Hudson County Community College to Showcase Works of 18 Artists from the College’s Foundation Art Collection

The artists featured in the exhibit are John Chamberlain, Darryl Curran, Edward S. Curtis, Robert Fichter, Suda House, Eti Jacobi, Mickey Mathis, Heidi McFall, Judy Mensch, Tracey Moffatt, Nancy Scheinman , Bonnie Schiffman, Jacqueline Spellens, Ann Sperry, Robert Von Sternberg, Melanie Walker, Todd Walker, and Nancy Webber. The exhibit will be curated by Michelle Vitale, Director of Cultural Affairs.

John Chamberlain

John Chamberlain was born in 1927 in Rochester, Indiana, and died in 2011 in New York. During his lifetime, John Chamberlain was perhaps best known for his distinctive metal sculptures constructed from discarded automobile body parts and other industrial detritus, which he began making in the late 1950s. His singular method of putting these elements together led to his inclusion in the paradigmatic exhibition The Art of Assemblage, at the Museum of Modern Art in 1961. Chamberlain's focus on discovered or spontaneous correlations between materials has prompted the interpretation of his work as a kind of three-dimensional Abstract Expressionism.

Darryl Curran

Darryl Curran has been active in the fine art photography field since 1965 as exhibitor, curator, juror, and board member of several arts organizations. Curran's creative work is housed in major public collections and has been included in numerous important group shows, such as Photography into Sculpture and Mirrors and Windows, Museum of Modern Art; Photography into Art, British Arts Council; Extending the Perimeters of Twentieth Century Photography, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Photography and Art/Interactions since 1946, Los Angeles County Museum of Art and Fort Lauderdale Museum of Art; among others. As president of the Los Angeles Center for Photographic Studies (LACPS) he lead the effort to produce 10 Photographers/Olympic Images, a project sponsored by the Olympic Arts Festival and exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art.

Edward S. Curtis

Born near Whitewater, Wisconsin, Edward Sheriff Curtis (February 16, 1868 – October 19, 1952) became one of America’s finest photographers and ethnologists. His gift for photography led him to an investigation of the Native Americans living on the Seattle waterfront. His portrait of Chief Seattle’s daughter, Princess Angeline, won Curtis the highest award in a photographic contest. Having become well-known for his work with the Indians, Curtis participated in the 1899 Harriman expedition to Alaska as one of two official photographers. From 1911-1914, Curtis also produced and directed a silent film based on the mythology of the Rawakiutl Indians of the Pacific Northwest. Curtis passed away in Several images by Curtis are on permanent view in the College’s Foundation Art Collection on the 4th floor of the Gabert Library Building located at 71 Sip Ave.

Robert Fichter

Growing up in Sarasota, Florida, Robert Fichter was intrigued by the landscape of sculptural ruins that remained on Long Boat Key from John Ringling's pre-depression era attempt to recreate the Italian Renaissance. Fichter has produced etchings, lithographs, and photographs at the Visual Arts Research Institute, Arizona State University, and lithographs at the Tamarind Institute. He has also produced two books featuring computer-generated imagery: After Eden, published by the U.S.F. Art Galleries; and A-X Cavation (text by James Hugunin), published by University of Colorado, department of fine arts.

Suda House

Recent photographic works on silk from Suda House’s Sanctuary series were selected by guest curator Kathryn Kanjo, the chief curator of the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego for the exhibition - Renewed: A Short Story About the San Diego Public Library’s Visual Arts Program. This exhibition celebrated the opening of the new Central Library with a selection of artists who previously exhibited in the San Diego Public Library’s Visual Arts Program and whose practices continue to resonate.

Eti Jacobi

Eti Jacobi is an Israeli visual artist who was born in 1961. Her early paintings demonstrated an unusual sensibility. Innocence, purity, and childishness are present in her works alongside eroticism and ethics, illustrated in a very different manner to previous manifestations of similar themes. Jacobi combines the fairytale mentality and the virtuosity of realization so that the spirit of animation imbues the paintings. She tries to release a fairy-like act, created by little devious picturesque tricks, or in the artist’s words: “My painting is the utmost degree of stuttering fairytales.” Jacobi has had several gallery and museum exhibitions, including The Centre for Contemporary Art, Tel Aviv and the ART+TEXT, Budapest. She has received the Jacques and Eugénie O’Hana Prize for Young Israeli Artist and the Minister of Education, Culture, and Sport Artists Awards for Young Artists.

Mickey Mathis

Mickey Mathis is a long-time Jersey City resident and freelance photographer who studied at the International Center for Photography in New York City. His photos can be seen hanging in restaurants, printed in magazines and ads, both locally and internationally. Mickey Mathis: World Trade Views was a solo exhibition at Benjamin J. Dineen, III & Dennis C. Hull Gallery in 2016. The work displayed was a timeline of the World Trade Center captured by Mathis from the western shore of the Hudson River over the course of 20 years.

