Museum Acquisition: The Provincetown Art Association and Museum acquires eleven oil paintings by Michael Mazur for their permanent collection.

The Estate of Michael Mazur is thrilled to announce the acquisition of eleven oil paintings for their permanent collection. Included in the acquisition are nine works that Mazur painted from life looking out onto the bay from his Provincetown Commercial Street studio.

Drift, oil on canvas, 2004, 36 × 72”

Studio View to Beach, oil on canvas, 2008, 28 × 30”

Bay View, oil on canvas, 2008, 16 × 16”

Window on the Bay 5, Provincetown, oil on canvas, 2008, 20 × 24”

Window on the Bay 4, Provincetown, oil on canvas, 2008, 20 × 24”

On View: Two works on view in “Framing Nature: Gardens and Imagination” at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Boston, MA March 15 - June 28, 2026

Growth, oil on canvas, 1996-1997, 36 × 38” each / 36 × 76” overall

The Estate of Michael Mazur is pleased to share that two works are included in the exhibition: “Framing Nature: Gardens and Imagination” at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Boston, MA March 15 - June 28, 2026

A plot of land, a relaxing retreat, a formal landscape, a place of constant labor: gardens can carry a range of associations, especially in the world of art. “Framing Nature: Gardens and Imagination” brings together art from across the MFA’s global collection to explore striking similarities and differences across time and place.

Visitors can see both beloved favorites and previously unseen masterpieces, all centering the garden as a fertile place for human creativity and imaginative possibility. Works ranging from wall-sized tapestries and intricately detailed Chinese scrolls give the illusion of garden spaces. Modern and contemporary prints, drawings, photographs, and paintings bring visitors on an immersive journey through a variety of cultivated and natural worlds. Visitors can look at how we relate to the outdoors, shape garden spaces through cultivation, care, and labor, and express this universal human impulse through art.

“Framing Nature” coincides with the 50th anniversary of Art in Bloom—a beloved tradition that takes place at the MFA every spring.

Tulip Book, Sketchbook bound in tan cloth, thirty-one pages with drawings in pen and ink, some with watercolor, 1991 - 2008

Publication Announcement: “Off The Coast of Paradise: Artists And Ossabaw Island, 1961–Now” includes work by Michael Mazur

Off the Coast of Paradise is accompanied by a lavishly illustrated scholarly publication that complements the exhibition and takes an in-depth look at the history of Ossabaw Island during the 20th century. The book considers the island in the context of the artists who spent time there, providing a rich understanding of a little-known place with lasting significance on a national scale. By challenging what we think we know about American residency programs during the last century, this volume shines a light not only on how artists used Ossabaw to retreat from their lives and concentrate on their work, but also as a wellspring of creative experimentation. A series of essays and remembrances reveals how various aspects of the island enabled artists to reconnect art to the American landscape beginning during a period of rapid postwar transformation. This publication also features an expansive chronology that highlights both the evolution of the Ossabaw Island Project and Genesis programs and their legacies. Off the Coast of Paradise: Artists and Ossabaw Island, 1961–Now is published by Telfair Museums.

edited by Erin Dunn and Beryl Gilothwest
Contributions by Henri Cole, Erin Dunn, Beryl Gilothwest, Vaughnette Goode-Walker, Allison Janae Hamilton, Thomas Lax, Megan Mayhew Bergman, and Wini Wood 208 pages with full-color plates
Hardcover
Published by Telfair Books

available through the Telfair Museum book store: https://shoptelfair.org/products/off-the-coast-of-paradise-artists-and-ossabaw-1961-now

On View: Two works on view in “Off the Coast of Paradise: Artists and Ossabaw Island, 1961–Now” at the Telfair Museums Jepson Center, Savannah, GA March 13 – to September 6, 2026

Palmetto - Ossabaw, oil on panel, 1975, 39.25 × 29.5”

The Estate of Michael Mazur is pleased to share that two works are included in the exhibition: “Off the Coast of Paradise: Artists and Ossabaw Island, 1961–Now” at the Telfair Museums Jepson Center, Savannah, GA from March 13 - September 6, 2026.

