Two Woodstock artists of very different backgrounds and aesthetics get major honors in our nation’s capital this season.
On Tuesday, October 18, Mercedes Cecilia, a longtime Woodstock Artists Association and Museum member and celebrated local arts teacher, will be the focus of an artist’s reception at the Peruvian Embassy in Washington, D.C. for her month-long show of abstracts, landscapes and illustrations from her recent book, Kusikiy, A Child from Taquile.
The works Cecilia will be showing includes a series of nine large abstract paintings, entitled Paqariy, that she has described as a microscopic mirror of her inner life, and The Color of Water, a series of 9 paintings that simultaneously evoke the lakes and rivers of our Catskill Mountains and the lakes and rivers of her native Peru.
“When I think of Peru, an intense warmth fills my heart and colors appear inside a trapezoid shape, as if the Inca trapezoidal doorway frames my memory field,” the artist has explained of her abstractions, and her simultaneous landscape views.
Next month, starting on November 25, photographer Jeffrey Milstein will center a new year-long show at the Smithsonian National Air & Space Museum entitled “The Jet As Art.” The exhibition, previously seen in Los Angeles and New York, previously resulted in the publication of a noted Abrams book, published in 2007, that was awarded first place in PDN’s Digital Photography issue.
Milstein previously started and owned PaperHouse Productions, whose die-cut pop photo images of iconic modern items revolutionized the way we treasure the highly-designed world we inhabit.
Hats off to both local artists. Isn’t a trip to D.C. now in order?++
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