The manmade candy-colored palette turns out to be an advantage for Rebecca McGee Tuck, who has work now in exhibitions at Readymade Gallery in Orleans, St. Botolph Club in Boston, Higgins Art Gallery at Cape Cod Community College, and the Cape Cod Museum of Art. In the works she writes about here, she applies the handcraft and pattern-making of weaving to her ropes and plastics. These pieces point out the senseless destruction of beaches and oceans while at the same time looping and tightening the material into its own kind of uncanny sense: Totemic, protective, beautiful.
Nearly a century and several hundred miles separate Betty Smith’s 1943 novel A Tree Grows in Brooklyn from contemporary Cape Cod. But however improbably, Smith’s semi-autobiographical story of growing up in a working-class urban neighborhood in the early decades of the 20th century has inspired a current group show at Readymade Gallery in Orleans.
“A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (and Cape Cod)” features work by nine of the gallery’s artists in residence and invited guest artists, all of whom use the natural world as a point of departure. According to a gallery statement, the show shares a central theme with the book that inspired it: “Just as in Smith’s novel where a tree growing outside a tenement building comes to symbolize resilience and hope, the paintings on view here reflect the tenacity of the natural world as much as the indomitable will of the human spirit.”
Artist and gallerist Nick Lawrence was the sole juror for the show “Departures,” currently on exhibit at the Cape Cod Museum of Art in Dennis. Lawrence selected 53 works from the 520 submissions for the group show. The museum sent out an international call for artworks that either exhibited a moment of departure from conventional norms and styles in the art world or a departure from the artist’s usual practice.
In 2020, Sarah Dineen unearthed a 19-square-foot painting that she had made as a graduate student at the School of Visual Arts in New York. “I call it my adolescent painting,” she says. “It was an awkward-stage painting that just never worked.”
In May, Lawrence opened the Readymade Gallery in Orleans, where he is showing works by his artists in residence along with local artists, many of whom Lawrence exhibited over a decade ago at DNA Gallery in Provincetown.
“We find small groups of artists with an affinity — whether they’re from New York, the Cape, or other areas — and get a conversation going,” says Lawrence.