Off the Coast of Paradise: Artists and Ossabaw Island, 1961–Now is the first major exhibition to explore the profound impact of an undeveloped, 26,000-acre barrier island off the coast of Savannah, Georgia, on artists working in the United States. The exhibition focuses on the Ossabaw Island Project (OIP) and Genesis—a pair of revolutionary multidisciplinary residency programs that ran on the island from 1961–1982—and their legacies in its examination of Ossabaw as a site for creative experimentation. Taking its name from a poem written by celebrated poet and former Genesis member Henri Cole, Off the Coast of Paradise features the work of internationally renowned artists, past and present, who have considered the island through myriad lenses in their work, including the historical, the environmental, the social, the cultural, and the personal. They include Harry Bertoia, Agnes Denes, Marcy Hermansader, Suzanne Jackson, Ellen Lanyon, Doris Lee, Sally Mann, Michael Mazur, Ross McElwee, Athena Tacha, Betty Tompkins, and Anne Truitt, among many others, as well as a major new commission by Allison Janae Hamilton.

Palmetto Grove, pastel on paper, 1976 71 × 89.5” on loan from Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA (gift of Jim Dine)

Gallery News: The Estate of Michael Mazur joins Schoolhouse Gallery!

After nearly thirty years of representation in Provincetown with Albert Merola Gallery, which closed its doors in 2022, the Estate of Michael Mazur is pleased to announce joining the roster of Schoolhouse Gallery with a solo exhibition from July 11 - July 29, 2025

Exhibition News: “The Garden Reveals Me” at Ryan/Lee Gallery, New York, NY, April 17 – June 21, 2025. Including work by Tim Braden, Samella Lewis, Cathy Lu, Michael Mazur, and Andrew Raftery

RYAN LEE Gallery is pleased to present The Garden Reveals Me. This group exhibition explores the ways in which artists use depictions of nature – from seeds to leaves to flowers – as a form of self-expression that reveals their desires, history, ancestry, and culture. In a way, an artist is like a gardener as they choose colors, lines, and textures and arrange them in a precise composition. The cyclical nature of the four seasons is explored in the works on view here through various mediums including painting, ceramics, engraving, and sculpture. Just like the interconnected, interdependent ecosystem of plants, insects, and animals that live in a garden, the works in this exhibition exist in symbiotic harmony.

In Michael Mazur’s Seasons by a Pond (2000), he depicts images of nature that verge into abstraction. The paintings transition from white and blue-gray ice, to the soft chartreuse hues of spring, to the vibrant red and purple blooms of summer, and finally the brown decay seen in autumn. Influenced by elements of Impressionist art, abstract expressionism, and traditional Chinese landscape scroll painting, Mazur combines aspects of several periods of art history separated by nearly seven centuries to create lush and luminous work. A larger set of the Seasons paintings can be found in the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Seasons By a Pond, oil on canvas, 2000, 48 × 48” each / 48 × 192” overall

Cathy Lu reimagines garden creation myths like the Garden of Eden and the Immortal Peach Garden as a way to think about the United States as both a utopian and dystopian space for historically excluded communities struggling to belong. Incorporating images of peach pits, Lu references the Chinese symbology of peaches as signifying immortality as well as the creation myth of the mother goddess Nüwa, who hand-sculpted humankind from the soil.

The title of the show derives from a quote by artist Andrew Raftery, writing about his series of twelve engraved plates that explore the life cycle of a backyard garden. Inspired by nineteenth century transferware, Raftery created unique designs for each ceramic plate that depict the artist working in his garden. With these works, Raftery sought a different approach to autobiography – revealing himself selectively through the narrow lens of garden imagery.

In the early 1960s, Samella Lewis became deeply engaged with Chinese studies, traveling to Taiwan and China to study Chinese art, language, and history. Her painting The Garden (1962) is an expressionistic, abstract portrayal of a flower garden, bursting with exuberant color. Individual blossoms merge together into a mass of vivid, swirling brushstrokes. Lewis described the marks in this work as “calligraphic,” inspired by her time in Taiwan.

Tim Braden’s paintings verge into abstraction while still conveying a specificity of place. An abundance of shapes and colors makes these works as bountiful as a well-tended garden. Braden says, “I have always been interested in color charts, how colors affect and change depending on what is put next to them, and how my mood can be altered by certain color combinations.” Braden’s work, based on keen observation with a painter’s eye, translates a saturated color palette into a light-filled vision.

