HAPPY HOLIDAYS FROM THE MATNEY GALLERY

Thanks to all of you who supported the gallery in 2023. 2024 will be a year of starting conversations and new collaborations. Whether you are an artist, art lover, art collector, or potential strategic partner, we have made it easier to align with the gallery with more ways to communicate with the gallery. Start a conversation directly with the curator via new contact pages. We have transitioned to private presentations and PDFs for much of the deeper catalogs of artists at the gallery. Many of the works are exclusive and not available online on public websites. Conference and zoom meetings are available to many of our artists with advance notice. The Private Annex Gallery now includes multimedia presentations not available elsewhere with some of the top artists from the South, Hampton Roads, Richmond, and elsewhere.

Our Holiday Newsletter collects many of our best shows and articles from the year in one place. Coverage includes featured shows in Virginia and Texas and virtual exhibitions with artists producing innovative work in academic, commercial, and personal milieus.

The gallery's mission supports the intellectual and commercial viability of our artists and the community. We encourage the greater community to visit art galleries.

John Lee Matney

Pictured works by Grayson Chandler. His one person show opens April 2024. Start a Conversation

Jill Carnes

Paul Light Jr. New works will be available in January. START A CONVERSATION

Rob Carter’s Smoke Screen Virtual Exhibition

Sandra-Lee Phipps START A CONVERSATION

Matney Gallery recently spoke to artists Vanessa Briscoe Hay and Sandra-Lee Phipps about their work, their friendship over the decades, and their collaborations on Sandra’s series of photographs, Lesson in Survival. Both artists are profoundly influential Athens, Ga, music, and art scene veterans. Vanessa Briscoe Hay is the lead singer of the legendary Athens band Pylon Sandra-Lee Phipps, a professor of art at The Savannah College of Art and Design known for her iconic early photographs of R.E.M. READ MORE

Three Excellences of Culture: Painting, Poetry and Music, the Work of Art Rosenbaum and Friends

Art Rosenbaum, Margo Newmark Rosenbaum, Neil Rosenbaum, Howard Finster, Dilmus Hall, Tyrus Lytton, Teddy Johnson, Kent Knowles, Dennis Harper, Jeffrey Whittle, Michael K. Paxton, Zuzka Vaclavik, Scott Belville

Pearl Fincher Museum of Fine Arts, Spring Texas

Special thanks to Courtney Gardner

Howard Finster by Art Rosenbaum and Art Rosenbaum by Howard Finster

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STEVE PRINCE

Steve A. Prince is a native of New Orleans, Louisiana, and he currently resides in Williamsburg, Virginia. He is the Director of Engagement and Distinguished Artist in Residence at the Muscarelle Museum at William and Mary.

Pictured: Hallelujah Anyhow, 2021, Linoleum, 36 × 24 in | 91.4 × 61 cm, Edition of 40. START A CONVERSATION

INSTALLATION/ WORKS ON PAPER 2023

Heather Beardsley, Robert Brown, Jill Carnes, Dale Clifford, Dana Jo Cooley, Christine Debastiani, Eliot Dudik, Brian Freer, Marie Gathiez, Christi Harris, Janice Hathaway, Vanessa Briscoe Hay, Ani Hoover, Teddy Johson, Kent Knowles, Brian Kreydatus, Ryan Lytle, John Lee Matney, Judith McWillie, Elizabeth Mead, Edwin Pease, Sandra-Lee Phipps, Steve Prince, Art Rosenbaum, Margo Newmark Rosenbaum, Sidney Rouse, Nicole Santiago, Taiz Shepard, Kristin Skees, Jeffrey Whittle,

VIEW THE EXHIBITION

HEATHER BEARDSLEY

 Heather Beardsley is an American visual artist that creates mixed-media projects at the intersection of art, science, and environmental issues. She works primarily with embroidery, cyanotype, and air-dry clay, mixing the aesthetics of scientific illustration with craft and children’s art materials to play with display conventions and visual hierarchies.

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SIDNEY ROUSE

Sidney Rouse is an American artist known for his evocative works examining entropy, illusion, and personal acceptance. A self-taught artist, his imagery is strongly influenced by the iconography and rituals he experienced within the Mormon temple as a child. 

