Anne Neely
Can artists label themselves "environmental" when so many different cultural, social, political issues are intertwined, at stake, and flung at their sensibilities? Yes. When there were actual movements in art, life seemed simpler. It was a time that didn't include a future which, now, seems so persistent in the present. I think we are just artists responding to our time in life. Henri Matisse once said, "Exaggerate in the direction of truth." That assumes you know it. It is viscerally clear to me that as our human time is limited on the planet, so our planet is changing, evolving in reaction to what we do to it. The planet is responding faster than we expected into a new version of itself which might not include us.
I think of my paintings, drawings and watercolors as walking a line between context and just painting. For the last two decades Climate Change has made environmental issues an increasingly urgent platform from which my mark making creates a joinery between one layer, one idea to the next, from the deepest meaning of my being. As a humble messenger for the planet, I feel these ideas about Climate Change, water and human life’s tenuous grip represent the ever so fragile balance between beauty and foreboding.
Anne Neely is a painter and printmaker who divides her time between Boston, Massachusetts, and Jonesport, Maine. She was a finalist for the Prix de Rome and was twice a finalist in painting for the Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellowship. She has been awarded residencies at the Millay Colony for the Arts in New York, at the Ballinglen Arts Foundation in Co. Mayo, Ireland, and at the Cill Rialaig Arts Center in Co. Kerry, Ireland. Neely's work has been shown at Lohin Geduld Gallery in New York, Alpha Gallery in Boston, as well as galleries in San Francisco and in museums around the country. Most recently, she had a solo exhibition at the Museum of Science, Boston entitled Water Stories, about water issues in America. Neely's work can be found in the collections of the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA; The Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY; The Davis Museum, Wellesley, MA; The Rose Art Museum, Waltham, MA; The deCordova Museum and Sculpture Park, Lincoln, MA; The Farnsworth Art Museum, Rockland, ME; Grunwald Center for Graphic Art, UCLA; The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA; The National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; The Portland Museum of Art, Portland, ME; The Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC; and The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY. Her work has been reviewed in Art in America, Art News, The New York Times, and The Irish Times, and a book has been published on her exhibition Water Stories at the Museum of Science, Boston.
