Julia Bland @ The Aldrich, Ridgefield - "Woven in the Reeds" Exhibition

Julia Bland: Woven in the Reeds 

Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield

May 15 - September 14, 2025.

JULIA BLAND

Helper (detail), 2024 

Courtesy of the artist and Derek Eller Gallery, New York 

Photo: Adam Reich

The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum announced JULIA BAND’s first solo museum presentation, Woven in the Reeds. Bland’s installation is part of Aldrich Projects, a quarterly series featuring one work or a focused body of work by a single artist on the Museum’s campus. Julia Bland debuts a monumental tapestry composed of canvas, ropes, linen nets, and fabrics that are dyed, woven, braided, tied, and sewn by hand. 

Bland grew up in Palo Alto, California, in the shadow of the counterculture movement of the 1960s–70s, and in the nascent stages of technological utopianism. Raised by parents with different religious backgrounds—her mother is Jewish, and her father is a Presbyterian minister—Bland’s upbringing was marked by a blend of spiritual influences. In 2008, she was awarded a fellowship to work in Morocco, where she lived on and off for several years. During this time, she studied Sufism and immersed herself in the country’s rich customs, materials, and craftsmanship.

Informed by these personal experiences, Bland’s textiles reflect a synthesis of visual cultures across time and place. Her work blends the tie-dyed, kaleidoscopic imagery of psychedelia with sacred Islamic geometry and Judeo-Christian symbols. Bland’s meticulous layering, diverse materials, and intricate fiber techniques result in compositions that exude rhythmic intensity and devotional energy, evoking the mystical abstractions of transcendentalist painters like Hilma af Klint and Emma Kunz.

The confluence of openwork netting and solid patches of material coalesce at certain points to form distinct shapes while dissolving into others, depending on the viewer’s perception. In this way, Julia Bland references the Shifting Gestalt Effect, an optical phenomenon that emphasizes the whole of patterns and objects over their individual elements. One image that may emerge is the “priestly hands,” a powerful religious symbol from ancient Judeo-Christian traditions representing divine protection. The work’s title, Woven in the Reeds, refers both to Judaism, where reeds are valued for their flexibility and strength and used for writing the Torah, and to Sufism, where—as the artist explains—“The song of the reed flute laments its separation from the reed bed, and is a frequent metaphor for the longing for God.”

The exhibition will be accompanied by a ‘zine.

JULIA BLAND (b. 1986, Palo Alto, CA) received her BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design and her MDA from The Yale School of Art. She has been an artist in residence at The MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, The Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Lighthouse Works, The Sharpe-Walentas Space Program, and The Shandaken Project: Storm King. She has received awards including The Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, The Milton and Sally Avery Fellowship from Yaddo, The Carol Schlosberg Memorial Prize, NYFA/NYSCA Fellowship in Craft/Sculpture, The Florence Leif Award for Excellence in Painting, and the Natasha and Jacques Gelman Travel Fellowship. Recent solo exhibitions include Rivers on the Inside, Derek Eller Gallery, New York, NY; Embers, Maya Frodeman Gallery, Jackson Hole, WY; Andrew Rafacz Gallery, Chicago, IL; The Lighthouse Works, Fisher’s Island, NY; Helena Anrather, New York, NY; and On Stellar Rays, New York, NY. Recent group exhibitions include The Tang Teaching Museum, Saratoga Springs, NY; Kasmin Gallery, New York, NY; The Swedish Institute in Paris, France; The Everson Museum, Syracuse, NY; John Michael Kohler Art Center, Sheboygan, WI; Chambers Fine Art, Beijing, China; and Yossi Milo Gallery, New York, NY. Julia Bland lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.

Aldrich Projects | Julia Bland: Woven in the Reeds is curated by Curatorial and Publications Manager Caitlin Monachino.

The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum

258 Main Street Ridgefield, CT 06877

www.thealdrich.org

Martha Diamond @ The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield - "Deep Time" Exhibition

Martha Diamond: Deep Time 

The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum,  Ridgefield 

November 17, 2024 - May 18, 2025 

MARTA DIAMOND 

Untitled, 1973 

Acrylic on canvas, 84 x 72 inches 

Collection of Jasper Campshure 

Photo: Jason Mandella 

The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum presents Deep Time, a traveling survey of five decades of work by MARTA DIAMOND, marking the artist’s first solo museum presentation in thirty-six years. Martha Diamond: Deep Time is accompanied by the artist’s first major monograph. 

