Judy Black Memorial Park and Gardens at One Green Hill
Washington Depot, CT
Hours: Saturday & Sunday 12-6 pm

Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects presents Painting in the Garden, the first art exhibition in the new Judy Black Memorial Park and Gardens at One Green Hill in Washington Depot, CT. The exhibition includes the work of twelve contemporary painters several of whom are connected to Washington Depot. The exhibition has been organized by Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects. It includes both representational and abstract work creating a conversation about the nature of painting and representation. Artists include Gideon Bok, Meghan Brady, Susanna Coffey, Andrew Forge, Margaret Grimes, Alison Hall, Ruth Miller, Matt Phillips, Stephanie Pierce, Giordanne Salley, E.M. Saniga and Stuart Shils.

There will be an opening for the public on July 2 from 4- 6 pm. There will also be a panel discussion for the public on July 9th at 4 pm entitled, Opposites Attract: abstraction and representation in conversation, with Meghan Brady, Susanna Coffey, Margaret Grimes, Alison Hall, Ruth Miller and moderator/art historian Jennifer Samet, PhD.

Gideon Bok paints his studio—the people, records, instruments, machines, and ephemera that float through it. Painted from life, over a course of months and sometimes years, the figures and objects dissolve and hint at what was. Bok received his BA from Hampshire College and MFA from Yale University in 1996. 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 and was included the 2015 Portland Museum Biennial.

Meghan Brady is an abstract colorist. Her geometric shapes move with painterly gesture and seem to be improvised as she works across the canvas. Everything is fresh and immediate. Brady received her BA from Smith College in 1998 and her MFA from Boston University in 2002. She recently curated an exhibition at Able Baker Contemporary in Portland, Maine. In 2015, she was the subject of an exhibition at Icon Contemporary in Brunswick, Maine and was included Portland Museum Biennial. In 2016, Brady and husband, Gideon Bok were exhibited at Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects in a two-person show entitled, Colors and the Kids.

Susanna Coffey is best known for her meticulously observed and exquisitely painted self-portraits. Sometimes she is in costume, within landscapes, or within her studio. She has also created a series of night paintings-nocturnal landscape of subjects from Europe to Alaska. She is the F.H. Sellers Professor in Painting at The School of The Art Institute of Chicago. She received her BFA in1977 at the University of CT, Storrs and her MFA in 1982 from Yale School of Art. Coffey’s work has been exhibited in The Weatherspoon Art Museum, The Aldrich Museum, The Hood Museum, The National Portrait Gallery, The American Academy of Arts and Letters among other institutions. Her work is included in the collections of The Yale University Art Gallery, The Art institute of Chicago, and the Minneapolis Museum of Art, among others. She received The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship in 1996. Susanna Coffey lives and works in New York City.

Andrew Forge (1923-2002) was a painter, teacher, and art critic. He was born in Kent, England and moved to the United States in the ‘70s where he exhibited through his death in 2002. He was a long time teacher at Yale University and a resident of Washington Depot, Ct. His paintings hover on the cusp between landscape and pointillist abstraction. His work is included in the collections of Corcoran Gallery of Art, Yale University, Tate Gallery, and the Arts Council of Great Britain. He was the recipient of many awards including a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship and The American Academy of Arts and Letters Painting Prize.

Margaret Grimes, a resident of Washington, CT, is a painter of the woods—tapestries of enamel-like foliage are densely woven together. She is a Distinguished Professor Emerita from Western Connecticut State University where she founded and directed the MFA program from 2000 – 2012. Grimes’ paintings have been exhibited at the National Academy of Design, the Philbrook Museum, the Queens Museum, the Ringling Museum, the Wilmington Center for Contemporary Art and the Provincetown Art Association. Her work has been reviewed in national and regional publications including Art in America, The Boston Globe, and Art New England. She is the recipient of the Benjamin Altman Prize from the National Academy of Design.

Alison Hall’s paintings are minimalist abstractions inspired by her love and study of the decorative elements of early Italian Renaissance painting. She received her MFA in Painting and Drawing from American University in Washington, DC. Her work has been included in solo and group exhibitions at Clement & Schneider, Bonn, Germany, The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, VA, and The Taubman Museum of Art, Roanoke, VA. Hall will execute a large-scale wall drawing at ROM HOF in Bonn, Germany this August. Her work has been discussed in ArtCritical and The New York Times, among others. Grants include The Virginia Museum of Fine Art Fellowship in Drawing as well as the Bethesda Painting Award.

