Many Colored Silken Threads

July 12 – August 17, 2024

Robert Armstrong • Jennifer Brook-Kothlow • Tom Davies
Judith Foosaner • Ruth Mayerson Gilbert • William Giles
Richard Murai • Kenneth Parker • Robertson Parkman

The Carl Cherry Center’s current exhibit, Many Colored Silken Threads, is taken from a poem written by Jeanne D’Orge (Mrs. Carl  Cherry) and published in Others for 1919, An Anthology of New Poetry Magzine, edited by Alfred Kreymborg. In the poem, as well as the exhibit, the title suggests the merging of difference and unity and also how the various divergent strands create a unified whole.

In the years before and after World War II, modernist art was varied in style and subject matter. In the current selection of artwork, the muscular surrealism and churning style of Jeanne D’Orge meets an array of forms, styles and motifs in art, photography and sculpture. Focusing on the period of 1935 to today, the exhibit is not a unified conjuring of modernism, but rather a cross-section of many-sided—even incompatible—art forms, media and themes from contemporary (and mostly local) artists and photographers.

From roughly 1939 to 1955, D’Orge painted a number of paintings focusing on Point Lobos, a few of which are included in the current exhibit. In addition to a book of poetry exploring Point Lobos, these striking, mostly black and gray paintings endlessly captured the wild, elemental landscape and seascape of the area. With the Lobos paintings, William Giles’ exploding wave and Richard Murai’s smiling bodhisattvas at Angor Thom and D’Orge’s silent, muted faces or, Judith Foosaner’s dark gestural markings with Cherry’s interior landscapes—dissimilar, and at the same time responding to the other–each sphere, medium and theme fused and juxtaposed to create a many colored silken thread.

Robert Reese
Executive Director, Carl Cherry Center for the Arts