 Utilizing mirrors, water, and illusory compositions, Rouse achieves surreal imagery entirely through analog techniques— a practice he describes as "outsourcing to nature." For this reason, he is as much a technical innovator pushing the boundaries of ordinary material as he is an artist in pursuit of sincere, creative expression.  START A CONVERSATION

GRAYSON CHANDLER

Grayson Chandler graduated with a BFA from the University of North Texas. His exhibited works have featured oil paintings on canvas and wood panel, and watercolors on paper.Fascinated by the intrinsic order and beauty of nature, Grayson’s work attempts to capture and abstract its character in a manner that is uncanny, yet familiar. Deeply curious about the forces that govern human reason and faith, his work probes the amphibious network linking logic, intuition, consciousness, and emotion. Through this perspective, we are encouraged to draw upon our own experience as a means of shaping the border between real and imaginary. Moreover, we are encouraged to explore how the shape of our experience shapes how we see, and how what we see is largely colored by what we can recognize. Within this aesthetic, the spectator is invited to enter a space that meditates on the means through which we conceive and assign meaning to form. CONTACT LEE MATNEY

ELIZABETH MEAD

Elizabeth Mead’s sculpture, drawing, and photographs have been exhibited across the U.S. as well as in Australia, England, Iceland, Italy, Japan, Korea, Portugal, and Taiwan . She has designed more than two-dozen theatrical productions including work with the internationally acclaimed, Tony award winning Theatre de la Jeune Lune.

A recipient of the Japan/US NEA Creative Artist Fellowship (2002-03), Mead spent six months living and working in Japan. Mead has received recognition for her work in theater by the Dallas Theater League (1998) and the Theater Communication Group/NEA Designer Fellowship (1997, 1998). Mead attended the Ecole Internationale de Jacques Lecoq in Paris, France (1995). She was awarded a work-stay residency at Sculpture Space in Utica, New York (1992).

She has been a visiting artist and artist in residence at numerous distinguished institutions including Cité Internationale des Arts, Artist Residency, Paris, France (2015, 2018), Slade School of Fine Art, University College, London, England (2001, 2002, 2003, 2013), Nes Artist Residency Skagaströnd, Iceland  (2009), Youkobo Art Space, Tokyo, Japan (2002-03), Carleton College, Northfield, Minnesota (2002, 2004), Pacific Northwest College of Art (1994, 2000), Southern Methodist University (1993,1997), Burren College of Art, Co. Clare, Ireland (1995).

She is Professor of Art and W. Reveley III Interdisciplinary Fellow at the College of William & Mary.

Savannah College of Art and Design Professors in Works on Paper

A Conversation with Kent Knowles, 2023

READ THE ARTICLE

John Lee Matney: Welcome Kent. Can you discuss works by Savannah College of Art and Design professors in Works on Paper?

Kent Knowles: So the works you're seeing is photography by Sandra-Lee Phipps You also see some of my work. And then we have two printmakers. One is the primary faculty member for our printmaking program, Robert Brown and the second is our Dean of Academics, Dale Clifford who's also a printmaker. There's a lot of methodology and different processes. Professor Robert Brown is working with photogravure, which is a fascinating medium, and I've never worked with it personally. But in a nutshell, you can get photographic reproductions printed on a plate that you can then physically manipulate however you want. So if you view his collection of work, you see this lovely marriage of nature and embellishment. and of course, that goes with color but also with details within the work itself. So you get a wide range of potential when you're dealing with imagery that we're used to seeing as photographic and as an accurate record. And then it's getting manipulated. With Dale Clifford's work, you're getting a glimpse into a very long-running dialogue of the artist utilizing woodcut, linocut woodblock to create these, these narratives based around a lot of birds, a lot of animal life a lot of rabbits, and I believe you all have work that is, are primarily birds and, and maybe ravens or crows, as I recall. READ MORE

Robert Brown

BODILY RHETORIC

 After many years of studying and teaching anatomy, Laura Frazure has developed a distinctive approach to figurative sculpture, specifically concentrating on the female body. Rejecting direct observation and the use of live models, Frazure employs a more structural approach to form-making and invented proportional relations. This process emphasizes “direct modeling”, highlighting form and form development with no subsequent mediatory processes. Using translucent waxes coated with a thin glaze of oil paint and varnish, air dry clay and a modeling compound, the figures are constructed on a steel reinforced aluminum wire armature. START A CONVERSATION

Laura Frazure, After Prada

Sarah Wicker with her work. Learn more

THE WILLIAM & MARY SENIOR STUDIO ART MAJORS’ CAPSTONE EXHIBITION

February 24- March 28, 2023

Matney Gallery, 5435 Richmond Road, Suite A Williamsburg, Virginia

The Department of Art & Art History invites you to come and view the featured work of the 2023 W&M Studio Art seniors. This exhibition is part of the Studio Capstone course, required by all Studio Art majors in their Senior year.

