A ‘Beloved’ Art Show
“Creating Beloved Community,” a youth art show about racial justice, runs through Friday, Jan. 28 at Wellfleet Preservation Hall, 335 Main St. The show, organized by the ArtPeaceMakers, a grassroots organization promoting peaceful engagement, asks children in grades pre-K to 12 to express their vision of a “beloved community,” a concept described by Martin Luther King Jr. The results are fun and full of feeling, borne from young minds and open hearts. The hall is open Tuesday through Friday, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.
Cherie Mittenthal at the Wellfleet CoA
Curated by Robert Rindler, “New Year/New Work” is a show of encaustic and mixed media works by Cherie Mittenthal at the Wellfleet Council on Aging, 715 Old King’s Highway, through Jan. 31. The show is the CoA’s first following a two-year hiatus.
Mittenthal, who has been executive artistic director of Truro Center for the Arts at Castle Hill for the past 20 years, has been working with encaustic for almost as long. She combines it with pigment sticks, oil, marble dust, ash, graphite, rubber, collage, and clay. Her works are modestly sized, with a palette of cool blues and grayscale. Mittenthal draws inspiration from the daily photographs she takes of the sea and sky, still lifes, and her beloved dogs.
“I love the sense of the unexpected, the sensation of scent, and the anticipation evoked by moving wax, while also scraping and carving through the wax,” says Mittenthal in a statement.
The Collage Paintings of Libbie Mark
In the male-dominated narrative of mid-20th-century abstract expressionism, Libbie Mark’s name is often forgotten. The exhibition “Art of the Abstract Mark: Libbie Mark’s Collage Paintings and Other Works, 1950s-1960s” at the National Arts Club, 15 Gramercy Park South in New York City, is an attempt to correct that.
Mark, who died in 1972 at age 66, was involved in the vibrant milieu of art communities in New York and Provincetown during the ’50s and ’60s. She studied with Hans Hofmann and Vaclav Vytlacil at the Art Students League and maintained a friendship with Grace Hartigan. She summered in Provincetown up until a year before her death.
The work, though of its time, retains a contemporary primacy, with a graphic fusion of collage alongside gestural, swinging strokes to rival Motherwell’s. Visit nationalartsclub.org for more info.
75 Years of Self-Portraits
“Paul Resika: Self-Portraits, 1946-2021” is showing at Bookstein Projects, 60 East 66th St. in New York City, through Feb. 25.
Resika is perhaps best known for his color-field paintings of Outer Cape landscapes often occupied by figures. But the iconic Provincetown painter has long expressed the landscape of the mind through self-portraits.
The show presents Resika throughout the decades: from the youthful romanticism of his early work at age 18, to his tangled shock of white hair and beard at 93. The show contains references from throughout art history, but what is consistent is the intensity of Resika’s presence, the vibrancy of his color, and the fluidity of his line.
