Alan Greenberg, Karen Baumeister, & Stuart Fineman
On View: March 22nd – May 2nd 2014
Reception: Saturday, March 22, 2014, 5:00 – 8:00 p.m.
nothing is everything is a group exhibition of paintings and drawings by three Philadelphia-area based artists, Alan Greenberg, Karen Baumeister, and Stuart Fineman.
Poetry and Music
Saturday, March 29 2014, 7:00 – 9:00 p.m.
In response to the exhibition a Poetry Recital with acclaimed writers from the The Montgomery County Poetry Wordshop (known as the Montco Wordshop), including celebrated poets; Fran Baird, Liz Chang, Susan Charkes, Doris Ferleger, Joanne Leva, Helen Mirkil, Amy Small-McKinney and Sean Webb, will highlight the exhibition. The evening will include a solo recital by cellist, Eugene Klein, of the Wilmington Philharmonic Orchestra.
About the Artists
Stuart Fineman has exhibited in the United States and Europe with solo exhibitions at Christopher Grimes in Santa Monica, Paule Anglim in San Francisco and ARCUS in Paris, France. His work is included in the Anderson Collection in Palo Alto, California, Sofitel in Paris, Saks Fifth Avenue, New York City and NTT data Communications, Tokyo, Japan. He holds a BFA degree from Philadelphia College of Art (UArts) and an MFA from Mills College in Oakland, California. He is an instructor in Design and Drawing at Drexel University and Philadelphia University.
Karen Baumeister graduated from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts earning a Certificate and MFA Degree in painting. Her work has been included in several juried and group exhibitions including; ‘In Daylight’ Small Paintings, Larry Becker Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, PA, and Eight Painters, Kathryn Markel Fine Arts, New York, NY. She is an adjunct professor at Montgomery County Community College in Blue Bell, and faculty member at Fleisher Art Memorial in Philadelphia, PA http://kbaumeister.blogspot.
Alan Greenberg recently completed We Remember, a Holocaust Memorial Commission for the Congregation Mishkan Shalom, in Philadelphia, PA. He was awarded a Pollock Krasner Foundation Grant and has taught at Tyler School of Art, the University of the Arts, and Drexel University. His work is held in numerous public collections including the Carnegie Museum of Art and the Delaware Museum of Art.
Thinking About Everything And Nothing
Carl Belz
Nothing is everything. The existential proposition is appealing, particularly in relation to visual art. But not all of it. Not art that originates in the purposeful urge to engage directly social or political issues and concerns, for instance, or undertake partisan cultural or institutional critique, or promote exclusively an ideology of one sort or another–in other words, and regardless of quality, not art that’s subsumed first and last by service to a personal agenda or theoretical program. Instead, art that addresses the ways of the world from a position that’s oblique to them, art that is self-aware in acknowledging its limits and autonomous in its being–art as art that stakes its all on being knowable in and of itself and is otherwise good for nothing. And why does such art mean everything to us? Because its ongoing process of knowing and acknowledging is synonymous with the experience of coming to ourselves from within rather than without, and too because it so candidly mirrors what modern experience–what our being in the world in the first place–is itself all about.
The art I’m referring to, modernist art, includes the paintings in this exhibition, a genre of abstraction representing a vital thread within the larger fabric of abstract painting, one whose history now reaches back a full century.
Acknowledgements and special thanks goes to Carl Belz, Director Emeritus of the Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, for his essay written for the exhibition, Thinking About Everything And Nothing.