Islanders old and young crowded the Old Sculpin Gallery Sunday night at the opening reception for She, featuring 60 works in multiple media by more than 40 Vineyard artists.
A juried show that examines the female in art from a kaleidoscope of perspectives, She is a departure from the norm for the waterfront Edgartown gallery.
Old Sculpin generally opens only its midsummer plein air group show to artists who are not members of the gallery’s Martha’s Vineyard Art Association. Juried exhibitions are even rarer, with years going by between them. And the work on display tends overwhelmingly toward the representational.
She is another kind of show entirely. Sunday’s reception brought scores of emerging and established artists, together with family members, friends and patrons, for a first look at the paintings, photographs, sculptures and other works in a panorama of styles and media. The show continues through Friday, Sept. 14.
“It shook Edgartown up a little,” said Chilmark artist and gallery owner Kara Taylor, who juried and curated the exhibition from more than 120 submissions and invited several other artists to participate as well.
“It’s conceptual, and a bit charged,” she added.
First-year gallery director Colleen Daly came up with the idea for She last spring and enlisted Ms. Taylor as juror-curator.
“Women are such a huge part of the arts, whether as subjects or objects, and I wanted to see how artists were exploring that concept in this present moment,” Ms. Daly said.
Ms. Daly titled the show She because “there is a lot of power in gender pronouns right now, and I wanted this show to illuminate what can happen here on the Vineyard when we bring art together under the umbrella of ‘She’ as we around the world move toward a broader understanding of what womanhood is.”
One thing Ms. Daly said she didn’t expect was that some Old Sculpin artists would enter works utterly different from the style of art they usually create. For instance, West Tisbury painter Valentine Estabrook, known for her plein air landscapes of Island scenes, submitted a starkly powerful female form.
“Our artists took this call and tried something different with it,” Ms. Daly said. “To see people that I knew submitting work that was new and challenging for them was really great.”
The artists in She range in age from teen to senior citizens, including recent college graduates and “quite a few early 20-somethings,” Ms. Daly said.
At the reception Sunday, Ms. Taylor said she was touched by how many parents of young artists spoke to her “with such pride in their eyes, thanking me for including their children in this show. “I remember feeling like that when I was young, feeling that encouragement,” Ms. Taylor said.
The youngest artist in She is photographer Davin Tackabury, whose triple portrait Lia is of a friend from the Martha’s Vineyard Regional High School. Mr. Tackabury said he and like-minded students want to start a photography club at the high school so they can travel and find new subjects for their lenses.
“The Vineyard gets a little boring,” Mr. Tackabury said. He’d like to visit Iceland, which he said is the world’s top destination for photographers.
At the other end of the She age spectrum is Jacqueline Baer, 85, the matriarch of an art-creating Island family that includes her husband Gene, daughter Gretchen and sons Jon and Chris. Ms. Baer’s colorful mixed-media sculptures transform humdrum clothing mannequins into exotic busts that resemble apsaras from outer space.
Priscilla Warner’s collages combine landscape photographs with cutouts of her childhood drawings, suggesting the persistence of a joyful innocence. In her work 13, a girl on a pony soars above a city by night. At Sunday’s opening, one viewer of this work was reminded of Marc Chagall and another of Flat Stanley.
Lily Morris, one of the artists Ms. Taylor invited into the show along with Stephanie Danforth and Traeger di Pietro, created her photorealistic Will Was Here—a voluptuous portrait of a woman dozing on a beach—with actual sand, oil paints and modeling glue.
Other media in the exhibition include Jenny Hersh’s soap ground aquatint dry point etching, Kathleen Poehler’s seaweed collage, an installation of driftwood, copper wire and handmade paper by Elysha Roberts and a silent film by Christina Montoya.
She is on display through Sept. 14. Also hanging at Old Sculpin this month are paintings by Meg Mercier, photographs by Melinda Fager and works in assorted media by other Old Sculpin member artists.
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