Jennifer McBrien’s embroidered”Subversive Thread” fabrics at the Academy Art Museum
The visual art scene in downtown Easton – also known as the Arts District – is now more so than ever before. From three fine-art galleries barely more than a year ago, Easton will soon have seven within strolling distance from Talbot County Courthouse, Academy Art Museum, Tidewater Inn, and Avalon Theatre.
On Friday afternoon, I took in one of the current exhibits at the Academy Art Museum and a show at the new Zach Gallery in the Prager Family Center for the Arts – also home to the Ebenezer Theatre and Chesapeake Music. Then I checked out the inaugural show at Talbot Resident Artists Gallery that opened just this month across the street from the Avalon, two shows featuring new artists at the dual Zebra and Spiralis galleries around the corner, plus a walk-through of the long-established Troika and Trippe galleries on Harrison and Studio B on Goldsborough. All in about an hour and a half. The range of artworks I encountered on my whirlwind tour was astonishing.
Although there are many, many, many times seven art galleries in Manhattan, given just a 90 minutes to tour a few I might not see such a plethora of styles and techniques – from simple charcoal-on-paper portraits to fabric-and-thread concoctions incorporating everything from photography to dollar bills and paintings made of molded clay – claymation stills. All this and the usual assortment of land- and seascapes capturing the natural beauty of the Chesapeake region.
I began my matinee tour at the Academy Art Museum where the next big show, “Bugatti: Reaching for Perfection” was about to be installed in the two main galleries for the Dec. 5 preview. The two smaller galleries down the hall from the main entrance host a most unusual show meant to expand the horizons of craft art, the subject of the popular annual weekend-long craft show and sale in October. “The Subversive Thread” will expand your imagination of what fabric art entails far beyond quilts and machine-stitched creations that have long been the purview of homemakers who do not necessarily consider themselves artists. In this thread show, four artists stretched the concept of fabric art to new and, at times, extravagant dimensions.
Han Cao repurposes what look to be family photo album images – a few in color, others black and white – in a “Self-Reflection” series, including “Wedding Day,” a 2021 photo with the happy couple looking at a mirror that reflects an embroidered window into an altered state of being.
Jennifer McBrien riffs on domestic art with her series of vintage lace napkins embroidered with images of endangered bird species. But more impressive is her 2024 laundry line of freehand embroidery on tea-dyed organza hanging like sheer curtains – all with nude female images from “Ruff Warrior Woman” to “Golden Warbler Woman.”
Stacey Lee Webber has cash on her mind with 2022 “Two Dollar Fire” and similar pieces with actual dollar bills interspersed with a hand-stitched cotton-thread motif. Michael-Birch Pierce anchors the quartet of fabric artists with his mixed-media on velvet pieces in circular and rectangular frames, including floating soft-focus “Ghosts.”
From there, I walked to Washington Street, past the Talbot Historical Society, to Zach Gallery in the Zachariah half of the Prager Arts Center shared with Ebenezer. The current exhibit, running through the end of November, features works by Paton Miller and Scott Bluedorn. Miller, a painter based in the posh Hamptons on Long Island’s East End, dominated the space with his large oils that emulate his 20 years of painting in Fairfield Porter’s Southampton studio. Most notable to me, raised as an Easton-area farmboy, is “Farmer.” A black man seated with a wheelbarrow behind him appears to be looking directly at the viewer – to me in this case – creating a personal connection.
Bluedorn, also from the Hamptons and whose work I have mentioned in Parrish Art Museum reviews during my Newsday career, spans painting, drawing and printmaking – all represented at the Zach. His “Ode to . . .” series of birds-and-fish watercolors with visible wavelengths emanating from their aura typifies his natural-world oeuvre.
The newest gallery in Easton opened with works by a trio of artists who are not represented by other galleries in town. The Talbot Resident Artist Gallery, just across Dover Street from the Avalon, is their chance to show and sell their art. Three artists inaugurated the new space through the end of November. Scott Sullivan’s charcoal-on-paper portraits display his drawing skills with, among several other images, an immediately recognizable likeness of Pete Lesher of the Talbot County Council and the Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum. Other portraits include a clarinetist that I mistook for the late Benny Goodman. (Sullivan said others have made the same misidentification.) Also showing at TRA is Joan Cramer, whose watercolors range from colorful abstract to representational, and Marianne Kost, whose oils include a highly recognizable Harrison Street scene as well as architectural paintings.
The TRA Gallery will soon have a new neighbor. Just around the corner on Harrison Street, the Zebra and Spiralis galleries are breaking up after a year of living together in the same space. It’s not a divorce but more like an amicable separation that benefits both galleries. Depending on how long it takes for the ink on the paperwork to dry, Spiralis will move two doors up on Dover Street from TRA in the shop formerly occupied by Swan Antiques. For now, they continue to share space that will become Zebra’s gallery alone.
Currently, one of the new artists you might want to check out is Joseph Barbaccia, a Delaware painter who deploys polymer-based clay as his medium instead of, say, canvas or various types of paper. His self-portrait looks a bit like a series of tiny beads that are painted over, giving the image a textured depth not readily achievable on flat surfaces.
If you’re looking for art to buy, Ingrid Matuszewski’s “It’s a Shore Thing,” is off the market. The abstract of, presumably, a stretch of Oxford waterfront, just sold for $4,200. But it’s still up on the gallery wall for now. Among the Spiralis artists of note is James Stephen Terrell, whose patterned-abstract “Think” may have you scratching your head with curiosity.
The old-guard galleries, of course, still have plenty to offer. The Troika Gallery on Harrison celebrates its 27 years in business with a retrospective of works by surviving artists for an anniversary group show of “new masterpieces” through the end of the year, with a First Friday reception Dec. 6.
The Trippe Gallery is observing “Another Side of Jill Basham,” one of its most prolific, not to mention popular artists, through November and beyond. The paintings include urban scenes and abstracts that are atypical of the Trappe artist’s familiar land- and seascapes of the Eastern Shore.Around the corner on Goldsborough, Studio B Gallery paintings by owner Betty Huang go further afield and abroad to capture the “Splendor of Provence,’ where she painted lush French scenes last summer. Awesome, or charme in Francais.
Easton Arts District
Talbot Historical Society, 25 & 30 S. Washington St., talbothistory.org
Write a Letter to the Editor on this Article
We encourage readers to offer their point of view on this article by submitting the following form. Editing is sometimes necessary and is done at the discretion of the editorial staff.