This year’s 25th annual MetroWest JCC Juried Art Show and Sale has been fielding admiring reactions and inspiring debate from a steady stream of visitors.
“There’s a lot of variety. My experience is that as much variety there is in the art, that’s how many different tastes viewers have,” said Gaelen Gallery Director Lisa Suss. “Visitors like to see if they agree with the juror’s choice of awards,” Suss said.
Juried by artist, educator, curator and Heidi Gallery Director Jeremy Moss, this year’s show had 169 entries from 61 artists with 80 pieces selected by 46 artists. Monetary prizes are given for the best in five categories, best in show, as well as honorable mention.
There’s much to honor. The show hums with good vibrations, memory, and connection, echoing Gaelen’s community-building legacy. “The show is especially good in bringing community together,” Suss said.
Enter the exhibition and there is a trio of fine portraits by Amy Wax. Sweet Neighbor (best for pastels) radiates the subject’s inner nature. Ellen Hark, a past winner, offers two painted busts (Adam and Nadine) that similarly project a rich humanity. Adam is also on the mind of pastel artist Marjorie Paradise.
Holding-on informs Rebecca Rosenheck’s splendid pastel Summer’s Finale in the Kitchen; it has an old master feel. Linda Schulman’s clever best-in-mixed-media My Home draws you in with similar longings.
Photography is uniformly strong and evocative. John Erdreich’s The Storeroom at Kuerner’s Farm is among my personal exhibition favorites. In the foreground, a simple, white wooden chair casts shadows on a white wall. The wall is pierced by a window–visual entry into a spare, raftered storeroom. In turn, the storeroom’s rear wall window beckons to trees beyond. Subject, lighting and composition ricochet back and forth in space and time.
Nearby, Gaelen veteran Miron Abramovici’s magisterial Closed puts me in mind of the Golden Age Dutch painting, The Goldfinch. Teal blue shutters resonate against an ochre wall. Metal hardware casts shadows, like a painter using trompe-l’oeil. Measuring 24” by 30”–36,” the exhibition limit, Closed is printed on canvas, enhancing texture. A scientist and engineer with 18 patents, Abramovici has time on his mind; see also his End of Time (honorable mention for sculpture) exhibited nearby.
Acclaimed black-and-white film photographer Burt Allen Solomon’s Angra Do Heroisma, Terceira, Azores, 2023 somehow both freezes and defines motion. Erik Taylor’s abstracted Raindrops Puddles (honorable mention) intrigues, and Martta Kelly’s best in photography’s teal and orange punning fish swim helter-skelter in School’s Out.
High-key colors command attention in both Maria Savidis-Markatos trio of photographs and Maya Gerenstheyn two abstracted paintings, Paradise and Firebird–dramas in liquid glass. Humor enters the exhibit with Nancy Collings bright orange pair of 1960s Volkswagen buses sporting the requisite era travel stickers. (Been There, Done That). There’s more humor in another Paradise pastel, Party Time (honorable mention) and Beth Heit’s Electric Blue Pear Family. (honorable mention for mixed media)
A pleasure of the show is viewing multiple examples of an artist’s work. Denis Orloff’s trio of landscape paintings pay homage to nature. Both Amy Arons (Waiting for the Train to Genova) and Dorrie Rifkin’s three pieces are the works of masterful painters. Strong compositions, translucent palettes and body postures enhance each work’s theme. Rifkin’s beautiful, moody Rainy Day Blue took home best in painting. Arons was a 2025 winner.
Visionary painter Karis Takaki’s spare, subtle Contours of Memory and Traces (HM) reward time spent looking. Her Tides, layers of luminous raw pigment, minerals and flax, has haunted me since first viewing at 1978 Gallery in March.
The Norbert Gaelen best in show goes to sculptor (and Drill Construction CEO) Philip Drill, whom I last profiled after his 2011 Gaelen best-in-sculpture win. Here’s Juror Moss talking about Drill’s powerful, two-piece seaweed-inspired Conversation.
“I had an instinctive reaction to the piece,” Moss said. “It’s remarkable that a sculptured piece made out of a hard material has so much softness and fluidity,” Moss said. “We sense the communication between these two organic forms.”
Similarly, ceramicist Michelle Kurlan-Schneider (also at that 1978 Gallery March show) martials her considerable skills with clay and glaze in her two-piece Sylvan Towers (best in sculpture). One piece is toadstool-shaped, crowned with a glorious dome, the other is ornamented, Gumby-like. Both delight.
The artists in the show are multigenerational. Patron Audrey Gaelen, now 98, was, as always, in attendance for the opening and awards ceremony. She and late husband Norbert endow the gallery and exhibit. Artists Drill, Abramovici, and Arthur Shapiro all have celebrated many birthdays with their imaginations and insights growing with the years: Drill turns 100 in 2027. Let’s close with Shapiro’s sculpture Jezebel, a sly abstracted homage to that legendary seductress. With a smile, it distills the female form. Bravo!
Closes: August 2
The Gaelen Gallery at JCC MetroWest
760 Northfield Avenue, West Orange, NJ
