Recent Exhibitions
March 19 - April 13, 2024
Carol Nussbaum: Mandala
Featuring the work of Frederick Ballet, Len DeLuca, and Joseph O’Neill
Carol Nussbaum’s Mandala artwork comprises a variety of photographic subjects, ranging from children’s toys to paper goods, woven and repeated into a “mandala” or circle. Found in every culture and faith, a mandala is structured around a unifying center and represents both wholeness and the universe. Mandalas can be found in the circles of the sun, earth and moon but also in our circles of family and friendships. Carol notes, “Weaving elements of my travel photographs or even a trip to a farm stand into a mandala, brings a new mood or movement to the experience.” While typically used as a meditation aid, mandalas can also serve to center living and working spaces. Following a successful and award winning career in advertising, Carol Nussbaum joyfully exhibits her photographic mandalas in galleries and private collections.
February 20 - March 16, 2024
This is Photography
Featuring the work of Frederick Ballet, Len DeLuca, and Joseph O’Neill
A photograph is supposed to tell a story, while true in a classical sense, that is not the goal of this exhibition. Rather the artists want the viewer to discard stereotypes and focus on the emotional impact of the image. Abstraction allows the viewer to delve into the subconscious and spark imagination. Each artist approaches this differently. Joseph O’Neill uses color and geometric form taking inspiration from the buildings in Manhattan, Len DeLuca walks through the city and is drawn to wall posters with their shredded layers, colors and shapes creating unique abstract imagery, while Frederick Ballet uses the natural world to balance reality with abstraction to leave the viewer with a meditative sense of beauty, peace and timelessness.
No matter the composition, the artists wish to challenge the viewer to see the world in a new light, be it through metaphor, absurdity or beauty and delve deeper into their emotions.
January 25 - February 17, 2024
The 27th Annual Friends of Pleiades Invitational
Featuring the work of Susan Angeles, Frederick Ballet, RM Cimini, Stephen Cimini, Shelley Feinerman, Trine Giaever, Phoebe Hawkins, Iness Kaplun, Bongnam Kim, Bernice Sokol Kramer, Jill Law, Noor Smadi Menash, Linda Mikula, Duane Noblett, Roy Owsley, Janet Rutowski, Fredian Slips, and Tami Uyama.
January 2 - 20, 2024
Rolando Jorif: War and Peace
November 28-December 23, 2023
A Family Affair
A Family Affair presented an eclectic mix of works by fifteen Pleiades Gallery artists, each one a representation of the distinctive style and artistic vision of its creator. This annual winter exhibition has become a favorite among visitors and collectors who enjoy discovering the exciting diversity of artworks created by this “family” of artists. This year’s exhibition features the work of Leda Arensberg, Joe Borse, Ellen Bradshaw, Len DeLuca, Barbara Fracchia, Joan Gantz, Phoebe Hawkins, Lisa Ocasio Hirkaler, Sribee Hunter, Emily Koch, Ann Kraus, Carol Nussbaum, Joseph O’Neill, Heather Stivison, and Joyce Weidenaar.
October 31- November 25, 2023
Michael Zenreich
Ordering Chaos
The imagery Zenreich creates is quiet and meant to be absorbed.
Basic concepts like order and chaos are used to discover hidden orders in nature, using math geometry and color.
His paintbrush is currently a computer.
He is fascinated by the medium’s ability to allow multiple variations of an image and the beauty of the digital print.
His work combines nature with geometric forms to create complexity and ambiguity.
Hopefully, these images can bring joy and fascination to the viewer’s eye.
October 3-28, 2023
Len DeLuca
Backspace: A Process of Rediscovery
Back Space portrays a return to a creative spark that was ignited in childhood; a simple process of scribbling shapes with a pencil or marker then filling them in with crayons is re-discovered and explored with oil sticks and acrylic paint on canvas and paper.
September 5-30, 2023
Ellen Bradshaw
Manhattan: Dusk to Dawn
The City that never sleeps. New York splashed in oil on canvas in those between hours from Dusk to Dawn.
A bewitching stage set between realism and abstraction. Theatrical colors. Fireworks gracing the skies above the Brooklyn Bridge! Famous icons showing off their Glory! Rhapsody!
The sky no longer passive but alive with the Golden Hour, the Blue Hour. That intensity of color highlighting the magnificence of ordinary structures taking on a character of their own.
