I look to the skies and watch the birds, storms rolling in, changing weather, and brilliant sunsets. We have lived on the Kansas prairie for four years and I am moved and changed by it, my work is much influenced. The subtle starkness is magnificent as I watch undulating streams of snow geese move like ribbons, calling far overhead. The Spring Peepers are singing, a first hint of Spring. Geese and ducks are returning as are many migrating birds. Ranchers are burning prairies, and see the horizon glow hot pink as the sun sets. The ground goes from charred black to neon green in a week, amazing. Often the talk is about water, whether is there enough or rarely is there too much. 

What damage are we doing to the earth, our waters, our living beings, and ourselves? What legacy do we leave for those who come after? First peoples teach that what we do now affects the next seven generations. What does uranium mining do to the Diné people who drink the same water? The repercussions seem endless, Native people are losing their ancestral lands in coastal areas due to global warming. Chief Oren Lyons, Faithkeeper of the Turtle Clan, Onondaga Nation speaks of ice, and I quote: “The ice is melting, the winds are coming, the fires are burning, the climate is changing. It is coming and it is coming very fast”. At some point the constant striving for greater production, more fracking, and more chemicals on our farms, and in our factory farming has to stop, it has to change. What legacy will we leave for our children and their children? Hopi and other prophecies have predicted that we would come to a fork in the road. I believe that we are there now, do we turn toward healing and change, or continue down this slippery path? I have faith that there are new ways to do things. And yet I mourn vanishing species; what will we do without bees and other pollinators?

The title of my exhibition refers to a beautiful song from the indigenous Tewa people called “Mother Earth, Father Sky”. I am respectfully borrowing the title, it is not my work, I have been deeply moved and inspired by it for nearly all of my life, and it echoes my feelings. These works are my prayers for goodness and healing.

I work with plaster and other mediums in my newest body of work, they are mounted on deep birch boards. I have carved into it, shaped it, made impressions, and added paint, and mixed media. I am over the moon inspired by the landscape in southern Missouri and northern Arkansas. 

I have family roots in this region, among the Ouachita and Ozark mountains. Have you hiked in them, see the crags and hollers, floated the rivers? I am drawn to water; thawing waterfalls, moving over rocks with sunlight reflecting from it, and the sounds, oh the sounds. 

And in honoring Father Sky, I am sharing cyanotypes with imagery of migrating birds and butterflies. Recent batiks reflect flowers, the Milky Way, and the stars. I look up and I look down. I am quiet and feel so fortunate to have had these transcendent experiences. Enjoy, and find quiet and peace while contemplating my work.

1. https://centerforneweconomics.org/publications/the-ice-is-melting/

Bio

Valerie Doran Bashaw, of rural Kansas, is a professional fiber/mixed media artist and fine arts educator. Always learning and experimenting, her media choices include plaster on board, cyanotypes, intricately dyed and stitched fabric stretched over deep frames, batik, shibori, surface design, combined and refined. 

Imagery is subtle, though colors can be intense. She is happiest watching birds, landscape, storms move in, with a strong interest in weather patterns, geology and geography. Attracted to the dance between accidental and intentional, spontaneity versus control, yin and yang. Creation is fueled by intuition and the drive to make art. 

Valerie is an educator, working with students of all ages and abilities. Education includes a BFA from the Kansas City Art Institute and a MFA from the University of Michigan. She has taught for Metropolitan Community Colleges, Park University, University of Central Missouri, Ghost Ranch Conference and Education Center, Kansas City Young Audiences, Accessible Arts, Bishop Spencer Place, the Barstow School and other venues. She continues to show her work exhibitions in the greater Kansas City area and her work is in many collections; including University of Kansas Medical Center, physicians offices, businesses and private homes from Mexico to Michigan and beyond. 

She has been active in various arts organizations including the Best of Missouri Hands, Missouri Fiber Artists and is on the Board of Directors for Sharing a Vision for Generations, raising money to award scholarships for Lakota women to study Lakota Studies at Oglala Lakota College in South Dakota. She recently co-authored a grant to benefit her rural community. Fingers crossed that funding will be awarded! 

Her works embrace the aesthetic of quiet, meditative work, meant to encourage reflection. A way to retreat from the hectic, over-stimulated world. Find the dreamtime, take a deep breath, retreat into contemplation and silence

“ONE OF THE EXTRAORDINARY UNDERTAKINGS OF OUR TIME.”
- SMITHSONIAN MAGAZINE

Please join us at Four Chapter Gallery for a print exhibition featuring the art and calligraphy of the Saint John’s Bible.

In 1998, Saint John’s Abbey and University commissioned renowned calligrapher Donald Jackson to produce a hand-written, hand-illuminated Bible. This work of art unites an ancient Benedictine tradition with the technology and vision of today, illuminating the Word of God for a new millennium.

St. John’s Bible is a unique and stunning work of art that represents a modern-day masterpiece of the ancient art of illuminated manuscripts. Commissioned by Saint John’s Abbey and University in Collegeville, Minnesota, this Bible is a collaborative effort of calligraphers, theologians, artists, and craftspeople from around the world. It was created using traditional techniques and materials, including vellum, gold leaf, and natural pigments, but with a contemporary approach and a fresh interpretation of the biblical text.