Tim Braden (b. 1975) is an artist who uses different types of paint, support, and application to explore subtle shifts in space, mood and tone. Braden’s work is ultimately drawn from a close reading of his environment and an attempt to depict the act of looking. He often combines patches of color and light to produce scenes that recall both the specificity of personal experience and nostalgia for another time and place.

Samella Lewis (b. 1924 - d. 2022) was an artist who studied with Elizabeth Catlett and later became an art historian, writer, curator, and activist. Through her artwork, she sought to uplift the Black community and portray them as beautiful. Perhaps best known for figurative works on paper, she also created paintings and sculptures.

Cathy Lu (b. 1984) creates ceramic sculptures and installations that manipulate traditional Chinese imagery and presentation as a way to deconstruct assumptions about Chinese diasporic identity and cultural authenticity. Unpacking how experiences of immigration, cultural hybridity, and cultural assimilation become part of American identity is central to her work.

Michael Mazur (b. 1935 - d. 2009) is known for his use of abstract and figurative visual vocabulary across a wide range of media, including painting, drawing, pastels and printmaking. Influenced by elements of Impressionist art, abstract expressionism and traditional Chinese landscape scroll painting, Mazur uniquely combines aspects of several periods of art history separated by nearly seven centuries to create lush and luminous work.

Andrew Raftery (b. 1962) is an artist whose work explores both observational and autobiographic narratives of contemporary American life. His artistic practice rests upon a deep expertise and appreciation for the antique medium of engraving, and his precise and labor-intensive works demonstrate the enduring relevance—and efficiency—of this medium’s application on contemporary subjects to disseminate images that are universally accessible.

Exhibition News: “Tender Loving Care: Contemporary Art from the Collection” at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Boston, MA, July 22, 2023 - January 12, 2025

At their core, creating and looking at works of art are acts of care, from the artist’s labor to the viewer’s contemplation and appreciation. Storage, conservation, and display are also ways of tending to art. This exhibition invites visitors to explore how contemporary artists trace and address concepts of care through their materials, subjects, ideas, and processes.

More than 100 works from the MFA’s collection—including recent acquisitions and objects that have never been on view before—define, depict, and demonstrate many forms of care through five thematic groupings: threads, thresholds, rest, vibrant matter, and adoration. Gisela Charfauros McDaniel’s portrait of her mother, Tiningo’ si Sirena (2021), moves between intimacy and an attentiveness to larger concepts that are meaningful to the artist, like cultural inheritances and ecological interconnectivity. For his Sound Suit (2008), Nick Cave extended the lifespan of discarded objects by transforming them into a surreal, otherworldly costume that asserts the value of Black life. The intensive time and labor that goes into creating textiles and fiber art is evident in examples by Sheila Hicks, Howardena Pindell, and Jane Sauer. Through these works and many others visitors can consider how different forms of care may inspire new models for living and feeling—now and in the future.

Sleeper with Headboard, etching on paper, 1959, 6 × 11.75”

Please Be Seated

Throughout “Tender Loving Care,” visitors are invited to take a moment for rest and contemplation. Please Be Seated began at the MFA in 1975 and was the first museum program in the country to commission contemporary artists to make benches and chairs for visitor use that were also acquired into the Museum’s collection. These objects transcend the traditional observational relationship between works of art and their audience, instead becoming active participants in providing care for museumgoers.

Exhibition News: “Power of the People: Art and Democracy,” Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Boston, MA, October 26, 2024 - February 17, 2025

“Power of the People: Art and Democracy” highlights the ways in which art has expressed ideas about democracy throughout history and how artists have asked citizens to contemplate democracy’s promise, participate in its practice, and call for improvements. Through 180 works of art, drawn almost entirely from the MFA’s collection and ranging in time from democracy’s origins in ancient Greece to today, visitors can compare past to present and reflect on how certain democratic struggles and concepts have echoed through the ages.

The exhibition features celebrated works, such as the Sons of Liberty Bowl (1768) by Paul Revere Jr., the ancient Roman Denarius of Brutus—or Ides of March—coin (43–42 BCE), and Shepard Fairey’s poster Vote! (2008), along with lesser-known but influential works of art on view for the first time, including Cyrus Dallin’s 1912 marble relief portrait of Julia Ward Howe and a porcelain sundial from the French Revolution featuring the new calendar.

With ceramics, coins, ancient marble reliefs with carved inscriptions, paintings, sculpture, prints, photographs, posters, fashion, and more, “Power of the People” invites visitors to reflect on, discuss, create, and participate in the democracy we share.”

