Finding 'Wonderland': Art curator Terry Rooney creates dreamscape in former Holyoke warehouse
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Amherst artist and curator Terry Rooney likes to think big. Really big.
So when she decided to curate an art show at Paper City Studios in Holyoke, she took over the whole space - all four floors - with not one but two exhibits of work by artists who mostly hail from the Pioneer Valley.
"I'm a wild and crazy girl," admitted Rooney, chair of the Amherst Public Arts Commission, who has curated multiple shows over the years in a wide variety of area venues.
No space in the former warehouse is wasted. From the first-floor exhibit, "Pioneer Women," to "Wonderland," on floors two, three and four, Rooney has gathered some 100 pieces by 40 artists to fill the walls, the floor space, the stairwells and even an old elevator shaft.
The result: a captivating and eclectic spectacle of work by artists of the highest caliber, whose broad range of styles and media creates a veritable playground of wonder. At every turn, another delightful surprise awaits.
Rooney says she had no problem filling the space for the massive installation.
"There is both quantity and quality of artists in the area," she said during a recent tour of the building, located at 80 Race St. in Holyoke.
"Pioneer Women," works exclusively by women, recently returned to the Valley from a run at the Tabla Rasa Gallery in Brooklyn.
While she recognizes that there is an abundance of male artistic talent in the area (plenty of works by men are on display in the "Wonderland" exhibit), Rooney says "Pioneer Women" offers local women artists a much-needed chance to show their work.
"It sort of evens the score in a field where women have been discriminated against for decades," she said.
The focus is on artwork created by women who are "blazing new artistic frontiers," Rooney says. Among them is sculptor Rosalyn Driscoll, who encourages viewers to handle her work, exploring the tactile surfaces.
"She feels that it adds another sensory experience," Rooney explained. "You can feel the roughness, or the smoothness." Driscoll, who lives in Williamsburg, is writing a book about touch and art.
Belinda Lyons Zucker, another of Rooney's pioneering women, creates dolls that are informed by her African and South Carolina ancestry, and that reflect the history of black people in this country.
Though her technique is steeped in tradition, Zucker's dolls have a contemporary twist. She created her clay and fabric piece "Oh What My Eyes Have Seen," for example, after Barack Obama was elected president.
An elderly black woman, dressed in gingham, sits on a rocking chair, clutching a Bible. Surrounding her are signs of the times. "Whites only"; "NAACP"; "Coloreds only"; "Stop lynching: shame of America"; and one with a picture of Obama that reads "Yes We Did."
Other artists have mixed media which don't generally go together, Rooney says. Deborah Kruger, for example, who trained at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York City, presents encaustic, fabric and feather constructions.
"She has invented a technique using encaustic, a wax, with fabric, then paints on it. I don't know anyone who does work like this," Rooney said. "They're really unique."
In Diana Savino's "Icarus' Wife," the artist combines egg tempera and etched ruby glass; Ann Burton's "Connected by the Thirty-Six" is a monoprint with sandblasted glass; and Mo Ringey adds mosaic tiles to everyday appliances in her "Toaster" and "Vacuum Cleaner."
"She just finds the most incredibly interesting antiques and then gives them a new life with this treatment," Rooney said.
Rooney, too, has contributed a piece that pushes boundaries: In "Flying House," she turns a painting into a three-dimensional sculpture. She was inspired, she says, while renovating a home in the Berkshires.
"I learned early on - you live your art," Rooney said. "Renovating our house ... really made me examine how women relate to structure - how, when the house was in upheaval, I was in upheaval. When it came together, I came together. To me, it's an extension of a woman's body."
Rooney, who moved to Massachusetts in 1983 from New York City, says she drew on her many years of work as both an artist and a curator to find her exhibitors.
"Coming from New York, I'm a tough critic, but I'm constantly blown away by the amount of talent in this area, and the quality," Rooney said. "This is why I did this show. Because we've lost so many venues to show art as artists, this is a way for me ... to change the paradigm in how we get our work out there to the general public."
Creating a dreamscape
On the way upstairs to Rooney's second exhibit, "Wonderland," viewers pass out of the realm of women's work to one that also features artwork by men, including Northampton radio personality Bill Dwight's series of photographs of local scenery and friends, taken with his iPhone.
