Art We Love – The Next Generation

Art We Love – The Next Generation

By George Rogers

It’s easy to spot well-established artists, the ones whose reputations and price tags grow with every passing season. But identifying a future star is a little trickier. There are plenty of talented young artists out there. Some burst on the scene but then disappear from our little spit of sand as the leaves fall. Others may show promise but haven’t thrown themselves fully into the work. The artists presented here have it all – talent, commitment, and connection to the Provincetown art community. Someday you can say you knew about them “back when”…

Esteban del Valle, Morning Lines

(marker, spray paint, color pencil on paper on panel, 24” x 18”), Albert Merola Gallery

Esteban del Valle is a multi-hyphenate artist whose work encompasses drawing, painting, performance, and film. He’s a storyteller whose narratives might sprawl across a 50-foot wall (see page) or come to life in the dense overlapping marks of a sharpie in an intimately scaled drawing. An artist with a political conscience, his inspirations range from hip hop to El Greco. And though raised in Chicago and now living in Brooklyn, what’s his favorite landscape? The dunes of Provincetown. Del Valle has been a fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center twice, and the town has cast a spell on him, ensuring his place in the Provincetown arts community for years to come.
 

Naya Bricher, Pink Aide

(oil on canvas, 50” x 60”), 411 Gallery

Artists have been transporting us to alternate realities for centuries, and Naya Bricher has that talent of taking us through the looking glass. Pink Aide could be called a dreamscape–all the elements are so familiar, yet clearly we’re not in Kansas anymore. Working from a preparatory collage curated from her store of found images, she brings the canvas to life with bravura under-drawing and a brush loaded with a candy-colored palate of oils. Ghostly passages of exposed under-drawing lend a sense of the surreal to an already shifting reality. It’s a painting of great surface beauty to which, like a dream, each of us will attach our own meanings.
 

Erin Woodbrey, The Continuing and Spreading Results of an Event or Action (Carrizozo, New Mexico)

(found objects, variable dimension), GAA Gallery

Some works of art grab you at first sight. It might be a bold composition, a luscious color palette, or an undefined air of mystery. Any of those qualities can make a work sing. But some art takes you to another level, born of an artist’s deep intellectual curiosity. That’s the case here. The intricate patterns, texture, and scale of this piece are fascinating – and then you learn that it was created from detritus found in the desert near the Trinity nuclear test site in New Mexico. The “exploding” composition becomes no less beautiful but strikes a deeper chord. It’s art that is thought-provoking and deeply satisfying on every level.
 

Wilder Alison, the faucethe drain breach/ a new life

(Died wool and thread, Two parts, each 27 3/16” x 53 1/8”), GAA Gallery

There’s a vibrating energy to Wilder Alison’s work and something almost cinematic in the way the artist has given us different frames of the same vista. Gorgeous washes of color meet crisp geometry, taking the eye on a journey through multiple horizons. And though painterly in appearance, there are no brushes or oils involved in this work. Hand-dyed wool is cut and rigorously composed, juxtaposing sometimes clashing colors and creating an elegant pattern language. As it turns out, this visual poetry is informed by the artist’s deep immersion in queer culture and literature – very Provincetown indeed.

George Rogers is an artist and ceramicist. After a career in museums including the MFA in Boston and the Smithsonian, he and his husband moved to Provincetown full time four years ago.