Exhibition News: Michael Mazur: Paintings, 1970-2008 @ Krakow Witkin Gallery, June 15 - July 19, 2024

Install: Michael Mazur: Paintings, 1970-2008

““If there is any kind of freedom that the post-modernist period has allowed, it is a freedom to move through different types of work-to take different parts of the artist’s personality and express them at different times and sometimes even simultaneously.””

— Michael Mazur

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Michael Mazur: Paintings, 1970-2008

June 15 - July 19, 2024

Krakow Witkin Gallery, Boston, MA

“If there is any kind of freedom that the post-modernist period has allowed, it is a freedom to move through different types of work-to take different parts of the artist’s personality and express them at different times and sometimes even simultaneously.”

—Michael Mazur

Michael Mazur first exhibited with Harcus Krakow Gallery in 1976 and, over the years, had relationships with Portia Harcus, Barbara Krakow, and Andrew Witkin. Krakow Witkin Gallery, in conjunction with Mazur’s Estate, proudly presents an exhibition juxtaposing figurative paintings from the 1970’s with abstract ones from the 1990’s and 2000’s.

“For Mazur, it is the distinctiveness of the surface rather than the choice of subject matter that defines an artist’s individual style. This emphasis on surface has been a constant aspect of his work over the span of his career; and it has been a persistent but ever-changing commitment to the art of landscape that has brought him to this realization… Michael Mazur’s most abstract paintings owe their distinctive forms to a delicate balance between old meaning and new techniques. His landscapes retain associative meaning from both the internal landscape of the body and the external world of nature.”

—Susan Danly, former Curator of American Art, Mead Art Museum, Amherst College

 Mazur’s paintings exhibit the artist’s consistent belief in equality. Equality of space, activity, people, and subject matter. In the 1970’s, Mazur’s handling of a backyard scene was as focused on mark making and color as it was on the foreground and background of each scene, with the entire surface being of equal importance. In his later abstract works, the same can be said, and by exploring both modes (and in all sizes), Mazur shows that both figuration and abstraction, along with all the space between, were significant areas to explore with the same amount of attention, creativity, and energy.

“In the gesture of resolution, evoking the dynamism of the world in a static medium, Michael Mazur’s distinctive intelligence asserts itself in the play between perception and form-making. Haltingly, in the pleased fumbling of the one who tries to imagine the artist’s imagining, happily, I follow.”

—Robert Pinsky, poet, essayist, literary critic, and translator

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On view: “Pond Edge” at Currier Museum of Art

Photos by Morgan Karanasios

Until March 31, 2024, Michael Mazur's “Pond Edge” is on view at the Currier Museum of Art in Manchester, New Hampshire. The exhibit is "Toward the New: A Journey Into Abstraction." Read more from the Currier Museum’s website:

In its enduring commitment to reinterpreting its museum holdings and proposing new perspectives, the Currier Museum of Art presents a new collection-based exhibition looking at the long journey toward abstraction that encompasses its many manifestations.

Many painters celebrated the physical properties of paint for its own sake – its thickness, texture, color – beyond its historic role as a transmitter of visual information, while sculptors used modern materials and industrial processes. Artists featured in this exhibition employed a variety of tools for inspiration, including complex compositional formulas, bold geometric forms, experiments in visual perception and arbitrary color, and the unconscious.

Many of the Currier’s all-time favorites are included in the show, such as Pablo Picasso’s Woman Seated in a Chair (1941), Josef Albers’s Homage to the Square: Early Rising I (1961), Alexander Calder’s Petit Disque Jaune (1967), and Joan Mitchell’s Cous-cous (1961–1962).

Currier Museum of Art

150 Ash Street
Manchester, NH 03104

603.669.6144
visitor@currier.org

Exhibition News: “Michael Mazur: Wakeby Islands” at Ryan Lee Gallery

Michael Mazur, Wakeby Night, 1983. Monotype and pastel on three sheets of paper, 75 x 149 in (190.5 x 378.5 cm)

Michael Mazur: Wakeby Islands
On view: October 25 – November 25, 2023
Opening reception: Saturday, October 28, 4:00-6:00pm
RYAN LEE Gallery, 515 West 26th St, NYC, 10001
Visit the gallery website

RYAN LEE Gallery is pleased to present Michael Mazur: Wakeby Islands, the artist’s sixth solo exhibition with the gallery. The exhibition celebrates the artist’s most famous Wakeby series (1982), a remarkable study of landscape and memory that follows Wakeby Pond’s full cycle of birth, life, death, and renewal—a subject Mazur would return to for years to come. The exhibition includes two monoprints (including some of the largest monotypes to date), an oil painting, and three pastels—all of which display his multidisciplinary dexterity across mediums to create a stunning variance in mood and technique.

