Glen Urquhart School

Raymond Nance, You’ve Come a Long Way Baby, New York, 11” x 14”, 1972, Archival Inkjet Photograph made from scanned 35mm negative.

Current exhibition

Photos by Raymond Nance

May 3 – June 17

An exhibition of photography by GUS school principal Raymond Nance, entitled: We’ve Come a Long Way, Maybe: New York and Louisiana in the 1970’s

Monday-Friday 8:30-4:00

(excluding holidays)

Past exhibitions

Paintings by Elizabeth Awalt

The Upper School Art Gallery of the Glen Urquhart School is honored to present the work of Elizabeth Awalt through April 30. Ms. Awalt’s visionary and magical paintings delve deeply into the expressive possibilities of paint.  Her large-scale sensuously painted anthropomorphic imagery have implied narratives and become vehicles to express primal emotions of love, joy, and sorrow.  Rather than explorations of specific sites, her meditations on the natural world are experienced by the paint’s sheer physicality and transformative potential.

“My work has developed from observational studies to expressive, evocations of nature. The micro and macro view of nature interest me simultaneously and recent paintings weave the two worlds together.”

Elizabeth Awalt received her MFA degree at the University of Pennsylvania under the direction of Neil Welliver. As an undergraduate, she studied Fine Arts at Boston College where she returned to teach and became a tenured professor. The artist has been the recipient of both a Massachusetts Artists Fellowship in Painting and an Individual Artist Grant in Painting from the National Endowment of the Arts. Elizabeth has been an artist-in-residence at several art colonies, including the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Yaddo, and the MacDowell and Millay colonies.
The artist has exhibited widely both nationally and internationally. Selected one person exhibitions include the G.W. Einstein Company, Inc., NYC,  Samuelis Baumgarte Gallery, Germany, Caldbeck Gallery, Rockland, ME, and Thomas Segal Gallery in Boston, MA. The Danforth Museum of Art in Framingham, MA presented, “Sanctuary of Light”, a one person show, in 2007.
Her work has appeared in numerous group exhibitions in museums and galleries, including the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA, the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, Ridgefield, CT, the Decordova Museum, Lincoln, MA, and the McMullen Museum of Art, Boston. Her work is in numerous public collections including: the Danforth Museum, the Decordova Museum, and the McMullen Art Museum.

The Glen Urquhart School is located at 74 Hart Street, Beverly Farms, MA. Gallery hours are Mon-Fri, 9 AM – 4 PM.  For information call 978-927-1064.

25% of sales benefit the GUS Scholarship Fund.

through Feb. 17th

Eighth Grade Shirt Project

How the Eighth Grade Shirt Project Began.

by Dawn Southworth

Sometimes the best of ideas arrive as epiphanies resulting from coincidence.

In my capacity as the Upper School Art teacher at GUS, I continually strive to design projects for my students that reflect my life long passion for the visual arts and also emerge from my experiences in the contemporary art world.

The Eighth Grade Shirt Project is an example of such a project that continues to amaze and inspire.  A number of years ago, an auction of commissioned artwork was organized to benefit a women’s shelter in Cambridge, MA. I was on the list of invited artists asked to create a specific object over a period of months to be later exhibited at the Copley Plaza Hotel, and then be put on the block at the gala benefit.

The event and benefit came to be known as the Boston Cardigan Project.

Each artist was sent an identical box with the same materials for the commissioned work.   Upon opening the box I found a beautifully folded simple white cardigan sweater.  The pristine white sweater had become a metaphor for shelter.  Months later, upon entering the exhibition, I was profoundly moved by the incredibly imaginative treatments the sweaters received, and by the highly emotional responses they evoked.

Several days after the auction, I was in a local goodwill shop and happened to gaze at a row of hanging crisp white shirts being offered for a dollar each.  It was at that moment our Annual Eighth Grade Shirt Project was conceived.

Subsequently, I now make an annual pilgrimage to a warehouse in Cambridge where people, trying to get by, are able to purchase clothing for a dollar a pound. I enter the warehouse with clothing strewn knee-deep over the floor. With garbage bag in hand, I wade through this sea of garments in search for white shirts for our GUS eighth graders to transform.

Since its inception, this simple, quirky assignment has become the highlight of our Eighth Grade Art Show.  Wondrous, amazing, inspired, and thoughtful, these shirts confirm my belief of art’s ability to provide meaning to our lives. The shirts have come to reflect our students’ engagement with society and often reflect the hopes and aspirations of these brilliant young minds.

In October each year, our eighth graders are given an assignment which reads as follows:

Eighth Grade:   Artist – Shirt Project for Eighth Grade Art Show

Each student will research an assigned artist and complete the following two components:

1.  Each student will be given a white shirt.  Each student, using the white shirt, is to create an autobiographical mixed media statement, with original ideas and symbology; and utilizing aspects of the assigned artist’s style and techniques.

2.  Create and write a two page paper (minimum) providing: a biographical profile of the assigned artist; and a critical assessment of the assigned artists’ contribution to his times.  Visual presentation of papers should be considered. Research papers will be displayed in the gallery during the art show.

For those of you wondering, I unraveled my sweater thread by thread, and hired a retired woman from my church to knit tiny white sweaters with little buttons.  For the finished piece I adorned them on the shoulders of discarded naked Barbie dolls, that I then stood proudly in a battered suitcase inverted on its side.

January 2010

Rebecca Kinkead

Hushed yet compelling figures convey a strong sense of emotion and weighted meaning in Rebecca Kinkead’s work.  The generously applied paint is built up in a tactile way, dripping and puckering to create rich surfaces from which the figures emerge. A graduate of the University of Vermont and Minnesota State University, Kinkead has been featured in solo and group exhibitions at galleries throughout the United States and, regionally at Clark Gallery, the New Art Center and Cushing Martin Gallery at Stonehill College.  In 2004, she received the Ballinglen Arts Foundation Fellowship.