Latest Art Show CrazyCool!!! through Sept 14!

Cooperstown NY—Visit the Art Garage on picturesque Beaver Meadow Road, one mile from town! Enjoy the current show, CrazyCool!!, a six-person show open every Saturday 11-3, and daily with a phone call or text to 315-941-9607. The exhibition features never-before exhibited work by the “ late great” self-taught artist, Louis Sherry, a Korean War “flyboy.” The galleries—both Middle Bay and Main Gallery bay—are chockful of colorful suspended sculptural “birdhouses;” also paintings, garden art and more by local artists George Hymas, Lucia Phillips and Zena Gurbo. The Sherry  “birdhouses” comprise abstract wooden shapes layered over a larger surface. Each overall shape has a double, each side sports a different painting, including the sides of the interior “box.” The whole is painted with fantastical imagery in bright colors, “things that come from my own mind!”  he once noted with pride and joy.

The exhibition also features works by the late Lavern Kelley (Oneonta) and the late Mississippi outsider artist, Sulton Rogers, formerly of Syracuse.

The exhibition is open Saturdays 11am-3pm, through September 14. As always the gallery will open daily with an appointment: just reach out to 315-941-9607 (cell).  

“I’m super excited about this exhibition,” noted Sydney Waller, Art Garage founder and curator. “It celebrates highly-original creativity among artists who mostly  have no formal training,” she added. The Art Garage represents the estate of farmer artist Lavern Kelley ( d. 1998). Especially known for carved painted trucks, in this show Kelley is represented by his rare rendition of three-foot tall, warm and loving Adam and Eve, holding hands, modestly garbed in clothing made of carved leaves; also several no-nonsense smaller figures. Kelley’s work is in the Smithsonian Museum of American Art and locally at Fenimore Art Museum, among many others.

 Also presenting figures, deliberately deformed, Sulton Rogers called his “haints, ” a southern word for ghosts. Waller met him in the 1980s when he worked in Syracuse: the works on display come from this upstate connection. Rogers subsequently moved back to his home state, Mississippi. His work is in numerous private and public collections including the High Museum in Atlanta GA,  the museum of African American Art, the University Museum of  Mississippi, and the Smithsonian Museum of American Art.

The living artists in the exhibition, CrazyCool!!! Include emerging artist Zena Gurbo (Gilbertsville and Brooklyn), whose distinctive vocabulary features small colorful paintings energized with lines, most based on the human form. She makes art as a path to self-discovery. George Hymas, formerly a fireman in NJ decades ago, works with found materials. Concerned about consumer consumption and waste, he transforms detritus into imagery intended to bring pleasure. His accomplished drawings in this show embellish beige dried and flattened (i.e. used) coffee filters. Images include villages, figures, animals and still-lifes. Lucia Phillips, a well-known self-taught artist, presents quirky paintings of animals, people and the built environment, including of a logger running from a falling tree, that may reference her woodsman husband, Bruce Phillips, known for his work in the lumber industry.

In conjunction with the show the Art Garage will be offering a series of free artist talks, on Thursdays: Aug  29 at 4PM – Zena Gurbo and Lewis Danielski—the gallery will open at 3PM– and Thurs Sept 12 at 5PM, when gallery will open at 4PM. All welcome. Reservations recommended.  

Images of the art are available on FB and on Instagram (@ArtGarageCooperstown) The Art Garage has been serving the area for 14 years with a rich array of artists producing contemporary and or/ outsider art. For more information please contact leartgarage@gmail.com , tel. 607-547-5327 or text / call 315-941-9607.

ABOUT THE ARTISTS

LOUIS SHERRY grew up on a dairy farm in Southampton, Long Island. By age 16 he was milking 36 cows by hand. Later he worked in the family‘s pasteurizing business, and delivered milk for many years, including to Jackson Pollock and other notable 20th century artists. When small family dairies went out of business, Sherry worked for a gas company. He also did landscaping, despite a serious accident. While running his landscaping business, he became close to artist Lee Jackson, a client whom he assisted periodically. Sherry was a “flyboy” during the Korean War and headed up a bomb squad. He moved upstate with his wife Brenda within the last decade, where they lived in a log cabin and he made his art fulltime. “I have total freedom now, “ he declared with exhilaration. He worked on his “out of this world”  projects fulltime –“sometimes even in the middle of the night,” he stated. When not making art, he enjoyed reading about World War II. His only gallery was the Art Garage, although one summer his work was displayed at Origins Café. His older work is on view in the Third Bay in the Art Garage. passed away earlier this month

He cut small shapes for his wildly colorful “birdhouses,” some animal-like, then pieced together with screws and layered over a larger surface. Each larger shape is attached to its double with a birdhouse box in between. He painted interior and exterior sides, including all 4 sides of the interior connector box. The whole is painted with fantastical imagery in bright colors: “Things that come from my own mind, ” Sherry exclaimed.

