Joan Snyder; Life of a Tree; oil, acrylic, pastel, cloth, papier-mâché, dirt, straw, seeds on canvas; 48 x 68"; 2007.

The Nielsen Gallery opens their 45th anniversary season with an exhibition of new work by Joan Snyder, a 2007 recipient of the MacArthur Foundation Genius Award. Snyder's work focuses on her personal response to interior and exterior landscapes through color, texture, and rhythm. Her paintings reflect a range of emotion, from darkly internal to meditative and lyrical. Snyder transforms her canvas with her combination of oils, acrylics, and found materials such as herbs, sticks, buttons, and glitter.

The Sue and Eugene Mercy, Jr. Gallery

Anne Currier

Anne Currier, Coincidence, stoneware.

In the words of Anne Currier, her works are “shaped by the interplay of masses and voids. Projection and recession, light and shadow, substance and impression are the subject matter of my work. The shapes are the players, intersecting, extending, colliding, or passing through/over/under/beyond one another to command space. Through the simplicity of clay cylinders, cones, planes, and edges, I can indulge my compulsion to experience both inside and outside spaces.” Curated by Jennifer McCandless, director of The Sue and Eugene Mercy, Jr. Gallery.

(L to R) Featured artists Gill Ross, Deborah Read, Vivian Berman, and Mardy Rawls.

A New View presents four new Depot Square Gallery artists. Printmaker Vivian Berman uses images of sea, sky, and land forms, with an abstract sense of light and space in her monotypes. Mardy Rawls’s watercolor landscapes and portraits exemplify the transparency and luminosity that is so effective in watercolor. Painter Deborah Read is fascinated by color and energized space, and how they affect the viewer. Gill Ross’s painterly monoprints show a fascination with, and love of, color and texture. Together these artists will fill the main floor space of the gallery with color-filled visual delight.

Rose Olson, Five to Nine, acrylic on maple veneer, 24 x 15 x 4", 2008.

This exhibit embraces the work of three artists whose non-representational work is shaped in different ways by the use of geometry. In Diane Ayott's oil paintings, richly layered accretions of markings such as dots, lines, circles, and ovals form overall spatial patterns and color shifts. Mary Bucci McCoy's mixed media work elegantly investigates intermediary spaces, such as those between organic and geometric forms. Rose Olson's luminous acrylic stripe paintings juxtapose shifting veils of color against organic wood grain. Consequences of Geometry was first shown at The Art Complex Museum, Duxbury, MA.

Maggie Stark, THERE 2008, video still. Photo: Stewart Clements.

THERE is a mixed media installation of new work by Boston sculptor Maggie Stark. Using mirror, light, and video in a series of pieces, she engages the viewer in a meditation on the nature of time. The viewer becomes someone walking to and fro on a track that appears infinite, but is confined; a beginning and an end that are contained within our bodies and our mortality.

Carle van Loo, Venus Requesting Vulcan to make Arms for Aeneas, oil on canvas, c. 1735. Purchased through gift from Jane and W. David Dance & Mrs. Harvey P. Hood W'18 Fund.

This exhibition presents the first comprehensive (and largest) display of the museum's vast holdings of British, Dutch, Flemish, French, German, Italian, and Spanish art from the Renaissance to the early twentieth century. It will feature over one hundred works of European art from the Hood's collection, including paintings by Perugino, Claude, De Heem, Van Loo, Batoni, and Picasso; sculptures dating from the Renaissance to the early twentieth century; and prints by Dürer, Rembrandt, Canaletto, Goya, Daumier, and Degas. It is part of an ongoing series focusing on the museum's permanent collection, and it follows last year's celebration of American art at Dartmouth.