Wakeby Pond, an idyllic body of water landlocked on Cape Cod, was where Mazur and his wife, poet Gail Mazur, spent much of their time from the 1970s on. Working from a long-time art studio on the bay, Mazur created prints and paintings of the pond, exploring shifts in perception and time through multiple horizon lines and inclusions of cut-outs of previous Wakeby landscapes, creating ‘picture-within-picture’ compositions. These details disrupt the seemingly linear timeline of a landscape and offer an exciting tension to the composition.

In Gail’s Garden, Wakeby (1983), gentle purple and white flowers convey a patient study of nature and its overgrowth. There are psychological undertones to the loose and gestural flowers overtaking the garden scene, conveying metamorphosis through their sprawl. A series of pastel-on-paper Wakeby studies also approaches the subject with softness, albeit with suggestions of capriciousness. Mazur pays particular attention to creating a nimble horizon line, interrupted by treetops and shrubbery against a colorful, cloudy sky.

Layering, of both subject and content, plays prominently in Mazur’s work. Originally discovering monotype through an exhibition of Edgar Degas’s works in the medium, Mazur was encouraged to explore its capacities. In practice, Mazur worked with master printmaker Robert Townsend in choreographic motions to achieve the extremely experimental and painterly washes in the Wakeby sessions. He eventually began incorporating simulacra through “ghost” impressions of print-over-print layering, and employing the technique of chine-collé, which effects diaphanous backdrops to each print.

Beyond the technical aptitudes underlying each artwork on view, the content itself speaks of a serene, somewhat mystic place. In the Wakeby Night triptychs from 1983 and 1984, we see oversized flowers loitering over a moonlit lake. In the earlier work, the moon glows in green tones, with flora exploding in the foreground; in the later iteration of the scene, while the sunflowers beam yellow, the night light casts a deep blue haze over the more subdued plant life, evoking an entirely different feeling of the placid pond.

Each panel in the original Wakeby Day/Wakeby Night series represented the single largest monotype ever printed at that time, placing the works themselves squarely into the realm of canonical, art historical touchpoints. Not only have the works been produced on massive scales, such as a grand in situ commission in 1982 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, but they also now belong to the collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, DC and Brooklyn Museum, NY.

The masterful range of technical nuances used to make these works—like the use of a roller to offset an image on one plate to another, the use of solvents to create painterly drips and layers, and the artist’s uses of his own fingers and rags to create impressionistic, tactile landscape portraiture—are not only iconic to Mazur’s career and œuvre, but to the evolution of the medium and art form of monotype at large.

On view: “Seaside Studio” at Albert Merola Gallery

Michael Mazur, Untitled (Rocks and Water), 2003 oil paint on vellum 30 x 27 1/2 inches (Photos courtesy Albert Merola Gallery)

Michael Mazur’s ‘Seaside Studio’

Artist Michael Mazur’s former studio in the East End of Provincetown, where he worked for more than 30 years before his death in 2009, seemed to float at high tide, nestled as it was into the shoreline astride the home and gardens he shared with his wife, the poet Gail Mazur. Working on the water, Mazur created astonishing gestural paintings of the sea that are as rooted in the natural world of the Outer Cape as they are mysterious and transporting.

“Seaside Studio,” on view at Albert Merola Gallery (424 Commercial St., Provincetown) through Oct. 5, is a collection of Mazur’s paintings, mixed-media pieces, drawings, and monotypes from the early aughts that are rich in autumnal color and ethereal in shape and line. The works depict the tidal dance of the bay in all its characteristic swirl.

Rocks are scattered and linked along the shoreline; underwater, they’re rendered as jewels. Each piece in the series is a version of the infinite variations of the sea and its contents. Mazur’s layered color-wash technique creates works that are permanent records of temporary perfections.

