BOSTON, May 14, 2024 /PRNewswire/ — ShowUp is pleased to announce its upcoming exhibition Cutting Edge: Contemporary Papercutting, featuring the work of Lorraine Bubar, Béatrice Coron, Hazel Glass, Rebecca Greene, Mark Curtis Hughes, and Swoon. The exhibition opens on Friday, June 7th and runs through September 1, 2024. An opening reception will be held on Friday, June 7th from 5 to 8 pm, and a number of artists as well as curator Rosa Leff will be present. Cutting Edge will also travel to the Guild of American Papercutters (GAP) National Museum for an exhibition in Fall 2024 after its three-month run at ShowUp.
Curated by Puerto Rico based contemporary papercutter Rosa Leff, this exhibition is an opportunity for audiences to experience the mutability of a medium often associated with craft and tradition and recognize its worthiness as a fine art. The unpretentious nature of papercutting no doubt comes from its roots in folk art. However, these masters use the accessibility of the medium to guide an appreciation of detail: a dense crowd or the intricate pattern of a turtle shell.
Stories are slowly revealed as the artists carve their paper with a preferred tool: usually a blade, knife or scissors. Drawing on their knowledge of papercutting’s rich history and their extensive expertise, they wield these humble instruments to create detailed works reflecting the world: LA’s tangled highways, the ocean’s deepest secrets, London’s busiest streets, the challenges of motherhood, and so much more.
These works address the process of papercutting, a meticulous excavation of one or many layers of paper, and its meditative qualities. Glass says “…my knife follows the lines until they’ve led me to the destination: sunken-relief sculptures that transport me from everyday anxiety to the enchanting.” In the end, the shadows of the cut paper remind us that there is even more to each story. For Coron the “shadows suggest danger but also opportunities for new adventures.”
Kicking off ShowUp’s Curatorial Incubator Program (SCIP), Cutting Edge: Contemporary Papercutting represents Rosa Leff’s first foray into the world of curation. SCIP resides at the intersection of ShowUp’s exhibition and educational pillar, offering a scaffolding that allows the selected curatorial fellow to scale to new heights, while also recognizing and honoring the value of their knowledge, labor, and their unique curatorial contribution.
Events associated with this exhibition include an opening reception on Friday, June 7th from 5 to 8 pm and First Friday on August 2nd. A selection of artist talks will be hosted on Instagram Live and don’t miss Craft Your Community, a community art project featuring social practice artist Naomi Chambers on Sunday, June 16th. For more information, dates and registration links, please refer to ShowUp’s website.
About the Curator
Rosa Leff
Between painting alongside her grandmother and watching her father build reproduction antique furniture, Rosa Leff grew up seeing no distinction between fine art and craft. What mattered was that things were made by hand and done well. It is with that in mind that she creates her hand cut paper pieces. Each of Leff’s papercuts is cut by hand from a single sheet of paper using a knife. Her cityscapes are based on photos she’s taken in her neighborhood and all over the world. While Leff is best known for her ability to capture thin tangles of powerlines and intricate brickwork, she also enjoys experimenting with novel media such as paper plates and paper towels. Leff delights in bringing a modern, urban perspective to a traditional folk medium.
Leff has served on the board of The Guild of American Papercutters (GAP). In addition to being a GAP member she is a member of The Paper Artist Collective. Leff has exhibited her work throughout the United States, in China, and in Mexico. Her work has been acquired by The Colored Girls Museum (Philadelphia, PA), The Museum of International Folk Art (Santa Fe, NM) and The Canton Museum of Art (Canton, OH). She is the recipient of a 2021 Maryland State Arts Council Independent Artist Award, the 2021 Municipal Art Society of Baltimore City Artist Travel Prize, and the 2023 360 Xochi Quetzal BIPOC Residency. Leff resides in Puerto Rico with her husband and chihuahuas, Chalupa and Refrito.
About the Artists
Lorraine Bubar
Lorraine Bubar was born in Los Angeles, California and studied art and animation at UCLA and Yale. She worked for many years in the animation industry on animated television commercials and special effects for feature films. Her short-animated films showed at many animation festivals, including the Annecy International Film Festival and the World Festival of Animated Film in Zagreb. She taught animation at Santa Monica College for several years. At that time, Bubar was also exhibiting her watercolor paintings, was the featured artist for a calendar published by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and illustrated a children’s book, Lullaby, by Debbie Friedman. Her love for drawing and painting led her to get a Masters in Art Education and a Teaching Credential at CSULA. She spent many years teaching, drawing, painting, and printmaking to middle and high school students and leading art projects for all age levels at places such as the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA).