Martha Diamond’s ties to The Aldrich extend back to 1972 when Larry Aldrich, the Museum’s founder, visited the artist’s Bowery studio and purchased the sevenby-six-foot acrylic on canvas painting, Untitled, 1972, marking her first museum acquisition. This painting was included in Martha Diamond’s debut exhibition, Contemporary Reflections 1972-73, an annual series at the Museum that spotlighted emerging artists with no gallery representation. Aldrich bought another painting from Martha Diamond a year later, Untitled, 1973. It would be included in three more exhibitions throughout the 1970s and 1980s at The Aldrich. Now in the Museum’s 60th anniversary year, Untitled, 1973 makes its return as the earliest work in Deep Time. 

Martha Diamond, who passed away in December 2023, is among the most perceptive painters of the last five decades. Her work’s formal concision and painterly bravado reflect an inner dialogue with generations of abstract artists, and the results are exceptional: an inimitable handling of gesture and space that reimagines the landscape tradition while deftly sliding between abstraction and representation. Encompassing paintings, works on paper, and monotypes, this focused survey of Diamond’s career proposes “deep time” as a new way of understanding her contribution to American painting. 

Deep time is a concept used to explore thousands of years of human civilization and billions of years of planetary history. In conversation with ancient monuments and the modern skyscraper, the exhibition emphasizes Martha Diamond’s commitment to capturing the emotional character of built space, tracking throughlines across mediums and methods to reveal a process that combines spirited experimentation with perceptive observation. Martha Diamond’s relationship to the built landscape of New York was surely informed by her more than 50 years spent maintaining her studio in the Bowery, demonstrating her tremendous perseverance as an artist and her rootedness in a single place over time. 

The exhibition is accompanied by the artist’s first major monograph, an amply illustrated catalogue that includes an original essay by the exhibition’s co-curators, a chronology, and texts reprinted from some of Diamond’s most insightful critics: New York poets steeped in the visual arts. Martha Diamond: Deep Time documents the inspirations that converge in, and are transformed by, Diamond’s enigmatic and utterly original work. 

Martha Diamond: Deep Time is co-organized by The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum and the Colby College Museum of Art, and co-curated by The Aldrich’s Chief Curator, Amy Smith-Stewart and Colby’s Katz Consulting Curator, Levi Prombaum. 

MARTHA DIAMOND (1944-2023) received a BA from Carleton College in Minnesota in 1964 and, after a period of living abroad in Paris, an MA from New York University in 1969. She was an active participant in New York’s art and poetry scenes in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Her work has been shown at major New York galleries and institutions from the mid-1970s on, including solo exhibitions at Robert Miller Gallery, Brooke Alexander Gallery, Galerie Eva Presenhuber, and the New York Studio School, and important group shows at Skarstedt, the Hill Art Foundation, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Whitney Museum of American Art. She also had concurrent solo exhibitions in 1988 at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art, Brunswick, Maine, and the Portland Museum of Art, Maine. Her work is in the permanent collections of numerous institutions, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Brooklyn Museum, New York; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Colby College Museum of Art, Waterville, Maine; the Portland Museum of Art, Portland, Maine; the Farnsworth Art Museum, Rockland, Maine; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the High Museum of Art, Atlanta; the North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh; the Art Institute of Chicago; the Minneapolis Institute of Art; and the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra. Her work was in the former collection of The Aldrich and was exhibited at the Museum in group exhibitions in 1973, 1974, 1985, and 1988. She is currently represented by David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles and New York. 

ALDRICH CONTEMPORARY ART MUSEUM

258 Main Street, Ridgefield, CT 06877

www.thealdrich.org

Loie Hollowell @ The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield - "Space Between, A survey of ten years" Exhibition

Loie Hollowell: Space Between, 

A survey of ten years

The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield 

January 21 - August 11, 2024

LOIE HOLLOWELL

Point of Entry (blue green mounds over yellow sky), 2017 

Courtesy of Carolina Zapf & John Josephson

The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum presents LOIE HOLLOWELL’s first museum survey and first museum presentation on the East Coast, which includes paintings and works on paper made over a decade, the debut of new pastel drawings and paintings that incorporate life casts of pregnant breasts and bellies, as well as never before exhibited works on paper from the artist’s archive.

