The Schoolhouse Galleries

494 Commercial Street
Provincetown, MA
02657

2005 SEASON

1. Winter Projects like Co-op galleries & other outside rentals.
   
2. byDESIGN A Special Department offering private sales to individual clients and design professionals right in the home and office.
   
3. Web Store Our on-line ARTShop sells Provincetown art worldwide all year round.
   
4. Winter Hours The galleries are open weekends throughout the year.
   

EXHIBITION HIGHLIGHTS: For 2005 The Schoolhouse Galleries continue to define contemporary art in the region with an exceptional season of new art from within and beyond the region.

Thomas Nozkowski, Q-61, oil on paper, 2004

Most notably we are delighted to present a new group of oil paintings on paper from Thomas Nozkowski July 29 August 17. Nozkowski is very well known for his paintings and drawings, which consistently manage to startle within familiarity. While some characteristics remain constant from canvas to canvas, each speaks its own unique visual language. The abstract forms in each painting seem verbs more than nouns, acting as the painted re-seeing of experience, so color and texture become ways to experience emotion and intellect. According to Nozkowski, "every painting is a way of learning to say one thing clearly." The results of this process represent a wide range of moods. Stark, bright, somber, lush, but above all, charged with the possibility to create intimate conversations between viewer and canvas, Nozkowskis paintings take on the dual challenge of abstraction: to freely access the individual imagination while articulating the demands of the shared concrete world.
Recent exhibitions of Nozkowskis work have taken place at Haunch of Venison Gallery in London and at Daniel Weinberg in Los Angeles. He has shown bi-annually at Max Protetch Gallery in new York since 1990.

Thomas Nozkowski was born in 1944 in New Jersey, and lives and works in New York. He earned his BFA at The Cooper Union, New York and, since his first solo show in 1979, has shown in galleries across the United States including the New York Studio School in 2003 and the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington D.C. in 1997. His work is included in many important public collections including The Brooklyn Museum, The Corcoran Gallery of Art, The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, The Metropolitan Museum, The Museum of Modern Art, New York and The Whitney Museum of American Art. He has been awarded numerous prizes including an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Painting, 1999 and a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship in 1993.

Paul Stopforth, Breath, mixed media on paper (triptych), 2005

Also exhibiting on July 29 is Paul Stopforth. Formerly of South Africa, and one of its most important artists, Stopforth has been living in the United States for fifteen years. Currently he makes very different work from the dispassionate cold gray graphite documentations of spaces of interrogation that earned him a place of honor in South African art history. Stopforth continues to produce tangible and transformative images that navigate and explore the complexities of living outside of one's cultural and geographical roots, outside of the 'beloved country'. The upcoming exhibition at the Schoolhouse consists of several large drawings (paint and mixed media on paper) from a 2004 residency at Robben Island, Nelson Mandelas island prison off South Africas coast. There he was compelled by the objects that Mandela held and used each day during his long internment, feeling that these objects (soap, hand towels, personal storage cabinets) ought to be viewed as sacred. There are also drawings using architectural remnants from Robben Island. Stopforth renders phenomenon as record while also making each piece phenomenon, infiltrating politics with humanness and a sense of possibility by imbuing each piece with the resonance of Mandelas touch.

Tony Mendoza, The Garden, digital print on archival paper, 2004

Tony Mendoza was born in Havana, Cuba in 1941. He left for Miami with his family in 1960. He bought his first camera at age eleven and continued photographing through grammar school, high school, Yale University (Bachelor of Engineering), and the Harvard Graduate School of Design (Master of Architecture). In 1973 to the dismay of his creditors and relatives, he turned full time to the pursuit of photography as art.
Since then his work has been exhibited and published widely. He is the author of five books, including Cuba: Going Back (1999), Stories (1987), and Ernie (1985). He has received three National Endowment For The Arts Fellowships. A Guggenheim Photography Fellowship, as well as two Creative Writing Fellowships from the Ohio Arts Council (He is the only artist in Ohio to receive Ohio Arts Council Fellowships in three separate mediums: photography, video and creative writing.). His photographs are in the collections of major museums including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, the Museum of Modern Art, the New York City, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Los Angeles, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Fogg Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA., Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus, OH, Addison Gallery of American Art, Andover, MA., and the Fort Lauderdale Museum of Art, Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Currently he teaches photography at Ohio State University.
For this exhibition he will present works from his upcoming book, The Garden, where he documents a flower garden from beginning to end, over the course of a summer season.

Francie Shaw, King, 2004

New to the galleries this season is an exhibition of photographic installations from Francie Shaw. Shaws work is notable for its sustained emotional rigor and visual complexity. She makes and then photographs elaborate environments that can be said to depict the baring, and the bearing of certain states of suffering. These are markedly painterly works where Shaw assembles numerous elements including figurines, wire, rubber, plaster, clay, self-portraiture, light projection, painting, drawing, translucent screens, and live posing. Shaw is inventive and highly skilled, and she uses her astonishing array of materials with authoritative meticulousness, but also with the involvement of someone with great knowledge of the deep interior of her own work.

Morgan Cohen, Wall With Arch, C-print, 2004

Once again we are pleased to present new work from Boston photographer Morgan Cohen. Cohen's most recent photographs derive a great deal from very little. Shooting spare environments like corners of rooms, ceilings and furniture fabrics Cohen introduces color in the printing process and achieves images of remarkable visual subtlety and sensuality. Cohen's work was exhibited in 1998 at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston in the show Transience and Sentimentality.

There will also be new work on view from Paul Lee, Vivian Bower, Phil Smith, and Marian Roth, among many others.

General Information
The Schoolhouse Galleries are located at 494 Commercial Street in Provincetowns historic East End Gallery District. The galleries are open Thursday through Monday 11 am until 6 PM, 9 PM on weekends. Limited parking is available in the Bradford Street end of our lot, located in the rear of the building. For further information about exhibitions or the artists please contact Michael Carroll at 508.487.4800 x105 or e-mail at mcarroll@theschoolhousegalleries.com