Heidi Draley McFall

Heidi Draley McFall was born in Iowa City in 1974, and has been making art since childhood. A self-taught artist, McFall’s drawings have been the subject of solo and group exhibitions at galleries and museums including Annina Nosei Gallery, New York; Leo Castelli Gallery, New York; Paolo Curti Gallery, Milan, Italy; The McNay Art Museum, San Antonio; The Museum of Contemporary Art Denver; and The Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art. McFall creates monumental pastel portraits that are haunting and endearing, personal and startling. Through heightened contrast in black and white, she invites us to explore the souls and personalities of those she depicts. There is an openness and volatility to her subjects that instills a closeness and sense of shared humanness between the artist, her viewers, and her subjects.

Judy Mensch

Judy Mensch has shown her prints throughout the United States and abroad. They are in public and private collections including the New York Public Library, New York Historical Society, Library of Congress, and Pfizer Inc. among others. She was awarded residencies to Yaddo, Ucross, Centrum voor Grafiek, Frans Masereel Centrum, and a grant to study Japanese woodblock printing from Art Quest, the Nagasawa Art Park Pilot Project, in Awajishima, Japan.

Tracey Moffatt

Tracey Moffatt is an Australian artist, filmmaker, and photographer that has held over 100 solo exhibitions of her work in Europe, the United States, and Australia. Each series devolves upon an unwritten narrative – a story is implied, but never stated. Part of the artist’s project is to dismantle the conventions of storytelling, paradoxically by using artifice alone to tell her tales. Moffatt’s subjects are based on true stories told to the artist that touch on deep-seated, implacable issues, on the wounds that never heal. Indeed, her avowed ambivalence about being categorized as an Indigenous artist is at odds with her commitment to the fostering of Aboriginal culture, and to the central place of Indigeneity in her work. This seeming contradiction – an apparent moral inconsistency – is resolved in her dedication to the accoutrements of success: as much as Moffatt’s work is about pain, it is also about glamour.

Nancy Scheinman

Fusing beauty, meditation, and personal experience, Nancy Scheinman creates thought provoking paintings. Layering is fundamental to her work, with patterns – printed, painted, and incised. In layering time, Scheinman's use of acid washes and photo emulsion on sheets of copper suggest an alchemist's approach, producing shapes, and textures out of which narratives emerge. Copper, canvas, bronze wire cloth, and etched clear vinyl are nailed onto a wooden structure and painted. Her complex mixed media collages find an interconnection of past and future. Their obsessive embellishment lends them a gorgeous power and vibrant energy.

Bonnie Schiffman

Over the past three decades Bonnie Schiffman has photographed hundreds of celebrities from George Burns to Jerry Seinfeld, Julia Child to Joni Mitchell, Muhammad Ali to Warren Buffet, all of whom have appeared in most U.S. and international magazines. The energy and spontaneity that Schiffman brings to her work is what gives rise to her unique images, we get a new and honest perspective of her subjects. Lauri Kratchovil, former photo director of Rolling Stone and InStyle magazine, said it best, “Bonnie doesn't put herself into the picture. She lets people do what they do so you don't get the celebrity, you get the person.” Schiffman has archived a collection of portraits whose importance lay not only in her capture of her signature style of photography, but also in their contribution to the chronicles of American cultural history.

Jacqueline Spellens

Jackie Spellens took a basic sculpture class in 1979. In 1992, Spellens and co-owner Bernice Schachter opened Sculpture Spaces in Fountain Valley, California as a place where they could do their own work and create a supportive environment for other artists as well. Working from models or photos taken from several angles, Spellens created her pieces from slabs of cold marble or natural rock. Sometimes the stone itself suggested a form, depending on the way veins appeared in marble. The subject matter also influenced the stone she selected. In the early 1990s, Spellens created a series of terracotta sculptures of Kenyan people, whose culture inspired her best known work.

Ann Sperry

Born in the Bronx, Ann Sperry graduated from the High School of Art and Music and Sarah Lawrence College, where she was a student of modernist sculptor, Theodore Roszak. Also inspired by artist David Smith, Sperry used welded steel, often with applications of color, to explore the expressive possibilities of the generally inflexible medium. Sperry began making sculpture in the 1960s. Her steel sculptures are included in the collections of Storm King Arts Center in Orange County, NY; Skirball Museums in Los Angeles, CA & Cincinatti, OH; and the Rose Art Museum of Brandeis University in Waltham, MA. She made art about her experience as a woman, a Jew, and a human being awestruck by the immensity of the cosmos. Sperry was also known for taking an activist’s approach in exploring social issues and their impact through her art. Sperry passed away in 2009.