Space Between tracks the development of Loie Hollowell’s visual language over ten years; a vocabulary that bridges abstraction with figuration, autobiography with art history, and biology with emotion. Orbiting two centuries of pioneering women artists that span generations and movements from Abstraction to Surrealism to 1960s Light and Space art, including Hilma af Klint, Agnes Pelton, Georgia O’Keeffe, and Judy Chicago, Loie Hollowell also cites Neo-Tantric painting as an important influence. Hollowell’s approach always begins with her own body as a guide to appraise seismic issues from sexual freedom to feminism, and reproductive rights and motherhood.

This survey’s focus considers time as material and theme. Loie Hollowell turns the body into a metaphorical clock, documenting extreme intervals of change through dramatic chiaroscuro, saturated color, and charged light. Her labor-intensive process begins with a pastel drawing. She makes notes in the margins indicating how to translate her vision into painting. Her sentient compositions are then built with geometric and biomorphic forms, evocative of bellies, breasts, vulva, and buttocks that abstract the physical and emotional transformations she experienced throughout conception, birth, and postpartum with her two children. 

Her paintings are endowed with dimensional relief, achieved by adhering CNC-milled high-density foam or cast-resin appendages to the surfaces to impersonate fleshy bulges and curves. These protrusions, which vary in depth, soften the works’ rigid two-dimensionality, and evade the line between painting and sculpture to confront the viewer with visceral beauty. She uses a palette that glows, throbs, and blazes, a luminescent progression of reds, blues, yellows, oranges, greens, pinks, and purples, that vaunt a mercurial tempo from tender to explosive. Applying a rigorous symmetry in reference to the human body, she choreographs the energies and emotions that come from the mental and physical with an emphasis on the birthing body; the epicenter of the universe, where the heavens connect with the earth.

The exhibition is accompanied by the artist’s first museum monograph, co-published by Gregory R. Miller & Co., featuring an essay by the curator Amy Smith-Stewart, Chief Curator.

LOIE HOLLOWELL was born in 1983 and raised in Woodland, California. She currently lives and works in New York City. She received a BFA at University of California Santa Barbara in 2005 and an MFA in painting from Virginia Commonwealth University in 2012. Her work has been exhibited at museums and galleries worldwide including Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti Shrem Museum of Art, University of California, Davis; Pace Gallery; Long Museum West Bund, Shanghai; Feuer/Mesler, New York; White Cube Gallery, Paris; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles; The Flag Art Foundation, New York; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas; Victoria Miro, London; and Ballroom Marfa, Texas. Her work is in public collections including the Albertina Museum, Vienna; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; ICA, Miami; Long Museum, Shanghai; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles; M+ Museum, Hong Kong; Stedjelijk Museum, Amsterdam; and Zentrum Paul Klee, Switzerland.

Loie Hollowell: Space Between, A Survey of Ten Years is curated by Amy Smith-Stewart, Chief Curator.

THE ALDRICH CONTEMPORARY ART MUSEUM 

258 Main Street Ridgefield, CT 06877 

www.thealdrich.org

Ping Zheng @ The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield - Where Memories of Travels

Ping Zheng: Where Memories of Travels 

The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield 

September 7, 2023 - January 7, 2024 

PING ZHENG  

The Moon Illusion, 2022 

Oil stick on paper

Private Collection 

© Ping Zheng

Courtesy of the Artist and 

The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum

The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum presents Ping Zheng: Where Memories of Travels Go, an installment of Aldrich Projects, a quarterly series that features one work or a focused body of work by a single artist on the Museum’s campus.

The project title describes Ping Zheng’s aim to be transported through her creative process in her pursuit of loftier dimensions. Her solitary journeying, initially a way to create refuge from an oppressive childhood in China, evolved into a means to evade the entrapments of our impersonal digital world. Ping Zheng takes inspiration from the varied and expansive landscapes she visited during the numerous artist residencies she has attended over the last decade throughout the United States, Europe, and China.

She also cites artists that orbit many centuries and geographies who too made work that merge their experiences of the natural world with a special blend of personalized spiritualism. Her sources are wide-ranging and span ancient Chinese landscape painting and twentieth and twenty-first century visionary abstractionists like Hilma af Klint, Agnes Pelton, Georgia O’Keeffe, Judy Chicago, Matthew Wong, Joseph E. Yoakum, and Takako Yamaguchi. Working exclusively in oil stick, Ping Zheng presses fingers to paper through intuitive systems of choreographed movements. She builds a distinctive and recurring lexicon of symbolic couplings that range from lighthearted rainbows and pulsating waterfalls, shadowy tree lines and glowing moonbeams, voluptuous mountains and rippling lakes, to cascading canyons and sunny orbs. The works are installed in a sequence that reflects the dramatic passage of light from daybreak to nightfall. Some works feature celestial objects and cosmic phenomena that underscore the unpredictable magic of our sizable planet.

