9.20.2007 ~ 12.31.2007
Reclaimed & Rejuvinated: Discards Into Art
Curated by Tom Puryear & Richard Kellaway
Gemini
Steve Bradford
This exhibit originated from a proposal made by a regional artist on behalf of a small group of fellow artists who felt their work had a major ingredient in common — that each re-employed objects and materials that society would agree had been rejected, thrown away, used up and cast off.
Museum curators Richard Kellaway and Tom Puryear have chosen to include some of those artists, along with others who have more direct ties to the SouthCoast.
NoNu Portable Shelter
Jon Taylor
Work by the following 10 artists is included in Reclaimed & Rejuvenated, Discards Into Art: Steve Bradford (Portland, ME); Martha Friend (Somerville, MA); Paul Gray (Cambridge, MA); Tim Lazure (Greenville, NC); Lucy Mitchell (Martha’s Vineyard, MA); Derek Sober (Brooklyn, NY); Marcella Stasa (Upton, MA); Jon Taylor (New Bedford, MA); Karl Unnasch (Chatfield, MN); and Gerald Weckesser (San Diego, CA).
Balancing Act
Tim Lazure
The ultimate result of working with reclaimed materials may be art that is aesthetically pleasing, sometimes exhibiting the artist’s good humor and provoking a laugh, often presenting objects and juxtapositions that speak to us from a forgotten past, and even sometimes providing lessons for us in the associations they call forth from our own storehouses of memory.
A composition often speaks louder than its parts and these demonstrate the artists’ manipulation of recycled and non-traditional materials.
NBAM takes pleasure in the leaps of associations they have accomplished.
New Work by Stephen Whittlesey: Tables & Shelves
Curated by David B. Boyce
A selection of sculptural work by this well-known
wood artist and UMD educator.
Museum Talk by the artist on Thursday, Nov. 8, from 4 to 5 p.m.
Infinite Shelves
Stephen Whittlesey
NBAM is pleased to present an exhibition of new work by Stephen Whittlesey, an artist who both straddles and confounds the traditional, purist definitions of studio craft and fine art.
Since the early 1960’s, when he began making studio furniture/sculpture from found and reclaimed materials, then in the late 1980’s began exhibiting his work as a member of the second generation of nationally recognized studio furniture makers, Whittlesey’s work has appeared in numerous galleries and museums across the nation, earning both prestige and critical acclaim. He is regarded as a master of this genre.
With regard to his most recent work, Whittlesey states: “My current body of work is in part about the nature and properties of wood itself — the material has a leading role in both structural and surface design. I wish to celebrate and reveal the potential of the material, its incredible endurance and beauty, even when it seems like its most useful days have long gone by. Very much a part of my thinking in this work are my questions about what constitutes value and importance when it comes to the objects I live with. Making work out of implausible and surprising and essentially worthless materials, and stretching the limits of both material and function, is how I try to answer those questions.”
Professor of Woodworking and Furniture in the Program in Artisanry at UMass Dartmouth since 1992, Whittlesey’s newest body of work concentrates on new conceptualizations for the traditional forms of tables and shelves, challenging and stretching our views of these types of functional furniture with exaggeration, high wit, and exceptional creativity.
Curated by David B. Boyce, the exhibit will provoke viewers to question their ideas about what shelves or a table could be, while enjoying Whittlesey’s vision, humor, artistry and technical expertise.
9.29.2007 ~ 12.31.2007
Vault Series: Alan Johnston (Scotland)
Curated by Joan Backes
It is with great pleasure that this Vault Series exhibit concentrates on the work of Alan Johnston who lives and works in Edinburgh, Scotland.
Johnston has created site specific work in many countries and over time has taken inspiration from nature and from artists ranging from Edvard Munch and Casper David Friedrich to Ad Reinhardt, among others.
His installations respond to the space and the architecture surrounding the site where they are created. They are wall drawings made of repetitive graphite marks that are revealed to the viewer in a quiet and contemplative, and at once surprising and provocative way.
