"Women Inspiring Women" Opens at Childs + Clark Gallery
A two-painter show dedicated to women who inspire, with glass and porcelain from six more artists.
Image: Kiki Dufault, "Hills-Remembering Pink Asters", oil and cold wax on canvas, 50" x 60."
October 10–November 22, artist reception Saturday, October 10, 5–7pm | Great Barrington, MA
Childs + Clark Gallery opens "Women Inspiring Women" on October 10, with new paintings by Kiki Dufault and Karen Iglehart as well as glass artists Mariel Bass, Nancy Callan, Yukimi Matsumoto, Tomo Sakai, and Naoko Takenuchi, along with ceramicist Jennifer McCurdy. The gallery has dedicated the show "to all inspiring women and all women inspired," after what it calls the recent loss of two inspiring women.
Both painters are primarily colorists, and each has named the women who shaped her work.
Dufault, who lives in the Berkshires, paints in oil and wax, mostly figures and landscapes, with broad, gestural brushwork that sets up a dialogue between the figure and the natural world. She comes from a family of female artists. Her mother was a dancer, her grandmother a painter and photographer, and her aunt a singer and pianist. She is also a musician, and she says the "individuality, strength and creative freedom of countless artists and musicians, many of them women" shaped her approach.
Iglehart is a painter and photographer who grew up in New York City with artist parents. Her paintings are shaped by her practice of Buddhism and aim to give the viewer a pause, "a space to move into," as she puts it, with graphite and palette-knife marks as points of energy. Her recent abstractions, she says, draw on jazz, Miles Davis especially, with quiet followed by intense bursts of sound.
She says seeing a recent Helen Frankenthaler show at Gagosian reminded her of Frankenthaler's "inner strength and solitary vision," and of how she kept working and changing despite being labeled a Color Field painter.
McCurdy has worked in porcelain for more than thirty years and lives on Martha's Vineyard. She throws thin porcelain vessels, carves them, fires them to cone 10 so they turn translucent, and sometimes gilds them. Her pieces are in collections including the Smithsonian's Renwick Gallery, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
Childs + Clark Gallery, 684 Main Street, Great Barrington, MA.
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After a decade of writing for RI (along with many other publications and organizations) Jamie took over as editor in 2025. He has a masters in journalism from NYU, a wonderful wife, two kids and a Carolina dog named Zelda.
