New Exhibition Focuses On Women’s Issues

BROOKFIELD — A unique new multi-media exhibition of contemporary conceptual craft work by 24 international profile women artists will open in the Lynn Tendler Bignell Exhibition Gallery at Brookfield Craft Center on Sunday, August 27. Entitled “Women’s World: A Work In Progress,” the show will run through October 22.

Admission is free. Hours are Monday through Saturday, 10 am to 5 pm, and Sunday, 12 to 5 pm.

Guest curator Gail M. Brown has selected artists whose work addresses issues of nurture, nature, occupation and spirit using materials of domestic familiarity, celebrating “our mastery of these responsibilities” to participate in the unique exhibition of primarily sculptural work.

The participating artists are Harriete Estel Berman, Patricia Burleson, Amanda Butler, Lou Cabeen, Jennifer Carroll, Sonya Clark, Cynthia Consentino, Clementine Cummer, Linda Franklin, Tina Fung Holder, Bryant Holsenbeck, Kathleen Holmes, Wendy Huhn, Peggy Johnson, Rose Kelly, Barbara Klunder, Lauren Levy, Terry Niedzialek, Debra Olin, Karyl Sisson, Lauren Schott, Gail Smuda, Barbara Stutman, and Janis Mars Wunderlich.

According to Ms Brown, work for the show was chosen for its “focus on traditional women’s work — nourishing physically and emotionally and teaching domestic skills and values. Some of the artists utilize these self same issues and/or materials to engage in a commentary on our historic and still-present state. Some make pointed personal observations of witty, acerbic or poignant nature.

Among the artists being featured in “Women’s World,” Harriete Estel Berman uses printed steel and tin of familiar product packaging to assemble new “common” objects, such as her quilts of traditional patterning which addresses the realities of the often still “idealized” traditional female roles;

Patricia Burleson combines domestic fragments into familiar scenarios in her memory baskets of often mundane, repetitive tasks. The charming tableaux, i.e. the laundry ritual, serve to elevate common enterprises to a more appropriately valued stature; and

Amanda Butler assembles sculptural shrines to motherhood and the overlapping stages of female life, emphasizing the powerful bonds of mother/daughter relationships in their simplicity and complexity, in the personal and the universal.

The Lynn Tendler Bignell Exhibition Gallery at Brookfield Craft Center is located in the historic mill building on Route 25, just east of the four corners intersection with Route 7/202. For further information call, 775-4526 or log on to the Web site at www.brookfieldcraftcenter.org.