A Look at Swann Galleries’ Staff Art Show

The Swann Staff Art Show, which was on display from July 11 to 18, featured selected artworks in various media from Swann’s talented staff. Take a look at our show below!

Harold Porcher, Director, Modern & Post-War Art

“When I choose to share my struggles, feelings, pain, and happiness, I choose abstraction because I feel I can convey my feelings and be heard, yet the imagery is open for the ideas the viewer wishes to interpret.

My line-flow, or scribble scrabble paintings and drawings were born out of working with my two-year-old son on his drawings. The term scribble scrabble was what he called this drawing form back in 2002. I began exploring the beauty and freedom of scribbling, modifying to create forms, and then using color to add push-pull dynamics to my compositions.

I hope that I can find my audience and encourage you to follow me on this journey. I welcome feedback, as I see the arts and human existence itself as a social and interactive experiment.”

Mars Boatwright, House Photographer

“In 2019, I began taking photographs of my family when I was visiting them in Florida for the first time. When I returned to my own life in Boston, with the pictures I’d taken and handfuls of images plucked from scrapbooks, I began my current project. They Get it Honest, focuses on my relationship with my family and what it means to return home. When taken as a whole, the images make connections between memories and time, and photography is a meditative practice that builds my own personal space and identity.”

Lauren Cooper, Associate Director, Vintage Posters

“I started teaching myself embroidery techniques back in 2017 and created these six works in 2020 when the onset of Covid left me with much more free time in my apartment. I was inspired by fabric swatches and gouache studies from the Wiener Werkstätte collections of the MAK Vienna and Cooper Hewitt museums. I became enamored with this Austrian Arts & Crafts movement as it pertained to vintage poster artists Koloman Moser and Josef Hofmann – two of its founders – and soon delved into the collections of textiles and wallpaper designs. Some of these designs, by artists Julius Zimpel, Maximilian Sinchak and Maria Likarz-Strauss, that I re-created as hand-embroidered patterns, were put into production by the workshops, but others may just be studies that never came to fruition.”

Devon Eastland, Senior Specialist, Early Printed Books

“I am bringing hand-built ceramics fired in a gas reduction kiln to cone 10. I create surface textures with hand-knitted swatches and stamps I make myself. The squiggles are jewelry pieces inspired by some earrings I bought in Paris in the 1980s.”

Nigel Freeman, Head of Fine Art

“I’m exhibiting two recent works on paper of collage and acrylic. I like to create artworks that function abstractly and aesthetically while incorporating recognizable or figurative elements. My collages use various found papers, including torn subway posters and photographs, that reference my personal experiences in various cultures.”

Alayna Ho, Cataloguer, Fine Art

“Touching My Shadow was created in the aftermath of the Covid lockdown, creating a visual collection of ways we could regain touch during a time when it was so heavily discouraged. In this book, shadows reclaim a physical presence, questioning whether touching the shadow of something can be the same as touching the thing itself. Each page was screenprinted in blue and red, and the hand-stitched pattern along the spine was designed by the artist utilizing elements of traditional Japanese stab binding techniques.”

Shannon Licitra, Shipping Manager

“I have a fascination with found papers of various colors, textures, and histories, and I enjoy the process of building images with them. For me, making a collage is always intuitive and an opportunity to play. The resulting images are abstract and a study on how colors and shapes interact with one another.”

Nicholas D. Lowry, Swann President

Amber Mustafic, Cataloguer, Vintage Posters

“I create autobiographical thread-paintings that center on themes of freedom, autonomy, consciousness and sensuality. Featuring depictions of myself and the people in my life as fantastical figures in vivid landscapes, I build a world of my personal mythology to explore my inner experiences and translate them into images.”

Marta Sharapova, Digital Media Associate

“I am presenting two books and a short film, all featuring playful approaches to graphic design. The first book, Duration, is an inquiry into the visual composition of time through images, cinema, interpretation and theory. I consider this book an attempt to recreate the “Kuleshov Effect” in book form, as if to invite the reader to submerge into time references, derive meaning, and emerge changed somehow. The second book, Atlas of Strings, is a poetic taxonomy of anything that could be classified as a string—point a to point b—otherwise understood as a line. For me strings became a canvas for linguistic and information theory. A film accompanies the book, coinciding with the book’s chapters. This pair of works was made with an intentional focus on analogue techniques; the book’s research was photographed, reproduced, strung together and photographed again, and the film was created by shooting on mini-tape with a Camcorder and combined with hand-animated Super 8 film. I invite you to explore the books and take a look at some of my experimental films!”