In fact, Johnston has been influenced by Zen Buddhism, and by the 15th century Japanese artist, Sesshu, and has worked in Japan numerous times since 1985.
Johnston’s practice includes painting and sculpture, as well as commissioned large permanent installations. It must be said that Johnston’s heritage figures into his oeuvre profoundly, and this is evident in any conversation with the artist.
Alan Johnston’s work has been shown internationally at such venues as the Tate Gallery, London; Museum of Modern Art, Oxford; Inverleith House and the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh; Hayward Gallery, London; the Jack Tilton Gallery and the Whitney Museum, NYC; the Carnegie Museum, Pittsburgh; and the DIA Genese Foundation, Dusseldorf, Germany, among many others.
Annual artMOBILE and Youth Education Exhibition
Curated by Museum Staff & Junior Docents
A special reception will be held for the artMOBILE & Youth Education Exhibition during AHA! Night on October 11 from 5 ~ 7 p.m.
Humanly Possible brings together four artists whose work depends — and has for their entire career as artists — upon realistic representation centering on the human figure and its familiar surroundings. In a time when the public often finds abstraction and conceptual art difficult to follow, it is sometimes comforting to guarantee realistic images in an exhibition. But these artists are not your great-grandmother's realists. Their work demands a lot of looking, a lot of thought about just what is being portrayed and a further guarantee of an intellectually challenging viewing.
Honoré Victorin Daumier (1808-1879), the French painter, sculptor and lithographer, did as much as any artist of his time to raise the political and social awareness of the citizens of France in the mid-19th century. In the span of four decades, he produced over 4,000 prints of social and political satire that reached thousands of people (many illiterate) through the illustrated journals, La Caricature and Le Charivari, and a number of lithographic albums that were produced for commercial sale. 
Three contemporary artists — Aileen Callahan, George Klauba and Mark Milloff — continue the tradition of interpreting Moby-Dick visually, illuminating it in powerful, innovative and distinctly different ways. Working in diverse media and drawing on abstraction, realism and mysticism, they each bring new understanding to Melville’s multi-nuanced and memorable novel. 
Beginning in the early 1960s, and throughout his career as an artist to the present day, New Bedford painter John Thornton has engaged in a series of evolutionary conversations — intellectual, emotional, and visual — with issues of abstraction. Each has resulted in distinctive phases or series of works that are, nevertheless, interconnected with a visual logic that invites rather than confounds insightful viewing.
Barbara Goldberg's shibori patterned textiles are the cornerstone of this exhibition. In her work she has merged personal conceptual investigation with traditional Japanese techniques for indigo dyed linen, or sumptuously colored velvets. The simplicity of composition and color in her textiles often conceals the intense mastery of technique, which is Barbara's aesthetic signature. 
After more than a century, American artist-etchers of the 1880s are entering a new era of appreciation, and among them Robert Swain Gifford (1840-1905) deserves perhaps the highest esteem. A resident of Dartmouth, Massachusetts, R. Swain Gifford achieved fame within the New York City art scene throughout the last decades of the 19th century. Like his friends and contemporaries Louis Comfort Tiffany, Winslow Homer, and Thomas Moran, Gifford was a pivotal character in the evolution of American landscape art.
"THIS IS A TEST" is an ongoing project that has almost become for the exhibits curator a sculptural document of the history of the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS).
Separated into three shows, 7 SouthCoast Photographers features the works of seven of the region's outstanding commercial photographers.
"This large-scale body of work, which includes six-by-10-foot bright canvases, monumentalizes the subject of the New Bedford and Fairhaven fishing fleets with reverence and an eye toward the unpredictable. The vibrantly colored and distinctive paintings are portraits of working boats, icons of the often unromantic reality of the fishing industry ... These paintings also represent the painterly pursuits of Williams, who utilizes a mixture of short, precise brushstrokes and wide, sweeping bands of color. These paintings are expressionistic documents of a culture and a way of life." - Excerpted from text by Mark H.C. Bessire, Director, Institute of Contemporary Art, at Maine College of Art.