Ping Zheng

Where Memories of Travels 

The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum 

This project is accompanied by a full-color eight-page ‘zine 

designed by the Museum’s Design Director Gretchen Kraus. 

PING ZHENG was born in 1989 in Zhejiang, China and lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. She received an MFA in Painting from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2016 and a BFA in Painting from the University College of London, Slade School of Fine Art in 2014. Her works are included in the collections of JP Morgan Chase Bank, Fidelity Investments Corporate Art Collection, the Cleveland Clinic Art Program, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.

Ping Zheng: Memories of Where Travels Go is curated by Amy Smith-Stewart, Chief Curator.

THE ALDRICH CONTEMPORARY ART MUSEUM

258 Main Street, Ridgefield, CT 06877

www.thealdrich.org

Prima Materia: The Periodic Table in Contemporary Art @ Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield

Prima Materia: 

The Periodic Table in Contemporary Art 

Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield 

Through August 27, 2023 

Matthew Barney 

Bayhorse, 2018 

Courtesy of the artist and Gladstone Gallery 

The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum presents Prima Materia: The Periodic Table in Contemporary Art, a group exhibition presenting significant and diverse works of art, which incorporate or reference thirty-five of the 118 elements on the periodic table by artists Matthew Barney, Edward Burtynsky, Rachel Berwick, Dove Bradshaw, Julian Charrière,Compound Interest, The Dufala Brothers, Ashley Epps*, Philp Grausman, Tom Lehrer, Bryan McGovern Wilson, Jeffrey Meris, Myra Mimlitsch-Gray, Cornelia Parker, Katie Paterson, Simon Patterson, Beverly Pepper, Winston Roeth*, Peter Selgin, Sunny A. Smith*, Edward Steed, Carlos Vega, Eleanor White*, and Robert Williams.

*Artists commissioned by The Aldrich to make new works for the exhibition.

While the basis of the exhibition is science, through expansive curatorial choices, the project will reveal the material basis for sociological, emotional, political, and even spiritual subject matter. Artists use specific materials for a reason, quite often for their metaphorical potential, and Prima Materia will explore hard facts as well as alchemical conjecture. A subtext that will be explored in the project is resource extraction, which will be incorporated through works that speak about the mining and refining industry and its legacy. As a society we are woefully unaware of the trail followed by common materials as they go from the earth into our hands, and the exhibition will give the viewer a greater appreciation of the material world, reveling in both the beauty and convoluted history of our understanding and manipulation of physical matter.

All art forms, even music and literature, are partially dependent on the material world. The visual arts, however, are more linked to materialism, as the field is primarily defined by objects. Even digital media is contingent on physical matter, whether it is the silicon that makes the microprocessor, or the lithium that is contained within a cell phone battery. Humans have speculated for thousands of years on how the world is comprised. “Prima materia” was a concept first put forth by Aristotle to describe the primitive, formless base for all matter. Plato later expanded on this in his treatise Timaeus, writing: “The body of the world is composed of four elementary constituents, earth, air, fire, and water, the whole available amount of which is used up in its composition.” The alchemists of both medieval Europe and those of the Islamic Middle East and North Africa were the first who began to doubt the primacy of the ancient four elements. Beginning in the Renaissance, their speculation led to the transition of the practice of Alchemy to Chemistry. Included in the “origins” section of the exhibition is Robert Williams’ installation Theatrum Chemicum Britannium – The Alchemist’s Shack. Based on the life of Eirenaeus Philalethes (Geroge Starkey), a practicing Colonial American alchemist who attended Harvard College in 1643, Philalethes’ work went on to influence European scientists such as Robert Boyle and Isaac Newton. The names given to the eras in human history—stone, bronze, iron, and now silicon—are indicative of how our understanding of matter has transformed culture.

Prima Materia: The Periodic Table in Contemporary Art is curated by independent curator and artist Richard Klein, The Aldrich’s former Exhibitions Director, and will be accompanied by a softcover catalogue featuring an essay by Klein.