Artificial neon lights become a player as the anonymity of figures and wavering shapes weave in and out between the shadows of After Hours.
The mysterious movement of the night and murkiness of her weather. The coziness of the indoors calling. Beckoning bars and restaurants. Fearsome Magical Gotham!
And the promising Quietude of a morning dawn.
Ellen Bradshaw’s work was influenced by the realism of the Ashcan painters, as well as the sense of color and atmosphere explored by the Impressionists. Ellen's usual subject is New York City.
"I'm drawn to the common everydayness of life in the city, and perhaps what is hidden just beneath the surface of the ordinary. The reflective moody quirky streets of Lower Manhattan are my usual subjects - the neighborhoods, the personalities of her buildings, the majesty of her bridges, the streets transformed by snow or the colors of night, the lone figures of daily routine, the everyday intensity of the simple passing of moments against that in-your-face reality that is New York City.”
July 11-August 5, 2023
Emily Koch:
To Be Made Whole
Koch’s previous works have focused on the female form, creating multi-dimensional playgrounds that are unbound by the female canon of ‘otherness’.
“To be made whole” breaks out of the feminine lens with a broadened approach to the subjective//objective experience. Assessing literature & visual systems from antiquity to today, Koch explores the relational nature of ‘being’, the never-ending dance between the self and the other: Whatever 'it' is that exists apart from ourselves creates us, but we also take part in creating whatever 'it' is. In this solo exhibition, Koch's visual worlds play with dimensionality, using mirrors, shadows, form and abstraction, to express the creative process that is ‘being’.
To be made whole by seeing and being seen.
June 13-July 8, 2023
Joyce Weidenaar:
Color Burst
Color Burst was an exhibition of Joyce Weidenaar’s paintings and prints. Weidenaar’s paintings typically depict everyday subjects that often go largely unnoticed. It is the focus on those objects, front and center, which heightens the viewer’s awareness and appreciation. Their shapes are inherently interesting and the works are often brightly colored. Recent subjects include calla lilies, a display of fans, and the window of a cowboy hat store. Close up, or with unusual perspective, these paintings take on abstract qualities as well. While the objects in Weidenaar’s paintings are realistically rendered, her monoprints are abstract and emphasize rich textures.
May 16-June 10, 2023
Joseph O’Neill:
BLACK & WHITE & COLOR
Award-winning New York-based photographer Joseph O’Neill, whose work has appeared in U.S. Embassies In Muscat, Oman and Riga, Latvia, presents his work in his new exhibition, BLACK & WHITE & COLOR.
O’Neill states that he uses abstract photographs to disprove the notion that a picture is worth a thousand words, and to prove that a conceptual image can create a powerful emotion. “As photographers, we are taught that for a photograph to have an impact upon the viewer, it must tell a story,” O’Neill said. “The most important aspect of viewing abstract photography is aesthetic, encouraging the viewer to experience a visceral—rather than emotional—feeling.” In this way, O’Neill encourages his viewers to create their own stories rather than having a narrative imposed upon them.
In this exhibition, O’Neill drew inspiration from of minimalism, using simple forms and lines to create his images. “These photographs bring about a heightened sense of drama: intense images communicated by the use of high contrast black and white, grey tones with crisp clean lines of the geometric form, but with a certain amount of realism.”
With this new show, O’Neill is further expanding the language of photography, leveraging digital technology and editing software to set a new precedent for the art form. “These tools give photographic artists a new way to redefine what photography is and what it can be, a new brush that we get to use for the first time,” he said. “I want to tear down the stereotype of what a photograph should be, to open up the art form, moving it into another strata. I want photography to be recognized as a legitimate form of visual art.”
Beyond his affiliation with the Pleiades Gallery, O'Neill has also been affiliated with the Phoenix Gallery for the last several years. His work has also been displayed as part of the Brooklyn Waterfront Artists Coalition, as well as in international exhibits and several magazines.
April 18-May 13, 2023
Elizabeth Cody:
What We Talk About
When We Talk About Color
In this show Elizabeth explores her relationship to palette, form, and composition challenging herself and the viewer to examine the emotional impact of color. An action artist with bold, confident strokes, her work on view seeks to elicit immediate connection while rewarding thoughtful attention over time. Beth’s colorist approach has been shaped and advanced by the style of great artists and teachers she admires Including Monet, Joan Mitchell, and Joan Brown. Their example urged her to be constantly aware of the emotional content of her color choice, of the tensions created by certain color juxtapositions and the way formal composition can become fluid depending on the color choices. She’s tried to make those core characteristics of her practice.
