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The Putney School Faculty Art Show 2024

By naomilin on November 16, 2024 in

When:

November 8, 2024 @ 9:00 am – December 8, 2024 @ 5:00 pm

2024-11-08T09:00:00-05:00

2024-12-08T17:00:00-05:00

Where:

The Putney School Michael S. Currier Gallery
418 Houghton Brook Road
Putney
Vermont 05346

Cost:

Free

Contact:

Lynne Weinstein

I am in my 27th year of teaching ceramics at The Putney School, a boarding high school in Putney, Vermont. I have two of my colored clay pieces and two pieces done with a medium that is newer to me of creating 2-D artwork with tea bags.

We are celebrating The Putney School Faculty Art Show. The show focuses on the inclusive nature of the second Putney School Fundamental Belief: “To learn to appreciate and participate in the creative arts where we give expression to our struggle for communication of our inner lives and for beauty, and to grant these arts great prestige.” This show features the work of 21 faculty members. It celebrates our faculty’s joy in making and willingness to share.

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EVENTS

Artist Statement

I grew up with my mother's loom in our family's living room. Not many years later I ended up with clay carving tools and a rolling pin in my own ceramics studio. The pairings of work in this show exemplify the influences of my mother's work on me and have served as an opportunity to both grow creatively and to honor my mother and her life's work.

Lore Kadden Lindenfeld (1921 - 2010) emigrated from Germany to the U.S. in the late 1930s. She attended Black Mountain College in North Carolina in the 1940s and was a student of both Josef and Anni Albers. Inspired by the Alberses and the Bauhaus school tradition, she worked as a textile designer for the New York fashion industry followed by a career as a weaver, fiber collage artist and as a weaving and art history teacher on the college level.

I grew up hearing riveting stories of Black Mountain College, its avant-garde, experimental environment and brilliant, unique personalities. As well, I was exposed to many artists and craftspeople during my childhood and took my first pottery class with a friend of my mother's. I responded to the immediacy of clay more than what appeared to be the tedium of threading warps on a loom.

While working on a degree in ceramics from Boston University's Program in Artisanry, I discovered the Japanese technique, Nerikomi, of layering colored clays to create patterns. I have been captivated by exploring many ways of working with colored clay ever since. I have also come to realize that my method of working with clay - the sense of movement, abstract graphic quality, nature-themed imagery and vivid color - echoes my mother's textiles. In designing work for this show, I was first more drawn to my mother's fiber collage work than her weavings, as a closer match for my own techniques and sensibilities. I later saw that the way I carve into the layers in two directions appear as woven fabric.

It was both fascinating and challenging to interpret a two-dimensional medium within a three-dimensional realm; to not just reproduce my mother's ideas and imagery but to draw inspiration and design the pieces as my own. My hope is that my ceramics, while paying homage to my mother, stand on their own just as her fiber works do.