THE ALDRICH CONTEMPORARY ART MUSEUM

258 Main Street, Ridgefield, CT 06877

www.thealdrich.org

05-02 / 27-08-2023

52 Artists: A Feminist Milestone @ Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield

52 Artists: A Feminist Milestone

Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield

June 6, 2022 - January 8, 2023

Tourmaline

Coral Hairstreak, 2020

Dye sublimation print, 29 ½” × 30”

Courtesy of the artist and Chapter NY, New York. 

Photo: Dario Lasagni. 

Erin M. Riley 

Webcam 2, 2020

Wool, cotton, 72” x 100”

Courtesy of the artist and P·P·O·W, New York. 

Stella Zhong

Every Other Chopped, 2021

81” x 68” x 65”, Epoxy putty, air dry clay, wire, grout, aqua resin, 

tint, sand, epoxy, paint, plaster, foam, wood, ball bearing 

Courtesy of the artist and Chapter NY, New York.

The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum presents 52 Artists: A Feminist Milestone. The exhibition celebrates the fifty-first anniversary of the historic exhibition Twenty Six Contemporary Women Artists, curated by Lucy R. Lippard and presented at The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in 1971. 52 Artists showcases work by the artists included in the original 1971 exhibition, alongside a new roster of twenty-six female identifying or nonbinary emerging artists that were born in or after 1980, tracking the evolution of feminist art practices over the past five decades. The new generation of artists included in the exhibition are:

Leilah Babirye (b. 1985)

Phoebe Berglund (b. 1980)

LaKela Brown (b. 1982)

Lea Cetera (b. 1983)

Susan Chen (b. 1992)

Pamela Council (b. 1986)

Lizania Cruz (b. 1983)

Florencia Escudero (b. 1987)

Alanna Fields (b. 1990)

Emilie L. Gossiaux (b. 1989)

Ilana Harris-Babou (b. 1991)

Loie Hollowell (b. 1983)

Maryam Hoseini (b. 1988)

Levy (b. 1991)

Amaryllis DeJesus Moleski (b. 1985)

Catalina Ouyang (b. 1993)

Anna Park (b. 1996)

Erin M. Riley (b. 1985)

LJ Roberts (b. 1980)

Aya Rodriguez-Izumi (b. 1986)

Aliza Shvarts (b. 1986)

Astrid Terrazas (b. 1996)

Tourmaline (b. 1983)

Rachel Eulena Williams (b. 1991)

Kiyan Williams (b. 1991)

Stella Zhong (b. 1993)

The new artists, who are all based in New York City, have not had a major solo museum exhibition in the United States as of March 1, 2022, aligning both with The Aldrich’s mission of representing the

work of emerging artists and with Lippard’s original mandate for the 1971 exhibition. 

“This group of 26 emerging artists reflect the revolutionary advancement of feminist art practices over half a century and exhibit a diversity of experiences and a multiplicity of sensibilities united by a twenty-first century feminist expression that is inclusive, expansive, elastic, and free,” said The Aldrich’s Senior Curator Amy Smith-Stewart, who curated the contemporary selection. 

52 Artists encompass the entirety of the Museum (approx. 8,000 sq. ft)—the first exhibition to do so since The Aldrich’s new building was inaugurated in 2004. The exhibition is organized by The Aldrich’s Senior Curator Amy Smith-Stewart and independent curator Alexandra Schwartz, with The Aldrich’s Curatorial Assistant Caitlin Monachino.

“52 Artists: A Feminist Milestone is one of our most ambitious exhibitions to date,” said Cybele Maylone, Executive Director of The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum. “Th exhibition charts the Museum’s commitment to emerging and underrepresented artists over time and offers an unparalleled opportunity for vital scholarship about the historic legacy of the 1971 exhibition. We are delighted to bring together this exceptional roster of artists for this timely and important show.”

On view at The Aldrich from April 18 to June 13, 1971, Twenty Six Contemporary Women Artists was organized by writer, art critic, activist, and curator Lucy R. Lippard, who viewed curating this landmark exhibition as an activist gesture. In its catalogue, she states: “I took on this show because I knew there were many women artists whose work was as good or better than that currently being shown, but who, because of the prevailingly discriminatory policies of most galleries and museums, can rarely get anyone to visit their studios or take them as seriously as their male counterparts.” With this exhibition, Lucy R. Lippard arguably founded feminist curatorial practice in the USA.

