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Four area artists will be featured in the first regional exhibition in the Richard A. and Rissa W. Grossman Gallery in Lafayette’s new Williams Visual Arts Building, 243 North Third Street, downtown Easton. The exhibition runs from March 31 through April 26.
The artists are painters Isadore LaDuca of Raubsville and Ryo Tokito of Pen Argyl and sculptors Gwenyth Jones of Scranton and Koenraad Van Linden Tol of Easton.
The gallery is open from 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday. The artists will participate in a panel discussion at 6 p.m. Thursday, April 12, in the gallery. There will be a public reception for the artists from 5-7 p.m., Tuesday, April 24, also in the gallery. Events are free and open to the public.
“Our four artists, with extremely diverse backgrounds, have all produced work which resonates the spirit of nature with a rather minimal and reserved palette,” says Jim Toia, visiting assistant professor of art and director of the Grossman Gallery.
“This is an important event for Lafayette and the community,” says Toia, who also directs Lafayette’s Community Arts Program. “With the addition of the Williams Visual Arts Building Lafayette is reaching out to the community by extending its visual art program into downtown Easton. The intention is to serve the community in a more direct manner. With the growth of the arts in Easton and the surrounding region, what better way than to dedicate a building to this cause?
“To further exemplify the extent of our community’s artistic range, local curator Deborah Rabinsky of De Arte Magick Galleria in Easton is collaborating in curating the show,” adds Toia. “She has extensive knowledge of the artistic resources in our region and will continue to contribute to exposing the scope and availability of the talent around us.”
After the regional exhibit, the Grossman Gallery will display the work of advanced Lafayette student artists Susan Baldaserini of Ridgefield, Conn.; Amy Dorfman of Meadowbrook, Pa.; Carly Fink of Alpine, N.J.; and Mandy Weil of Scarsdale, N.Y., from April 28 to May 19. All are seniors pursuing departmental honors in studio art.
LaDuca’s work was featured last year at Marywood University, Scranton, Pa., MCS Gallery in Easton, and the Allentown Art Museum. He is a board member of Art Community of Easton and has served as art reviewer for The Easton Irregular since 1998. LaDuca has curated exhibitions at the Centre Space and White Birth Galleries. He teaches art history and drawing at Northampton Community College, Bethlehem, Pa.
Jones’ sculptures have been included in many exhibitions, most recently in Gardo’s Gallery, Philadelphia. She earned a First Place Award last year from Northeast Regional Art and received a fine art grant from Marywood University in 1999. She has been an art teacher at Scranton Cultural Center since May 2000.
Tokito’s paintings have been in one-man shows at galleries in Japan, Toronto, New York, Pittsburgh, and Easton. He also has been represented in more than 40 group exhibitions around the world since 1973. In 1989, he moved his studio from Soho in New York City to take in the inspiration of nature at the foot of the Appalachians.
Van Linden Tol has received many grants and awards for his art, which merged with science in a project that explored liquid crystals. He received a grant from the Dutch government for that work, and the result was shown on Dutch television station ARVO. Van Linden Tol’s projects have taken him to the Netherlands, Germany, and Ireland. He worked for Vision Quest, a rehabilitation program for juvenile delinquents, from 1991-1994. When he moved to Easton in 1995, he started work on a large tree sculpture and smaller wood sculptures.
It is planned that the Grossman Gallery will dedicate about 40 percent of its exhibition time for local, regional, and community artists and art groups, with accompanying educational programs that include artists’ workshops, lectures, and panel discussions. These programs serve both adult and high school evening programming, which take place at no charge in the Community Arts Studio, adjacent to the gallery.
Future community-based exhibitions will include “Selections From Thursday Night,” May 25-June 12, highlighting work produced in the open-studio drawing sessions held every Thursday night in the Community Arts Studio. That show will continue through July 7 in the lobby gallery. From June 15 through July 14, there will be a collaboration between Costa Rican artists and junior high and high school students in conjunction with Lafayette’s Experimental Printmaking Institute (EPI), curated by master printmaker Curlee Raven Holton, associate professor of art at Lafayette and director of the EPI. A Costa Rican student workshop exhibition will run July 20-August 17.
For information on the Community Arts Program, contact Toia at (610) 330-5577.