2025 pedagogy of tears, Aidron Duckworth Gallery, Brooklyn
Brian Bishop, Lucinda Bliss, Gaby Collins-Fernandez, Amy Giese, Patricia Miranda, Craig Stockwell, Jason Stopa, Jonathan VanDyke
In 2020, in the early days of COVID, I wrote an essay for Precog magazine titled, “The Pedagogy of Tears.” In January of 2020 the low-residency visual arts MFA that I was directing at New Hampshire Institute of Art had come to a painfully sad ending after seven years. During that time, we had accumulated a magnificent faculty, mostly from NYC, and in that awful ending our friendships had deepened. We remain in close touch and the artists in this exhibit all come from that faculty group.
Pedagogy of tears refers to that MFA program and, for me, a re-imagining of how an MFA might allow students to speak with the heart. Low-residency students are mostly adults with lives and an already accumulated life’s work in their hands. Our commitment in that program was to meet students where they were and work to help them to articulate and actualize their desired processes and artworks. I cannot help but cry when speaking to students at meaningful moments. I am moved by their efforts in the face of so much that resists. I tried to fight that impulse but came to realize that my tears were a moment to acknowledge the depth of our human efforts. That the tears might be a part of the pedagogy of teaching art.
We are a group that has held each other close with deep interest in the work each of us makes. How the art we make is also (literally?) a mirror and a mark of these same pedagogic qualities (immersion, saturation, compassion, access, etc.). Our connection surprises us. And sustains us. This exhibit is presented in honor of our friendship and with hope of nudging the art world towards the best version of what it might be. Perhaps a place where tears, love care and meeting people where they are. That hunger continues between us.
till human voices wake us, Aidron Duckworth Gallery, Brooklyn
August 2-September 1, 2025
Elizabeth Gilfilen, Anna Gregor, Olivia McLeod
I first met Beth when I was at the Sharpe residency 2013-14. Beth had been there a year or so before. I did a studio visit. I’ve always been intrigued with artists that use a language that is forgotten, forbidden or failed. Beth is a gestural abstract painter, a language assumed to be depleted and done in by its association with masculine raging. What is most interesting is that she has worked within a range of mark making and a constrained painting process for so many years now and has continually produced images that are compelling and alive. An apparently spent language being spoken authentically by a voice uninhibited by the prohibitions of speaking that language.
I met Anna when she was in Patricia Miranda’s crit group (as I recall it) and I was giving crits. I apologize for featuring what occurred (Anna) but Anna at some point wept speaking of her work. It was a weeping that was not out of discouragement or frustration but (to me) a genuine feel for something heartfelt and sacred. Another area of prohibited language, the sacred. Which drew me in, and Anna’s (at that time) attraction to sacred imagery for the sacredness of it was a fresh (old) breeze blowing in. I’ve since followed Anna’s work and visited with her as a Grad student at Hunter. I have been repeatedly impressed with the willingness to explore unusual methods, techniques and language in the pursuit if something quite unknown and unseeable (but totally existing as materiality). Anna writes well, really enjoyed her recent essay/mag “paintings and Paintings”
Olivia was recently introduced to me by Jonathan Van Dyke. Jonathan has taught with me in various Grad programs and now teaches at Bard. Olivia is a recent grad. I took a look at Olivia’s work and then we had a Zoom meeting. I was struck by how the work is so physically present and speaks to the body. I also adored the artist statement, artist statements are so hard to get any feeling into, and I felt that this statement both carried an intelligent thesis as well as personal exposure. I was certainly struck by (again) the materiality of the work and also (again) its’ curious referencing of previous art (In this case 70s Arte Povera sculpture, a connection to history I enjoyed discovering and especially because the connection was absolutely unintentional on Olivia’s part).
One of the efforts in working with my nephew’s gallery is considering my deceased brother-in-law, Aidron Duckworth, who was very much a Modernist and (in my own experience) a complicated man largely embittered by his relation to the art world. Part of this gallery effort might be to consider that and perhaps even heal.
