Our Virtual Art in Focus series offers the opportunity for a close look at a single work of art, all from the comfort of your home!

Join us for a discussion of “Goodbye Goddess,” a mixed-media work by Norma Minkowitz and part of the temporary exhibition “Norma Minkowitz: Body to Soul,” on view in the Bellarmine Hall Galleries from January 27 – April 6, 2023. Bring your questions and observations to our virtual discussion!

Please note: This event is virtual only. If you are interested in the in-person Art in Focus on Thursday, March 2 at 11 a.m., click here!

About the exhibition: “Norma Minkowitz: Body to Soul” is a solo exhibition surveying the artist’s four-decade engagement with the physical and symbolic properties of thread. Minkowitz reinvents traditional needlework by crocheting fantastical forms, coating them in resin and shellac to create rigid sculptures and hangings. The delicate, mesh-like surfaces of her artworks break down oppositions between soft and hard, inside and outside, body and soul.

The poetic title “Body to Soul” is borrowed from just one of the sculptures that will be on view, but it is a broader theme that reverberates across the exhibition’s selection of over thirty vessels, sculptures, wall hangings, wearables, and works on paper – including never-before-seen examples coming from the artist’s studio.

Norma Minkowitz lives and works in Connecticut. Her work is represented in private and public collections across the United States and internationally. She is unique among fiber artists creating hard sculptures from soft materials, and for using thread to invoke universal themes of mortality, memory, nature, and writing. The exhibition is guest curated by Sarah Parrish PhD., Assistant Professor of Art History at Plymouth State University, New Hampshire.

https://www.fairfield.edu/museum/norma-minkowitz/

Image: Norma Minkowitz, “Goodbye Goddess,” 2003, paint and resin on fiber. Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, CT, The Costume & Textile Purchase Fund, 2004.10.1. Photography © Allen Phillips/Wadsworth Atheneum.