Thanks to the support of the Matney Gallery, the following Studio Art seniors will be featured in this spring's Capstone exhibition:

Azaria’h Alexander, Gabrielle Buffaloe, Talia Carstoiu, Sophie Cassidy, Chris Eliades, Rebecca Golden, Alina Kacar, Grace Moser, Miles Piontek,  Yuxin (Kathy) Qin, William Tatum, Angel Valdez-Machicado, Sarah Wicker, Yaxi Xiao

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NUDES, A CONTEMPORARY VIEW

Curated by Diana Blanchard Gross and John Lee Matney

Chris Corson, M. Dierking, Laura Frazure, Brian Freer, Agnes Grochulska, Janice Hathaway Jennifer Hartley, Karl Jones, Brian Kreydatus, Devon Lawrence, Mark Miltz, Sandra-Lee Phipps, Julia Rogers, Sidney Rouse, Rebecca Shkeyrov

Manet's Olympia, a painting of a reclining nude woman, was met with outrage and condemnation when it was first exhibited in 1865, as it challenged the traditional notion of the idealized female nude. Today, the nude continues to be a popular and debated subject. VIEW EXHIBIT

Pictured: Chris Corson, Plinth, 2019, 8 x18 x23, Wood fired clay

Read about the exhibition at Nudes, The Mirror, The Big Tent

RELATED CONTENT

Eva Series and other works: An interview with Mark Miltz

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Press Release for the Eva Series

This series of works features the integration of Japanese pop cultural images (anime) into traditional western fine art objects. The pieces rely on both the contrasts inherent in the disparate source materials and the interplay between these contrasting cultural symbol systems for their content. In effect, the works are translations. They attempt to emphasize a commonality of experience through the mediation of the native symbol systems of the viewers, whether western or Japanese. By using Japanese elements in western motifs, I am exploring the ways in which the assimilation of content is affected by its form.
The works overall deal with universal issues of love, alienation, sacrifice, and the crucible of adolescence by using that most universal of images, the human body. The body (often at life size) facilitates a metaphysical link between individual viewer and art. VIEW EXHIBIT

A GLIMPSE IN THE FUTURE

 THROUGH FEBRUARY 17, 2023

A Glimpse Into the Future, curated by John Lee Matney, emphasizes forward movement. As seen in this preview, movement takes many forms. With the passage of time, art evolves, but evolution is also possible through past reflection. This show brings new and old pieces of art into dialogue with one another in order to highlight artists’ messages. Lenticulars, traditional and transformative painting, photography, and sculpture are all on display.

Pictured Olga Tobreluts. VIEW RELATED ARTICLE

Sam Beirne, our marketing intern in 2022-23 hanging works by Jonn Lee Matney and Scott Belville

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John Lee Matney, Jeremy and Ada, 1994

JOHN LEE MATNEY: PSYCHOLOGICAL LANDSCAPE REVISITED

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PROFILE ON IVAN PLUSCH

Ivan Plusch (born in 1981) is a Russian contemporary artist. One of the authors who has formed a new wave of figurative painting in St. Petersburg in the late 2000s-2010s. He also works with objects and total installations (including collaborations with his wife Irina Drozd). The main issues of art are the collective unconscious, historical memory (in particular critical comprehension of the Soviet past), human identity in the world of high technology.

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Leigh Anne Chambers: Shape Shifters and Spirit Guides with Christi Harris: Lachrymose

December 8, 2023- January 10, 2024

where

5435 Richmond Rd
Williamsburg , Virginia 23188

Chambers’ works do not have an explicit narrative, they develop a language informed by contemporary culture. Supplies from the hardware store like liquid rubber and spray paint work in tandem with imagery.

Pictured: Peaceable kingdom remix, liquid rubber, oil and spray paint on panel, 72” x 60”, 2021

Leigh Anne Chambers

Statement:

My studio practice is largely driven by materials. I am drawn to the immediacy of supplies from the hardware store like liquid rubber and spray paint. These work in tandem with imagery created from composite drawings of comics and coloring books. While these pieces do not have an explicit narrative, they develop a language informed by contemporary culture.

Christi Harris

Statement for Lachrymose:

This work explores the intersection of grieving and “emotional labor” made tangible in embroidered phrases from condolence letters from a late 19th-century Virginia family. Harris discovered the letters at a flea market, and during the pandemic she spent time painstakingly embroidering words or phrases from the letters onto handkerchiefs in the style of the writer’s handwriting. Hundreds of these embroidered receptacles for grief and tears will be suspended around the viewer in the Microgallery, becoming a tangible manifestation of the universal human experience of grieving.

Hundreds of these embroidered receptacles for grief and tears will be suspended around the viewer in the gallery, becoming a tangible manifestation of the universal human experience of grieving.

CNU’s Christi Harris with Ryan Lytle

View of Christi Harris’ Lachrymose installation

Revisiting Art House on City Square and Temporal Distortions: Artists Working in the Contemporary South