Silent Spring – The Enduring Legacy

George Marshall Store Gallery, York, Maine
June 8 – July 14, 2013

For this show, I completed an “indoor” nest for my Raku eagles’ eggs that had been a part of the big eagle’s nest installation and interactive teach-in I did for my “InterRelated” show at Chatham University last fall. The double size 8′ wide nest is still installed on the quad in Pennsylvania, and this smaller nest went in the summer show at the George Marshall Store Gallery in York, ME. “Silent Spring: the Enduring Legacy” is the title curator Mary Harding chose for the show, and the quotes from Rachel Carson that are revealed inside my eggs are her “enduring legacy.” They have as much currency today as they did 50 years ago.

In addition to participating in this show, I delivered a gallery talk about my connection to Silent spring, as well as my process.

Maine Women Pioneers III: Worldview

University of New England Art Gallery, Portland, ME
March 12 – May 12, 2013

…”the world they view every day is a world of beauty under threat.” – Agnes Bushnell, from the “Worldview” section of the Pioneers catalogue

I was honored to be included with 50 other women artists in the Pioneers exhibit at UNE this spring. Forms and media and personal vision—all so varied, fresh and exciting! We are alive and well, and only the tip of the iceberg here in Maine. In a panel discussion, we shared our thoughts about our struggle as women against gender bias — how far we have come, but also how far to go with women only 5% of artists represented in museums.

In addition to my mixed media work and paintings on the wall, I made an installation on the floor, “Go Inside the Stone III.” Art critic Daniel Kany (Maine Sunday Telegram art review, “Worldview: Answers in the Questions, 3/17/13) singled it out, much to my delight:

“Chappell’s illusion- and camouflage-oriented installation of stones and sea-life prints—in standing mirrored Mylar rings—might be the most original and fascinating piece in the show.”

InterRelated: One Artist’s Response to Silent Spring

MONOPRINTS | MIXED MEDIA | INSTALLATION

Chatham University, Pittsburgh, PA 
September 27, 2012 – November 15, 2012

Honoring the 50th anniversary of the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, Kate Cheney Chappell mounted a solo exhibition at Chatham University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The exhibit, showcases over 50 works from monoprints and mixed media to installations and artist’s books.

As part of the show, Kate collaborated with students to build a life-size eagle’s nest on campus from collected dead branches. Raku-fired clay ‘eagle’s eggs’ she created were hidden on campus for students to find. The eggs contain messages about DDT and its contribution to the thinning of eagle’s eggshells, and the subsequent decline in their population. Silent Spring sparked a debate that led to the banning of DDT and other pesticides in 1974. Kate hopes to engage the current generation of young people in the 50 year-old environmental questions that still have currency today. The word DDT, spelled out in the artist hand, is hidden in several of the collagraphs Kate made on large etching presses at the Peregrine Press in Portland or on residencies at the Vermont Studio Center.

You can read more about the show, the installation and exhibition here.

Women Artist’s at New Britain Museum 

December 18, 2010 – March 20, 2011

Chosen from over 600 works by female artists in the permanent collection, this exhibit showcased the art by theme. Kate was honored to be hung with artists such as Mary Cassatt, Lee Krasner, and Georgia O’Keefe, and to have her artwork shown under the theme of Nature, with an essay in the catalogue.

“Evocatively extracting, abstracting, and integrating images and felt knowledge of nature, her gently rendered monotype {“Explosion of Amphibian Deformities”} allies poetic reflection and ecological warning.” (p. 66)

Kate also participated in a day-long Symposium with the co-curators, both professors of Art History at the University of Hartford: Nancy Noble, who spoke on The New Women Artists: Redefining Modern Art, and Sherry Buckberrough, whose topic was Why Women Now: Women Artists in the 21st Century. Kate spoke on The Ecology of One Artist’s Journey. 

You can read a little about it on the New Britain Museum link.

New/Now: Inner Terrain

New Britian Museum of American Art
March 7, 2008 – May 25, 2008

Inner Terrain, an exhibition of Kate Cheney Chappell’s intriguing artwork celebrating the wonders and questions of life and nature, wasl be the subject of a NEW/NOW exhibition on view at the New Britian Museum of American Art from March 7 – May 25, 2008.

Inner Terrain featured a variety of different works from Chappell’s 3D mixed media images, collagraphs, monotypes and watercolors. Chappell fuses poetry with art for this exhibition, with much of her inspiration coming from Wendell Berry’s poem, The Peace of Wild Things. A smaller exhibition within the larger one will be on view–Go Inside the Stone, based on Charles Simic’s poem by the same title. Viewers will enter a sort of “stone zone,” “…a place where time slows, a spiritual habitat of stones,” as Chappell says.

Download a copy of Kate’s Gallery Talk for the show.
Click to download a copy of Kate’s Artist’s Statement for the show.

Poems inspiring the work in the show included: The Peace of Wild Things, by Wendel Berry; Stone, by Charles Simac; Breath, by Kabir; and Deep With the Winds, by Rainer Maria Rilke.

E • N • V • E • L • O • P • E

Monotypes | Collographs | Etchings | Mixed Media | and the Envelope Project

Octoer 3- 27, 2003
Round Top Center for the Arts, Damariscotta, Maine

Most printmaking starts with a hard surface from which an image can be transferred to paper. Lithographs begin with stone; dry point and etchings begin with copper or zinc plates. The surface is incised with tools, and may be etched with acid, before being inked, wiped, and printed on a press. Multiples of the same image (editions) are usually done in this way. This is the traditional approach.

Envelope Project The Envelope Project began when Kate read a poem by Maxine Kumin called “The Envelope”. Having recently lost her own mother, Kate was moved by Kumin’s unusual metaphor of daughter as container for the mother, and by her call to us as daughters to “carry our mothers forth in our bellies”. She conceived of a one-of-a-kind artists’ book of envelopes filled with the words and images of women artists and poets about their mothers. The following artists responded to Kate’s invitation to fill the empty envelope she sent each one, and the Envelope Book was born:

Click to download a copy of Kate’s gallery talk for the show.