52 Artists surveys this landmark exhibition, including works of art from the original exhibition and recreations of some of the more ephemeral pieces, and, if neither are available, related works from the same period. The exhibition also includes recent works by many of the original artists, examining how their practices have evolved over the past fifty years. By showing the original group alongside emerging artists of today, the exhibition testifies both to the historic impact of Lucy R. Lippard’s milestone exhibition and the influence of the original twenty-six artists she presented at The Aldrich on a new generation of artists.

Merrill Wagner 

Untitled, 1969 

Courtesy of the artist and David Zwirner, New York 

Merrill Wagner 

Inlet, 2010 

Courtesy of the artist and David Zwirner, New York 

Lucy Lippard’s original 1971 exhibition at The Aldrich was one of the first institutional responses to the issue of women artists’ invisibility in museums and galleries. More specifically, the show offered a rejoinder to the protests by the Ad Hoc Women Artists Committee (founded by Poppy Johnson, Brenda Miller, Faith Ringgold, and Lucy Lippard) over the absence of women in the Whitney Museum of American Art’s 1970 Sculpture Annual. Twenty Six Contemporary Women Artists opened the floodgates to a host of other feminist exhibitions throughout the 1970s, signaling Lucy Lippard’s emergence as a visionary feminist curator and critic and marking the debut of many groundbreaking artists. 52 Artists not only celebrates this radical exhibition but underscores its ongoing influence on future generations of artists.

Howardena Pindell

Untitled, 1968–70 

Mott-Warsh Collection, Flint, Michigan

Photo credit: Robert Hensleigh and Tim Thayer 

Howardena Pindell 

Carnival: Bahia, Brazil, 2017 

Courtesy of the artist and Garth Greenan Gallery, New York

The artists whose work was presented in the original 1971 exhibition are as follows. All but three of the original twenty-six artists have work included in 52 Artists (*Starred artists are not participating):

Cecile Abish (b. 1926)

Alice Aycock (b. 1946)

Cynthia Carlson (b. 1942)

Sue Ann Childress* (b. 1947)

Glorianna Davenport* (b. 1944)

Susan Hall (b. 1943)

Mary Heilmann (b. 1940)

Audrey Hemenway (1930-2008)

Laurace James (b. 1936)

Mablen Jones (1943-2021)

Carol Kinne (1942-2016)

Christine Kozlov (1945-2005)

Brenda Miller (b. 1941)

Mary Miss (b. 1944)

Dona Nelson (b. 1947)

Louise Parks* (b. 1944)

Shirley Pettibone (1936-2011)

Howardena Pindell (b. 1943)

Adrian Piper (b. 1948)

Sylvia Plimack Mangold (b. 1938)

Reeva Potoff (b. 1941)

Paula Tavins (1936-2019)

Merrill Wagner (b. 1935)

Grace Bakst Wapner (b. 1934)

Jackie Winsor (b. 1941)

Barbara Zucker (b. 1940)

The original 1971 catalogue was designed by architect and scholar Susana Torre. A new, 180-page hardcover book designed by Gretchen Kraus, The Aldrich’s Design Director, and co-published with Gregory R. Miller & Co., accompanies the exhibition. This significant catalogue includes new essays by Lippard, Smith-Stewart, and Schwartz, as well as rare historical documentation of the original exhibition, images, installation views, and checklists from both the 1971 and 2022 shows.

52 Artists: A Feminist Milestone

Published by The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum

Essays by Lucy Lippard, Amy Smith-Stewart, and Alexandra Schwartz.

192 Pages, fully-illustrated, Hardcover

The exhibition is organized by The Aldrich’s Senior Curator Amy Smith-Stewart, who selected the emerging twenty-six artists, and independent curator Alexandra Schwartz, with The Aldrich’s Curatorial Assistant and Publications Manager Caitlin Monachino.

THE ALDRICH CONTEMPORARY ART MUSEUM

258 Main Street Ridgefield, CT 06877

www.thealdrich.org

Amaryllis DeJesus Moleski @ The Aldrich, Ridgefield - Portal Pieces

Amaryllis DeJesus Moleski 

Portal Pieces

The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield

January 6 - May 29, 2022

AMARYLLIS DEJESUS MOLESKI

Graduation Day, 2021

Courtesy of the artist

Amaryllis DeJesus Moleski: Portal Pieces is the third installment of Aldrich Projects, a single artist series that features a singular work or a focused body of work by an artist every four months on the Museum’s campus. Sited in the Leir Atrium, AMARYLLIS DEJESUS MOLESKI presents two large-scale works on paper, Graduation Day, 2021, and The Guardians, 2015. 

