NEW Art Exhibit by Abby Levine

(Union City, NJ)  The City of Union City, Mayor Brian P. Stack & Board of Commissioners cordially invite the community to the new solo art exhibit “Inside Out and Backwards” featuring artist Abby Levine opening on Friday, May 10, 2013 at 7:00 PM at  the William V. Musto Cultural Center located at 420 - 15th Street in Union City, NJ.

There will be live music and refreshments.  The artist will be present to speak about her work.  Admission is free.  The exhibit will remain up for approximately two months.

The show will consist of carved wood paintings and wall reliefs completed within the past year.  Abby Levine has been living in Union City since 2008.  She has been exhibiting her work since she graduated from Tyler School of Art, Temple University in 1976.

While a student at Temple University, Abby became involved with pattern and decoration, banding columnar stretched canvases with intense color. Figurative elements and narration began to work their way into the equation and, by the early 80’s, she was producing small papier mache dioramas based on Greek mythology. A move to the trash-strewn Williamsburg section of Brooklyn led to a preoccupation with architectural forms and the production of fragmented, constructed and reassembled wood structures painted in shades of white. Relocation to Seattle brought a reexamination of color and the use of dead-matte paint along with a continued development of wood construction techniques. The tension between the organic and manmade became a major focus. After 1991, the narrative and architectural merged with the addition of pyrography (woodburning) as a linear device. The retention of architectural elements referenced furniture and religious constructions, with the overall form of the piece providing a metaphor for its content. Making narrative pieces generated a great deal of scrap wood, which eventually became parts of new pieces, more abstract and less pre-determined.  The most recent pieces are meant to be fiercely whimsical, teeming with life, and independent of cultural context.

For more information about this event or any other at the William V. Musto Cultural Center, please visit: www.UnionCityMuseum.org