Opening Reception Sunday for Silvermine Arts Center’s Latest Guild Group Exhibition

The Silvermine Galleries will present a Guild Group Exhibition with new work by 44 members of the Silvermine Guild of Artists.

The public is invited to an opening reception on Sunday, Nov. 18 from 2 to 4 p.m., and the exhibition runs through Dec. 20.

During the run of the exhibit, an extended Gallery Store will be open through Dec. 23, for those in search of unique gifts by artists and artisans from the Silvermine Guild and the Northeast region.

— an announcement from Silvermine Arts Center

The exhibition is curated by Susan Eisner Eley of Susan Eley Fine Art, the salon-style gallery on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.

“My criteria for selecting art has been the same since 2006, the year I established a contemporary art gallery on the Upper West Side of New York City,” Eley said. “Art that attracts me is executed with a high level of craft and technical proficiency, and expresses something new that I have never seen before.”

As it nears its Centennial, Silvermine is celebrating its accomplished painters, sculptors, printmakers, and collage and mixed media artists.

“My family has a deep history with Silvermine,” she said. “My mother, Carole Eisner, is a long-time Guild member who since the 1970s has exhibited her sculptures in group and solo exhibitions at Silvermine. From the time I was a child I have visited Silvermine, accompanying my parents in support of my mother’s career.”

Visitors will be able to see new work and new explorations in this wide-ranging, end-of-the-year Guild Group Exhibition.

“Reviewing artwork by 137 artists for this exhibition was no easy task. While culling through hundreds of paintings, photographs, prints, collages, mixed media, textiles and sculpture, I felt like a kid in a candy store,” Eley said. “A plethora of well-crafted and innovative artwork greeted me at every turn.”

The artists included in the exhibition represent a variety of artistic media. Nash Hyon, a Wilton resident who teaches the Cold Wax course at Silvermine, reveals in her scraped and layered surfaces complexities of pattern and a sense of the passage of time. She is equally adept working in monochrome or high color.

Susan Manspeizer of Pound Ridge shapes sensuous, curved forms out of bent plywood and brings brilliant hues or subtly soft color to the fabric-like folds of her sculpture.

Nancy Moore of Ridgefield will show watercolor paintings from her “Unconventional Women” series, which explores women “who are not beautiful in a conventional sense, and who are not engaged in conventional activities.” One of her works recently won the Juror’s Choice Award at the New Britain Museum of American Art’s Nor’Easter Exhibition.

Inspired by patterns and images in nature, Mitchell Visoky of White Plains creates bold and luxuriously three-dimensional compositions in paper collages on cradled board.

More About Silvermine Arts Center

Silvermine Arts Center is one of the oldest artist communities in the United States. Its 5­acre campus in New Canaan, Connecticut, consists of a nationally renowned artist guild, an award­-winning school of art offering classes for all ages, an arts and fine crafts shop, and a gallery offering over twenty contemporary and historic exhibitions annually.

Silvermine is a non­profit 501(c)(3) organization that also offers an Outreach Education Program, Art Partners, and hosts lectures, film screenings, and special events.

Silvermine Galleries are open six days a week from 12 noon to 5 p.m. and by appointment Friday. For more information, call (203) 966­9700 ext. 20 or visit the website: www.silvermineart.org.