Falling Mist by Jackie Battenfield

“Four Printmakers” will exhibit their works in Haverford’s Cantor Fitzgerald Gallery, Oct. 27-Nov. 22, 2006. The exhibit will be curated by painter and printmaker Hee Sook Kim, assistant professor of fine arts.

The four featured artists—Jackie Battenfield, Gloria Escobar, Lisa Mackie, and Kelly Reemtsen—spent a week at Bryn Mawr College’s Arnecliffe Studio during the 2004-2005 academic year, hosting workshops and working with students; the Cantor Fitzgerald exhibit will include pieces created with those students. Additionally, two former student collaborators, Rachel Robbins and Deborah Sosower, will join the artists for a panel discussion, “Printmaking and Collaboration,” Friday, Oct. 27 at 4:30 p.m. in the Gallery.

Jackie Battenfield will be showing 13 prints. Her work focuses on “the fluidity of water and the natural gestural action of tree branches along side abstract brush strokes and poured layers of paint.” When creating prints, she works with handmade papers from Asia and draws upon Buddhist contemplative practice: “I have found that a meditative state arises from giving attention to a single aspect of nature, in this case, water movement or the action of a tree limb.” Battenfield earned a B.A. from Pennsylvania State University and an M.F.A. from the College of Visual and Performing Arts in Syracuse, N.Y. She has exhibited in solo and group shows throughout the United States and Japan, and her work appears in international collections. She has been awarded grants from the Sam and Adele Golden Foundation for the Arts and the New York Foundation for the Arts, and has received a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant in Painting and the Warren Tanner Memorial Art Fund Award in Painting. Battenfield was an artist-in-residence at Haverford’s John B. Hurford ‘60 Humanities Center in 2005.

Gloria Escobar will show 10 medium-size pieces of a recent series of mono-prints/collages, most of which have women’s faces as the subject matter. Her work emphasizes shape and color in an abstract manner; color shapes define the background and black lines are overimposing elements that define the subject. Escobar earned her B.A. in studio art from the University of Antioquia in Medellin, Colombia, and her M.F.A. in printmaking from Syracuse University. She teaches design, drawing, and printmaking at Hartwick College in Oneonta, N.Y., where she is a founding member and director of Round House Press as well as chair of the art history department. Her pieces have been shown throughout New York, New England, and South America, and she has received grants from the New York Foundation for the Arts, Organization of American States, and the Institute of Colombian Culture. She was a visiting artist at Haverford in 2004.

Lisa Mackie describes her art as “a compilation of picture fragments that I have photographed, drawn, written about and remembered. The images deal with a delicate balance between cognition and process.” She will be showing a series of nine books from her “Rising, Falling and Floating” series in an installation with a video. Mackie received her B.F.A. at the University of Michigan and her M.F.A. at the University of Wisconsin. She has had solo exhibitions in New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, and Pennsylvania, as well as Mexico and India. Her works have been included in group exhibitions in the Mid-Atlantic, California, North Carolina, and Poland, and are part of numerous university and corporate collections. In 1990, she established the New York-based Lisa H. Mackie Studios, which was accepted into the Rutgers Archives for Printmaking Studios, Jane Voorhee Zimmerli Art Museum, New Brunswick, N.J. Presently, Mackie teaches at Dowling College in Oakdale, N.Y.

Kelly Reemtsen is interested in “multiples and iterations (very often re-iterations) of the same theme, and the notion of prefabrication and cookie-cutter production.” She is dedicated to pushing the boundaries of traditional printmaking, using the broadest spectrum of techniques in unconventional combinations. She holds degrees from Central Michigan University and California State University, Long Beach, and has exhibited in solo and group shows throughout Southern California. Reemtsen also received commissions from hotels and restaurants in Los Angeles, New York, Las Vegas, Little Rock, Ark., and Halifax, Nova Scotia. She is a member of the Brewery Art Association, Gallery 825 Los Angeles Art Association, and the Graphic Arts Council of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

Located in Whitehead Campus Center, the Cantor Fitzgerald Gallery is open 11 a.m.-5 p.m. Monday-Friday and noon-5 p.m. Saturday and Sunday. On Wednesday evenings, the Gallery will stay open until 8 p.m. For more information, call (610) 896-1287 or visit www.cantorfitzgeraldgallery.org.