The Light of Interiors

Jean Blackburn Gideon Bok Anne Harvey June Leaf Susan Lichtman Sangram Majumdar Michele Mirisola Stephanie Pierce Eleanor Ray Giordanne Salley E.M. Saniga Katy Schneider Jason Stopa Bob Thompson Opening: Wed, July 19, 6-8 pm Summer hours: Tue - Sat, 12-6:00PM & by appt. July 19 - August 26, 2017

Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects presents our summer group exhibition, The Light of Interiors (after a poem by Kay Ryan). Included are works by Jean Blackburn, Gideon Bok, Anne Harvey, June Leaf, Susan Lichtman, Sangram Majumdar, Michele Mirisola, Stephanie Pierce, Eleanor Ray, Giordanne Salley, E.M. Saniga, Katy Schneider, Jason Stopa and Bob Thompson. The chosen pieces tackle the light that animates the objects of a home—that makes things glow or disappear, lending importance, weight, presence, and absence. These separate works are scattered portions of a domestic scene. Shown together, they create a home—the bed, the pillows and sheets, the basement, the cords tangled on the floor, the fireplace, the dining table, a collection of things.

Jean Blackburn dissects and rearranges furniture into sculpture. Ken Johnson once referred to it as a “tour de force of constructivist improvisation.” She has been a professor at RISD since 1982. She received her MFA from Yale University. She has had solo shows at Purchase College, McDough Museum of Art, and Pierogi.

Gideon Bok makes painterly recordings of the details of his studio. His work is intimately entwined with music through the instruments and record albums that appear in his paintings. He received his MFA from Yale University. He is a recipient of a 2004 Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship, and a Purchase Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 2005, his work was surveyed in an exhibition at the Center for Maine Contemporary Art. He has had four solo/two-person exhibitions at Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects.

Writing about Anne Harvey (1916-1967), John Ashbury commented on “the probing anguish of an almost James-ian dissecting eye” in her work. She was born in Chicago and raised in Paris. Her early mentor was Constantin Brancusi. Her work was purchased by Giacommeti and Calder. She was included in both of Peggy Guggenheim’s exhibitions of women artists. She had a memorial show at the Robert Scholkopf Gallery in New York in 1971. Her first one-person show in forty years was held at Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects in May.

June Leaf’s paintings, drawings, and sculptures invent an extreme and personal vision of the human figure. She approaches her figures almost like a Wright brother working in a garage. She was born in Chicago in 1929 where she studied at the New Bauhaus Institute of Design and at Roosevelt University in 1954. She had her first solo exhibition at Sam Bordelon Gallery in Chicago in 1948 and has lived in New York City since the early 60’s. She splits her time between Manhattan and Nova Scotia. She is included in numerous museum collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, The Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Art Institute of Chicago. In 2015, she had concurrent solo shows at Edward Thorp Gallery and Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects. In 2016, she had a solo show at The Whitney Museum of American Art.

Susan Lichtman creates contemporary intimist paintings of her home and family which possess a quality of being fictions painted from memory. She has been an Associate Professor of Painting at Brandeis University since 1989. Her recent shows include: List Gallery, Swarthmore College, Swarthmore, PA, Smith College, Northampton, MA, and The Bannister Gallery at Rhode Island College. Lichtman had a solo show this spring at the Eleanor D Wilson Museum at Hollins University. She had her first New York City one-person show of paintings at Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects in June.

Sangram Majumdar extends the vocabulary of working from life. He received his BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design, and his MFA from Indiana University. His work is currently the subject of his first solo museum exhibition at the Asia Society Texas Center, TX. He will have a solo exhibition at Barbara Davis Gallery in September 2017. His work was included in the 2010 Invitational Exhibition of Visual Arts at the American Academy of Arts and Letters and has had three solo shows at Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects.

Michele Mirisola poeticizes the politics of the bedroom and the studio while re-examining its minutia. She received her BA from Hampshire College. She has had solo shows at KMR Arts in Washington, CT, and Beefhaus Gallery in Dallas, TX. Her work has been included in group shows at TSA Gallery, David & Schweitzer Contemporary, Children’s Museum of Art (NY), and Apt. 38. This is her second group show at Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects.

Stephanie Pierce fixes on windows and the world beyond them, which she paints with a stuttering, slow scan. She received an MFA from University of Washington, Seattle where she studied with Ann Gale. Her work has been published in the New Yorker. She received a Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters and Sculptors Grant in 2014 and an Arkansas Arts Council Individual Artist Fellowship in 2012 and is included in the collections of The Museum of Fine Arts Boston, and the Boston Public Library.

Eleanor Ray’s painting are small scale meditations on the nature of art and architecture. She received her MFA from the New York Studio School. Her first exhibition at SHFAP was included by Jerry Saltz in his list of the Ten Best Art Shows of 2013. In 2015, Ray was included in the annual Invitational Exhibition of Visual Arts at the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She received their museum purchase prize and her work was subsequently included in the Exhibition of Work by Newly Elected Members and Recipients of Honors and Awards. Ray received a New York Foundation for the Arts fellowships for painting in 2015. Recently she has been working in residencies in the American West and Europe. She has had three solo shows at Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects.

Giordanne Salley paints quirky romantic paintings of nature and young love. She received her MFA in painting from Boston University in 2013. She was singled out by Roberta Smith in The New York Times, as a young artist to look out for. She had a solo show at The Vermont Studio Center in 2011. She was included in Intimisms a show curated Aliza Nisenbaum at James Cohan Gallery in Chelsea. Her first solo show in New York City was at Steven Harvey Fine Art Project’s Projector Space in 2015.

E.M. Saniga paints mordant still lifes of unusual objects along with landscapes and figures. He studied with Seymour Remenick at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts and privately under Bruce Kurland. He is both a painter and a distinguished Professor of Information Technology at the University of Delaware. His work was exhibited at The Lancaster Museum of Art in 2012. He has exhibited four times at Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects.

Katy Schneider is a painter, illustrator and musician. She received her BA at Yale University, completed the Skowhegan program in painting and sculpture, and received her MFA from Indiana University. She is the recipient of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship and teaches at Smith College. Recent solo exhibitions this year include shows at Hidelll Brooks Gallery in Charlotte, NC, and the Eli Marsh Gallery at Amherst College. Her work is in the permanent collection of the Smith College Museum of Art, the New Britton Museum and the Museum at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art. Her work has been reviewed in The New York Times Book Review, and The New Yorker. She has illustrated three children’s books including “Once I Ate a Pie” which won the Bank Street Award.

Jason Stopa emerged from a school of Brooklyn painting with a mix of painterly pop and abstraction. His new work exudes a Matisse-ian all over decorative richness. He received his MFA from Pratt Institute. He is a contributing writer to Art in America, The Brooklyn Rail, and Whitewall Magazine. This summer, he was part of shows in Texas and France. This is his first time showing at Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects.

Bob Thompson (1937-1966) came from Louisville, Kentucky to Provincetown and New York, in 1958. In his brief career he made a remarkably full body of work, utilizing compositions from old masters, painted in radiant new jewel-like colors. Working in the cultural nexus of New York City in the early 60’s, among artists such as Nina Simone, Ornette Coleman and Charlie Haden, Thompson showed at the Martha Jackson Gallery before moving to Ibiza and Rome where he died in 1966. He was the subject of a major survey at The Whitney Museum of American Art in 1997.

Please contact the gallery at 917-861-7312 or info@shfap.com for further information or photographs.