The Abstract Body 9/4-10/31, 2015. NHIA Sharon Arts Center Gallery, Peterborough, NH Ahhh the body, how badly we (as a culture) need to hold on to/find/locate/remember our bodies. We are abstracting, getting distant from our bodily awareness, nature, place, time. This exhibit is about art that connects to the body and time, in the making, the viewing and in the very presence of the work itself. Much of this work is hard to see, it appears casual, it doesn’t emphasize skill. This is work that speaks to the possibility of either nothingness or terrible beauty, beauty that unsettles but speaks out of an attempt to consider the ecstatic, the erotic, the muck of bodily awareness. Artists: Enrico Riley, Amanda Church, Richard Jacobs, Jutta Koether, Paul Pagk, Sangram Majumdar, Lucy Mink, Jennifer Paige Cohen, A. B. Miner, Carrie Moyer, Dennis Kardon, Lee Newton, Susan Metrican, Rachel Beach, Steve Locke, Jill Moser, David X. Levine, Porfirio DiDonna, Lucinda Bliss, Tricia Rose Burt
2012 Robert S. Neuman at Keene State 1972-90, Carroll House Gallery, Keene, NH. Keene State faculty member Craig Stockwell has curated an exhibit of works by Robert S. Neuman who taught at Keene State from 1972-1990. He is represented by Allan Stone Gallery in NYC and he was the very first artist to exhibit at the prestigious Pace Gallery of NY(when it first opened in Boston), the Pace Gallery recently celebrated their 50th anniversary. Robert S. Neuman is an abstract painter who has worked through a variety of approaches to different questions about painting. He usually works in extended series in which a particular motif is explored. His work has an ability to combine precise hard-edge geometries with bold physical gesture and studied primitivism. His use of color is both intelligent and bold.
PROGRESS? Marlboro College, Drury Gallery,
As artists we are often asked to consider progress while simultaneously and theoretically disbelieving it. It begins in school with critiques seeking to endlessly better the work, move the work, take it further… In a simple sense one might simply accept that the idea of progress and the impossibility of it coexist.
Artists: Humberto Ramirez, Jon Gitelson, Jon McAuliffe, Malcolm Wright, Anna Schuleit, John Willis, Martina Lantin, Cathy Osman, Greg Hayes, Tamara Reynolds, Craig Stockwell, Hari Kirin, Mary Reid Kelly, Patricia Treib, Christopher Page, Victoria Hely-Hutchinson, Tim Segar Curated by Craig Stockwell with Jeffrey Stuker
2009 Drawing Itself (with Mara Williams), Brattleboro Museum, Brattleboro, VT
This exhibition is called Drawing Itself. The title came from an e-mail that was sent out to one of the artists whose work we were considering; it was a brief effort to explain the gist of the show, “Big survey…no particular theme other than drawing itself.” The title and description are accurate in the sense that we have had the pleasure of really looking at a wide range of work that all falls under the category of drawing. The category of drawing is bound by some central concepts but it is also a category open to shifting boundaries.
Artists: Jason Alden, Stephen Antonakos, Romare Beardon, Debra Bermingham, Jake Berthot, Lucinda Bliss, Linda Bond, Charles Burchfield, Tricia Rose Burt, Paul Cadmus, Kim Darling, Porfirio DiDonna, Jim Dingilian, Rackstraw Downes, Linda Etcoff, Julie Evans, Emily Eveleth, Madelin Fan, Julia Featheringill, Barbara Garber, Victoria Gittman, Greg Gomez, Mark Greenwold, George Grosz, Christine Hiebert, Chuck Holtzman, Richard Jacobs, Howard Johnson, Mel Kadel, Katherine Kehoe, Robert Kushner, Annette Lawrence, Rico LeBrun, John Lees, Joan Linder, Whitfield Lovell, Alice Maher, Gordon Meinhard, Gordon Moore, Jill Moser, Ethan Murrow, James Nelson, Alec Obrosey, Gelah Penn, Kate Renner, Jessica Rosner, Alexander Ross, Evelyn Rydz, Paul Shore, Peter Solano, Nancy Murphy Spicer, David Sullivan, Sumru Tekin, George Tooker, Sandra Vasquez de la Hoya, Joan Waltemath, Mia Westlund Roosen, Faith Wilding, Le Xi
