The 21st Annual SOMA Artists Studio Tour
Saturday, November 2th & Sunday November 3rd, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m.
Ends November 17
The Herb & Milly Iris Gallery at
South Orange Performing Arts Center
There have been 20 wonderful years of the South Orange Maplewood Artist Studio Tour. This year, the 21st, the tour’s planning committee asked how they might expand further into the community, involve more residents—artists and non-artists alike – and make artist participation in the tour more open to young artists or artists from less advantaged backgrounds.
“We asked, ‘How can we have more non-artists feel a part of the tour?” said Jennifer Malone, chair of the tour’s planning committee.
Jeremy Moss, event vice chair and exhibit curator, had an idea – bring the tour to the biggest, most widely attended local event of the year: August’s Maplewoodstock Music Festival. The powers that be at Maplewoodstock were on board. Panels to be painted and later connected to make up the permanent tour logo were set up next to a SOMA information center. Anyone could grab a paint brush and—in Malone’s words—“get their hands into the paint.”
“We had kids as young as 6 and every age on up,” Malone said. “It was a great early kick-off.”
The final, happy result is on display in SOPAC’s main front window now and reproduced on the SOMA website, banners, posters and more.
Here’s what else is new:
“We established the Patricia Bell Scholarship,” said Malone, noting it was named after a local art collector and longtime benefactor of the tour. “In her memory, we mentor several Columbia High School students by inviting them to participate in the tour for free and sharing with them our experience as professional artists.”
Related is Moss’s Accomplishing Artist Club at Columbia High School, the Maplewood township and South Orange village’s secondary school. He will be hosting member students at his open studio, too.
“We also began to waive fees for local artists who would not otherwise be able to participate,” Malone said.
Participation is gratifyingly high, sky-high actually: Everyone is celebrating the contributions of both young, emerging and student artists. All told, the event boasts 111 exhibiting artists, ten percent non-resident.
49 Sites, 111 Artists: Strategies for Advance Planning
As always, the tour includes SOMA’s many community centers, its First Presbyterian and Trinity Church, its Durand-Hedden House Museum, select local businesses and the private homes and studios of some of the artists.
That translates to 49 sites open for five hours a day for two days. How to plan? Where to go? Some folks park or stroll over to a walkable area and that’s fine. Others have specific artists in mind and map their route accordingly. I’ll be starting at the Maplewood 1978 Art Center, the former home to the opening receptions and accompanying exhibits.
Malone will be there along with a jewelry maker and five other artists, including Debra Bernath – her oversized watercolor Iris is a standout at the tour’s accompanying exhibit.
I want to see the eight artists at the DeHart Community Center, and perhaps chat with metal artist and jewelry maker Aaron Lifschultz whose work I fell for at the West Orange Arts Council’s shop earlier this year. Columbia High School student Abby Pasternak—whose piece in June’s Pierro Gallery Show was a smart surprise—will be there, too, along with two intriguing photographers Allan Wood and Gina Petrecca (I want to hear more about their works on exhibit at SOPAC) and notable others.
My stamina isn’t what it was, but also on my radar is Ken Stanek at his studio who will be doing rapid $20 portraits and offering copies of his must-have book, About Town, SOMA: The Illustrations of Ken Stanek. I love finishing the weekend at the Skate House, a nostalgic spot adjacent to the South Orange Duck Pond) to visit with Elyse Carter, spend time with her paintings and I need some of her note cards depicting Maplewood Village. Arts Beat profiled Stanek and Carter earlier this year. The two other artists sharing the Skate House space include another CHS student, photographer Z Urist.
Warren Court in South Orange is a mini-artist enclave with an Art Walk all of its own. I am in awe of Sybil Archibald’s vision and the power of her beautiful, haunting works—see her evocative The Language of Dawn, Day 896 on exhibit at SOPAC. She’s hosting Wendy Bellermann, who is the tour’s fundraising chair, and two other artists. Down the street are Sandra Charlap and Leslie Goldman at 36 and Fred Courts at 45, all three exhibit standouts noted below.
Still, asking where to go?
Jeremy Moss—whose current and past area contributions and positions fill a page of my reporter’s notebook—has put together a smashing exhibit of 59 of the participating artists. Unveiled fills both floors of SOPAC’s Herb and Milly Iris Gallery and is open seven days a week through November 17th.
Here is the Good News Scoop: Moss has just finalized an agreement with SOPAC (he’s the former curator there and current guest curator) to host the Studio Tour’s future receptions and exhibits. That means now and moving forward, over half of the artists will be on view weeks before and after the tour. Don’t neglect the craftspeople and artists, but experiencing some of the art hanging on walls firsthand before November 2 or 3 might help shape your route on the big weekend.
On To the Exhibit: UNVEILED
Unveiled, the latest exhibit at the Herb and Milly Iris Gallery, opened to 150-plus guests strong on September 26. It’s quieted down now, and you can spend as much time as you like with the art and with a few other artists on permanent view. That includes Arts Beat favorite Dan Fenelon’s exuberant painted pillars and painted sculptures.
