INTRODUCING NEW MEMBERS DON FREEMAN ALAN POWELL AND MEMBERS LATE WINTER GROUP EXHIBIT OPEN AT LONGYEAR GALLERY

Longyear Gallery of Margaretville is pleased to announce the opening of "Introducing New Members Don Freeman & Alan Powell" and “Members’ Late Winter Group Exhibit,” a new group show featuring the art of all other Longyear Gallery Members. Opening on Friday, February 16th, these exhibits will run through Sunday, March 17th, 2024, with the Artists’ Reception on Saturday, February 17th from 3-5 p.m. 

The work of Don Freeman, American artist, film maker and photographer, has been widely published in French, German and American Vogue, The World of Interiors, Elle Décor and Architectural Digest.  Freeman has exhibited in international galleries and private collections and has published five books of photography exploring interiors: Artists’ Handmade Houses, The Hotel Book: Great Escapes North America; the objet d’art: Ted Muehling: A Portrait; taking flowers back to their Dutch Renaissance beginnings: Styling Nature; and early works: My Familiar Dream, which currently resides in the permanent collections of the Victoria & Albert Museum.

Freeman's award-winning documentary Art House (2016) revisits the intimate domiciles of the eleven artists represented in Artists' Handmade Houses, revealing the spiritual residue their presence left in unpopulated rooms.

In discussing his photographic process and his subject matter, Don Freeman states that he "tries to push the envelope of what a photograph can be." Technically, his photographs are shot in black and white with high speed (often pushed) 35mm black and white film, maintaining the inherent grain. They are "hand-held, shot in low light, in dark rooms or under only a slight ray of light with the slow exposures offering an unexpected and accidental blur and fractured sense of light and time of place."  In his current work, Freeman notes that  "Lately, I have been treating my images in Photoshop, layering the image with pressings from plants and watercolor. The final photograph is digitally printed on Hahnemuhle photo rag paper, giving the impression of a Japanese woodblock print (Mokuhanga). Taken over a 30 year span of life, my images capture the archetypes that reside within our collective unconscious. I want them to be recognizable, but not immediately clear in their representation of different realms of sleep and wakefulness, reality and delusion, reason and madness and the connection between man and nature." A visual and electronic media artist based in Fleischmanns, New York, Alan Powell's fifty-year career encompasses sculpture, painting, experimental videography,  multichannel installations, and audio compositions. His work has had moments in a multitude of genres, seen many collaborations and residencies, but always ultimately comes back to the convergence of his art, his politics, and this world around him and finding the pathways to integrate them. 

Alan Powell has an MFA  degree from the Mason Gross School of Art, Rutgers University and completed his undergraduate work in Video, Film, and Photography at the Rhode Island School of Design. A professor emeritus at Arcadia University, he has also taught video production, web design, computer animation and critical theory as it relates to art practice at the Rhode Island School of Design and Temple University. As part of his work, the artist explains, he and Connie Coleman, after meeting in 1978, began a collaboration in video work that spanned thirty years. Their work has been exhibited at The Kitchen, The Museum of the Moving Image in New York, The Philadelphia Museum of Art, Carnegie Mellon Museum of Art, The Long Beach Museum in California, and the Musée d’Arte Moderne in Paris and is archived at Cornell University Library. Currently a board member at TermiteTV, a Philadelphia based video collective, and at Signal Culture, an electronic arts residency program in Loveland, Colorado. Powell is considered "a grandfather of electronic media" and remains at the helm of emerging and experimental offshoots. 

Longyear Gallery is a cooperative art gallery that first opened in Margaretville in Fall 2007. In “Members’ Late Winter Group Exhibit,” Longyear Gallery’s 34 artists, including Robert Axelrod, Joanna Barham, Temma Bell, Robert Buckwalter, Marcia Clark, Neil Driscoll, Don Freeman, Gail Freund, Ann Lee Fuller, Elaine Grandy, Irina Grinevitsky, Robin Halpern, Louise Kalin, Hedi Kyle, Linda Lariar, Margaret Leveson, Helane Levine-Keating, Patrice Lorenz, Ron Macklin, Alethea Maguire, Douglas Maguire, Frank Manzo, Helene Richard Kirk Mills, Bonnie Mitchell, Wayne Morris, Manzo, Anthony Margiotta, Sheila McManus, Alan Powell, Lesley A. Powell, Deborah Ruggerio, Victoria A. Scott, Gerda van Leeuwen, and Ros Welchman, will be presenting their watercolors, prints, monotypes, photographs, drawings, ceramics, objects, mixed media work, and oil paintings.  

Future 2024 Longyear Gallery exhibits will include "Night," a Special Group Exhibit running from Friday, March 22nd - Sunday, April 21st featuring different interpretations and renderings of "Night" by Longyear members. This special exhibit will be accompanied by a group show of those Longyear Gallery artists who will not be participating in “Night.” Following these two group shows will be two solo exhibitions including a Memorial Exhibit of the work of Longyear Gallery's late and beloved member Anna Contes and "Interpretations," featuring the art of Leslie A. Powell, running from Friday, April 26th through Monday, Memorial Day, May 27th with the opening reception on Saturday, April 27th. All solo shows will be accompanied by a Longyear Gallery Members Group Show.

 Longyear Gallery's "Introducing New Members Don Freeman & Alan Powell" and “Members’ Late Winter Group Exhibit” will be on view Fridays, Saturdays, Sundays, and Holiday Mondays each weekend from 11 p.m.-4 p.m. Longyear Gallery is located Downstairs in The Commons, 785 Main Street, Margaretville. For information, please see Longyear Gallery’s website, www.longyeargallery.org, or call 845.586.3270 during gallery hours.