BCA Center, Summer 2020 Gallery Education Guide

A BCA ACTIVITY GUIDE JULY 22 – OCTOBER 10, 2020

JoAnne Carson, Knotty Pine, 2016

Welcome to the BCA Center JULY 22 – OCTOBER 10, 2020 Use this guide to explore the exhibitions on three floors of the BCA Center. You will SEE many different works of art, THINK about how the exhibition themes and ideas connect to our contemporary lives, and DO your own recording and sketching of your ideas.

Exhibiting artists featured in this guide: JoAnne Carson, Annelein Beukenkamp, Brendan Bush, Sarah Carlson-McNally, Cat Cutillo, Kylie Dally, Frank DeAngelis, Lorna Rose Dielentheis, Phillip Dolson, Kevin Donegan, Aleyna Feinberg, Barbee Hauzinger, Ella Whittemore Hill, Martha Hull, Aleda Kirstein, Caitlin La Dolce, Noah Lagle, Nikki Laxar, Sarah Letteney, Misoo, Zoe Nicholson, Scottie Raymond, Ken Russack, Seeko the Kid, Ross Sheehan, Sam Simon, Susan Smereka, Dakin Fuller Vasquez (f.k.a. Kara Torres), Isaac Wasuck, Corrine Yonce, and Johanne Durocher Yordan.

JoAnne Carson: A Sense of Wonder features large-scale paintings and drawings by JoAnne Carson. The artist’s wondrous worlds of flora are playful, surreal, comic, and often have dark elements. Her exuberant compositions feature animated abstractions in the form of bushes, flowers, branches, and trees. Richly patterned and colorful, her imagery evokes the transformative and cyclical nature of life.

Stay Home / Stay Safe [Executive Order 01-20] presents 30 Vermont artists with new work created in response to the theme of ‘home’ and Vermont Governor Phil Scott’s Executive Order 01-20 | Amendment 6 emergency declaration Stay Home / Stay Safe. The exhibition explores our evolving and increasingly complex relationship to home in response to the COVID-19 pandemic through a diverse spectrum of media and aesthetic approaches.

EXTENDED THROUGH SEPTEMBER 26

Estefania Puerta: Sore Mouth Swore plays with notions of materials, media, and transformation. Estefania Puerta uses a variety of textural and sensory materials including beeswax, synthetic hair, scented oils, and dirt to create works of art that defy boundaries and definition. (Explore on your own in the Lower Level Gallery and BCA stairwell).

Exhibition Themes and Vocabulary Wonder Nature Gardening Flora Life Cycle

Dualism Surreal Abstract Pandemic Isolation

Experience Community Creativity Transform Equality

First Floor Gallery

JoAnne Carson: A Sense of Wonder

Breezy (detail), 2019

A Sense of Wonder explores themes of wonder, joy, and curiosity for the natural world. JoAnne Carson draws inspiration for her imaginary nature scenes from her lush garden in Shoreham, VT, where she experiments with form, composition, and color. In her surreal landscapes, the artist transforms bushes, flowers, and trees into colorful abstract forms and fanciful characters.

Her work tells different stories about nature - its strength and ability to renew life cycles, and its fragility when faced with human impact on the environment. Carson shows ideas of opposites, such as light and dark, hope and uncertainty through her rich use of color, pattern, and imagery.

What elements of nature do you see in Carson’s painting titled Breezy?

Can you identify the hidden words and images? What are they?

What is going on in this scene? What story about nature is being told?

Imagine you could enter this painting. What do you hear, smell, and feel?

Explore JoAnne Carson’s painting Breezy to inspire your own imaginary scene from nature. Make a sketch of flowers, bushes, trees, and whatever else you wish to ‘plant’ in your wondrous garden. Include any nature creatures in your composition. If you like, add words that express your ideas or feelings about nature.

First Floor Gallery

JoAnne Carson: A Sense of Wonder

Field Days (detail), 2014

JoAnne Carson observes and draws the flora – plants, flowers, bushes, and trees – in her garden to inspire her art. In her painting Field Days, the artist uses a variety of lines, shapes, and colors to illustrate nature elements, seasons, times of day, and moods. Through her use of abstraction, an arrangement of pink shapes becomes a flower, and purple vertical lines looks like rain. Night and day exist in the same scene represented by cool colors of blue, purple, and green and warm colors of yellow, orange, and red.

Carson creates her compositions through a multi-step process. She works from drawings, photographs of her garden, photos and memories of past sculptures and unfinished paintings. She recently starting collaging ideas together in Photoshop to create new work. All of her compositions relate to one another as they depict wondrous worlds.

What types of lines and shapes did Carson use to create images of trees, flowers, sunshine, and rain in her painting Field Days?

What colors did she use to show different types of flora, times of day, and seasons?

How are the scenes on the left and right sides of the composition similar?

How are they different?

Draw forms and elements from nature using lines, shapes, and colors to create your own abstract imagery.

Draw a flower using shapes

Draw rain or sunshine using lines

Draw something in nature using only cool colors of blue, purple, and green

Draw something in nature using only warm colors of yellow, orange, and red

Second Floor Gallery

Stay Home / Stay Safe [Executive Order 01-20]

Cat Cuttillo, The Backyard Superhero (detail), 2020

Home is often seen as a place of shelter, comfort, and safety where we live as a part of a family. For many people during the COVID-19 pandemic our homes have become the center of our lives - where we go to school, our playground, and place of work. Different communities experience the challenges of the pandemic in different ways. In Stay Home / Stay Safe, 30 Vermont artists explore how our homes have changed during this time of isolation.

Each artist was given the same size 24" x 36" canvas and asked to create an original work of art in response to the pandemic and the theme of home.

The artists work in a variety of media including painting, photography, mixed-media, and collage. Many different voices, ideas, and experiences of home are shared through their imagery, materials, and techniques.

What words or ideas come to mind when you look at Cat Cuttillo’s photograph The Backyard Superhero?

How do you think the artist created this image? What colors stand out for you?

What is the young person feeling?

How has the pandemic changed your time at home? What is different and what is the same?

Draw your favorite thing about staying at home during the pandemic.

Maybe it’s your favorite family activity, a special place that you created for yourself, or time with your pet. Then, draw something you dream about doing when the time of isolation is over, like going to the movies, playing a group sport, or traveling to see a relative.

Keep on drawing!

Draw something that gives you a sense of joy and wonder for the natural world. Is it a sunset, the woods, a flower garden, a spiderweb, a colorful bird, or nature in your backyard? Go on a nature walk or look out a window to inspire your sketch.

Burlington City Arts 135 Church St Burlington VT 05401 BURLINGTONCITYARTS.ORG

See.Think.Do! invites youth and adults to the BCA Center for an interactive arts experience. Visits last approximately 1-2 hours and begin in the gallery with inquiry-based exploration, lively discussion, and active multidisciplinary learning. Programs conclude in the studio classroom, where students create works of art inspired by exhibition themes, materials, and artistic processes.

Youth and adults may also arrange for a guided gallery tour led by the BCA Center’s curator and gallery staff.

To schedule your visit, please contact: Melinda Johns, Gallery Education and Programs Coordinator, at mjohns@burlingtoncityarts.org, or call 802-865-7551.

Visit burlingtoncityarts.org/gallery-education for more information.