This month's exhibit will feature a collective of local female artists! Head to the Hoxie Gallery from 5-7 pm Wednesday, November 1st to "Meet the Artists". Their pieces can be viewed in the Hoxie Gallery through the month of November during library hours.
Participating artists will include Ana Flores, Jillian Barber, Ruth Sussler, and Shirley Bell.
About the artists:
Ana Flores is an award-winning sculptor, ecological designer, and educator. For over two decades, she has been promoting interdisciplinary dialogue and groundbreaking collaborations between the arts and sciences. She has worked with communities to design award-winning outdoor installations, parks, and programming that engage people with the history of their local landscapes and the landscapes they carry within- as cultural heritage. Most recently, her work has been featured in solo museum shows at the Lyman Allyn Museum in New London, CT, and at the Newport Art Museum. Her studio is in Charlestown, Rhode Island, surrounded by forest that is ancient Narragansett land.
Born in Staffordshire, England, Jillian Barber grew up in Westerly, RI and graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design. There she studied ceramics with Norm Schulman and glass with Dale Chihuly. Mythical portraits and imaginary creatures are enduring themes in Barber’s ceramic sculpture. An artist from childhood, her fascination with nature, animals, faces, and costume continues today. Her expressive work creates a personal mythology of dreamlike images. The portraits are exotic, richly textured, and exquisitely detailed. Often working from plaster face castings, Barber’s masks invoke timeless mystery and magic. For over 30 years, Barber was mask and costume designer for the Chorus of Westerly’s Celebration of Twelfth Night. Dragons, unicorns, wild boars, stags, and wolves came alive on stage. Her fascination with mythical beasts, fairies, kings and queens had come to be and were also translated into clay. Barber’s work has received a RISCA Fellowship in Design, numerous Katherine Forest Craft Foundation awards for excellence in ceramics, and over 100 juried awards. A retrospective, Vintage Jillian, was held at the Newport Art Museum where her work is in the permanent collection. Barber is represented by the Charlestown Gallery, the Fuller Gallery in Jamestown, RI. and DeBlois Gallery in Middletown, RI. Barber was invited to be Artist in Residence at the Ocean House in Watch Hill, RI in January 2019 and 2020. In September, 2022, Barber mounted a 50 year Retrospective in the Hoxie Gallery at the Westerly Library.
Ruth Sussler was a 20th/21st Century Visual Artist of Landscapes, portraits, still-life, oil and watercolor painting, drawings and greeting card designs by commission, out of portfolio and studio 1950-2020. She was born in 1928 in Chicago, Illinois and passed away in 2020 in New London, Connecticut. As a child Ruth studied art at the knee of her father Philip Lyford, commercial artist. In 1944, she completed a summer fellowship at Black Mountain College studying under Josef Albers and Jean Charlot. Graduated from Bennington College with a visual arts major in 1950. Over the decades she had many solo and group shows throughout CT and NY and was affiliated with Mystic Art Association, Connecticut Women Artists, ART IS Group of Lyman Allyn Museum and "Stills Group" of New London.
Shirley Bell has been creating her expressive watercolors from her home on Conanicut Island, Jamestown RI, since 1983. Watercolor is the perfect medium for capturing her subjects ranging from flowers in her gardens, animals, insects, people, and her coastal island life. Shirley paints mostly plein air and attributes her fresh, spontaneous painting style to her first-try efforts to achieve the correct color and value of her subjects. In 2002, Shirley launched her own successful stationary business. Selling stationery with over 300 of her designs on it to numerous gift shops throughout New England and the West Coast. She won her first national LOUIE Award in 2009. Exhibited in the gift shops of many museums and art-conscious societies, Shirley’s works were featured in the Farnsworth Museum in Maine, the Brooklyn Museum, the Cleveland Botanical Gardens, the Field Museum in Chicago, the Holden Arboretum in Ohio, the Fernbank Museum of Natural History in Atlanta, the Everson Museum of Fine Arts in Syracuse, the Cincinnati Zoo, the Harry P. Leau Botanical Gardens in Orlando, the Mystic Aquarium, and many other locations throughout New England and the nation. Her focus now is on painting original art full-time. Her joy of painting is evident when you experience one of her vibrant works.
