Graham Shay 1857

After jointly presenting an exhibition of artists belonging to the National Association of Women Artists (NAWA) this past spring, Lincoln Glenn and Graham Shay galleries return to recognize the contributions of some of the historical instructors of the Art Students League as we mark its 150th anniversary. From Frank Vincent DuMond to Adolph Gottlieb, Paul Manship to Charles Alston, Charles Hawthorne to Wolf Kahn, Guy Pene du Bois to Augustus Saint-Gaudens, instructors of the Art Students League have had a profound influence in molding American art. The League was founded in 1875 due to artists’ increasing dissatisfaction with the National Academy’s conservative and traditional perspective. Throughout its esteemed history, the League has served as an institution run by artists in support of artists. The present exhibition displays a wide array of genres, periods, media, and artists associated with teaching “League” classes in celebration of its 150th anniversary. The League opened at 108 Fifth Avenue, on the corner of 5th Avenue and 16th Street, and held its first classes in half a room on the building’s top floor. The school, which offered life drawing classes every day of the week, was membership-based. There were no grades, no set courses, and no degrees offered. Instead, the League was run like a French atelier, promising small classes and granting the instructor a studio and freedom to teach whatever they deemed appropriate. As membership continued to grow, the League relocated to increasingly larger spaces. In recent years, the legacy of the school remains, as the League continues to educate a wide variety of young artists, both professional and amateur. Some of the other faculty represented in the exhibition include Al Loving, Kikuo Saito, Chaim Gross, William Zorach, Everett Shinn, Jose de Creeft, Theodore Stamos, Max Weber, and Jacob Lawrence. The exhibit will explore the variety of artistic expressions of Arts Students League instructors, through over a century of artistic production. This joint exhibition will be on display January 16 - February 28 at 17 East 67th Street, and the gallery will be open to visitors 10 am – 6 pm, Mondays – Saturdays. The exhibition will be accompanied by a complimentary catalogue with an essay by Jonathan Spies. An opening reception will be held on Thursday, January 16th from 5:30-7:30pm.

After jointly presenting a show of 1913 Armory Show exhibition artists this past fall, Graham Shay 1857 and Lincoln Glenn return this spring to recognize the contributions of some of the thousands of women artists who were members of NAWA. Founded in 1889, the organization is the oldest women artists' collective in the United States and has provided a community for professional women artists, promoting the work of its members through annual exhibitions, traveling shows, awards, and educational and outreach programs. Throughout its illustrious history, NAWA’s membership has included the likes of Mary Cassatt, Bessie Potter Vonnoh, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, Blanche Lazzell, Isabel Bishop, Doris Lee, Dorothy Dehner, Louise Nevelson, and Faith Ringgold in its ranks. Just as Virginia Woolf believed that women authors needed a modest wage and a room of their own to write fiction, women artists have searched for a place to exhibit their work and a group of their peers to provide artistic and intellectual support. The National Association of Women Artists (NAWA) (and originally called the Woman's Art Club of New York) was founded by five women who felt isolated from a community of their peers and from the opportunity to exhibit their art. They provided women with an alternative to the male-dominated National Academy of Design and Society of American Artists in New York, which continued to bar women from participating in many life drawing and anatomy classes, from gaining governing positions, and from exhibiting their art at annual exhibitions. Art historian Wanda Corn's comments about the necessity for the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington seem apropos of NAWA: “Until such time as female culture is fully integrated into our museums and cultural institutions, women's exhibition halls still have a job to do. When other institutions do so little, women's buildings foster respect for women's work – and in the process, give women back their past.” Examples by Jane Peterson, Agnes Pelton, Anna Walinska, Alice Schille, Absentia St. Leger Eberle, Bessie Potter Vonnoh, Gertrude Fiske, Dorothy Dehner, Blanche Lazzell, Doris Lee, Isabel Bishop, Mary Elizabeth Price, Anna Richards Brewster, and Kyra Markham, amongst others will be on display for visitors. The exhibition will run from March 28th through May 31st (overlapping with The American Art Fair and American Art Conference) and the space will be open to visitors from 10am-6pm on Mondays-Saturdays. A complimentary exhibition catalogue accompanies the exhibition at 17 East 67th Street; it features an essay originally written by Donna Gustafson for the initial presentation of the NAWA Collection at Rutgers at the university’s Zimmerli Art Museum, and was edited for length by Jeffrey Wechsler. An opening reception will be held on Thursday, March 28th from 6-8pm. To illustrate the continued activity of NAWA into the present day, our show is held in conjunction with Hollis Taggart gallery, which will present a selection of work by fourteen current members of NAWA, along with works by several Honorary Vice Presidents of NAWA. An opening reception will be held at Hollis Taggart, 521 West 26 Street, on Thursday, March 21st, from 6-8pm.

Graham Shay presents two complementary exhibitions, on view together in our main Gallery showroom, for the 2024 edition of Master Drawings New York. The surreal, molten metal sculptures by Ibram Lassaw, spanning a period from 1950 through 1985, draw the viewer through and within. On the walls, the second part is a selection of modernist paintings, watercolors, collage, and drawings by mid-century artists including Robert Motherwell, Stuart Davis, Mercedes Matter, Anna Walinska, Richard Serra, Willem de Kooning, Perle Fine, Louise Nevelson, Jimmy Ernst, Mary Abbott, and Hans Hofmann. Highlights from the paintings portion are a 1979 oil on paper sketch Drunk With Turpentine, the final study for Motherwell’s finished painting White Sanctuary, 1981. Similarly, included amongst three Stuart Davis drawings, is a sketch for his painting, Flags, 1931. The New York modernist Anna Walinska is represented by a powerful black and white oil painting, Tokyo Landscape, 1957, and a Shan paper collage Figures, 1961. Canadian Jean-Paul Riopelle’s colorful expressionist Landscape, circa 1958, is another highlight. The sculptor Ibram Lassaw is represented by seven unique works. The artist was among the earliest American sculptors to work in an abstract style, beginning in 1933. Lassaw was a charter member of the The Clay Club, 1934 (now the Sculpture Center) and American Abstract Artists, 1937, and exhibited at both annuals. Further exhibitions were held at the Whitney Museum of American Art, 1951, Kootz Gallery, New York, 1952-1958. The Museum of Modern Art included Lassaw in several exhibitions, including the influential Twelve Americans, 1956. Other institutions that have featured Ibram Lassaw include The Heckscher Museum of Art, Huntington, New York, 1973, Guild Hall Museum, East Hampton, New York, 1988, and Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa, 2023. Throughout his career the artist made open space a primary material in his work. Lassaw’s approach is both surrealist and abstract expressionist, and molten metal is an ideal medium for the spontaneous image he sought. His method is action sculpture, the image drawn from the metal itself: a wire core overlayed with globs of molten bronze or other alloys. The process is analogous to drawing in space, not as fluent as pen or brush, but still spontaneous. Changing from one alloy to another in the welding process achieves a myriad of surfaces, a variety of colors, textures. The process and materials are varied, a mixture of metals, brass, nickel-silver, stainless steel, bronze, iron, manganese, silicon and tin. Color was prized and created by treating the metals with salts, acids and alkalis, achieving greens, blues and other colors.