4U2C: the 24th Annual Gaelen Juried Art Show & Sale
Closes: July 31
Janet Botax’s vivid painting Last Drag Queen Standing took Best in Painting at the 24th Gaelen Art Show. With companion piece Madam Vivien V, the subject and the works demand attention.
The approximately 65-piece exhibit of paintings, drawings, pastels, photography, mixed media and sculpture continues through July 31 at JCC Metrowest in West Orange. Credit former South Orange resident Gary Denburg for the deft installation.
“We’ve had a strong response to this year’s show,” said longtime West Orange arts mainstay Lisa Suss, the longtime director of the JCC Gaelen Gallery and JCC Arts Manager. “At least 80 members of the art community and its supporters came out for the opening and award ceremony.”
Audrey and Norbert Gaelen
Established in 1999 by Audrey and the late Norbert Gaelen, the Gaelen competition attracts entries from both outstanding established and emerging artists, largely area. In 2006, ten years prior to his death, Norbert explained the couple’s goal: “We felt there was a lot of talent in the community and no one was putting it together. These artists had no place to show,” Norbert said in the interview.
Audrey Gaelen, now 97, held court at this year’s opening. Newark natives, the Gaelens’ interest in art emerged from Audrey’s volunteering for the area chapter of the National Council of Jewish Women’s fundraising art shows long held at the JCC last century. From their self-taught beginnings, the couple created an esteemed collection of Native American pottery, later donated to the Montclair Art Museum where part of the collection is on permanent display.
The Gaelen Juried Show was long held at the past JCC gallery in Whippany. Norbert and Audrey also endowed galleries at JCC Metrowest including the current gallery, where the show has been held since 2021.
There, an 825-square-foot space was constructed over the lobby of the West Orange building’s atrium. Ten tons each of concrete and steel plus 4,500 pounds of glass went into the engineering feat. It’s a good space to both view the year-round rotating art exhibits there and the JCC’s powerful permanent collection of wall sculptures.
This year, Mary Clare King, a curator at the galleries of Kean University where she studied fine art and art history, chose the Gaelen’s 45 participating artists and awarded the blue ribbons. King, recognized for her own work in photography and landscape, sought works that strongly connect with the viewer, a goal well realized here.
Here Are Some Connections I Made
The show is strong in portraits, strongly executed by three of the blue-ribbon prize-winning artists and others. Boltax’s dramatic Last Drag Queen Standing (Best in Painting) and her Madam Vivien V, a standout work at this past winter’s NJ Arts Annual at the Montclair Art Museum, arrest attention at the exhibit entrance.
Montclair’s Boltax, who teaches painting and portraiture at MAM’s School of Art, is recognized for her thematic portrait series. In 2024, she discussed her current series of drag paintings with MAM:
“The theatricality of this art form has also challenged me in new ways,” Boltax said. “While I’ve traditionally painted only faces and a bit of the torso—since the face is particularly engaging to me—my models have generated such expressive poses that I feel compelled to include more of the figure and background in my paintings.”
West Orange-based Amy Wax took home Best in Drawing/Pastels for her Girl with the Hidden Smile, a highly engaging piece. “I look to give a sense of story, I want to capture the spirit of the sitter,” Wax said in conversation.
In her pastel, Blonde Girl with Attitude, note Wax’s mastery of texture in the contrasting roughness of the girl’s sweater and smoothness of the eponymous blonde hair. The rhythm of the composition holds the subject’s confidence.
Ellen Hark, who has advanced arts degrees from Kean, works in many mediums. She is represented by a mixed media piece and two sensitive polychromatic clay portrait sculptures, Danielle and Nadine (the latter Best in Sculpture). Both share with Boltax a bold use of color.
Continuing in portraiture, you can’t walk by the bold color and heightened reality of Livingston-based Kevin Goldman’s Elton Bird and his Billy and Willy (above). Both paintings capture the joy in music of their larger-than-life performers. Marjorie Paradise’s pastel Waiting for Eclipse has a similar intensity. Watercolor master Amy Arons’ Izzy by the Sea—NFS and surely a portrait of a family child–enchants, and note Rosann Toma’s Insomnia.
Arons is a master watercolorist; her beautifully modulated A Floral Symphony by David winning Best in Watercolor. Note how she handles the representation of metal. If offered a choice of only one Arons’ works, I would bring home her Lean into the Light (above) where the bending blooms atop a brass wall sconce, perform a dance of color, texture, shadow and light. I would pair it with Laura Russomano’s captivating photograph, Garden Dancer (below.) If Arons’ watercolor tulips make a graceful bow, Laura Russomano’s photograph transforms a pink and white blossom into a prima ballerina.
It must have been a challenge to award the blue ribbon in photography with many superb entries. Top honors went to Joel Estrada’s La Luna en Antigua (below) where an earth-toned giant moon, maybe wearying of its lonely orbit, seems to seek the companionship and warmth of a Caribbean village. The folks going about their daily business may be oblivious to this celestial astonishment, but you won’t be.
Eric Lax’s Haunting Serenity (below) earned the photography honorable mention nod. It and his Winter Labyrinth are both superb. In the latter, nature transmogrifies into amoeba-like colored patterns. But, pause and really look at Haunting Serenity’s majestic balance and winter-blue light. Kimberly Nicholais’ Cape Cod bookends Lax’s Haunting Serenity in its light and stillness. What a happy surprise to see my long-ago history student, Joanna Dreifus, now in Livingston after years living in New York, represented by Return. We think of Manhattan as a gray city. Here it bathes in golden light.
Shadow and light and patterns inform both Burt Allen Solomon’s three fine black and white works and Barry Heyman’s Stockholm Seagulls and Sparks Lake. Solomon has long been a highly regarded fixture on the South Orange-Maplewood Studio Art Tour and many group shows.
Leaving photography, delight in Anna Warivonchic’s painting Blissful Relaxation. Two mixed-media pieces intrigue: Katherine Philip’s Denali and Irene Feigen’s Serendipity (Honorable Mention, mixed media.) And what fun I would have choosing the blooms to chat with the faces on Terry Sherman’s Vase # 1 (Honorable Mention, Sculpture).
Do go and find your own favorites pieces. Maybe yours will be John Zollo’s highly skilled Best in Show pastel drawing Cyber Mutt or his Fragments of Dawn, evoking beauty.
When You Go
Directions and hours are at the gallery’s website. Handicapped accessible parking on ground level and the level 2 entrance. Wheelchairs available at the 2nd floor entrance.
