19 December, 2016
The new HCA Gallery rolls into 2017 with a wildly varied selection of work by area artists – from Lissa Banks’s painting of explosively blossoming parrot tulips to William Moser’s awestruck carving in koa wood of King Lohiau of Hawaii to Jean Cummiskey’s glittering miniature mosaic of Boston Harbor.
Organized by HCA co-director Kris Waldman, the exhibition presents 18 pieces by 18 artists associated with Hopkinton’s newly expanded community arts center. “It’s an unusually diverse show,” Waldman says, “and it shows the range of our members’ artistic practices. In 18 pieces we have works in ten different media.”
Banks’s much, much larger-than-life-size tulips, in hot yellows and reds, curl and list with Mapplethorpe-like suggestiveness. Banks, who also works as HCA’s administrator, showed several paintings in this past spring’s Describing the Real at HCA.
Moser, a Hopkinton resident who also carves stone, based his relief Resurrection on the legend of Lohiau, who was killed by a jealous god. Through the love of the goddess Hiiaka, as Moser depicts, he emerges from a flower, a man again.
Cummiskey, also of Hopkinton, has been creating scenes out of fragments of glass, mirror, bead, and shell and for six years. This view, looking in from the water toward Atlantic Wharf, captures the reflective night face of the city as it appeared in 2015.
A Fresh Take: New Work by HCA Members runs from December 19 through January 19. A free reception for the artists and the public will be held at the gallery on Friday, January 13 from 6:30 to 8:00 PM.
For more information about this exhibition, the HCA Gallery, or the Hopkinton Center for the Arts, contact Kris Waldman at kris@hopartscenter.org or 508-589-4409.
