The Arts Center at Duck Creek presents the exhibition Frank Wimberley: Stratum opening on Saturday, April 30, and on view through June 5. A reception for the artist will be held from 5 to 7 PM on Saturday, April 30.
Wimberley is a well-known presence in the art scene on the East End and a major figure in African American art since the 1960s. The show will celebrate the evolution of this nonagenarian’s distinguished career that spans over six decades.
While Wimberley has created an abundance of vibrant abstract canvases throughout his extensive career, this exhibition will focus on works that seem to evoke the atmospheric qualities of the East End landscape, infused with the rhythmic cadences of the jazz music that is his lifelong passion. His spontaneous approach, analogous to jazz improvisation, results in gestural elegance and formal complexity. Blending paint with pumice, fabric and paper, and using tools like a palette knife and scraper, he creates richly textured, multilayered compositions. The resulting topography in each work reads like an archeological dig through his processes.
Wimberley has made collages throughout his career, and several are included in the exhibition. In a video interview with Nanette Carter, the artist describes the ways in which the collage process contributed to the development of his painting practice: “I started to make collages in order to teach myself to paint, because painting is a construction of layers.”
On Sunday, May 15, Carter and Sylvester Manor’s Donnamarie Barnes will join at Duck Creek for a discussion about the Artists of Eastville, with Wimberley’s exhibition as backdrop.
Wimberley, a 2022 inductee into the Guild Hall Academy of the Arts, has lived and worked in Sag Harbor since 1965. His work has been exhibited widely, and is included in numerous museum and corporate collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Parrish Art Museum, The Saint Louis Art Museum, the Art Institute of Chicago, Guild Hall, Harvey B. Gantt Center for African American Arts and Culture, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, The Studio Museum, and Yale University Art Gallery. He is represented by Berry Campbell Gallery in New York.
Also opening at The Arts Center at Duck Creek will be Drew Shiflett: Patches, Strands, Collage — Drawing, on Saturday, April 30, on view through June 5. A reception for the artist will be held from 3 to 5 PM on Saturday, April 30.
Merriam-Webster’s definition of drawing falls terribly short of Drew Shiflett’s interpretation of the same term. Although “the art or technique of representing an object or outlining a figure, plan, or sketch by means of lines” does indeed describe an aspect of Shiflett’s work, it is only one of the many processes she uses to produce a work of art.
“Regardless of what form my artwork takes,” Shiflett says, “drawing is the main impetus behind the work. While in the process of making each piece, I find myself straddling novel combinations of drawing, relief, and sculpture.”
Shiflett’s drawings are built from a range of materials, including handmade paper, fabric, glue and canvas, often tinted with watercolor or marked in conte crayon. The closer you get to each work, the more your preconceived ideas of these materials start to unravel. Shiflett embraces the idiosyncrasies of her medium in subtle ways, encouraging the buckling behavior of dampened paper, or the strata formed by a change in materials. These more capricious aspects of the work reveal not only the spontaneity with which they were built, but their authentic and organic individuality.