artist’s 37-year career. Organized by the Memorial Art Gallery of the University of Rochester, the exhibition will be on view in Rochester from February 15 through May 24, 2020, after which it will travel to two additional venues in the United States. Drawn from both private and institutional collections, The Path to Paradise will feature approximately 45 of Judith Schaechter’s stained-glass panels along with a selection of related drawings and process materials.

Adebunmi Gbadebo: True Blues, 2019

In this series, I am engaged with concepts around land, memory, and erasure. In “History Paper”, I use beaten cotton linters and human hair collected from black barbershops to form sheets of paper. These papers become abstracted documentations, loaded with genetic histories carried through the hair. I introduced blue into my work after my maternal family traced and located the three plantations our ancestors were forced to work as enslaved Africans. True Blue Plantation harvested Indigo and rice.

Matt Bahen

From a distance, Bahen’s paintings appear almost photographic in clarity yet as one draws near, the image disintegrates into a series of sculptural marks. The works themselves have an intrinsic dichotomy of surface and image; the thick and rough handling of the paint reinforces the brute nature of the subject and the conceptual agenda of the work

Barbara Earl Thomas

the artist at work on Cures and Curses; large scale cut steal windows commissioned by Multnomah County Central Courthouse, Portland, OR.

Leonardo Benzant

“I imagine myself as an Urban Shaman exploring both my familiar visible world and the hidden dimensions of other realms that lurk beneath the surface of daily life.”