| nona hershey | |||||||||||||
| Nona Hershey‘s work is included in numerous public collections around the world, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY; Library of Congress, DC; Fogg Museum; Yale University Art Gallery; Minnesota Museum of Art; Crakow National Museum; and the Calcografia Nazionale, Rome. She has participated in over 100 Print Biennials and Group Exhibitions internationally. Numerous solo exhibitions include those at Mary Ryan Gallery, New York, NY; Dolan/Maxwell Gallery, Philadelphia,PA; Galleria Il Ponte, Rome, Italy, and Miller Block Gallery, Boston. She has had residency grants at the Asillah Forum Foundation, Morocco; the Ballinglen Arts Foundation, Ireland; the MacDowell Colony, NH, and at the Ucross Foundation, WY. She taught at Tyler School of Art in Rome, Italy for 12 years and at Temple University’s Tokyo program for one year. Since September 1993, Ms. Hershey has been Professor and Coordinator of the Printmaking Department at Massachusetts College of Art in Boston. She was a recipient of a Massachusetts Cultural Grant in 2004. Hershey’s fascination with clouds began when she was in Ireland in 2001, just at the outbreak of Foot and Mouth disease. There she saw heart breaking stories in the news about mass slaughter along with vivid depictions of the smoke from burning animals. In Ireland she wanted to capture the force of the wind over remote hills known best to the animals that had foraged there unwittingly. Since then, she has observed a proliferation of events, each with their own horrific billowing smoke and devastation. Hershey listens to NPR in her studio and is an avid reader of current news. The travesty of what we are often told, versus what is actually happening to our environment and to masses of victims bombed, burned and tortured plays an active role in her thinking about the sky. Since the beginning of time, clouds have represented uncertainty. Religion, science, and art have continually attempted to determine the specific origin and character of forces larger than our selves. Clouds have represented the wrath of gods; the beneficent containers of rain; the boundary between this world, and the mystery beyond. As the clouds shift, so does our imagination, our well being, our hope and our lack of it. ~ NH Nona Hershey’s work is an attempt to grasp the ephemeral. Using balls of cotton imbued with graphite powder, the drawings are made by slowly building up layers of tonality to evoke form and light. The softness and translucency of the medium lends itself well to mutability. This gradual, incremental process is a continual dialogue of invention as forms begin to emerge and the openings between the clouds become animated by the character of their edges. The finished works suggest air, light, movement and the precariousness of hope. Linear markings are sometimes embedded behind the clouds to suggest wind patterns and sometimes right up front on the picture plane as a means to establish a palpable distance between the viewer's position and the shifting clouds behind and beyond the pictorial frame. That dichotomous aspect of illusion: the artificiality of the flat picture plane versus a believable sense of wind and air is parallel to this artist’s own questions about instability and power within and beyond our control. |
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