TENERA

ABOUT THE EXHIBITION

Tenderness is in need of cultivation. It is a vital counterbalance to the many hard edges we encounter in our daily lives. It is an act of replenishment and communal care. Tenera features six artists whose work centers around tenderness. From intimate,  at times nostalgic, domestic scenes to the emanating vibrancy of well-wishes to a loved one, the exhibited works offer moments of reveling in being soft in order to cultivate that essential tenderness. 

There is tremendous tenderness in the act of making: from the diligent painted realism of Leeah Joo and Cindy Rizza to the repetitive practice of Andrea Sulzer and  Barbara Sullivan, to the emissions of love and care of Crystalle LaCouture and Sharon Chandler Correnty, the creative process is one of cultivating tenderness. 

ABOUT THE ARTISTS

Sharon Chandler Correnty is an art educator based in Massachusetts. Her passion for teaching since 1979 is based on her endless energy cultivating her knowledge of all art genres. She is continuously embracing every technique and every medium to provide a well rounded creative arts program.

Over the past three years she has revisited her love of textiles. On an impulse she signed up for a Gathering of Stitches organized and hosted by Samantha Hoyt Lindgren and since then she has not stopped. The action of taking cloth and immersing it in a marigold plant  bath and then the process of cutting and machine stitching and best of all putting a slow sashiko stitch as a way to connect and develop a mindful Practice has kept her centered during these turbulent times. Her husband carefully curated and planted a dye garden and her love of natural fibers has influenced her own wardrobe. It has been so gratifying to drape on her own body and be a witness to what she calls sizeless and gender fluid clothing. She allows the fabric to guide her and her philosophy is that beautiful cloth should be worn. Even if you think you cut wrong or you have made a mistake, it is the problem solving and the results that makes that garment more interesting.

Crystalle Lacouture is an artist based in Boston and North Adams, MA. She received her BFA in Painting/Printmaking from Skidmore College in 2000, where she received the Pamela Weidenman Excellence in Printmaking Award. While living in NYC, Crystalle was a longtime assistant to activist artists Nancy Spero and Leon Golub and a printmaker and Resident Key Holder at the Lower East Side Printshop. She has attended residencies at Surf Point Foundation, Vermont Studio Center, the Vanguard Mastheads, the Contemporary Artist Center, and Room 83 Spring. Her work is in the collections of Fidelity, the Hammond Museum, and Skidmore College. In addition to her full-time studio practice and other curatorial projects Crystalle is a curator at TOURISTS, a hotel near Mass MoCA in North Adams, MA. She exhibits her work throughout New England and New York and is represented by Beth Kantrowitz from BK Projects and Drive-By Gallery in Boston.

Leeah Joo is a Korean-American painter based in Connecticut. Born in 1971 in Seoul, Leeah was raised by a sculptor father and an illustrator mother. At age ten, her family moved to Indianapolis, where she spent her youth. She studied painting and art history at Indiana University in Bloomington and received her MFA in painting from Yale School of Art. Her paintings have been exhibited widely in the U.S. and South Korea and recognized with awards from Pollock Krasner,  George Sugarman Foundation and Connecticut Commission on Arts. Since 1996, she has taught and served as visiting artist/critic for over 25 institutions including the Kansas City Art Institute, Maryland Institute College of Art, Hartford Art School and Fairfield University. She lives and paints in Middlebury and teaches at Southern CT State University in New Haven. 

Native to Maine, Cindy Rizza is a classically trained, representational oil painter with her BFA from the New Hampshire Institute of Art. Her iconic representations of familiar domestic subjects summon conflicting feelings of comfort and loneliness, hope and foreboding, and of life and loss. She is a recipient of numerous awards, including the Vermont Studio Center Artist Grant, Second Prize at the 9th Annual Lore Degenstein National Figurative Drawing and Painting Competition at Susquehanna University in Selinsgrove, PA and most recently the Best of Show Prize at the Wausau Museum of Contemporary Art Annual Juried National Exhibition, in Wausau, WI. Her work is collected internationally. Cindy lives and works in Southern New Hampshire.

Barbara Sullivan is a painter/sculptor and installation artist living in Maine. She works in the age–old medium of fresco, which she learned when she was the head cook at The Skowhegan School of Sculpture and Painting. She teaches drawing foundations at The University of Maine Farmington. She also teaches fresco workshops; including, The Aspen Institute, The Farnsworth Museum, Haystack Mountain School, Pratt Institute, Bowdoin, Colby, and The University of Maine.

In 2007, Sullivan had her first solo Museum Exhibition, at The University of Maine Museum. She has shown widely in Maine and in New York, recently in, “Fresco, Off The Wall” at The Hudson Guild Gallery. She has received Adolph and Esther Gottlieb and The Pollock/Krasner Grants. 

Andrea Sulzer received her Master of Fine Arts from the Glasgow School of Art, Scotland. She has had solo exhibitions at the Portland Museum of Art, Bowdoin College, and the University of Maine Museum of Art. Sulzer exhibited at ICON gallery, in Brunswick, Maine over a span of about 20 years. A recent solo exhibition, once removed (2018), took place at Maurer Zilioli Contemporary Arts  in Munich, Germany. In 2019 and 2020, she completed two large-scale public art projects (glass tile  mosaics and murals) for Maine schools through the Maine Percent for Art program.