BRATTLEBORO — The Brattleboro Museum & Art Center (BMAC) will present a free talk by curator Elissa Watters about the exhibit “Louisa Chase: Fantasy Worlds” on Thursday, May 19.
Louisa Chase (1951–2016) was an American artist best known for her paintings, which integrate geometric forms, bright colors, and gestural marks.
The exhibit showcases Chase's multi-media work, integrating sculpture, drawing, painting, and print, from across her career of 40 years. It includes many objects that have never been exhibited before.
After training in printmaking at Syracuse University, Chase mainly practiced sculpture during her master's of fine arts work at the Yale School of Art. In 1975, an exhibition at Artists Space, a then-emergent alternative gallery in New York City, launched Chase's career.
She exhibited at the 1984 Venice Biennale, and her work is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Corcoran Gallery, and the Library of Congress, among others.
After about a decade of wide recognition, Chase lost the limelight despite the continued development of her visual language.
“She kept producing art, and she produced a ton of art in those later years, but it was only shown rarely, and it entered relatively few museum collections,” Watters said in an interview with BMAC director of exhibitions Sarah Freeman. “But the work is amazing, and it needs to be shown more.”
Watters served as a guest curator at the Williams College Museum of Art and as the Florence B. Selden Fellow in the Department of Prints and Drawings at the Yale University Art Gallery.
She is a doctoral student in art history at the University of Southern California. She holds a bachelor's from Dartmouth College and an master's in art history from Williams College and the Clark Art Institute. Previously, she curated the BMAC exhibit “Natalie Frank: Painting with Paper.”
To register for the Watters's free talk Thursday, May 19 at 7 p.m. via Zoom and Facebook Live, visit brattleboromuseum.org. The talk will begin with a video tour of the exhibit.
“Louisa Chase: Fantasy Worlds” is on view at BMAC through June 12.