Lorraine Bubar’s current painterly papercuts, created from layers of handmade colored papers, reflect the heritage of papercutting found in numerous cultures around the world and capture the diverse ecosystems where she has traveled. Her love of hiking and nature has led her to explore the world and to Artist-in-Residencies at Denali, Zion, Petrified Forest, Lassen Volcanic, and Capitol Reef National Parks. Bubar’s paper pieces have been exhibited in galleries locally and internationally, including Germany, Lithuania, Switzerland, Tasmania, Japan, and the Shanghai International Paper Art Biennale.
Hazel Glass
Hazel Glass creates intricate windows into abstracted worlds. Her Paper Strata sculptures began as a studio experiment in 2015, and have since taken her around the world through dozens of exhibitions and publications. Though Hazel has called many places home over the years, she only ever really meant it about Portland, Oregon.
Mark Curtis Hughes
Mark Curtis Hughes (b.1987) is a UK based Paper artist. Originally from Leicester, he studied Printmaking at the University of the West of England in Bristol. Mark began papercutting in 2010 as part of his process for making woodcut prints and gradually the paper took over. Mark was a secondary school art teacher for ten years in Central London and he now teaches at Wellingborough School in Northamptonshire. Alongside his teaching he has built up his papercutting practice and exhibits nationally and internationally.
Papercutting is like excavating an image, it’s an exploration and there is something very ancient and weathered in the completed piece. For Mark, the act of making is as important as the outcome, by the nature of unearthing the image, and the improvisation which goes into it, it is impossible to anticipate what the image will look like until it is complete.
Mark’s work explores the layers of complexity in the city, ranging from chaos built on chaos to the little pockets of calm. His work tries to capture the nature of interaction, navigation and passing moments within the confusion and depth of the urban environment. This world is all about flashing images and singular moments, recorded or remembered as papercuts they are uncovered and become artefacts.
Béatrice Coron
Béatrice Coron explores visual storytelling in artist books, paper cutting and public art.
Born in France, she was a shepherdess and truck driver among others, then she worked in tourism and lived in Egypt and Mexico for one year each and in China for two years. She then moved to New York where she launched her career as an artist in 1984. In all these places she collected many stories.
Her work can be seen in collections such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Walker Art Center and her public art in New York, Chicago, Paris and Hong Kong among others. To catch all in one place.
Rebecca Greene
Step into a world where the discarded finds new life and nature’s allure meets human ingenuity. Boston native Rebecca Rose Greene is a visionary prop maker and set dresser renowned for her contributions to iconic productions like ‘Knives Out’ and ‘Little Women.”
Through her fine art practice, Greene transforms forgotten remnants of modernity into enchanting anthropomorphic pieces, each one exuding a profound sense of human connection and inspired by the beauty of wildlife. A current artist-in-residence at the Boston Center for the Arts, visitors to her studio can explore the captivating realm of Rebecca’s work, where creativity thrives and nature’s splendor is lovingly preserved. Greene is currently developing not only her professional and fine art practice, but also her work as a changemaker in Boston’s art scene as a board member of the nonprofit Piano Craft Gallery.
Swoon
Caledonia Curry, known as Swoon, is a contemporary artist and filmmaker recognized around the world for her pioneering vision of public artwork.Through intimate portraits, immersive installations and multi-year community based projects, she has spent over 20 years exploring the depths of human complexity by mobilizing her artwork to fundamentally re-envision the communities we live in toward a more just and equitable world. She is best known as one of the first women Street Artists to gain international recognition in a male-dominated field, pushing the conceptual limits of the genre and paving the way for a generation of women Street Artists.
Her recent work has been focused on the relationship of trauma and addiction. Through community partnerships that center compassion and the transformative power of art, Curry draws on her personal history growing up in an opioid addicted family as a catalyst for connection and healing. Over the past 10 years, she has founded and developed collaborative multi-year projects in Braddock and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; New Orleans, Louisiana; and Komye, Haiti, that address crises ranging from natural disasters to the opioid epidemic.
She is currently developing a full length narrative movie which will bring together drawing, immersive installation, stop motion animation and her collaborative work, with the traditions of storytelling through film.
About ShowUp
ShowUp is a 501c3-designated art activism focused nonprofit exhibition space in Boston’s South End. Founded in 2019 by Christine O’Donnell as a sister nonprofit to Beacon Gallery, it has taken over the gallery’s mission and programming and continues to refine the social-impact work started in 2017. It both practices art activism by exhibiting underrepresented artists and features art activists. It strives to support artists and an engaged art community working for social impact through its “Three Es”: Exhibitions, Education, and Engagement.
Our Mission
ShowUp is a groundbreaking contemporary art exhibition, education, and community-building space, creating an innovative environment for underrepresented artists’ voices and visions.
Our mission is to
CONNECT artists to local communities and beyond
AMPLIFY artists and their voices
PROVIDE artists tools for self-sufficiency
EMPOWER artists and curators to experiment, learn, and have meaningful exchanges
Learn more on our website and Instagram.
SOURCE ShowUp