Amaryllis DeJesus Moleski’s practice is informed by her Puerto Rican American heritage and a peripatetic upbringing spent crisscrossing the US. Probing motifs of intersectionality, mythmaking, and queerness, she says her visual worldbuilding exploits the “spaces in-between categories” and honors “the trouble and pleasure [sited] there.”

Her expansive body of work spans drawings, video, sculpture, performance, and installation. Using fabled symbolism, Amaryllis DeJesus Moleski’s pantheon of black and brown femme goddesses, heroines, and crusaders adventure across time and space using magical powers to protect and prevail. Her inspirations span art history, popular culture, and higher realms, from comics, ancient cuneiform, Caribbean Surrealism, occult, and alchemical diagrams. 

Graduation Day is a monumental drawing and collage on paper that depicts an erupting rainbow inferno. Inside a triangular-shaped grotto, a figure levitates above a shadowy portal. Two spirit beings, one an iridescent blue and the other a fluorescent brown, hover over the reposing body. They each clutch the end of a wishbone, a symbol of untapped potential. A pink triangle blazes within the scene, snapping the wishbone and releasing a purple flame that burns and shimmers with beaming optimism.

The Guardians is a large gouache and tea drawing on paper. It portrays a pair of protectors brandishing bone swords in the company of a dark horse. Within a field of chamomile, they stand guard. Each is heavily adorned and tattooed with symbols of strength, abundance, nourishment, and passage.

These two works on paper are part of an ongoing mythology that spotlight marginalized histories and femme power. Invigorated by lived and imagined experience, Amaryllis DeJesus Moleski’s utopian storylines speak to struggle, redemption, repair, and reinvention. 

AMARYLLIS DEJESUS MOLESKI was born in 1985 in Bordeaux, France. She earned an MFA from the Yale School of Art in 2019 and a BFA from California College of the Arts in 2014. She is a current recipient of the Keyholder Residency at Lower East Side Printshop, a 2021 Creative Capital Awardee, and was a 2019 Kindle Project Makers Muse Award recipient. Her work has been exhibited both nationally and internationally including the Brooklyn Museum, El Museo Del Barrio, Cue Art Foundation, MoCADA, SOMArts, New York University, Luce Gallery, Weatherspoon Art Museum, among others. Amaryllis DeJesus Moleski will be featured in the Museum’s forthcoming exhibition, 52 Artists: A Feminist Milestone, opening in June 2022. She lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. 

Amaryllis DeJesus Moleski: Portal Pieces is curated by Senior Curator Amy Smith-Stewart.

THE ALDRICH CONTEMPORARY ART MUSEUM

258 Main Street, Ridgefield, CT 06877

thealdrich.org

Frank Stella @ The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield - Frank Stella's Stars, A Survey

Frank Stella's Stars, A Survey

The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield

Through May 9, 2021

Spanning more than sixty years, Frank Stella’s studio practice has pushed abstraction to the limits, investigating every category from painting and printmaking to sculpture and public art. Among the myriad of forms found in Stella’s work, one element continuously reappears, a motif that is simultaneously abstract and figurative: the star. Immediately identifiable, the star stands out amidst the tangle of abstract, invented forms the artist has explored over his long career. Under the spotlight for the first time, this exhibition surveys Frank Stella’s use of the star, ranging from two-dimensional works of the 1960s to its most recent incarnation in sculptures, wall reliefs, and painted objects from the 2010s.

Frank Stella’s use of the star form emerged during his first decade in New York as he was exhibiting his groundbreaking striped and shaped paintings. It then vanished and resurfaced many decades later at a moment when he committed himself to three-dimensional abstraction. Today, the star is the lead in scores of works from small objects to towering sculptures. Scaled to the table or the open air, Frank Stella’s star works transport us—we imagine how disparate elements shift, how parts are assembled, how paint is applied. The works parade an outsized material resourcefulness that collapses analogue and twenty-first century fabrication techniques: RPT (rapid prototype technology) plastics, teak, aluminum, stainless steel, birch plywood, fiberglass, carbon fiber, and more. With their automotive neon hues, shimmering and natural finishes, the stars, big and small, flex and project a spatial dynamism that intimates a potential maneuverability—as if they were built to perform.

