195 Chrystie Street Gallery, NYC (Lower East Side), Location of the 129th Annual Members’ Exhibition.
Reception: Thursday, October 11, 6:00 – 9:00 pm
The National Association of Women Artists is honored to present its 129th Annual Members’ Exhibition, a show of paintings, works on paper, sculpture, mixed media, photography, and collage by established member artists. This year, the exhibit will be held at 195 Chrystie Street in the artistic heart of New York’s Lower East Side. For two weeks, members’ artworks will be on displayed 7 days of the week, just a heartbeat away from the New Museum of Contemporary Art, the International Center for Photography, the celebrated Tenement Museum and many other galleries and restaurants ideal for the gallery-going public.
The Annual Member’s Exhibition continues NAWA’s long history of nurturing and inspiring talented, visionary and dynamic women artists from throughout the United States. NAWA was founded in 1889 by five brave and innovative women who were barred from full participation in the male-dominated National Academy of Design and the Society of American Artists. Early exhibitions included works by Mary Cassatt, Suzanne Valadon among others and as the roster grew, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, Louise Nevelson and Alice Neel became noted member luminaries. NAWA’s existence is a testament to the integral and essential role of women in the art world. NAWA’s president, Jill Cliffer Baratta, will be hosting the opening reception and award ceremony from 6:00 – 9:00 pm. on Thursday, October 11, 2018, with over $10,000 in awards.
This year’s lineup of jurors is an impressive one—a distinguished painter-writer-teacher, a SoHo gallery owner and a senior curator for the Brooklyn Museum.
Margaret McCann
Margaret McCann’s paintings range stylistically from realism to quasi abstraction, with an emphasis on spatial and compositional complexity. They have been inspired by living in Rome 8 years, Atlantic City 4 years, growing up in a large family, and painters from Brueghel to di Chirico and Lucien Freud. Her solo exhibitions include Jannone Disegni di Architettura in Milan, The Painting Center in NYC, and Artemesia in Chicago. She also shows with the Zeuxis still life group. McCann studied at Yale U., Wash. U in St. Louis, and the NY Studio School. Her awards include Fulbright, Ingram-Merrill, Blanche E. Colman, and NH State grants, with numerous artist residencies in the U.S., Rome and Paris. She grew up in Cleveland, lives in NYC, teaching at NY Academy of Art, Montclair U., and the Art Students League. Her teaching career includes UVA, Syracuse U., Pratt among others, and in Rome at RISD, Trinity College, John Cabot U. and Loyola U.
McCann writes art reviews for Painter’s Table blog. She edited the Skira/Rizzoli book The Figure: Contemporary Perspectives (2014) for NYAA, featuring images and essays by emerging and established artists. Her essays address the western tradition’s changing techniques from antiquity through cyberspace, and prevailing cultural influences such as Freud, fascism, and feminism.
Anita Rogers
Anita Rogers is the founder of Anita Rogers Gallery, a contemporary fine art gallery in SoHo, New York City. The gallery is known for cultivating the careers of exceptional painters and sculptors, both figurative and abstract. Anita Rogers Gallery has become a hub for New York artists, who are descendants of the New York School, and aims to provide a place for authentic discourse on the current and future state of the art world.
In 2012, Rogers founded British American Household Staffing, the nation’s leading domestic staffing agency. BAHS is headquartered in NYC with offices in LA as well as Miami, London and Geneva. Prior to working in the recruitment industry, Anita worked in Sephardic research at The Hebrew Union College – Jewish Institute of Religion in Greenwich Village. Anita has a strong background in the arts and is a trained opera singer and harpist. A British citizen, she holds a degree in Ethnomusicology from SOAS (The School of Oriental and African Studies) joint with King’s College London in Western Classical Composition.
Lisa Small
Lisa Small was appointed Senior Curator, European Art, at the Brooklyn Museum in 2017, coming on board in 2011 as Curator of Exhibitions. Most recently, she organized the exhibition and edited the catalogue for Killer Heels: The Art of the High-Heeled Shoe (2014). She also co-curated the traveling exhibition French Moderns: Monet to Matisse, 1850-1950 (2017). At the Brooklyn Museum, Small coordinated presentations of Georgia O’Keeffe: Living Modern (2017), The Rise of Sneaker Culture (2015), The Fashion World of Jean Paul Gaultier: From the Sidewalk to the Catwalk (2013) and Jean-Michel Othoniel: My Way (2012).
Previously, Small was Senior Curator of Exhibitions at the American Federation of Arts, where she coordinated traveling exhibitions including Turner to Cézanne: Masterpieces from the Davies Collection, National Museum Wales and Gods and Heroes: Masterpieces from the École des Beaux-Arts, Paris.
Prior to AFA, Small was a curator at the Dahesh Museum of Art, where she organized and contributed to catalogues for numerous exhibitions. Small has taught art history and the history of photography at Hunter College, Brooklyn College, and the School of Visual Arts. She received a BA from Colgate University, an MA in Arts Administration from New York University, and an MA and M.Phil in Art History from CUNY.