On this Fresh Morning - new drawings by Margot Glass

      just to be alive

            on this fresh morning

                  in the broken world.

                        I beg of you,

excerpted from Invitation by Mary Oliver

Kenise Barnes Fine Art is pleased to present On this Fresh Morning – new drawings by Margot Glass. Glass focuses primarily on drawing, using various traditional methods and materials as a foundation for her work, this exhibition features twelve homemade organic walnut ink and shell gold drawings made using fine point crow quill pens.

Glass is inspired by the tradition of idealizing nature in art and design as ornament across cultures while seeking to observe and represent her subjects as accurately as possible in all their irregularity and imperfection.

Central to her work is the exploration of ephemeral, fragile subjects, focusing primarily on weeds, “waste plants” and other plants generally considered to be undesirable, to recognize their beauty in their imperfection and asymmetry. Her focus on these marginal plants is guided by the question of what we value, what we consider ‘belonging’ to mean, and to highlight the beauty of what is present in the disrupted landscape that we find ourselves in today.

Margot Glass grew up in New York City, and studied at The Art Students' League, Brown University, Rhode Island School of Design, and Fashion Institute of Technology. Her educational and professional immersion in decorative arts history, applied textile and decorative design techniques inspired her exploration of the dynamic relationship between stylization and imperfection in representations of nature in her subjects. Her paintings and drawings widely exhibited in galleries and museums in the United States and internationally. Glass’s work is in private and public collections including Hunt Institute for Botanical Documentation at Carnegie Mellon, the Weatherspoon Museum, The Del Coronado Corporate Collection, Midwest Museum of American Art, Oak Spring Garden Foundation, The Mark Parker Collection, and Beth Rudin DeWoody Collection. Her work has been published in Orion Magazine, Watercolor Artist, American Art Collector to name a few. She was the recipient of a Massachusetts Cultural Council STARS Artist Residency and is currently working on a site-specific commission for the Arts in Embassies program for a new US embassy in Bangkok, Thailand. She is the recipient of an Oak Spring Garden Foundation Interdisciplinary Fellowship in VA and a Lost & Found Lab Artist Residency, CT. 

Margot Glass lives and works in Western Massachusetts and has been a visiting lecturer at Smith College in addition to other colleges and museums.

Please contact Lani Ming Holloway, Associate Director, Lani@kbfa.com, 860 560 3085 with inquiries or to arrange a preview of the exhibition.