At The Aldrich, Frank Stella’s star works are on view outdoors throughout the Museum’s grounds and inside the galleries. Outside, large-scale sculptures are sited from Ridgefield’s historic Main Street, the Museum’s semi-enclosed interior courtyard, and two-acre Sculpture Garden. Inside, the exhibition occupy the entire ground floor including the Museum’s Project Space where the largest sculpture in the exhibition, Fat 12 Point Carbon Fiber Star (2016), challenges the room’s perimeter with its twelve puffed up rays stretching twenty-one feet in all directions. The star is characterized in this survey as a breakthrough element. From a simple, planar shape to an ornamented spatial object, its manifestation reveals stylistic continuity amidst decisive variation.

The Museum’s founder Larry Aldrich showed early interest in Frank Stella’s work and exhibited Tetuan (1963) one year after he founded The Aldrich. Additionally, the Larry Aldrich Foundation Fund, established in 1959, supported the Museum of Modern Art in purchasing Stella’s painting The Marriage of Reason and Squalor, II—the first work by the artist to enter their collection. Since the Museum’s founding in 1964, Frank Stella’s work has been included in fifteen group exhibitions.

Frank Stella (b. 1936, Malden, MA) has created an exceptional body of work over his six-decade career. Spanning painting, sculpture, and printmaking, his work is held in more than fifty public collections including the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, and the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC. Frank Stella currently lives and works in New York.

The exhibition is accompanied by a full-color 200-page hardbound catalogue, featuring essays by the exhibition’s curators Richard Klein and Amy Smith-Stewart.

FRANK STELLA'S STARS, A SURVEY

200 Pages, fully-illustrated

Hardcover, ISBN: 978-1-941366-29-5

Published by The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum 

and Gregory R. Miller & Co.

Essays by Richard Klein and Amy Smith-Stewart 

Design: Gretchen Kraus

Production Coordinator: Caitlin Monachino

Copy Editor: Mary Cason

Curated by Richard Klein, Exhibitions Director, and Amy Smith-Stewart, Senior Curator at The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum.

THE ALDRICH CONTEMPORARY ART MUSEUM

258 Main Street, Ridgefield, CT 06877

www.aldrichart.org

History of The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum

History of The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum 

In 1964, Larry Aldrich (1906-2001), fashion designer and passionate collector of contemporary art, purchased the historic “Old Hundred” at the top of Main Street in Ridgefield, Connecticut, to hold his growing collection of art. Originally constructed in 1783 by Joshua King and James Dole, two lieutenants in the Revolutionary War, the building was nicknamed “Old Hundred” because it served as a grocery and hardware store from 1783-1883. It was also Ridgefield’s first post office.

In 1883, Grace King Ingersoll, a descendant of Lieutenant King, remodeled the building and it became her home. From 1929-1964, it served as Ridgefield’s First Church of Christ, Scientist. Mr. Aldrich purchased the eighteenth-century structure because of its high-ceiling rooms and the extensive backyard that would be suitable for the year-round sculpture garden he envisioned.

The Larry Aldrich Museum opened in November 1964 as one of the country’s first museums devoted exclusively to the exhibition of contemporary art. In 1967, the Museum was incorporated as a nonprofit organization and was renamed The Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, with an original Board of Trustees that included Alfred Barr, Joseph Hirshhorn, Philip Johnson and Vera List. To better focus on its founding mission to exhibit only contemporary art, the Museum’s Board voted in 1981 to deaccession Mr. Aldrich’s permanent collection.

Foremost in Mr. Aldrich’s vision was that the Museum should make contemporary art accessible to a variety of audiences. Over the course of its forty-year history, it has become renowned as a national leader for its presentation of outstanding new art, the cultivation of emerging artists, and its innovation in museum education.

In 2001, The Aldrich Board of Trustees, with Larry Aldrich, chairman emeritus, in attendance, voted to proceed with a major renovation and expansion. Groundbreaking took place in April 2003, and the Museum was closed to the public until its reopening in June 2004. The grand reopening of the expanded Aldrich coincides with the Museum’s fortieth anniversary.

The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum continues to champion its original mission: to take risks that distinguished the life of its founder, Larry Aldrich, to exhibit provocative and significant contemporary art, and to offer innovative educational programs that now serve as national models in museum education.

THE ALDRICH CONTEMPORARY ART MUSEUM

258 Main Street, Ridgefield, CT

www.aldrichart.org