GOURMET TAKE-OUT!
Wednesday, February 23, from 4:30–5:30pm
Gourmet Take-Out: Hake & Bake! And I Helped!
With Chef Joe Cizynski
Enjoy an evening of warm, comforting foods to take off that Winter chill! This delicious menu includes butternut squash soup with roasted chestnuts and sheep’s milk cheese, baked hake stew with potatoes, tomatoes, Romano beans and olives, and rice pudding with dried apricots. Relax, and nurture yourself in culinary style.
No modification or substitutions at this time
Re-heating instructions included
Price includes meal taxes
Order by noon on Tuesday, February 22
$40 – Member, $45 – Non-Member
THIS WEEK’S MUSE
ARTISTS TELL THE STORY
An exhibition is a just a collection of unrelated art. Superficially, at least, that’s true. Different artists, competing styles, various media, and all shapes and sizes. As consumers of art, we the viewers are comfortable with these differences and at ease when they are put together in a gallery. Disparate art makes it interesting, keeps eye and mind engaged.
But, add a story and everything elevates. A story draws everything together, provides context and meaning. Now it’s no longer a room full of art. Now it’s a journey, an experience, and it’s telling us something.
A story unifies diverse art and diverse artists in such a way that we not only see art we didn’t expect, but we are told things we didn’t know. An art exhibition can present difficult subjects and difficult ideas that provoke us to disagree to challenge opinion. We may not agree with them, but that’s okay. In fact, that’s precisely the point: that it can challenge us is the reason art can be such a powerful tool for change.
The 39 artists that make up EMPOWERMENT VS EXPLOITATION tell its story. Each of them, one way or another, challenges our opinion. This week, we highlight four more who have helped create it.
Theresa Lucey is a fine artist living in Orlando, Florida. Her practice focuses figurative realism and her subjects—largely female—are coiled in tension, constricted by the weight of domesticity. “That which can be looked at also looks back at us. We are simultaneously its consuming voyeur, and the subject of its voyeuristic gaze.”
Both artist and emergency medical physician, Jeanette Hammerstein discovered painting as an outlet to process the difficulty of medicine – of seeing the faces, the worries, the problems. “I like the idea that creating a piece of artwork is taking something of yourself and planting it outside. It sits there waiting and just maybe someone will connect or be moved by that moment you had creating it.”
Portrait artist Steve Morrell lives in Boulder, Colorado and creates modern, realistic oil portraits of people (and dogs and horses!) He likes to blur the lines between painting and viewer, the experience and the one experiencing. “Underlying this intention are deeper concepts of self-acceptance, transformation and healing, although It is my hope that the viewer creates their own narrative based on their own experience and feelings.”
Sonja Czekalski is an interdisciplinary artist living and working in Rhode Island. She is also director of the Hera Gallery in Wakefield, RI. She works in fiber arts, hand-paper making, and photography. “I want the viewer to explore the female figure through an empathetic gaze. I invite the viewer to question the validity of the stereotyped feminine.”
These artists, and all the others in the exhibition, are getting us thinking and getting us talking. The artists are telling the story.
EMPOWERMENT VS EXPLOITATION PROGRAMMING
Bystander Intervention Workshop, with Deirdre ‘deer’ Sullivan and Chris Morin
Healing Through Creative Expression (tri-lingual), with Katia DaCuma and Deirdre ‘deer’ Sullivan
Community Prevention Strategies, with Chris and Carolyn
Documentary screening of the film ‘Roll Red Roll’
Enough Abuse: A Child Sexual Abuse Prevention Workshop, with Chris Morin and Beverly Costa-Ciavola