Dangerous Women Two,” a showcase featuring works of 70 female artists at Mercer College’s gallery, is the inspiration of Tricia Fagan, a West Windsor resident and the gallery’s curator. The multi-media show, a mixture of art, history, and life, inspired by 20th century women, opens Tuesday, September 4. An opening reception will be held Saturday, September 8, 2 to 5 p.m., at the gallery on the second floor of the communications building.##M:[more]##
Fagan invited regional artists to each select an historic “dangerous woman” from a list she compiled including artists, activists, or visionaries from this geographic region who were active during the period between the two world wars. Individually researched by Fagan, they represent a broad spectrum of women who took artistic and personal risks, and challenged the roles of womanhood, art, and society.
The exhibit featuring works in oils, watercolors, mixed-media collages, stone, metal, photography, prints, and jewelry is a collaboration between Mercer College and Trenton Avant-Garde, a nonprofit Trenton-based arts organization. The artists’ works will be displayed beside a text panel featuring a short biography of the historic figure they selected. Artist statements exploring these relationships will also be available for the duration of the exhibit.
Fagan became interested in the project more than a decade ago as she read about women from this region who had been making ground-breaking contributions as visual artists, photographers, fashion designers, writers, performers, and activists in the 1920s and 1930s. “As I read about more and more of these women, I kept asking myself, ‘Why haven’t I heard more about them before?’” she said. “These were astounding, risk-taking, amazingly modern women who were bold — often fearless — in the way they approached their lives.”
Paying tribute to their pioneering efforts became Fagan’s passion, an idea that was embraced by local artists in the first “Dangerous Women” show, which featured 42 artists in 1996-’97 at Joe’s Mill Hill Saloon and the Ellarslie Museum in Trenton. “I thought that was it, but the show wouldn’t go away,” Fagan says. She continued to compile more than 100 mini-biographies of fascinating women in the tri-state area, including writer and poet Dorothy Parker, precisionist painter Elsie Driggs, printmaker Minna Citron, sculptor Dorothea Schwarcz-Greenbaum, and two New Yorkers still living, artist and sculptor Louise Bourgeois and photographer Helen Levitt.
West Windsor artists include Connie Tell, with a mixed media exhibit honoring Charlotte Gilman Perkins, Renee Kumar with a watercolor collage honoring Dorothy Day, and Gail Mitchell with a quilt honoring Bernarda Bryson Shahn.
Kumar, who was raised in Massachusetts, admits that she always painted “outside the lines” and that the nuns were not pleased by her art. She graduated from University of Massachusetts, Amherst, with a degree in developmental education and childrens creativity. While there, she met her future husband, Rakesh Kumar, who was working on his doctorate in computer science.
They moved to Hopewell Junction, New York, when he began working for IBM in Fishkill. They moved to Kingston nine years ago when he became the director of the vision and robotics lab at David Sarnoff. Two years ago the family moved to West Windsor.
Their children include Nikhil, 15, a junior at High School South; Anjali, 12, a seventh grade student at Grover Middle School; and Kiran, 8, a third grader at Hawk School.
Kumar returned to art classes at Mercer and at the YWCA Princeton. She has studied with area artists Arlene Milgram, Barbara Osterman, and Pat Miller. A member of Artworks in Trenton for close to 10 years, , she was very involved in the recent Art All Night event. “It’s given me a lot and I want to give back.” Kumar, an active member of West Windsor Arts Council, is working on an upcoming all-day art show.
“Tricia Fagan is the artist behind this whole thing, she has been working on it for more than a decade,” she says. Kumar chose Dorothy Day because they were both raised as strict Catholics and she was attracted to her. “I had read her book a long time ago but I see her with a whole different meaning now that I’m a mother. Women, no matter what they are doing, are dealing with loss and emptiness.”
Dorothy Day, known for her social justice campaigns, co-founded the Catholic Worker Movement in 1933, and was the author of “The Eleventh Virgin,” a semi-autobiographic novel featuring her bohemian lifestyle, common law marriages, and an abortion, and “The Long Loneliness,” her autobiography about her later years as an activist with the Catholic Church. She was also the subject of films, “Entertaining Angels: The Dorothy Day Story,” and “Dorothy Day: Don’t Call me a Saint.”
Kumar’s father was an engineer and her mother was a psychologist. “My mother was a dangerous women in her own right,” says Kumar. “She inspired me and left the church when she was disillusioned with it.” Kumar also left the church at 16, returned at age 40, but feels that she is no longer politically aligned with it. She and her husband are raising their children more as Hindis than Catholic.
“If there is one group show to see this year this is it,” she says. “The dangerous women took chances and changed the way we look at the world.
— Lynn Miller
Art Exhibit, Gallery at Mercer County College, Communications Center, 609-586-4800, ext. 3589. www.mccc.edu/community_gallery Opening reception for “Dangerous Women Two,” a multi-media exhibit featuring artists, activists, and visionaries presented through the eyes of 70 area artists. Saturday, September 8, 2 to 5 p.m.
An educational guide will be available for teachers and parents. Gallery talks and other special events associated with this exhibit will be announced. A list of the artists, their selected historical subjects, special events, gallery talks, and additional viewing hours, are available on the website at www.mccc.edu/community_gallery. On view through October 6. Regular gallery hours are Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays, 10 a.m. to 3 p.m., and Fridays, 10 a.m. to noon. To volunteer as a docent call 609-570-3588
