Mary Frank has been making art for more than six decades. Her exploration of wood, plaster, wax, clay, monotype, ink, cut out paper, paint, and photography has yielded a rich body of work. She sculpts, draws, paints, prints or cuts out of paper archetypal figures that raise their arms, crouch, leap, recline, stride purposefully, or clutch their breasts, as well as spectral robed figures, animals, plants, and architectural fragments.
“Winslow Homer: The Nature and Rhythm of Life” on view at Cooperstown’s Fenimore Art Museum through August 24, displays a small but comprehensive collection of paintings shown in its entirety for the first time. On loan from the Arkell Museum, which is located in Canajoharie and was established by Bartlett Arkell, founder of the Beech-Nut Company, the show, which also includes two other Homer works, one from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, enables the viewer to take in the range of Homer’s work within the space of a single room.
Artist Judy Pfaff has won numerous awards, among them a MacArthur Fellowship, and now, 10 years after the MacArthur, she has yet another feather to put in her cap: the International Sculpture Center’s 2014 Lifetime Achievement Award. Pfaff, a longtime professor of the arts at Bard and co-director of the college’s Studio Arts Program, has the added pleasure of sharing the honor with her close friend and fellow sculptor Ursula von Rydingsvard, who also is being recognized by the ISC (stay tuned for an upcoming article about von Rydingsvard).
Georgia O’Keeffe is most commonly associated with stark, mystical, and deeply sensual paintings of New Mexican hills, mesas, adobe walls and crosses, simplified and abstracted into a symbolist language, along with its skulls and bones, often floating in an exultant, spiritually charged space.