UPCOMING EXHIBITIONS

Mentoring Courtney Love

Mentoring Courtney Love: David LaChapelle & Courtney Love

On View: April 13 – August 10, 2013

The concept of mentoring is one not often associated with the contemporary art world. Yet artist Courtney Love, best known as a musician, credits artist and photographer David LaChapelle with mentoring her as a visual artist. Love's work, featured in this exhibition, are all works on paper. They are executed in a combination of pastel, watercolor, graphite, colored pencil, charcoal, acrylic, and marker. The works on view are all portraits, including some self-portraits, and this is where we see the relationship between her work and that of her mentor David LaChapelle. While LaChapelle's photographic portraits are slick and hyper-real, Love's portraits are sketch-like and spontaneous. Her images are raw and full of emotion, and they bear a resemblance to her music. There is a consistency in vision between her music and her visual art that suggests an authenticity of expression.

Kitty Wales: Lionfish

Opening July 2013

Fascinated by the anatomy and movement of living creatures, Kitty Wales creates sculpture and installation art based on her direct observations of animals. She has traveled to the Scottish Hebrides to study wild goats, the Spanish Pyrenees to observe bearded vultures, and the Caribbean to document reef sharks in their underwater habitat. As part of a collaboration between the Lyman Allyn Art Museum and the Mystic Aquarium, Wales visited the Aquarium to observe their collection of marine life, taking photographs and preparing sketches that would later fuel her creations in the studio. Inspired by the textural, feathery forms of the lionfish, Wales then set to work envisioning a site-specific installation intended for the Lyman Allyn. Three larger-than-life lionfish sculptures constructed of welded steel, heavy paper, and recycled pencils will transform the gallery into a “deep-sea” environment for visitors of all ages.

Based in Massachusetts, Kitty Wales has worked on many site-specific installations at museums throughout New England and elsewhere, including DeCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, Lincoln, MA; the Fuller Craft Museum, Brockton, MA; the Currier Museum of Art, Manchester, NH; and the Fort Lauderdale Museum, FL.

Kitty Wales, Lionfish sculpture in progress, 2012, welded steel and heavy paper. Photo credit: Kathryn Osgood, 2012.

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