Cotter, Holland; New Jersey Shares Worldly Treasures, The New York Times, July 12, 1996
Excerpt from New York Times Article:
THIS is a fairly low-key summer in New Jersey art museums, with one really spectacular exhibition unfortunately ending its run this weekend in Newark.
New Jersey State Museum
"Six Artists: The 1990's," organized by Zoltan Buki and Alison Weld, holds center stage at the New Jersey State Museum in Trenton. Most of the participants have Manhattan reputations but have been brought together here on a different geographic pretext: they either live or work in New Jersey. (Three teach at Rutgers University.)
George Segal is the best-known figure, though he is represented here by thick-textured, lugubrious grisaille paintings of still lifes rather than his signature sculptures. If nothing else, they underscore the fact that this artist's work has always been closer to Expressionism than to the Pop art with which he is often linked.
Emma Amos and Bill Barrell also fall somewhere in the Expressionist camp, Mr. Barrell with brushy, chromatically bright semi-abstractions, Ms. Amos with a racially charged figurative subject hemmed in by borders stitched from African cloth.
Judging by their quirky, pointed titles ("Laptops for the Poor," "Prayer in Schools"), John Goodyear's paintings also have political subtexts, though they're a little hard to decipher. What catches the attention is their odd format. The diagrammatic images are half-obscured by wooden screens suspended an inch or so from the painting's surfaces, some of which gently sway from side to side.
Like Ms. Amos's work, Patricia Lay's sculpture combines materials (metal and ceramic) associated with both art and craft. She works incrementally in small forms and, whether piled up in thin columns or lined up horizontally on the wall, they keep up a consistently engaging conversation. The show's most striking works, though, are the quietest: tree-trunk sculptures by Gary Kuehn entirely covered with the sheen of pencil graphite, bringing nature and culture into a thought-provoking alliance.
No visitor will want to miss the museum's small but solid permanent collection of work by black artists. It begins in the 19th century with a portrait of a child by Joshua Johnson and landscapes by Robert Duncanson and Edward Mitchell Bannister, then blossoms into real diversity closer to our own time.
The abstract painting by Alma Thomas titled "Wind Tossing Late Autumn Leaves" (1976) is a beauty, with its shower of black curved lines on a white ground. So, in its different way, is Sister Gertrude Morgan's undated "Revelation," with its red-haired angels hoisting megaphone-shaped trumpets and its Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse dressed like cowboys. The collection is brought up to date with strong pieces by Benny Andrews, Mel Edwards, Richard Hunt and Alison Saar.