ZENA GURBO is a Brooklyn/Gilbertsville-based artist who works with brown paper bags, found canvases, wood and other papers to create therapeutic process paintings, many very large, others small. Often using the human figure painted in hot pink as her background, she noted that she “zones in and out to create usually blue lines that represent the various voices and characters that are all parts of me and the process. “  She observed that her work can end up with a decorative feeling or present a more complex array of characters, or a blend of both. “Through this process I’ve been able to better understand myself and the world around me,” she explained.  Gurbo has exhibited in a number of spaces including in Greenpoint, Brooklyn

GEORGE HYMAS grew up on Staten Island, in a family of artisans and artists– boat builders, sculptors and ‘wood smiths.’ A “proud New Yorker,” early in his professional career he was a technical illustrator and architectural model-builder. Then he spent twenty years as a professional firefighter for the City of South Orange, NJ. A creative polymath, “in a world awash with [our] castoff consumer items, I seek to re-purpose them to bring a bit of joy and laughter, ” he noted, especially in stressful times. He is also known for marionettes created for Franklin Stage Theater several years ago, featured in their Midsummer Night’s Dream production Following retirement from firefighting, Hymas moved to Otsego County where he has restored an 1802 farmhouse in Pierstown on cleared land deep in the woods. In addition to making art, Hymas writes poetry and conducts research on his wide-ranging interests that include paleontology and entomology. He studied geology and early man at SUNY Oneonta. He last exhibited his work at the Art Garage in 2020 in a solo exhibition.
 

LAVERN KELLEY (1928-1998) lived and worked in Otsego County on his family farm. He began carving at age seven when given a pocketknife, his lifelong tool of choice.  His father did not approve of his art-making since they had a farm to run. Initially created as crude toys for his brother and himself, the carvings grew to become so technically accomplished that by 1998 they looked like metal replicas. Kelley also made two-sided drawings on long winter nights when chores were done, through the early 1950s. In the mid-1950s he began to photograph his finished work in carefully staged photographs composed outdoors and that made the trucks look ‘real’.  During the last 12 years of his life Kelley became something of a sensation in the folk art world. The New York State Council on the Arts recognized him as a Master Folk Artist. He spoke and gave demonstrations locally and far away (New York-Historical Society) and Santa Fe.  He has been featured in The New York Times, Art and Auction and Kaatskill Life. Many private and public collections his work, including Fenimore Art Museum. The Farmers Museum  and the National Baseball Hall of Fame Museum, locally, as well as

the Smithsonian and the Museum of International Folk Art in Santa Fe, among others.

LUCIA PHILLIPS developed her distinctive voice with no formal training and considers herself “a beginner after 20 years of dabbling” For years she worked as an assistant or posed for figure drawing classes. One day when posing for artist, Elizabeth Nields, she realized she wanted to create art rather than pose. Phillips’ first show in a gallery was in 2019 at the Art Garage, previously she exhibited at a few local restaurants. Most of her work is privately acquired by a single Texas collector.

She farms part-time, paints all winter and lives “a quiet life in the hills of Hartwick, where life can be pretty sweet.” She will share an array of subjects:  dogs, compelling figures, forests, subjects abstracted into simplified shapes. She noted, “…painting is a great way to process emotions and memories and dreams.” A seventh-generation Texan, Phillips now lives on a farm with lumberman husband, Bruce Phillips. They produce garlic and maple syrup and raise their own food. “We are super busy during the growing season,” Phillips noted, “but in the winter…. my little hobby…has consumed every inch of space in our home and a huge amount of my time. I derive [such] pleasure from creating new images.”

SULTON ROGERS (1922 – 2003), a Mississippi folk artist, spent most of his life in Syracuse, NY working at a chemical plant. He moved back to Oxford, Mississippi, in 1995 and lived there until he died. Rogers referred to many of his carvings as “haints” and primarily carved humans with oversized features. The oversized features included multiple eyes, animals coming out of body parts. While he normally carved people, he would also carve animals. His work is in the permanent collections of the University of Mississippi Museum of Art, the African American Museum, and the University Art Museum. His carvings have also been exhibited in the New Orleans Museum of Art and the American Visionary Art Museum as well as at Gallery 53 Artworks, Cooperstown.