Now, curating and designing a two, three or four-person exhibit is a challenge. Curating and designing a show of 59 individual works by as many artists is a formidable challenge. Adding to the design conundrum is the space: The gallery walls meander along hallways and to out-of-the-way corners. Moss explains his strategy:
“I ask each submitting artist for three pieces completed within the past three years.” Moss said. “I think I am subconsciously playing the Connections Game when I choose the exhibit pieces: What connections can I find? What work has a logic to hang near another work?”
“I spend a lot of time laying things out on the floor and running up and down between the two floors,” Moss continued. (The less athletic can use the elevator.) “It’s vital that the exhibit forms a cohesive whole.”
He nails it.
I viewed the exhibit on a quiet mid-week, long afternoon. Seeing the connections is part of the delight. There are groupings linked by subject matter, some by medium and sometimes Moss finds a theme in a certain shade of yellow-green, or a line, a shape. You will discover more.
I especially like the third-floor long wall that celebrates all things urban, culminating in POW painter and event Promotion and Graphic Chair Leslie Goldman’s celebratory pop piece, Beaujolais. The urban-suite reflects a diversity of styles from photo-realist painter and tour’s Advertising Chair Shara Bailey’s sweeping view of the NYC skyline, I’ll Take Manhattan, to Fred Court’s Approaching with its ominous, anthropomorphic gabled buildings in wonderfully modulated sizes and colors.
Artist and teacher Sandra Charlap often works in a representational style. Here, her watercolor and ink The Blue City becomes an intriguing abstraction. You can get metaphorically lost in the multiple city blocks, which I suggest you do. Here’s Charlap:
The Blue City is based on the blue city of Jodhpur, India. My maps are based on the idea of wanderlust and the concept of home and identity. I travel the world in my mind and through lenses imagining my life in new and unexpected places. Blue City is one of the places I could land… Maybe someday.
Opposite the middle of the urban tour are diverse multimedia pieces. There is veteran fiber artist Ellen Weisbord and her tour de force Aurora Borealis which rivals its celestial inspiration. In conversation, Malone pointed to younger artist Helen Chywski’s wonderful color and compositional sense. Chywski is synesthetic, she visualizes sounds in color and shape. My jazz musician husband and I agree her lively Green Onions captures the infectious groove of that Booker T. and the MG’s classic tune.
Also, among this grouping, Liz Munro’s Dazzling Death, a mixed-media glitter collage, makes the case for being fabulous at any stage of life, including afterwards. Dazzling indeed!
There is a suite of smaller work’s including Jay Pingree’s striding figure Yellowcoat who may be measured in inches but has a powerful presence and Cat Delett’s sly charmer, National Donut Day. Nearby is Moss’s own The Burren from Galway in impasto, acrylic paint, acrylic ink and watercolor pencil on an aluminum panel. An evocative landscape putting me a bit in mind of Marsden Hartley in Maine. Moss writes this:
While on vacation in Ireland in 2023, I visited Galway. This was the view from the Airbnb, looking across Galway Bay to the Burren, with that big Irish sky. The colored border on the left is an abstract reference to the stucco finish on many homes in Ireland.
The border also pulls the viewer back to the picture plane, a reminder that the landscape is the illusion, the flat surface the reality.
I could say something about every piece in the show but I am going to conclude with my favorite trio and with Malone’s punning Two Pairs, a still life of two pairs of pears. The trio and Two Pairs are at opposite ends of the third floor.
First, to Malone. Sometimes, as here, the term still life becomes an oxymoron. Malone gives an arresting weight and life to her inanimate subjects: “My art distills emotions into vessels—a still life, a flower, a table an interior scene” Malone wrote. Yes.
This edition of Arts Beat concludes with a trio of stylistically different critters: Ken Stanek’s enchanting watercolor Squirrel with a perfect pool of pink, a quartet of perplexed seagulls perfectly spaced around a single Dorito in William Figdor’s Dorito Bandito’s and Bellermann’s majestic Two Lions. A future Arts Beat will be taking a longer look at Bellerman’s methods and mission. Suffice here, that grinding her own colors from the same materials our early human ancestors used in the cave art of southwest Europe, Bellermann speaks to the timelessness of art.
The timelessness of art seems fitting last words here.
Learn More
Included on the tour and high on my list to view before its Nov. 10 closing is Kaleidoscope Hispanica, a group exhibit celebrating Latino culture at The Baird Community Center’s Pierro Gallery. Studio tour and Pierro Gallery co-founder (with late husband Lennie Pierro) Judy Wukitsch has been posting happily about the art there.
The SOMA website boasts a downloadable guide with images and hard copies are available around town. The site has profiles of each artist as well. It makes for happy planning.
Most of the visual art is for sale, much at very affordable prices, some steeper. But art you love becomes a friend that travels with you through life. Shopping for the holidays at the Studio Tour could be a strategy, too. Remember it’s jewelry, ceramics, prints, and other surprises, as well.