In this show, all of the works are oil and acrylic paintings on paper and Mylar. This particular series was originally inspired by paintings of Bill Scott, a teacher and mentor. Scott is a contemporary abstract painter based in Philadelphia whose abstracted landscapes echo flora and fauna using lines and blocks of intense color. From this exploratory starting pad the series evolved to create works that honored its colorist roots by using formal compositional elements - circles, triangles, squares - that are surrounded and transformed by strong, aggressive brushwork featuring a stark, bright, pure palette. The resulting works are intended to challenge and please, to demand attention and reward contemplation, to hold interest and earn a place in your life.
A small series of works on paper in this show explore the impact that the absence and presence of color have on our emotional engagement with an image. Is a flower without color a flower? Can it be more than a flower? Does it become something else? Can a flower in full color be anything other than a flower? How is our interaction with an image expanded, limited or enhanced by color? These related pieces pose these and other questions for the viewer. Taken together the paintings and drawings in this show ask us to consider what we think about when we think about color
Heather Stivison: Seeds of Change.
Paintings of Climate Change and Hope
March 21-April 15, 2023
Heather Stivison’s paintings depict natural objects and symbols seemingly floating, untethered in the wind or in deep and shallow bodies of water. Seed pods, stones, plankton, strands of DNA and nautical charts commingle. Stivison says she is inspired by her reading about climate change, observations of the natural world, and interest in petroglyphs and ancient rock carvings and paintings
Art critic Don Wilkinson said of Stivison, writing in The New Bedford Standard-Times, “Much of her imagery, although clearly rooted in reality, flirts with the abstract. It is that nexxus between the two poles where she is most comfortable as an artist. In the space of visual disruption, she opens herself up to the possibility of different narratives than simple observation might deliver.”
February 21-March 18, 2023
Susan Keifer:
Where Do We Go From Here?
“Susan Kiefer: Where Do We Go From Here?” features many new and recent paintings by Susan Kiefer, whose artistic practice has as its impetus the simplification, abstraction and ordering. Kiefer finds geometric shapes to be expressive of an extreme humanness that achieves a high level of intimate engagement. Kiefer’s shape of choice is the circle, symbolizing, as she most emphatically states “perfection, the earth, moon and solar system, even the atoms comprising the universe.”
Geometric forms are to some degree considered universal, with an origin shrouded in the earliest eras of human intellectual development. Mathematically oriented at first, they were “invented” by Thales and Euclid, and then perfected over the ages. They entered creative practice with Wassily Kandinsky, El Lizzitsky, and Naum Gabo, each of whom labored to escape from reality, and yet plumb it to its deepest contexts. Each of them represents a certain kind of imagination, expressive of avant-garde ideas of form, that eschew a certain ephemeral sensory exposition, in which the usual narratives become an all-over experience; objects are transformed or translated into basic geometric forms; and a whole array of recognitions takes the appearance of an abstract rendering. If one has an interest in looking, one can find value relationships and hints of narrative in these paintings.
Susan Kiefer achieves a similar degree of heightened perception through her regard for and use of geometric shapes, especially hard-edged geometric abstracts by considering the work of her artistic peers. She was “drawn to images with simplicity and clear composition” and began to prioritize these conditions in her own work in 2020. She has graduated to the employment of angular shapes, partly inspired by the work of Thornton Willis, and as background patterns in some of her newest work.
Kiefer’s forms create either opaquely narrative spaces through which one may have the opportunity for an experience that’s neither overtly evident nor sensually suggested; or they receive her forms as value representations that are simultaneously symbolic and relatable, and universal enough to translate into other visual mediums. Not every painted image has a story to tell, but it does contain a variety of visual elements that combine to present a formal event of infinite value. In works such as “On A Clear Day” and “The Meaning of It All,” the title acts like a question or a challenge. That is part and parcel of an idealistically distinct work—the raising of an ideological bar within the direct aesthetic moment. Simple words compel us to consider the elemental allegories available to us. It’s a vision worth an extended view.