CWE Art Openings- Friday, April 11th

Beverly Mayeri is a studio artist living in the Bay Area with over 30 years experience as an established ceramic sculptor. She earned a BA from the University of California, Berkeley, and an MA in sculpture at San Francisco State University.

Mayeri works with refined and elegant heads and figures often using meticulously patterned details that allude to the inner life of emotions, thoughts and human frailties. The pieces are painted in washes of acrylic paint. Mayeri’s figures “evoke a richly complicated human presence,”and often “bridge the psychological, the political and the sensuous within one hybrid form.” Her work has been shown extensively in numerous museums and galleries, and is included in many public and private collections. She has received 2 NEA grants, and a Virginia Groot Grant, and has lectured and taught many workshops throughout the U.S.

Inspired by the the heroes, toys, and action figures of his youth, Newport challenges “The Hero” ideals by hand knitting replica costumes as well as the suits of heroes of his own invention. These costumes combine their heroic, protective, ultra masculine, yet vulnerable personas with the protective gestures of his mother – hand knit sweaters meant to keep a child safe and warm. The costumes are life-size wearable objects that hang limply on hangers, deflating the standard muscular form of the hero and offering the space for someone to imagine themselves wearing the costume, becoming the hero. The doll-like figures that accompany these costumes raise the relationship between childhood play and adulthood, between toy and figurative sculpture, and between how our ideals about the body clash with the real and the possible. His work offers narratives of the popular personal hero through a contemporary textile outlet.