Tag: new york studio school

Solo Shows

Jenny Lynn McNutt: Nativity of squirms

Contributed by Jason Andrew / At the New York Studio School Gallery, Jenny Lynn McNutt’s exhibition “Touch Me” reclaims figuration in ceramics as a matter of urgency rather than nostalgia. With an immediacy that heightens their corporeal impact, McNutt kneads together cultures and rituals embraced during her travels to West Africa, China, Eastern Europe, Ireland and Italy. The 20 sculptures representing a decade of work embody forms twisting, crouching, bracing, and blooming in what the artist aptly describes as “a nativity of squirms,” which captures both their generative vitality and their refusal of repose.

Gallery shows

Lisa Corinne Davis and Shirley Kaneda: Different strokes

Contributed by David Carrier / In the charming traditional galleries of the Studio School, Shirley Kaneda displays six large, vertically-oriented acrylic paintings. Lisa Corinne Davis presents seven oil works of various sizes. Where Kaneda organizes her pictures with playful vertical stripes of high-pitched pale blue or pink, Davis’ pictures are based on grids, disrupted to form swelling nets that enclose but do not entirely capture her forms, which are underneath. These bodies of work thus reveal two distinctly different strategies for pictorial composition. In traditional terms, Kaneda is a painterly artist, a colorist, while Davis works like a draftsperson, in a linear style. Art-historically speaking, if Kaneda renders exquisitely refined images reminiscent of Juan Gris or Sophie Tauber-Arp, Davis maps the structure of the city grid in ways that recall Julia Mehretu.