Ubiquitous and Familiar

The Paintings of Elisabeth Pearl

PRESS KIT

Provincetown, MA: Provincetown Art Association and Museum (PAAM) presents Ubiquitous and Familiar: The Paintings of Elisabeth Pearl from April 14 - June 5, 2023, curated by artists Jane Paradise and Mike Wright.

The Exhibition
With a nod to the social consciousness of the New York Realist School, Elisabeth Pearl tells stories through her oil paintings. By using bright colors, composition and details captured from Provincetown and Boston, she makes street scenes come alive. Elisabeth paints quirkiness into the architecture, the people, and the animals, particularly dogs—after all, she once had a Siberian Husky who ruled the house with an iron paw!

In her Contemporary Icons, she juxtaposes obsolete circuit boards with sacred images derived from medieval and Renaissance art. These circuits, today a constant in our lives, inform our sense of the sacred. She turns to abstraction in her Cosmic series, which shows an interest in particle physics, eastern mysticism and philosophy. These paintings are created using a contemporary fresco process—carving into the thick surface she has laid onto a wood panel. Elisabeth explains her process: she starts by taking photographs and making sketches, then uses imagination and memory to tell the story. She adds that if she hits a point where she needs extra inspiration she takes a walk down the street!

About the Artist
Elisabeth Pearl was born in 1945 on Coney Island, Brooklyn. She received her BA from the State University College of New York at New Paltz, and taught art in the New Paltz schools. She then moved to Boston and taught art at Girl’s Latin School. Craving more time for her own painting, Elisabeth trained as a lab technician and worked many years at Newton-Wellesley Hospital before finally moving to Provincetown in 1993 as a full-time painter. She continues to live in Provincetown with her partner, the artist Alexandra Smith.
She was a member of PAAM’s Exhibition Committee for twenty years.

Sky Power: Beckoning Color

PRESS KIT

Provincetown, MA: Provincetown Art Association and Museum (PAAM) opens its summer program with Sky Power: Beckoning Color. Curated by PAAM CEO Christine McCarthy, Beckoning Color is on view May 5 - June 25, with a public reception on Friday, May 19 at 6pm. Sky Power will be joined by Christine McCarthy for a Fredi Schiff Levin Lecture at PAAM on Thursday, June 15 at 6pm ($15 Museum admission, and livestreamed on PAAM’s Facebook page and YouTube channel, @paam1914).

The Exhibition
Sky Power is a contemporary painter based in Provincetown. Her emotion-driven, colorful abstractions and dreamscapes are driven by strong composition and color-as-form, created in the language of abstraction.

Influenced by three Hans Hofmann students–Paul Resika, Selina Trieff, and Robert Henry–Power’s paintings seek to show the connection between representational and abstract art through composition.

From the Curator
On the occasion of Sky Power: Beckoning Color, twenty-five works of art, spanning five decades, were selected not only to enforce Power’s place within the Art Colony, but her direct impact as a Provincetown painter. Instead of focusing on one particular series, or body of work, I chose to include artworks from differing series and decades to demonstrate the full scope of Power’s career.

That the Provincetown Art Association and Museum has organized this project is altogether fitting. Power first came to Provincetown in 1976 and discovered a vibrant art colony. Her various jobs—from owning a horse and buggy business to chef to piano tuner to gallery director—shaped her creative life which has resulted in an exquisite body of work driven from nature and the natural landscape of Outer Cape Cod. I commend Sky for her self-discovery—experimenting, studying, teaching and pushing herself to become a master colorist.

Alicia Henry

PRESS KIT

Provincetown, MA: This summer, Provincetown Art Association and Museum (PAAM) presents an exhibition of work by Alicia Henry. Curated by Ngina Lythcott and Marian Roth, the exhibition is on view May 12-July 9, with a public reception on Friday, May 19 at 6pm.

The Exhibition
Alicia Henry is a contemporary multi-media artist, who was a fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in 1993 before going on to exhibit at the Ewa Nogiec Gallery in Provincetown. Henry’s work is concerned with the body, and how unseen relationships (race, gender, class) can form identity. Using various materials, including dye, acrylic, fabric, thread and paper, Henry depicts the human figure in tension between isolation and connection, ultimately seeking to convey a shared humanity.

Henry writes: “The human figure, in isolation and in interactions is a common recurring image in my work. I am interested in the complexities and the contradictions surrounding familial relationships as well as societal differences and how these differences affect individual and group responses to themes of Identity, the Body, and Beauty. My current work explores these ideas, addressing the process through which individuals (specifically female) navigate these issues.”

About the Artist
Alicia Henry received her B.F.A. at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and her M. F.A. at Yale University School of Art. She also attended Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Henry has received numerous awards, grants, and residencies, for example, a Ford Foundation Fellowship, a John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, a Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant, Art in General, MacDowell Art Colony, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown residencies, Tennessee Artist Fellowship, and the 1858 Prize for Contemporary Southern Art, to mention a few. Her works have been exhibited nationally and internationally and are held in private and public collections (Hunter Museum of American Art, Tennessee State Museum, Cheekwood Museum, Dallas Museum of Art, and Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts Museum etc.). She is Professor of Art in the Department of Arts and Languages at Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee.