About the Artists
Louis Sherry (Greene, NY) is a self-taught artist represented exclusively by the Art Garage. Raised on a family farm in Long Island, NY he went into the family’s milk distribution business after “big ag put the small dairy farmers out of business.” He speculates that he might have delivered milk to Jackson Pollock and other up-and-coming NYC artists who had moved to Long Island for low rents and more studio space. Later, he did landscaping until suffering a work-related injury. Sherry also fought in the Korean War as part of the airforce. After he and his wife Brenda retired upstate, he began to make art for pure pleasure, without any intention of ever selling or exhibiting his work. That was until former Cooperstown area artist Michael Stiles glimpsed his work at a church fair near Ithaca. Knowing the Art Garage’s history of self-taught exhibitions, he immediately contacted us. Sherry’s first one-man show in 2015 sold out and he exhibited additional work in an Art Garage/Origins Café collaboration further down Beaver Meadow Road in 2017 to acclaim. Because of his attachment to the Art Garage, a permanent space in our MG Gallery has been dedicated to several of his birdhouses in recent years. Here, the art objects sit alongside actual garage material, offering our visitors an unexpected taste of the whimsy amid the seemingly mundane.In 2015, his show was animated by whimsical birdhouses exploding with color and a blend of geometric and organic motifs. Now in his late eighties, he has begun to experiment with a new approach: small paintings on wood, finished with handmade frames which extend his signature effusion of color beyond the confines of the conventional picture plane. He will also be offering a menage of miniature animal sculptures, ranging from the mundane to the mythical. Although his practice has slowed somewhat due to health issues, this former ‘flyboy’ in the Korean War nevertheless rises each day to create in the workshop beside his log cabin. Like his shed and basement, this artistic sanctuary is brimming with with sculptures and paintings. In his words, “It’s out of this world…No one has seen such a thing before—you are stepping into the envelope of another world that I have imagined. When I work, I open a door to my imagination and step into it…I have peace of mind—I am following my heart.” The principle of joy that undergirds his practice is reflected in the visionary art he will exhibit.
Terry Lee Harmon Slade (Schnevus, NY) is a full-time artist known for his large-scale multi-media installations and work with cast, blown, and fused glass, which he has exhibited regionally as well as abroad. His work in the Middle Gallery will feature a series of small drawings on paper accompanied by several life-sized glass panels and sculptures. While his earlier work was markedly playful, in the last several years his tone has changed. Like all of us, he described facing, “the reality of living in a world threatened by a frightening disease…even more worrying” because of the way it reflects our “inability to live in harmony with nature.” Intense and sometimes apocalyptic, Slade’s use of color is vital component of the broader meditation on recent pandemic times his pieces now express. His offering at the Art Garage is related to current projects exploring his fascination with microscopic images of germs, titled Small Things to Worry About and More Things to Worry About, respectively.
Growing up in Nebraska, the retired professor of art and sculptor-in-residence at Hartwick College’s thinking about the earth was influenced by the vastness and increasing vulnerability of the landscape. His work has long explored the relationship between humans and the natural world at an anthropological as well as artistic level. For over 20 years, he has researched ancient monuments, stone circles, and burial chambers in the British Isles and Brittany and has been inspired to produce numerous drawings, cast-bronze sculptures, and installations in wood and mixed media. Ethereal and distressed, his current work represents the confrontation between this minute dimension of the environment and the humans who move through it unaware. He explained, “Bodies nestled in a landscape once signified human living together with nature, but now the body is pierced by inexplicable shards, revealing how little we have respected and lived in a symbiotic relationship with the earth.” His figures are ghostly, “as though shattered by the much larger things humans now have to worry about.”
He exhibits frequently and his work is in many public private collections throughout the US, Europe, and Japan. He was commissioned in 2016 to create a commissioned piece for the Munson-Williams-Proctor Arts Institute in Utica, entitled Dreams and Apparitions: A Mantra for the Survival of the Earth. In the past, he has also exhibited at the Albany Airport (2019), CANO, Oneonta, Stone Quarry Art Park, Cazenovia, and the Smithy, where he will be showcasing a large body of work this summer in an evolving solo show in the Third Floor Gallery. |
