From New York to Lincolnville
June 15, 2019 @ 1:00 pm – 2:00 pm
Talk by Susan Danly
Slab City Rendezvous guest curator Susan Danly will investigate how and why a group of young New York artists first came to midcoast Maine in the 1950s, bringing with them new ideas about modern art. The diverse group included figurative and landscape painters Lois Dodd, Rackstraw Downes, Yvonne Jacquette, Alex Katz, and Neil Welliver; filmmaker and photographer Rudy Burckhardt; installation artists Red Grooms and Mimi Gross; and painter/sculptor Bernard Langlais. What they created on Slab City Road transformed art-making in Maine and the course of art in America.
Currently an independent curator of American art, Susan Danly has worked in museums across the country over the past thirty years—from the Huntington Library and Art Galleries in California to the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia, the Mead Art Museum at Amherst College in Massachusetts, and the Portland Museum of Art. A specialist in the history of American photography, she has authored numerous books and catalogues, most recently a history of photography in Maine, along with Libby Bischof and the Maine State Historian Earle G. Shettleworth, Jr.
During her tenure at the Portland Museum of Art, Danly organized a variety of exhibitions that focused on the work of contemporary Maine photographers: in 3 Biennials; in monographic studies of Madeleine de Sinety and David Stess; and in photographic images of the painter Georgia O’Keeffe taken by Todd Webb. In 2017, she curated an exhibition for PhoPa Gallery in Portland, Maine, about the renewed interest in pictorial aesthetics among Maine artists such as Shoshanna White, Amy Parrish, David Wolfe, and Koichiro Kurita. Her interest in historic processes also led to a commissioned photographic portfolio about the Winslow Homer Studio.
The Lead Sponsor of Slab City Rendezvous is Camden National Bank and Edith F. Dixon. This exhibition is made possible thanks in part to the generous support of the Arete Foundation.
Cost: $15; $10 museum members, including gallery admission