Robert von Sternberg

From the earliest efforts to irrigate the desert, to the postwar population explosion, to present-day suburban sprawl and conservation efforts, human enterprise has shaped the landscape of Los Angeles. It is perhaps appropriate that Robert von Sternberg, who has lived and worked most of his life in L.A. County, identifies human incursions into the natural world as a recurring theme at the heart of his photographic practice. The surreal artificial lighting that illuminates the American nighttime often provides the definitive photographic images that von Sternberg seeks in his travels. Through the roads, fences, signage, buildings, and all the other material structures of civilization, humanity marks the land; even in our bodily absence, we make our presence insistently known. Von Sternberg serves as the Executive Director of The Museum Project and was instrumental in bringing pieces from the collection to Hudson County Community College.

Melanie Walker

Melanie Walker has been a practicing artist for over 50 years. Her expertise is in the area of alternative photographic processes, digital, and mixed media, as well as large scale photographic installations and more recently, public art. She has received a number of awards including an NEA Visual Arts Fellowship, Colorado Council on the Arts Fellowship, and an Aaron Siskind Award. She taught at a number of universities including San Francisco State University, SUNY Albany, Alfred University and the University of Kentucky, Lexington. She has been collaborating on public art with artist/sculptor George Peters and together they have been recipients of numerous public art commissions in a number of national and international locations.

Todd Walker

Todd Walker (September 25, 1917 – September 13, 1998) was essentially a self-taught artist whose medium of choice was photography. He worked with light formed images for 60 years exploring Sabatier solarisation, artist books, silkscreen, lithography, collotype, and digital photography. All of these images utilized additive color with source images starting as black and white negatives. After his military service in WW2 as a flight instructor in the Army Air Corps, Walker married and returned to Los Angeles where Shirley Burden shared a studio with him in Beverly Hills. In the 1950’s he gained a reputation and became a successful freelance photographer working with clients like Charles & Rae Eames, Frank Brothers, TV Guide, and Campbell Ewald, making the signature Chevy ads from the late 1950’s. His work is in many collections around the US. He continued to exhibit his work primarily through educational venues.

Nancy Webber

A guide at the Saint Louis Art Museum gave five-year-old Webber a card with a detail from a painting and challenged her to find the work in the gallery. Webber recalled the game years later when, as an art student visiting Florence, she observed similarities between the portraits in the museums and the faces on the streets. The marriage of art and life is Webber’s theme as she creates artistic reincarnations using ordinary people with striking resemblances to famous portraits. Her series includes over 200 likenesses and covers all periods and styles of art history. With a casual attention to detail, Webber focuses on her subjects and their features, providing minimal intervention in reconstructing the scene. By literally drawing analogies between subjects like Frida Kahlo and a contemporary young woman, Webber reminds the viewer that the masterpieces we now see as objects of art started as portraits of real people. In 2003 Webber received the commission to provide public art for the Los Angeles Animal Care Center in San Pedro, CA. The concept for the project was, “Life Imitates Art.”

In 2012 The Museum Project originated as an association of distinguished American artists desiring to express their appreciation for the obvious direct and indirect career benefits derived as university professors and/or gallery artists from the public institutions that were supportive of, and promoted, photography as a fine art. To date The Museum Project has donated 3,925 photographs to the permanent collections of 143 museums or university museums, 10 libraries with special collections of art, and nine municipal or hospital foundation collections in 49 states, Washington, D.C., Australia, Canada, France and Great Britain. The project now in its fifth and final phase has an inventory exceeding 300 separate images created by the 13 presently participating artists.

The HCCC Foundation is a non-profit 501 (c) (3) corporation giving tax-exempt status to contributors. Since it was established in 1997, the Foundation has provided deserving students with scholarships totaling more than $2,650,000.

The HCCC Foundation Art Collection, valued at over $1 million, represents America’s and New Jersey’s rich artistic and cultural history, from the Hudson River School period to the present. Included are more than 1,000 paintings, lithographs, photographs, sculptures, American craft pottery and more by major artists such as Man Ray, Ben Shahn, Joan Snyder, and Marcel Duchamp. A growing collection of emerging and established New Jersey artists is included. Themes include diversity, urban life, science, technology, United States history and culture, and architecture. The Collection was established in 2006 to coincide with the initiation of the College’s Fine Arts program. The Foundation Art Collection is displayed throughout the College’s Journal Square and North Hudson Campus buildings. Thank you to the many generous HCCC Foundation Art Collection donors who made this exhibition possible.

The Benjamin J. Dineen, III and Dennis C. Hull Gallery summer hours are Monday through Thursday, from 12 to 4 p.m. The Gallery is closed Friday to Sunday and holidays. Information on upcoming events at the Gallery may be obtained by visiting https://www.hccc.edu/community/arts/index.html, emailing galleryFREEHUDSONCOUNTYCOMMUNITYCOLLEGE, or phoning (201) 360-5379.