SHFAP/ Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects presents CHURCH KAMINSTEIN ROSEN, an exhibition of three artists, Amanda Church, Beth Kaminstein and Stanley Rosen, who met at Bennington College in the early 1970s. Stanley Rosen was Beth Kaminstein’s ceramic teacher at Bennington, where Amanda Church was studying painting.  Church and Kaminstein went on to share a basement studio in the East Village from the late seventies into the eighties, where the affinities between their work began to take root.

Amanda Church studied painting at both Bennington College and The New York Studio School in the seventies. Her Pop-oriented paintings mix abstraction and representation to varying degrees while consistently referencing the body in landscape through shifting perspectives and erotically tinged dispositions. Her work was recently included in Long Island Painters: A Survey 1880s to the Present, MM Fine Art, Southampton, NY. She received a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship in 2015 and Pollock-Krasner and New York Foundation for the Arts grants in 2017. In 2019 she will have a solo show at High Noon Gallery.

Beth Kaminstein has lived and worked in the Florida Keys since the late 80s. Her ceramic sculpture, with its resonant color and seductive configurations, evinces a transformative response to her ocean side environment. Her clay works were juxtaposed with Helen Frankenthaler’s prints, at Cross MacKenzie Gallery in Washington, D.C. in 2013. In reviewing a group show at SHFAP, New York Times critic, Roberta Smith noted Kaminstein’s “beautiful ceramics,” relating them to Color Field painting.

Stanley Rosen, now 92, taught ceramics at Bennington College from 1960-1991.  Throughout his teaching career, Rosen refrained from exhibiting his work, focusing his energy on his students.  Within the last three years, Rosen’s work has come into public view with exhibitions at MAD (New York’s Museum of Art and Design) and a solo show originated by the Bennington Museum, which traveled to the Alfred Ceramic Art Museum. His first recent solo gallery exhibition took at place at SHFAP in 2017. This summer Rosen’s work was seen at Peter Blum Gallery and will be included in a two-person show at Thomas Erben Gallery in April 2019.  SHFAP will present a solo installation of Rosen’s work at the NADA Fair in Miami, December 6-9, 2018.  Rosen’s sculpture reflects a multi-cultural esthetic. Within its intimate scale, and hand built ceramic technique, it evokes a host of architectural associations. Here he is showing a group of drawings from the 1960s that reveal another aspect of his rendering process.

The three artists relationships are like a chain letter of work and friendship. They share an open-ended, suggestive conception of the possibilities for abstraction.