Opening Reception: “Norma Minkowitz: Body to Soul”

Join us as we celebrate the opening of the exhibition Norma Minkowitz: Body to Soul, on view in the Bellarmine Hall Galleries from January 27 – April 6, 2023. Light refreshments will be served in the Great Hall. The Bellarmine Hall Galleries will also be open until 8 p.m.

Please note: The Cultural Alliance of Fairfield County (https://culturalalliancefc.org), as one of 400 participants in the Sixth National Arts & Economic Prosperity Study, organized by Americans for the Arts, will be conducting a short audience survey at the opening reception for Norma Minkowitz. This is an anonymous study that happens every 5 years. Through a simple 2-page survey, the study figures out how much money we, as audience members, spend when we go to arts and cultural events. The information helps cultural groups demonstrate their value to municipal leaders and state representatives. Your anonymous answers will help support cultural events like this one. We look forward to your participation. Further information will be available at the event and at https://culturalalliancefc.org/aep6/

About the exhibition:

Norma Minkowitz: Body to Soul is a solo exhibition surveying the artist’s four-decade engagement with the physical and symbolic properties of thread. Minkowitz reinvents traditional needlework by crocheting fantastical forms, coating them in resin and shellac to create rigid sculptures and hangings. The delicate, mesh-like surfaces of her artworks break down oppositions between soft and hard, inside and outside, body and soul.

The poetic title Body to Soul is borrowed from just one of the sculptures that will be on view, but it is a broader theme that reverberates across the exhibition’s selection of over thirty vessels, sculptures, wall hangings, wearables, and works on paper – including never-before-seen examples coming from the artist’s studio.

Norma Minkowitz lives and works in Connecticut. Her work is represented in private and public collections across the United States and internationally. She is unique among fiber artists creating hard sculptures from soft materials, and for using thread to invoke universal themes of mortality, memory, nature, and writing. The exhibition is guest curated by Sarah Parrish PhD., Assistant Professor of Art History at Plymouth State University, New Hampshire.

https://www.fairfield.edu/museum/norma-minkowitz/

Image: Norma Minkowitz, Baggage, 2007, fiber, resin, modeling paste, paint. Courtesy of the artist and browngrotta arts. Photo by Tom Grotta, courtesy browngrotta arts.