CRS (Center for Remembering & Sharing) is delighted to welcome back artist Anne Barry for her second exhibition at CRS. Since her first show at CRS in the spring of 2006, Ms. Barry's work has become increasingly well known and has continued to develop in new and exciting ways.
"Gather Light" 29" x 29"
Photo by D. James Dee
Anne Barry is an artist and teacher in New York and New Jersey. She has studied art at the New School in New York; influential teachers were Jennifer Dubnau, Anne Craven, Emily Barrett and David Dewey. Albers color theory, as taught by Emily Elman, remains an ongoing source of inspiration.
She has studied fibre arts with Nancy Crow and Meiny Vermaas-van der Heide. She has shown prize-winning traditional quilts at juried shows in New York (Empire Quilt Guild) and New Hampshire (Cocheco Quilt Guild). Her teaching includes quilt making at the New School and Grace Seniors, Jersey City, and workshops in her home studio, and she founded the Jersey City Quilt Guild in 1992. Her fabric constructions have been photographed in books and magazines, including “Two Girls Working,” (Rutgers University Press), and the current Winter 2008-9 issue of Palisade Magazine (Hoboken, NJ). For the past several years she has shown her work at juried shows in New Jersey, and has participated in the Jersey City Artist’s Studio Tour. Before shifting her career interests to the visual arts, Anne Barry was a writer of nonfiction books, among them Bellevue Is a State of Mind (Harcourt Brace), and of articles for Esquire, Cosmopolitan, and many others, as well as a teacher of writing at the New School. She is married to director and actor David Greenwood, and lives in Jersey City.
Artist’s Statement:
After years as a nonfiction writer, I shifted my choice of expression to the visual arts. I found that the skills were transferable—in all kinds of art one uses form, color, repetition, shape, proportion, line. I continue to be amazed at how joyful and instantaneously gratifying it is to work with fabric and visual design. The work is completely engaging and in the moment. From early childhood I played with fabric, making costumes for dress-up and quilts for my dolls. Traditional patchwork quilts were an early love, but I soon wanted to open out and explore. I tossed away rulers and patterns, and began freehand fabric compositions, which eventually evolved into the fabric constructions I make today. I slash fabric with a rotary cutter, try out the pieces on a design wall, sew them together and slash again, and sew again, until I know the piece is done. The work is abstract and geometric, improvisational and free.
I have retained the quilted line as a design element, as I like this link with my pioneer ancestors, who slipped beauty into the functional in their hardworking lives. Quilting gives the sculptural quality integral to the design, and is tactile and inviting. My focus is design and color and pattern, so I no longer quilt all my own work, but give that loving labor to an Amish quilter, who stitches the lines I have delineated. My intention is to make each piece a kind of celebration of its own creation, the embodiment of the liveliness and pleasure of the creative process itself and the colorful world in which I do my work
