Brooklyn-based artist Gail Flanery celebrates friendship, collaboration, and women artists in Continuum, a group exhibit currently on view at Established Gallery.
L-R: JoAnne McFarland, Free, 2012 and Tatana Kellner, Violent, 2018
While reading Mary Gabriel’s Ninth Street Women, which chronicles the careers of Lee Krasner, Elaine de Kooning, Grace Hartigan, Joan Mitchell, and Helen Frankenthaler, Flanery reflected on her life as an artist and the relationships she has developed with fellow women artists over the years.
“I was musing over the time I’ve spent in my life as an artist here in the city and the people I know,” she said at the gallery Sunday afternoon, “and the women that I have known through this whole period of [our] living in New York and paddling through the art world. I met these women in different ways but all of it having to do with art.”
Flanery was moved by the connections formed by the five artists in Ninth Street Women, “the influence that they had on each other” and “the risks that they were taking” when the arts community was “still a man’s world” and women had to balance their careers with their families. “That really made me stop and think because I’ve seen it. It was not always easy to be acknowledged [as an artist] and to get a show.”
L-R: Gail Flanery, Ocean, 2018 and Damali Miller, Memories of Home Once....and always
L-R: Ellen Chuse, Totem, 2017 and Kathy Caraccio, Victorian Wallpaper I, II, 2016
L-R: Amy Weil, Flowers not for Algernon and Karen Gibbons, Snake, 2018
Doris Rodriguez, Kite Dreams
L-R: Olivia Beens, Flowers of Perseverance, I, II, III and JoAnne McFarland, Positive Shirley, Negative Shirley
It can still be challenging today for women artists to be recognized, making the need for a supportive community crucial. “If you’re a functioning artist and you’re trying to get shows, you’re trying to be seen, and you’re trying to figure out what do…there’s a conversation that you can’t really have with anyone else as easily, as naturally [as another artist],” Flanery said. “There are things you don’t even have to describe because you know they know. There was a familiarity in a lot of [Gabriel’s] writing, just with the relationships.”
After receiving the offer to curate the exhibit at Established Gallery, Flanery faced the daunting task of coordinating the show in three weeks. “That night I tossed and turned,” she recalled, “and the next morning I got on the phone and I just called everybody.” She contacted artists she has known and collaborated with over the years—some for more than four decades—including former classmates, members of the printmaking community, members of 440 Gallery, and colleagues from the Studio in a School program. With the help of assistant curator Mitchell-lee Van Rooij, who is also assisting Flanery with her archives, the pair managed to present an empowering, consistent exhibit showcasing a diverse selection by 14 artists who have paid their dues in the NYC art world.
Born in Ohio to a career army sergeant, Flanery spent her childhood moving every 18 months around the world. “We’d ship out of Fort Hamilton Army Base in Bay Ridge. We’d leave from there and come back there,” she recalled. When her father retired from service, the family settled not far from the base in Staten Island where Flanery completed her last year of high school.
“From the time I was a little kid I’ve always drawn,” Flanery said before fondly telling her “fairy princess story.” During a visit to her grandmother’s farm in Ohio when she was about five years old, Flanery remembers standing outside with her pet cow and seeing a “fairy princess” fly by. “She was exquisite and had amazing wings, long blond hair, and high heels, of course.” While she now realizes it was probably a dragonfly, as a child she excitedly ran to tell her grandmother about her sighting. “I started to describe her and my Grandmother Abigail said to me, ‘Wait, don’t tell me. Show me,’ and she handed me a paper and a pencil.” This sparked Flanery’s passion for visual storytelling. “I always drew from that point on. It started early and it never ended…. Grandma, until the day she died, had that picture taped behind her bed.” she said. “When I became a teacher I often used that as my experience in how…there’s more than one way to tell a story.”