Ruth Miller primarily paints still lifes and landscapes, with a timeless meditative atmosphere and painterly fluency. She first studied art at the University of Missouri and then at the Art Student’s League when she moved to NYC in the early 50s, where she had a studio on 10th Street when it was a center for New York school painting. After raising a family in the 60s in Pennsylvania, she moved back to NYC in 1972 and began to teach at the New York Studio School where she taught for many yeas. In 1974 she married painter/scholar Andrew Forge, and moved to New Haven. She has also taught at Queens College, The University of Hartford, Yale Norfolk and the MFA program of Parsons School of Design. Her work is included in the collections of The Delaware Art Museum, The Corcoran Gallery and The National Academy Museum. She is a long term resident of Washington Depot.

Matt Phillips is a color abstract painter based in Red Hook, Brooklyn. His paintings often begin with an underlying geometric scaffolding but over time, they drift from the measured to articulate particular forms, tune color relationships, and define space. Phillips was an assistant professor at Mount Holyoke College and Hampshire College. He is a founding member of TSA (Tiger Strikes Asteroid) gallery in Bushwick. In the fall of 2014, the University of Maine Museum of Art presented a survey show of Phillips’ paintings entitled Staring at the Sun with a Penny in My Pocket. In 2015, Phillips installed a mosaic commission, realized with Steven Miotto, at PS106 in the Bronx. Phillips was a resident at the MacDowell Colony in February.

Stephanie Pierce’s observation-based paintings explore interrelationships between light, time, and sound, as well as perception and how reality can be represented as it is reconsidered over time. Pierce received an MFA from University of Washington, Seattle, BFA from The Art Institute of Boston, and she attended the Yale Norfolk Summer School of Art. She has shown nationally and is represented by Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects in NY. Stephanie received a Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters and Sculptors Grant in 2014 and an Arkansas Arts Council Individual Artist Fellowship in 2012.

Giordanne Salley’s paintings explore the intersection of love and nature. With sensitively textured surfaces she creates close-ups of the memories of running through the woods, skinny-dipping, and being in love. Salley received her MFA from Boston University in 2013. She had a solo show at The Vermont Studio Center in 2011. Her first solo show in New York City was at Steven Harvey Fine Art Project’s Projector Space in 2015. The New York Times critic, Roberta Smith singled Salley out as an artist to look out for.

E.M. Saniga paints from observation and memory, creating a model of reality at once naturalistic and mysterious, analytical and poetic. His motifs are traditional yet paradoxically unfamiliar. His paintings carry a sensitivity to the beauty of death and decay. Saniga 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. He endows a residency program called the Charles and Lois Carlson Landscape Painting Prize awarded to a Pennsylvania Academy student. His work was exhibited at The Lancaster Museum of Art in 2012.

Stuart Shils is a Philadelphia based painter and photographer whose practice originates in the tradition of plein air landscape painting. His increasingly abstract recent work expands the idea of perceptual painting to focus on color sensations about place and sense memory. These continue to display his exquisite painterly touch in both monotypes and oil paintings and his sensitive eye to architectural abandon in his recent photographs. In 2014 Shils first book of photographs, because I have no interest in these questions… was published. Shils will exhibit new photographic works here.

Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects is grateful to The Washington Park Foundation and The Judy Black Memorial Park and Gardens at One Green Hill for making this exhibition possible in the center of Washington Depot. For nearly 10 years, the former Texaco gas station on the site in the center of Washington Depot sat vacant until a group of generous Washington residents and business owners purchased the property. Judy Black’s contribution was instrumental to turning the abandoned Texaco station into The Judy Black Memorial Park and Gardens at One Green Hill. Black had said of the space, “The gardens are designed to invite all to step away from worry and stress, offering people a place to dream, be inspired and experience the continually unfolding wonders of nature. The gardens will be a gathering place to meet friends, to visit with neighbors and a place for children to play and explore.”

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