Galaxy Gallery in Oak Bluffs, home of the nonprofit Martha’s Vineyard Center for the Visual Arts, celebrates the Island’s art teachers this month with a show by more than a dozen current and retired arts educators whose careers extend well beyond the classroom.
Open for its final weekend on Sept. 29, Sept. 30 and Oct. 1 from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m., the exhibition includes paintings and prints of Island themes by Elizabeth Whelan, Donna Straw, Nancy Danielson, Eva Cincotta, Kenneth Vincent, Laura Jemison and Sheila Fane, and a photograph by Alida O’Loughlin.
Collages by Bricque Garber, jewelry by Lucinda Sheldon and ceramics by Frank Creney and by Mark Bateman are also featured, along with fine woodworking pieces by Robert Yapp — and the wood and beach stone collaborations he makes with his wife Debra Yapp.
The artists themselves are staffing the gallery during the show, with Mr. Yapp welcoming visitors last Friday afternoon. Both he and Ms. Yapp taught Island students for 34 years before retiring, Mr. Yapp said. He was the industrial arts teacher at Oak Bluff School, while she taught art at both Oak Bluffs and Edgartown schools.
In their collaborative works, Ms. Yapp’s beachcomber collages of smooth stones, sea bricks and driftwood are framed in hardwood by Mr. Yapp to create wall art, mirrors, key racks and other pieces that they also sell at the Vineyard Artisans Festivals in West Tisbury.
Two of Mr. Yapp’s solo woodwork pieces are in the Galaxy show as well: his Pagoda four-drawer jewelry chest of walnut and maple, and Derby Fever, a lift-lid box of zebrawood inlaid with mahogany in the shape of a striped bass.
The natural world also inspires Ms. Sheldon, who teaches beading and enameling at Featherstone Center for the Arts and is showing a table of pieces at Galaxy. Working in cloisonné, a jewelry-making technique that originated more than 2,000 years ago, Ms. Sheldon combined wire and enamel into a graceful dragonfly pendant with a necklace of twisted strands of beads.
She is also showing enameled earrings and other pieces depicting flowers and colorful abstracts, along with simpler beaded necklaces.
Other Featherstone teachers in the show include Mr. Creney, who runs the art center’s ceramics department, and Mr. Bateman, who teaches wheel throwing and other techniques, as well as Ms. Garber, Mr. Vincent and Ms. Cincotta.
Ms. Whelan, an accomplished portrait and still-life painter who lives on Chappaquiddick, taught a series of popular online drawing courses through the Vineyard Haven library in 2020 and 2021 and has more than 50 instructional videos on the internet. In the Galaxy exhibition, she is showing a nearly photorealistic garden scene of zinnias and cabbages, a cluster of ripening pears cascading from a tree and a still life of blue-ribbon-winning eggs from the Agricultural Fair — complete with the judges’ note: “Gorgeous, all!”
Ms. Danielson has several still life and interior oils in the show, as well as a Vineyard beach scene and an Iowa landscape in the plein air style.
Island vistas also appear in paintings by Mr. Vincent, Ms. Jemison and Ms. Cincotta, as well as in Ms. Fane’s work — which leans more toward the abstract — and Ms. Straw’s modernist, color-block views of dinghies and docks.
Ms. O’Loughlin’s Still Life (For Barren Uterus) is an outlier in this show, a color photograph printed on glass that shows an aged tree trunk, barely touched by green leaves from a nearby plant.
The Teachers Art Show is on display Friday through Sunday from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. at Galaxy Gallery, 99 Dukes County Ave., Oak Bluffs.
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