Splitting his time between Provincetown and Cambridge, Mazur made profound contributions to contemporary art. His work is part of many prominent collections, including the British Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Museum of Fine Arts Boston. He taught printmaking at Harvard for 20 years and is a touchstone for many artists who have lived and worked in Provincetown.

“He was tireless in his work ethic,” says gallerist Albert Merola. “He was never without pencil or pen and paper, and he was drawing up until the last days of his life. Mike was a special force in the Provincetown arts community, and his presence is missed to this day. He was an inspiration to us all.” —Kirsten Andersen

Original text from The Provincetown Independent, September 21, 2022

Publication news: Michael Mazur’s “Images from a Locked Ward” in Manual Magazine’s Spring 2022 Issue

“Territories of the Self,” On Michael Mazur’s Images from a Locked Ward

by Leon J. Hilton

Michael Mazur (RISD faculty, ca. 1961)
American, 1935–2009
Impressions Graphic Workshop, Inc., publisher
The Corridor, from the portfolio Images From A Locked Ward, 1965
Lithograph on paper
Plate/sheet: 50.8 × 65.4 cm. (20 × 25 3/4 in.)
Gift of Jim Dine 80.266.2
© Michael Mazur; Courtesy of the estate of the artist and RYAN LEE Gallery, New York

If we did not know from the title of the series that we are viewing images from a locked mental-hospital ward, The Corridor [Fig. 1] might suggest another setting, namely a perspectival view of a proscenium stage as seen by someone sitting in the audience of a theater. Proscenium wings are suggested by the curtain-like “legs” framing the stage, stretching back into the further distance. Abrasively sketched figures are perhaps walking, but more likely standing.

The Corridor is the second lithograph in Images from a Locked Ward, Michael Mazur’s series of fourteen lithographs printed in 1965 and published as a limited edition in collaboration with the eminent Boston lithographer George Lockwood. The lithographs are the culmination of a period of image-making shaped by Mazur’s firsthand observations of life in the psychiatric ward of the Howard State Institute of Mental Health in Cranston, Rhode Island, where starting in 1962 Mazur worked alongside his RISD students as a volunteer instructor in the art therapy program. The Corridor presents a view of asylum architecture’s orderly segmentation of space, designed to maximize the visibility of the human beings inhabiting it. The architectural elements function as instruments that are used therapeutically to manipulate the human beings. Yet the theatricality of the setting also enhances the sense of something chimerical, even ghostly, about the several seemingly human forms that flitter across the horizontal plane. Spectral and desubjectized, their faces are turned away from us or obscured by shadows.

If The Corridor presents the asylum as a stage set, the image that follows in the Locked Ward series, The Occupant [Fig. 2], gives us a portrait of sorts: a medium-length shot that takes us closer to one of the figures. Here a figure sits slouched in wheelchair, body contorted at an uncomfortable angle as if to meet the gaze of the viewer head-on: the facial expression is intensely rendered but also difficult to interpret. It is a face that might be looking out at us with curiosity, smiling with a friendly greeting, or perhaps grimacing.

The Occupant reiterates in lithographic form a composition that Mazur first used in 1962 in an aquatint etching in his Closed Ward series. In it, finely cut swatches of shadowy ink made up of thin straight bands emanates diagonally from the back of the seated figure’s head to the upper right corner of the page. Contrasted with the rigid verticality of the lines used to designate the background walls and horizontal lines indicating the floor, this diagonal swoop suggests the movement of the patient’s head as he turns in his wheelchair in the direction of the viewer, in curiosity or surprise at the arrival of an unexpected visitor. In both the 1962 and 1965 iterations of The Occupant, the most predominant shape, and the source of the composition’s strangely radiant energy, is the wheelchair in which the subject is seated. 

Continue reading here

On view: Mazur’s “The Inferno of Dante” at the Springfield Art Museum

The Inferno of Dante: Etchings by Michael Mazur

September 18, 2021 - February 20, 2022

Weisel and Kelly Galleries

Springfield Art Museum

“Illustration, like translation, is risky business… At worst, illustrations can sidetrack the reader by introducing ideas or images that change the meaning of the text, skew its tone, diminish its impact. At its best, though, illustration is a reinvention.’’ - Michael Mazur

The Inferno is the first and most familiar of the three sections of The Divine Comedy, a narrative poem written in the early 14th century by the Italian poet Dante Alighieri. The poem recounts a journey that defines the human condition. Told in the first person, it follows Dante and his guide, the Roman poet Virgil, as they travel through Hell, Purgatory, and eventually Paradise. The Inferno is an exploration of sin, weakness, despair, sadness, and loss. Countless artists have been inspired by The Divine Comedy, including Gustave Doré, William Blake, and Auguste Rodin. 

