Kelly Slater
Kelly Slater is a self-taught artist who specializes in figurative abstracts of landscapes and teaches online art workshops that focus on improvisation. For the past several years, she has focused on becoming intimately acquainted with a few locales in the northeastern United States. Recent residencies—which combined creating art with teaching art workshops--have included Bascom Lodge at Mount Greylock in Adams, MA; The Trustees of Reservations’ Field Farm, in Williamstown, MA; and Moose Track, in Franconia, NH.
Seeking to reconnect with both the rhythm and the spiritual sustenance of nature, Kelly observes her subjects closely and at length—focusing on the quality of light at a particular time of day or at a particular season and on the energetic lines created by landforms or by the branching of trees.
Most recently, her work has moved toward greater abstraction, with the aim of capturing the space, colors, and light of the landscape with a minimum of details and shapes. Her goal remains to produce artwork with a strong, dreamlike intensity that hints at a powerful world within and behind the visible world.
Kelly works out of her home studio in Saugus, MA. For more information see: https://kellyslaterart.com/
Kathleen Dalton
Kathleen Dalton majored in history at Mills College, but loved pottery, drawing, and every art class she could take at Mills. Then, after almost a fifty-year hiatus from art when she became a professional historian and author teaching at a boarding school in Andover, she returned to art when she and her husband retired to East Lexington.
As she studied printmaking she found herself walking around her new neighborhood in East Lexington wondering what the majestic trees had seen as humans came and went around them. The oaks near Sutherland Woods, in fact, could have been standing when Indigenous people made their homes near the Mystic River and hunted deer in neighboring woods.
As a student of Selma Bromberg (like Kelly Slater) at the Cambridge Center for Adult Education, she learned several printmaking techniques: monotype, drypoint, woodcut, and solar plate. Though she learned ukiyo-e and traveled in Asia, she returned home to produce a collection of art about the trees of East Lexington.
After the murder of George Floyd she has worked with the Stone Building Advocates to encourage the Town of Lexington to address the persistent racial injustices that haunt the U.S. and to reopen the Stone Building (formerly Robbins Hall) as a place to talk about race and prejudice of all kinds and to learn about the abolitionists who gathered in East Lexington long ago. Her S.B.A. work has connected her to local historians who have helped her learn about trees, Lexington's Black history, its history of slavery, and its abolitionist and transcendentalist past. As she wrote the script for this exhibit her Phillips Academy world history course focusing on the Atlantic Slave Trade helped fill in the story of trees and early American politics. Trees, a sense of place, and curiosity about East Lexington's past pulled together her work and Kelly Slater's work to tell a story in this exhibit.
She shares with Kelly Slater a strong affinity for trees and a concern about climate change, and in this exhibit, trees, as living witnesses to history, provide a different angle to view human endeavors in this beautiful place called East Lexington. Humans used up the dense forests that once covered Massachusetts, without knowing or heeding the environmental consequences. Despite warnings from wise neighbors like Thoreau and Elizur Wright about the centrality of trees to human survival, forests were ravaged. Trees also bear witness to our own time when we need to increase forests in order to survive.