Featuring Heidi Fowler, Katherine Cox, Joe Karlik, Zemma Mastin White, Julia Clift, Blake Conroy, Jacqui Crocetta, Simma Liebman, Grace Mitchell, and Kathryn O’Grady.
Summer at MassoniArt is a celebration of new work by gallery artists. Virtually all the work featured deals with the challenges of climate change and our connection to the natural world.
This show will be on view at MassoniArt Gallery, 113 South Cross Street, Chestertown, MD, from July 15 – August 15, 2025.
Grace Mitchell ‘s attached essay contends that “contemporary artists rapple with this situation in different ways. Leading some to conclude that simply “bearing witness” is probably the best bet. Bearing witness involves simply observing, documenting, comprehending, and even adapting to the situation at hand.”
Katherine Cox’s graphite drawing “In the Wind Last Night” captures the delicacy of wind through trees, while “The Sea Within” overwhelms with the sheer power of water. Heidi Fowler committed to using recycled materials in her work over twenty years ago and her new body of work depicts her meditations on the 23rd Psalm. “Through the Valley, Still” references her ongoing journey “through the valley” with materials ranging from security envelopes as the substrate and painted designs inspired by garments fashioned by the wives and grandmothers of Japanese fisherman, sailors, and firemen for their loved ones.
Newcomer to the gallery, Julia Clift, incorporates her residency in the Shenandoah region to reflect on our separation from nature via ICT devices in her large scale oil paintings. Using metal as his medium Blake Conroy captures the intricacy of the briar patch and crabapple branches in
his multi-layered hand cut and etched copper and brass reliefs. While Kathryn O’Grady’s oil on board landscapes drawn from sojourns in her backyard are fierce explosions of color and texture. The abstract repeated patterns and confetti colors of Zemma Mastin White’s “Cherry Blossoms” signal the joy of spring and Simma Liebman’s collaged landscapes of winter trees created from multiple photograph images on transparencies mounted on canvas overlayed with oil and wax all ask us to bear witness to inherent strength and complexity of creation.
Grace Mitchell’s landscape paintings have long sought to be harbingers of the challenges facing our planet due to man-made climate change. Her new paintings continue to depict the damaged quality of the environment but do so in bright, celebratory colors and are meant to show a joy in what remains of our magnificent world. In her essay, Birds after a Storm, she reflects on the 250th anniversary of our nation, our national identity and spiritual well-being. I encourage you to read it in full and plan a visit to the gallery to “delight in whatever sunlight remains.”
Hours during the exhibition are Thursday – Friday, 11am – 4pm, Saturday, 10am – 5 pm and Sunday 11-2. Private appointments may be scheduled at any time by contacting either Carla Massoni (410-708-4512) or Kate Ballantine (410-310-0796) in advance.
In addition to featured exhibitions, MassoniArt continues its tradition of showcasing a diverse selection of works by represented gallery artists throughout the year. Visitors are encouraged to explore the full breadth of the gallery’s offerings during their visit.
Birds After A Storm by Grace Mitchell
If it’s true, as the Pulitzer Prize winning American historian Perry Miller believed, that our national identity and the spiritual well-being of our citizens are inextricably entwined with the terrestrial environment of the country, what do the degradation and increasing threats to that environment suggest about the national identity and spiritual well-being of the citizens/country today?
The artists of the 19 th century Hudson River School, recognized as creating the first uniquely American art, portrayed and celebrated the terrestrial environment of a very new country that was vast, beautiful and rich in resources, offering new opportunities for freedom, progress, and wealth no longer available in the old world. Artists who painted this majestic landscape thought of it as a manifestation of the divine and saw themselves as spiritual teachers, bringing the word of God to the world. All was great and good.
Unfortunately, of course, the world was also receiving another divine message in the form of the doctrine of Manifest Destiny, which used Biblical quotes to show that Americans had been chosen by God to populate the continent. A major expansion was on its way west, running roughshod over much of this magnificent land and encouraged, as it turns out, by enormous paintings of the wilderness created and put on public display by some of the Hudson River School artists.
So there was a potential conflict all along, and the putative father of the Hudson River School, Thomas Cole, feared that untrammeled development would throw off the moral compass of the nation and lead to societal decline.
As we approach the 250th anniversary of our nation, it appears that his fear was well founded. Contemporary artists are faced with a less than majestic landscape and an existential crisis founded in that untrammeled development. They grapple with the situation in many different ways and some have come to the conclusion that simply “bearing witness” is probably the best bet. My current paintings were motivated by that approach. Bearing witness involves simply observing, documenting, comprehending, and even adapting to the situation at hand. There’s no great expectation of its making any big change in the situation. But it is recorded. Plus it’s good for the spiritual well being of the artists and, one hopes, the people who have the opportunity to see the work.
The new paintings continue to depict the landscape, while the technique of sanding, scraping and repainting relates to the damaged quality of the environment. But they are painted in bright, celebratory colors and are meant to show a joy in what still remains of our magnificent world. The birds that one may recognize in the paintings are really part of a centuries long tradition in art of both the West and the East that sees birds as symbols, as links between heaven and earth, as harbingers of peace and hope and transcendence. They were not planned by me. They flew in during the process of sanding and were most welcome. But seeing them inspired two of the titles I used: “After a Storm” and “Birds Sing After a Storm”, are derived from a quote attributed to Rose Kennedy, who, speaking of grief and great loss at the time of the assassination of RFK, said “Birds sing after a storm” and suggested that we should “continue to delight in whatever sunlight remains.”
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