Greenhut Co-Owners and Co-Directors John Danos and Kelley Lehr are excited to announce the opening of our new venture, Cove Street Arts in Portland. The focus of this multi-media space will be a celebration of Maine’s storied and out-sized place in American Art History, with a mission of promoting contemporary Maine art, contributing to the Maine arts economy, and engaging meaningfully with in the vibrant and growing East Bayside community by offering workshops and art-centered educational opportunities. Our 8,000 square foot exhibition space will be dedicated to showing the incredible breadth and depth of fine art being made in this state and demonstrating how Maine remains a buzzing locus of creative energy – and how vibrant and vital Maine’s art scene continues to be. The space includes multiple galleries and showrooms, a bookstore/small works gallery, event and workshop space, and a full-size, retractable movie screen for video art installations and film screenings. In recognition of the current paucity of affordable studio space in Portland, Cove Street Arts also features two artist studios in which residencies will be offered on an invitational basis.
Our three inaugural gallery exhibitions are:
Photographing Coastal Maine — an excellent photography exhibition curated by former CMCA and PhoPa curator, Bruce Brown, who we are honored and delighted to announce will be working with us on an ongoing basis. The current show features multiple works by each of 10 invited photographers, who hail from Kittery to the Canadian border and all points in between. Though the work included is organized around a central theme, this exhibition boasts a great diversity of style, process, and subject matter and includes both well-established and up-and-coming photographers. Participants are: Jeremy Barnard, Jennifer Steen Booher, Caleb Charland, Gifford Ewing, Carol Fonde, Tim Greenway, Carl Austin Hyatt, Peter Ralston, Celeste Roberge, and Ni Rong.
Lucile Evans: A Retrospective — Lucile Evans (1894-1993) was a fearless, emotionally complex, and extremely talented painter and printmaker who achieved an impressive career despite the marginalization and constraints faced by female artists of her generation. Evans began her career in California. She participated in the 1939 San Francisco World’s Fair, and, in 1940, she exhibited in a group show at the Stendahl Gallery in Los Angeles that traveled to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. While living in California in the 1940’s, she was featured in a group show at the Pasadena Museum of Art alongside such luminaries as Paul Klee, Raoul Dufy, Maurice de Vlaminck and Fernand Léger, and she also participated in three group exhibitions at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. After relocating to the East Coast (first New York and then D.C.) Evans’s star continued to rise. She exhibited extensively in solo and group shows in major institutions and galleries, including the Corcoran Gallery (with her work winning awards in three exhibitions there), the National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC, the Baltimore Museum of Art and the Art Institute of Chicago. (We were delighted, but not surprised, to learn that Greenhut’s own David Driskell curated Ms. Evans into two of these group exhibitions!) Evans’s work is in the permanent collections of Howard University Art Gallery, the National Collection of Fine Arts, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC. the Phillips Collection, Washington, DC, and the Superior Court of the District of Columbia, among other important museum and public collections.
This retrospective was carefully curated to include paintings, etchings and prints that demonstrate the artist’s fascinating evolution of style from the 1930’s through the 1970’s. Included are 2 award winning lithographs and 6 works with museum provenance. Kelley and John would like to express our gratitude to the Evans family and estate representative Laurie Perzley for this exciting collaboration — for giving us the opportunity to shine a long-overdue light on an underappreciated female artist’s legacy, and to proudly claim this impressive artist, who spent the last five years of her life in Wells, for Maine.
The Sartorial Self — a fun, fabulous, and thought-provoking meditation on the role fashion plays in shaping and expressing identity. This exhibition features bold 1970’s and 1980’s watercolors and wooden constructions by Greenhut artist Fred Lynch alongside Lesia Sochor’s translucent images of women’s garments and mannequins, painted on found sewing patterns, and Crystal Crawley’s 2- and 3-dimensional works inspired by the artist’s interests in the form and history of clothing and the possibilities of paper and fabric sculpture with traditional handiwork. The show also features an authenticated 1950’s Andy Warhol illustration for Capezio Shoes, and Gin Stone’s magnificent and ultra haute cat goddess, Bast, who, like her runway worthy gown, is made from reclaimed North Atlantic fishing gear.
And we’ve filled the non-gallery exhibition space and the small works gallery with stunning work by John Bisbee (sculpture), Tim Christensen (porcelain), Michel Droge (paintings, graphites), Tom Hall (paintings), Sean Alonzo Harris (photographs), Bernard Langlais (wooden construction), Tom Paiement (mixed media), Stephen Porter (sculpture), DM Whitman (gum bichromate, mixed media), and our first ever Cove Street Artist-in-Residence, Greenhut artist George Lloyd (paintings).
Categories: Announcement, exhibitions, general announcements, openings, Portland, shows
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