Schick Art Gallery to showcase faculty artists

The Schick Art Gallery at Skidmore College will present the 2015 Selected Art Faculty Exhibition, featuring new works by John Galt (sculpture), Doretta Miller (painting), Lauren Sandler (ceramics), and Peter Stake (painting.)

Scheduled Thursday, Nov. 5, through Sunday, Dec. 13, the exhibition will feature an opening-night reception from 5:30 to 7 p.m. Nov. 5 at the gallery. All four artists will participate in a gallery talk at 4:30 p.m. Wednesday, Nov. 11. Schick Art Gallery events are free and the public is welcome. The gallery is located in the Saisselin Art Building; a map of the Skidmore campus may be found on the Skidmore College website.

John Galt’s work combines interest in the human figure, sensitivity to form and movement, and a passion for iron and bronze casting.  Galt received an M.F.A. from the University of Pennsylvania in 1988, following that he worked in commercial foundries, and since 1990 he has operated his own casting business in western Massachusetts. Galt has been teaching sculpture at Skidmore since 1990 and is actively involved in foundry events like iron-pours both on and off campus. Galt’s work has been exhibited regionally and in Europe, and he has participated in symposia on iron casting in Latvia and the United Kingdom.

Using miniature toys as actors and her own garden as stage, Doretta Miller created enigmatic scenarios on which to base her new series, Garden Stories. These paintings combine a long-standing interest in museum dioramas with preoccupations about current events, especially environmental and geo-political tensions.  

Miller earned an M.F.A. from Northern Illinois University and has been teaching at Skidmore since 1982. In 1996 she was a visiting professor at Qufu University in the People’s Republic of China. She also curated two exhibitions on contemporary painting in China, one for the Tang Museum and another for the First Street Gallery in New York, N.Y. Her painting Portrait of Chair with Hibiscus and Andy Warhol's Flowers (1964) won a juror’s prize and purchase award at the 2015 Artists of the Mohawk Region this past summer.

Lauren Sandler’s recent ceramic works are re-creations of common household objects such as hairbrushes, soap dishes, spoons, and cabinets—in her words, “mundane assemblages that reveal the unique significance of our lives.” Though life-sized and realistic in form, the pieces have lustrous, subtly glazed surfaces and an obvious lack of utility; they occupy an ambiguous realm between the literal and the metaphoric.

Sandler received an M.F.A. in ceramics from Pennsylvania State University. She has been an adjunct assistant professor at Skidmore since 2013; she is also a visiting teacher at Saratoga Bridges. She has shown her work extensively, most recently at Salem Art Works in Salem, N.Y., and in Two by Two: Small-Scale Ceramic Sculpture Biennial at Eastern Washington University, Cheney, WA, where she received a juror’s award.

Peter Stake’s abstract paintings arise from his interest in relationships of color, light, and space.  He received an M.F.A. in painting and drawing from California State University at Long Beach in 1982. He has been teaching at Skidmore since 1986 and has also served as director of the Schick Art Gallery and as chair of the Art Department. He has shown his work in individual and group exhibitions at numerous regional venues, as well as in California.

Stake writes, “My work is concerned with balance, tension, equilibrium, mystery, and with polarities such as geometry and gesture, flatness and space, darkness and light, openings and obstructions. … The excitement I find in relationships within the work corresponds to a vitality I find in my experience of the world.”

Skidmore’s Schick Art Gallery is open from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Monday through Thursday, from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Friday, and from noon to 4 p.m. weekends. For more information, call 580-5049.