The Brooklyn Rail

The Delaware Valley in Eastern Pennsylvania embraces an alluvial plain historically rich in pastoral potentiality, long providing a fertile locale for the incubation of American art. Exemplars of early American modernism such as the precisionist Charles Sheeler and the more formally labile Charles Demuth worked in the area in the very early part of the twentieth century. Generations of the Wyeth family grew up and worked in Chadds Ford in Delaware County. And, prior to their decamping to Eastern Long Island, the area served as both inspiration and temporary respite from the heat of summers in New York City for members of the Abstract Expressionist movement. In a precursor to his tragic death, Jackson Pollock crashed his brother Charles’s car into a tree in Frenchtown, on the New Jersey side of the valley. Walker Evans captured some of his most memorable photographs in Bethlehem and Easton, PA. The area’s relative proximity to both New York City and Philadelphia has found it a convenient locale for contemporary artists to maintain studios as well. Chakaia Booker fabricates her works in Allentown (in the adjacent Lehigh Valley) while Emil Lukas works in Stockertown.

Enter ArtYard, a contemporary art center, residency, and theater complex opened in Frenchtown in 2016 by founders Jill Kearney and Stephen McDonnell. Kearney grew up in an artistic household. Her parents Jack and Lynn Kearney founded the Contemporary Art Workshop in Chicago and often spent summers in Provincetown, Massachusetts amongst the legendary de facto artist community there. Inspired so, Kearney has worked to engender a vital locus for the arts in the Delaware Valley region. At both the older and new ArtYard spaces (a state-of-the-art facility was inaugurated in 2021) Kearney has invited both locally-based and internationally-recognized visual and performing artists to present a wide variety of exhibitions and performances. The current exhibition, In The Company of Still Life, was curated by Alex Cohen and Clara Weishahn of King Oaks. It takes as its subject the genre of still life and encompasses both historical and contemporary examples. The curators have chosen to contextualize that typically retiring and quietist genre in a rambling installation meant to reproduce a variety of domestic settings. The installation is compartmentalized into nine discreet “rooms,” actually suites of color-coordinated ensembles with decorous titles such as “The Celadon Room,” “The Blue Room,” and “The Library.” These designations are ostensibly meant to evoke specific moods of contemplation and to both envelop and complement the assembled works which range from the art historical to the most contemporary practitioners of the still life. The earliest example is evident in three diminutive studies by painter John F. Peto, who, with William Harnett, is best known for his trompe-l’oeil compositions from the nineteenth century. Here he is represented by a less radical frontality: an illusionism such as in Still life With Mug Pipe and Matchstick (ca. 1890s) which appears more akin to Jean Siméon Chardin’s subtle soliloquies. Peto’s work could be considered an aesthetic lodestar to the curatorial as, in many instances, the organizers have chosen to juxtapose actual still life ensembles in the overall installation with artists who play with the illusionistic instantiations of such. A few examples include Rudolf Stumpf’s “Books” (2015–25), steel manifestations of books painted as if real; Brian Guerin’s BG01-12 Fruit Cups Vessels (2019), which resemble their titular subjects yet in metallic glazed earthenware; and Mayumi Sarai’s wooden Bowl of Cherries (2010) (Vija Celmins’s studies in duplicate copies of quotidian natural and man-made objects offer a precedence here). In other incidents the show veers more towards a dematerialized objectivity, as in the luminously veiled arrangements of symbolic objects in the paintings of Gwen Strahle. Her deceptively quietist still lifes embody the nature morte aspect in a surrealistically energized field of closely valued hues in mythic reverie. Her canvas Sleeping Shadow (2022) has at its base a recumbent female figure contemplating a landscape of biomorphic “vessels” connecting the inner and outer metaphor of embodied form in a grand analogy.

One of the enduring attributes of the still life is how formally flexible is its otherwise staid historical genre. Examples of such plasticity are made evident by the large roster of artists in this exhibition coming at the historical form with wildly different approaches that revitalize the genre. Ken Kewley has found a way to encode basic geometric form in circles and rectangles into a new visual mapping of tabletop arrangements in his Large Still Life I. and II. (both 2016) while his daughter Clara Allison Kewley opts for a more reductive and graphic pop idiom as shown in her Grocery Store (2024). The painter Rotem Amizur reinvents Henri Matisse’s lyrically abstract compositions in Still Life With Purple Plums (2025) as Elizabeth Endres moves the flower arrangement into a vitally expressionist depiction in Gathered Bouquet (2023).

One of the more discreet installations in “The Hallway” section of the exhibition is a series of small etchings by the Gothically-inspired author and illustrator Edward Gorey. These eight works at times focus on single objects, as in Aunt Edna’s Lampshade and two pieces from Alms for Oblivion (all 1978) and at others on claustrophobic arrangements as in Les urns Utiles (1980). Gorey famously activated the power of otherwise inert objects to propel dramatic and often tragic circumstance in his narratives, effectively reanimating the concept of nature morte into a dire struggle with mortality itself. His is an extreme example of how objects arranged in otherwise retiring and decorous ensembles can obtain a vitality all their own and could act as an ancillary metaphor to being viscerally engaged In the Company of Still Life.