The annual Phillips Mill Art Exhibition is a juried show, with jurors selecting submissions from a pool of talented artists living within a 25-mile radius of historic Phillips Mill, located on River Road in New Hope, to be exhibited. Artists must submit their work by Saturday, Aug. 22, at 5 p.m. Complete directions can be found at phillipsmill.org.
The show has new judges each year to give the show a unique look. Jurors are accomplished artists in their own right, often having an academic background. Curators and art historians have also served as jurors.
Due to COVID-19, this year’s 91st annual exhibit will be totally online. This allows for the health and safety of artists, judges, volunteers, patrons and guests. It also greatly expands the show’s reach due to extensive social media work, advertising and publicity efforts.
This year’s painting and graphics judges are: Mark Bockrath, Elsa Mora and Celia Reisman. Sculptor judges are Diane Marimow and Gary Weisman.
Bockrath is a representational landscape and figure painter living and working in West Chester. He graduated from the University of Delaware in 1981 with an M.S. degree in art conservation. He works as a paintings conservator in private practices in West Chester, and has taught classes on painting materials and figure painting at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia. His work is in numerous corporate, private and public collections, including the State Department, Oberlin College and The McGraw-Hill Companies. He is represented by the Gross McCleaf Gallery in Philadelphia.
In addition to landscapes of his native Pennsylvania, Bockrath has painted landscapes of Maine for nearly 30 years. He mostly works in oil or pastel and uses charcoal and silver point for portraits and figures. He is interested in work that has a unified visual and emotional impact, and the surface of the painting apart from its subject or composition. The emotion determines the technique; the painting then takes a life of its own in the process. Visit markbockrath.com.
Mora is an artist and curator. A recipient of the UNESCO-Aschberg Bursaries for Artists, she was born and raised in Cuba and moved to Los Angeles, California in 2001, where she lived until 2012. Mora currently resides in upstate New York with her husband William Horberg, and their two children.
Mora’s art has been exhibited worldwide in art galleries and museums. She taught at the Vocational School of Arts in Camaguey, Cuba, and has been a visiting artist at the Art Institute of Chicago, San Francisco State University, the Art Institute of Boston, the MoMA Design Store, and the National Gallery of Art, among others. Her work is in the permanent collection of the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C., the Long Beach Museum of Art in California, and the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art at the University of Oregon. Mora has collaborated as an illustrator with such organizations as the Museum of Modern Art, Chronicle Books, The New York Review of Books, Penguin Random House, The Oprah Magazine, Cosmopolitan and teNeues, among others.
She is one of the founding members of ArtYard, a contemporary art center based in Frenchtown, New Jersey, where she is artistic director and curator. Visit elsamora.net.
Reisman’s paintings of residential landscapes combine abstract structures within a rich, complex world of invented color and shape. Relying on drawings made from direct observation and memory, she develops large scale paintings in the studio that modify and compose light and space but still honor the initial site that inspired her. Concerned with balance, proportion and an order imposed onto the subject, Reisman’s work reflects an altered view of the world around us.
She is represented by Gross McCleaf Gallery in Philadelphia, where she has shown her work for more than 20 years. The Paul Thiebaud Gallery in San Francisco and Big Town Gallery in Rochester, Vermont, have showcased her in solo and group exhibitions and her work has been seen in other galleries throughout the United States.
Her work was selected for the American Academy of Arts and Letters Invitational Exhibition, where she received a Hassam, Speicher, Betts, and Symons Purchase Award. In 2000, she had a Fifteen Year Survey Exhibition at the James A. Michener Art Museum in Doylestown. Her paintings toured in two traveling exhibitions curated by Alan Gussow entitled “Artist as Native” and “Rediscovering the Landscape.” Her other awards include residencies at Borgo Finocchieto Artist Residency in Buonconvento, Italy; the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation in Taos, New Mexico; the Rochefort-en-Terre Residency in France; the Ragdale Foundation; and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.
Reisman was a Visiting Critic at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts and Mount Gretna School of Art. Previously, she taught at Swarthmore College, Dartmouth College and other institutions. She received a bachelor of fine arts degree at Carnegie Mellon University and went on to receive a master of fine arts in printmaking from Yale University. Visit celiareisman.com.
Marimow is currently a Philadelphia sculptor, as well as an educator at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. After graduating from Elmira College, she received a graduate degree in art from Tyler School of Art. She taught art to children and young adults in public and independent schools on the east coast for more than 30 years.
Marimow has exhibited her ceramic sculptures and wall pieces in galleries in Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Arizona. In 2016, her sculpture was selected and displayed for three months in the International Terminal of the Philadelphia Airport. Her sculptures reside in private collections throughout the United States, including one that was purchased by the Berman Institute of Bioethics at Johns Hopkins University. Visit Diane.Marimow.com.
Weisman studied sculpture and drawing at Washington University in St. Louis, The Art Institute of Chicago, and received a BA from Columbia College. Further study included 10 years of apprentice studies with sculptors Jack Kearney (Chicago), Leslie Posey (Florida, alum of PAFA class of 1921) and Evangelos Frudakis.
He has had numerous solo shows, including Berry Hill Galleries, New York; Arcadia Contemporary, New York; Odon Wagner Gallery, Toronto; Yoram Gil, Los Angeles; Sande Webster Gallery, Philadelphia; Sirona Fine Art, Miami; and Stanek Gallery, Philadelphia. Additionally, he has exhibited his work in Australia, Singapore, Beijing, United Arab Emirates, Taiwan, Spain and the Netherlands.
Weisman is collected and commissioned both publicly and privately, in the United States, Canada, China and the Middle East, as well as being honored at the White House for his work at the American Embassies in Bandar Seri Begawan and North Vietnam. Some of these commissions/collections include the Art Museum at University of Kentucky; Midway Airport, Chicago; City of Duluth; Union League of Chicago; Cole Collection Wadenoyen, Netherlands; Arnot Art Museum; Burroughs Pharmaceutical; Carr Corporation, D.C.; Cigna, Philadelphia; Cantonet, Dubai, UAE; Steuben Glass, New York; and the City of Philadelphia.
He co-teaches open studio figure modeling and is a student critic in the certificate/BFA program at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia. Visit garyweisman.net.
The jurors will complete their work by Sept. 2, when the accepted works will be posted online by 9 a.m., at phillipsmill.org
