PUTNEY — Artist James Mullen will showcase his work in a free art exhibition in the Michael S. Currier Center at The Putney School.
“Luminous Edge” will run from Jan. 19 to March 3, with an opening reception on Friday, Jan. 27, from 4:30 to 6:30 p.m.
On display will be 72 vignette paintings from Mullen’s Pilgrimmage series. These paintings investigate iconic sites belonging to the lexicon of the 19th-century American landscape.
“Presented as a grid, the paintings start to interact with each other, both formally as well as conceptually, and begin to kindle questions about how we define landscape, such as what is natural versus artificial?” Mullen said of his work. “These paintings also engage ideas about the public versus the private, seeking out the territory between where we live, and where we visit.
“I am particularly interested in how we form our understanding of place, through the combination of memory and experience, and between seeing and thinking. This collection documents that journey towards a more mindful engagement of our environment, and understanding our place in it.”
Mullen was born and raised in rural western New Jersey. He received a Bachelor of Fine Arts with an emphasis in sculpture and printmaking from the University of New Hampshire, and a Master of Fine Arts in Painting at Indiana University.
He has taught at the Savannah College of Art and Design in Georgia, the University of Evansville in Indiana, and since 1999, has taught at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine, where he is a professor in the Department of Art.
Mullen has received numerous awards and scholarships. Recent solo exhibitions include Phoenix Gallery in New York City; University of Southern New Hampshire; The College of the Atlantic in Bar Harbor, Maine; and the Barrington Center for the Arts at Gordon College in Wenham, Massachusetts.