Art Gallery Exhibit: Beyond The Page/2020-2022

Beyond the Page/2020–2022
Paintings by Dana Clancy

Exhibit Dates: February 2–March 11, 2022

Artist Talk: Wednesday, February 9, 2:00 p.m. via Zoom - register & add to calendar [Updated 3/16/2022: watch a recording of the Artist Talk]
Closing Reception: Thursday, March 10, 5:00–7:00 p.m. in the RSM Art Gallery

The RSM Art Gallery at Bentley University is pleased to present Beyond the Page, a new series of paintings on paper by Dana Clancy. In September of 2020, amid the ongoing isolation of the Covid 19 pandemic, Clancy began painting on pages of the Sunday New York Times during her weekly Zoom meetings. The paintings are palimpsests; headlines, images, paragraphs, and sentences from the news pages are painted over but rarely fully covered, a visible understory beneath the artist’s layered colors, gestural portraits, and transcribed pieces of dialogue between friends and colleagues.

All are invited to attend a discussion with the artist (via Zoom) on February 9 at 2:00 p.m., and a closing reception in the RSM Art Gallery at the Bentley Library on March 10 from 5:00-7:00 p.m. Please view the library's information for visitors site for hours, directions, and current health and safety policies.

Artist’s Statement

Since September 2020, I’ve been painting portraits and the words of artists and friends on top of pages of the newspaper, an act of archiving moments from a day onto the facts of this particular time of crisis. I paint only on the Sunday New York Times, physically covering the news with alternative words and images as the week unwinds. Paintings made over a week’s news and over weeks of time create a record of public feeling compiled from private moments. In these word and image paintings I try to capture what is beautiful, captivating and reflective of shared experience.  Abstractions about change, fear, and hope feel grounded by the specificities about how artists talk about the physical world and our relation to material construction. Studio gestures and the weekly flow of talk between a group of artists is recorded by the speedy mark of the brush. Painted portraits capture time in a different way than the photographic moments glimpsed through the paint. The fragile days, pages, and national landscape solidifies through repetition and accretion. What is the weight of words, of paint, of what we are shaping as artists in balance with the heaviness of the daily news? 

This ongoing series of paintings tracks the academic year from my perspective as both an artist and a leader of an art institution. The news and the conversations help me consider where we go from this time of pandemic and injustice that, intertwined, call for social change through our own informed daily actions.

Dana Clancy

https://www.alphagallery.com/dana-clancy
https://www.instagram.com/dana.clancy/