press release september 2011
(< Return to Press Releases)CSMA's Mohr Gallery Presents Glacier Works: Paintings & Prints by Sukey Bryan
Opening reception with artist on Friday, October 21, 6-8 pm
The Community School of Music and Arts (CSMA) at Finn Center in Mountain View presents Glacier Works: Paintings and Prints by Sukey Bryan. The exhibition will be in CSMA’s Mohr Gallery from October 14-November 27, 2011, with an opening reception with the artist on Friday, October 21, 6-8 pm.
The exhibition will feature large oil paintings and monotype prints from glacier environments, including ice cliffs, icebergs, icemelt and waterfalls. These pieces were created in the artist’s studio from a distillation of memory, notes, photographs, and sketches from materials gathered as artist-in-residence in Denali National Park and Preserve and from Prince William Sound in Alaska. This selective program allowed the artist to live and work in an isolated cabin in the middle of the wilderness of the park. The transformative experience of working within a landscape of such boundless scale is the inspiration for this work which celebrates the beauty, power, and delicacy of glacier ice: intersection of water and climate.
Bryan works with images that explore the interaction and transformation of natural elements propelled by tidal, climatic, volcanic and tectonic forces. “I am interested in nature's contradictory delicacy and power, the phases of existence and the various ways the promise of life is fulfilled,” says Bryan. “The simultaneously regenerative and destructive cycles of nature evoke awe and exultation in their beauty and the suggestion of causality and order within chaotic and complex systems.”
Bryan is a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship recipient and has exhibited nationally in galleries, non-profit spaces, colleges and museums. Her work is held in many local collections. Bryan has an MFA from the Maryland Institute and a BA (Fine Arts and English) from Yale University. Bryan’s professional experience also includes teaching and being co-director of a school-wide, bi-weekly art program at Lucille M. Nixon Elementary School in Palo Alto.
The Community School of Music and Arts (CSMA) at Finn Center is committed to providing Arts for All, regardless of age, level, background or economic means. The non-profit, founded in 1968, reaches 40,000+ people annually providing classes, lessons, camps, in-school programs (Art4Schools, Music4Schools), concerts, exhibitions, lectures and free community events. In Jan 2004, CSMA opened Finn Center, Silicon Valley’s first-ever center for music and arts education and the school’s first permanent home since its founding in 1968. CSMA is among the top 10 schools of its kind in the US and the largest non-profit provider of arts education in the region.