"I think he's got a really good eye," Rooney said. "He uses this really simple thing, his phone, to photograph."
In planning the three-floor "Wonderland" exhibit, Rooney says, she searched for artists, like Dwight, whose work is out of the ordinary and uplifting.
"I wanted there to be a feeling of wonder ... there's just so much bad news, I just wanted to do something that would make people feel good and enjoy themselves," she said.
Her goal: to create "a dreamscape" on the top three floors of the former warehouse, which features high ceilings, massive windows that look out on the canal across the street, wide-plank floorboards and white-painted brick walls. In the dramatic setting, Rooney has installed sleeping beauties, flying houses, dancing dresses and angels, and more - all meant to transport viewers "to a magical time and place," she says.
"For 'Wonderland,' I was looking for a special light, a feeling of fun," Rooney said. She found it in an eclectic group of artists, all but four from the Pioneer Valley.
Included are angels created in steel by James Rhea, who received a master's degree in art from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Rhea, who was brought up "down South in the Bible Belt," Rooney says, creates his angels - some of them holding weapons - to show his growing disillusionment with religion.
Among the other bewitching pieces are Berkshire artist Lisa Yetz-Griffith's installation of larger-than-life dancing gowns constructed of burlap, celluclay and acrylic; Amherst's Nancy Winship Milliken's photographs of ephemeral, fetus-like shapes mounted in enormous circular fourth-floor windows; Northampton artist Gregory Stone's bird sculptures, made from found wood; and "All the Trappings," a mixed-media hut created by 3-D artist Angela Zammarelli of Northampton, who has filled her tent-like structure with enticing stuffed sculpture and colorful wallpaper with fanciful designs.
Unfortunately, but understandably, the inside of that piece is off-limits: A lace doily blocks entry into the fantasy world the artist has created. Too bad, because it looks like the perfect place to curl up for a little daydreaming.
Across the room - in the elevator shaft, no less - is "Light Flour," an entertaining installation by Chris Nelson. Viewers are invited to pull on a chain which produces a fine powder of flour that floats down the shaft, catching the theatrical lighting Nelson has installed as it swirls through the space and creates ghostly shapes. Try blowing on the flour for added effect.
Assembling the dynamic exhibit was like "putting together a giant puzzle," Rooney said. A fine example of that is Rooney's placement of works by New York artist Alfonso Munoz, "Pioneer Women" artist Driscoll and Chad Sellig, a UMass graduate.
Munoz used recycled material to build giant chickens perched in a coop on shelving high above the floor. The point, Munoz writes in his artist's statement, is to bring attention to the migration of Puerto Ricans to New York City, and how they were treated poorly.
Nearby, but at floor level, is Driscoll's sculpture of rawhide and copper that glows with an inner light. Placing the two in close proximity was risky - "Rosalyn's is a very meditative kind of work and Alfonso's is in your face," Rooney says - but the deliberate juxtaposition is in keeping with her overarching goal of creating spaces in which adjacent works "communicate" with one another. Adding to the aura are Sellig's photographs - apparitions of the room itself - which cover the high arched windows at the end of the room.
As the exhibits' July 31 closings near, Rooney says she already has big dreams about ways to use the space at Paper City Studios again in the future. Her hope? "To give Mass MoCA a run for its money, right here in Holyoke."
About these exhibits
WHAT: "Pioneer Women" and "Wonderland"
WHEN: On view through July 31
WHERE: Paper City Studios, 80 Race St., Holyoke
GALLERY HOURS: Saturdays and Sundays from 1 to 4 p.m., or by appointment
MORE INFO: On Sunday at 4 p.m., there will be a showing of the film "The Heretics," Hampshire College professor Joan Braderman's first-person account of her membership in The Heresies Collective, a feminist organization at the epicenter of the 1970s art world in lower Manhattan
On July 31 from 5:30-7:30 p.m. there will be a closing reception, with a 7 p.m. performance by Karen Dolmanisth.
For information, call 330-4505 or visit http://papercitystudios.wordpress.com/
Kathleen Mellen can be reached at kmellen@gazettenet.com.