The result is a stunningly beautiful and visually striking Bible that reflects the diversity and richness of contemporary culture and the timeless wisdom of the Bible. With its intricate details and vibrant colors, the St. John’s Bible has captured the attention of art lovers and Bible enthusiasts alike and has become a treasured work of art and a testament to the enduring power of the Bible as a source of inspiration and spiritual guidance.

Learn more at https://saintjohnsbible.org

Exhibit Dates: June 2 — August 27, 2023

First Friday Receptions:
June 2 and August 4 | 5:30 – 9:00pm

Open Hours:
Saturdays | 12:00 – 4:00pm

Amy Kligman’s first solo show at SLCA, OFFERINGS, presents a series of recent paintings that continue the artist’s ongoing interest in cycles and seasons, milestones and ritual. These paintings are offerings of intent and reflection.

In this series, I am thinking a lot about cycles and seasons, milestones, and ritual. How do we mark time, what do we celebrate. Why do certain gestures – like lighting a candle, seem to give importance to a moment? Many of these traditions are residual echoes from practices that were obscured and absorbed into patriarchal monotheistic religions to create palatable vehicles for control and power. While I personally do not cosign the dogma associated with these religions, I do recognize the power they hold and the impact the ritual and beauty has on people. I believe the impact of that ritual and beauty can exist in a space without dogma, without narratives of Gods and Monsters. These paintings are meditations in that space, offerings of intent and reflection.

I am also considering the oppression of the feminine – feminine gesture, feminine aesthetic, vulnerability, compassion, emotion. I think about women in history – in art history, in history writ large, whose work enthralls but whose stories trouble me. I think about Ana Mendieta, Zelda Fitzgerald, Henrietta Lacks, Sylvia Plath, Hilma of Kint. I think about the way I operate in the world and how long it took for me to understand how recently the freedoms I have now came to be. I consider how long it took for me to understand the barriers that still exist, perhaps better cloaked than before. I think about how many times I changed my natural inclinations or desires to fit what I thought others wanted – and by others I mean white, cis, heterosexual, men in places of decision making power. I think of how many times that worked, and I cringe.

For this reason, I embrace aesthetics and ways of mark-making that have not held the same esteem as others in the Euro-centric fine art canon that I know. I embrace folk art influences, that came from decorative practices that were the beautiful and laborious creative acts of anonymous women (including my own mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother). I embrace the color pink. I embrace nods to cake decorating, flower arrangement, quilt making, textile pattern and surface design, object collections, and the aesthetics of domestic spaces. I see these gestures as a sort of inheritance, from women in my own lineage living less than glamorous lives, attempting to bring light and beauty to the world in the practical ways the social and economical boundaries permitted.

Altars are created to manifest action, to create change, or to remember, to honor. My altars are no different, in that regard. They are pools of reflection, of meditation, of thinking about the way things are and the way I want to operate as a human moving forward.

Sherry Leedy Contemporary Art is pleased to present an ensemble of gallery artists and artists new to the gallery in SHARP-SIGHTED. The sixteen artists, that are featured, work in a variety of media, and with a range of concepts, but all share a keen sense of vision, creativity and purpose. They reveal art as an exploration of ideas and as a way to experience the world. For some, observation of the environment and nature is a source of inspiration. For others, the art process and the materials themselves, spark their creativity. Other influences are numerous, such as memory, emotion, geometry, pattern, spirituality, ornament, color and gesture. An indefinable mix of possibilities and passion propels these artists forward in their art practice day-by-day resulting in exceptional work in painting, collage, photography, ceramic and fiber. Each artwork is as unique as its’ maker.

Jeff Aeling | Laura Berman  |  Jane Booth | Marcus Cain | Angie Jennings | Kathy Liao  | Annie Helmericks-Louder | John Louder | Art Miller, | Nancy Newman Rice |  Nora Othic  | Barbara Rogers | Andy Ryan |  Sun Smith-

A native New Yorker, Terry Winters graduated from Pratt Institute in 1971, focusing on painting. Through the 1970s, while studying nature, especially molecular level life forms, Winters honed his craft as a drawer and a painter until he was ready for his inaugural exhibition in 1982 at the prestigious Sonnabend Gallery. Later that same year he began his first foray into printmaking at Universal Limited Art Editions (ULAE) on Long Island. Winters became one of the leading printmakers in the U.S. At first, he was leaving his Manhattan studio one day a week to work with the master printers at ULAE, and that later escalated to up to four days a week. As art historian Richard Axsom wrote in “The Philosophers’ Stone: The Prints of Terry Winters:”

Printmaking is a forum whose procedures and collaborative protocols have allowed Winters to explore the expressive nature of his drawings. For an artist whose cardinal subject is protean form, printmaking encourages a changing image through the various proofing phases that lead to an editioned print. A print reflects a progressive history of alterations. It is a record of mutation, an accumulation of discrete changes that has no exact counterpoint in drawing or painting.

Over the years, Winters’ paintings, drawings, and prints have been featured in major retrospectives at the Boston Museum of Fine Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Irish Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.