After completing high school, Flanery sold refrigerators in Manhattan for a brief stint before enrolling at The Cooper Union where she met Damali Miller, one of the artists featured in Continuum. “I love that school so much,” she said. “That school picked me up from one world and dropped me in another in such an enormous way.” Flanery recalls making lifelong friends and having incredible instructors at the school, including the art historian Dore Ashton who guided Flanery when she felt overwhelmed. After waitressing at many of the old Soho artist haunts to pay her rent throughout school, Flanery received her BFA in 1972.
Amy Williams, The Hemingway Series
Robin Holder, Copper Leaf Promise
Tracy Penn, Everything is Everything
L-R: Susan Newmark, The Language of Flowers I, II, 2015; Olivia Beens, Flowers of Perseverance, I, II, III; JoAnne McFarland, Positive Shirley, Negative Shirley; Amy Williams, The Hemingway Series
Shortly after graduating, Flanery met Kathy Caraccio whose “unique and extraordinary” personality fostered Flanery’s love for printmaking. “I discovered that I loved process and that’s what [Kathy] gave me,” Flanery said. “I learned so much from her and she gave me such confidence,” Flanery added, noting that she continues to learn from Caraccio today.
“The printmaking world is so small and intense, that everyone who has a shop knows everybody else in the city,” according to Flanery. She adds it was through Caraccio that she met Tatana Kellner who contributed two pieces to Continuum.
In the mid 1980s when Flanery moved from Soho to Park Slope, she needed to find a kindergarten for her son so she visited PS 107. “I went to look in on one of the classes and Olivia Beens was there with Studio in a School,” Flanery recalled. “I had never heard of it but I walk in and here is this artist and she’s really teaching. She’s not doing the turkey hand [tracing] kind of things…. I was like, ‘This is where I want my boy to go to school.’”
After working with Beens as a volunteer for Studio in a School, Beens recommended Flanery as a teacher for the program. Flanery spent the next 20 years teaching art to pre-K through high school students across the city, retiring about six years ago. Along with Flanery and Beens, Flanery’s old friend and classmate Damali Miller also taught for Studio in a School. Other Continuum artists Flanery met through the program include Robin Holder, Doris Rodriguez, and Susan Newmark.
Flanery has been a member of Park Slope’s 440 Gallery for ten years. It was at the artist-run gallery that she met Ellen Chuse, Karen Gibbons, Amy Weil, and Amy Williams, 440’s Gallery Director. Connections with Continuum artists JoAnne McFarland and Tracy Penn were more recently established through the Gowanus arts community.
Flanery’s prints are inspired by nature and feature vast landscapes, open skies, and bold horizons. “I would say palette is definitely my first consideration,” she notes. The deep blue waters in her Ocean complement Miller’s Memories of Home Once….and always. The similarities in the works' colors and lines suggest the synergy between the two longtime friends.
Gail Flanery stands next to Ocean, her monotype with chine collé
Flanery points out the relationships between Kellner’s Almost Gone and Weil’s Flowers not for Algernon, and the conversation between their palettes and grids. Penn's intricate encaustic piece Everything Is Everything is a perfect companion to Newmark's multi-layered collages The Language of Flowers I, II in the rear of the gallery just across from William's entrancing installation The Hemingway Series. “Mitchell and I walked through here and we were both like, ‘Wow. This is such strong work,’” Flanery recalled after hanging all the pieces. “I’m really glad we were able to hang it with space because each piece is so powerful.”
Joyfully explaining Continuum to a visitor at the gallery on Sunday, Flanery noted, “The thing that pulled it together for me is my relationship with these artists. I’ve known them and made art with them 30, 40, some of them almost 50 years in New York, and we never dropped the thread. And the thread was creation…our work. There’s great variety in our work but there’s a strength and a continuum.”
“It was about us keeping on keeping on,” she continued. “After decades it continues. That was the commonality, the artists I knew who have never stopped.”
Continuum
Established Gallery
75 6th Avenue, Prospect Heights, Brooklyn
Exhibition on view January 18 through February 9
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