Painter and printmaker Michael Mazur had a lifelong fascination with the poem. In the early 1990s, Mazur and longtime friend poet Robert Pinsky (U.S. Poet Laureate 1997-2000) collaborated on the production of a new illustrated translation of The Inferno pairing Mazur’s monotypes with Pinsky’s translations. This initial project was later expanded into a portfolio of etchings.

Traditionally, illustrations of the poem have included the figures of Dante and Virgil. Notably, Mazur chose “absolutely not to put Dante and Virgil in these images. I wanted to show the things they saw, not to show them seeing – so that there would be no distance between you and the image.” The resulting portfolio, shown in its entirety here, includes 41 etchings paired with the relevant excerpted portions of Dante’s poem in Italian with Pinsky’s English translations.  

This exhibition is pulled from the Museum's permanent collection.

https://www.sgfmuseum.org/256/The-Inferno-of-Dante-Etchings-by-Michael

On view: “Gathered at the edge of light” at Albert Merola Gallery

Bay Rain III, 2009, oil paint on linen, 48 x 48 inches (121.9 x 121.9 cm)

Michael Mazur: Gathered at the edge of light

June 12 - July 1, 2020

Albert Merola Gallery, Provincetown MA

The Albert Merola Gallery is happy to present our first exhibition of 2020: paintings by Michael Mazur. The title, Gathered at the edge of light comes from a passage early on in Dante’s Inferno. It is appropriate in many ways, not least of which is that Mazur was deeply involved with Dante’s masterwork, and had a deep love of all things Italian. One of his major accomplishments was the epic illustration of the Inferno. He made drawings, monoprints, and a complete suite of etchings, illustrating the story of Dante and Virgil’s journey through Hell. This accompanied the translation done by Robert Pinsky, a United States Poet Laureate and dear friend of Michael and Gail Mazur.

The paintings in the current exhibition reflect two different periods - The Branching paintings are from the mid-1990’s, and the Rain on Water are the last series that he worked on before his death in 2009.

Michael Mazur lived his life as an artist. He was never not observing or drawing or thinking about work. He was deeply interested in the human condition, as is evidenced in his Locked Ward Series and portraits, but was deeply moved and involved with the natural world, and how the two interacted. Studies from nature were always part of his practice. The beautifully lush Tendrils, or Blue Branching, evoke dreamy worlds between nature and abstraction. These branching forms were also incorporated into some of the Dante imagery he created.

The Rain on Water series is endlessly fascinating. Water into water - reflecting in the light, ceaselessly combining and reforming. These are beautiful, colorful, joyous celebrations of the most transient and ungraspable images. They express the fleeting sense of time and motion, while uniting all the deeply felt abstract imagery that Mazur had explored for much of his lifetime.

For many years Michael Mazur painted in his studio on the water in Provincetown. His studio was, literally, often “on the water”, as it sat on the harbor beach, and the tides would wash up underneath. This proximity to the shoreline would infiltrate his work, as is seen in Bay Rain III - a breathtaking summation of all those things, expressed in a view of Provincetown harbor.

Mike’s contributions to the Provincetown art community and its history have been significant and wide-ranging. He founded the Provincetown Print Project in 1990, and was the driving force behind five years of the Fine Arts Work Center’s Print Project Portfolio. The print room there is named after him in recognition for his contributions to the practice and to the Work Center.

We’d like to give special thanks to Gail Mazur for her support and guidance and to Bryan Smith for his invaluable assistance in making this exhibition possible.

Michael Mazur had been making prints, drawings and paintings for over 50 years. His work has been shown in over 150 solo and group exhibitions, and is included in most major public and private collections throughout the country.

His work has been exhibited at MOMA, The Whitney Museum of American Art, The Brooklyn Museum, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. A traveling retrospective of his prints opened at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston in 2000. He was a full time faculty member at RISD, Brandeis University, and later, a visiting artist for many years at Harvard’s Carpenter Center. He served on the Boards of the Artist Foundation in Boston, MA, the Council for the Arts and Humanities, and was an Overseer of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. Mazur was on the Board and Visual Committees of the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts and was its Co-Chair from 1997 until 2001.

