If galleries were trains, Eric Firestone Gallery would qualify as a long-distance passenger locomotive. Board through the entrance at 40 Great Jones Street, and feel history embedded in the door frame’s pebbly paint layers, reaching back to the 1896 building’s warehouse origins. Inside, Women Across America: 1945–1979, a multigenerational exhibition, traces the connections among twenty-six artists across the decades bracketed by World War II and the Vietnam War. Fellow passengers Dylan and Caitlin Thomas (in Miriam Schapiro’s fiery, pixelating 1954 portrait) wave from the window. Organized by Director of Research Maddy Henkin and Associate Director Alabel Chapin, the exhibition reveals the supportive networks and aesthetic relationships formed by artists who found connections across music, poetry, performance, science, and the feminist movement.
Overshadowed by her role as a preeminent mid-century art dealer, and one of few women gallerists of her era, Betty Parsons’s abstract paintings and sculpture have a frank playfulness. Often incorporating driftwood combed from the beach near her Long Island Sound studio, Parsons aimed to capture what she called the “invisible presence” in her surroundings. In Summer Sun (1957), blocky layers of tangerine orange are inscribed over an underpainting of lavender gray, while vessel-like shapes in white and turquoise bob along. Using sgraffito techniques, she scratched through the upper surfaces to reveal deeper layers in the painting.
Parsons represented Jeanne Reynal, who reinvested the ancient art of mosaic with new effects and meanings after an apprenticeship in the late 1930s with Russian mosaicist Boris Anrep. Reynal intersected with the majority of American artists of the New York School and had close friendships with Arshile Gorky and Adaline Kent. Her untitled mosaic (1966) in this exhibition contains smalti, hand-cut glass that is scattered across the surface in waves of color as a constellation of stars fills the night sky.
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