From the Archive: The Last Testament of Michael Mazur (John Yau for Hyperallergic)

Recently, I showed the film Fifi Howls from Happiness (2013) by Mitra Farahani to my undergraduate class. The film is about the last days of Bahman Mohassess (1931 – 2010), an Iranaian artist living in Rome in a hotel room that he seldom leaves. At one point, he tells an anecdote about the day Pablo Picasso died, followed by one about Salvador Dali lying on his deathbed, and sitting up and cursing a priest who has come to visit him. We see him laughing heartily after recounting each story. How to stage your departure as you shuck off your mortal coil was a subject that fascinated Mohassess, who knew his own end was fast approaching. Fahrani believes Mohassess wanted the film to be made, knowing it would document his death, and that it would be his final performance-cum-work-of-art.

A few days later, I went to see the exhibition Michael: Late Work, Rain and Flowers at Ryan Lee (October 25–December 22, 2018). The exhibition included five paintings, three of which were done the year he died, and in the small back gallery, 13 pen-and-ink drawings selected from the more than 100 Mazur did in the summer of 2009, when he had lost much of his mobility. Drawn on modest-sized sheets of paper, depicting cut flowers as well as plants and ferns growing in the artist’s backyard, they are dated between June 15 and August 17, 2009, the day before he died. Having looked at the entire set of drawings some years ago, I hope that someday they will be published together as a book, as they are a moving chronicle of a man who, facing the end of his life, spent each day saying hello and good-bye.

Michael Mazur, “Bay Rain III” (2009), oil on canvas, 48 x 48 inches (all images courtesy Ryan Lee Gallery)

On view: “Late Work, Rain and Flowers” at Ryan/Lee Gallery

Michael Mazur: Late Work, Rain and Flowers

October 25 – December 22, 2018

RYAN LEE is pleased to announce an exhibition of paintings and drawings by Michael Mazur (1935–2009). Known for his virtuosic facility with painting, drawing and printmaking, Mazur remains celebrated for his relentless drive to create and reinvent. Late Work, Rain and Flowers presents a selection of paintings and previously unexhibited drawings that were made in the final years of Mazur’s life.

Throughout a career that spanned more than half a century, Mazur explored a range of styles, techniques and subject matter. He often worked in series and in various media at once, experimenting with stencils, airbrushing and printing on silk. Content impelled him, whether he was responding to social injustice or absorbing aesthetic traditions of the Far East. As Mazur explained to Robert Brown in a 1993 interview for the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art, “…content drove my engine, but the form always interested me, in terms of its relationship to the content… form-making, the facture of making paintings or drawings or prints, that has interested me and had its influence on me throughout all the work.”

This mutually constitutive relationship between form and content in Mazur’s oeuvre is particularly evident in the stylistic divergence between these two late bodies of work. While each treats an elemental form of nature, the fragility of the flower drawings presents a stark contrast to the power and dynamism of the pounding rain in the oil paintings. In the Rain paintings the viewer is subsumed, both caught in torrential downpour and somehow under water. The simultaneous horizontality and verticality in Bay Rain III (2009) suggests visual access from above as well as head-on while also presenting a Rorschach-like reflection of itself. Combined with rocks and ripples rendered in turquoise, cerulean and lavender, the resulting image evokes creation and disintegration. By contrast, Mazur’s floral drawings are delicate and minimal. Despite limited mobility during a period of recovery in the last year of his life, he produced over 100 ink drawings of plants and flowers—many of which had been given to him by his wife or observed in his own garden. Executed in black ink, these intimately scaled images seem to hover, emerging and receding from the negative space.

Taken together these last works by Mazur illustrate the dueling potentialities of nature and art. As Mazur explained when the Rain paintings were first exhibited in 2009, shortly before his death, “all good and great paintings provide a whiff of mortality and, ultimately, are a celebration of the life force; they are both the tunnel and the light at its end... Light and dark, color and its absence, form and anti-form all contribute to this.”

Michael Mazur (1935 New York, NY – 2009 Boston, MA) is an internationally recognized artist known for his fluidity between paintings, drawings and prints as well as between abstract and representational imagery. Born and raised in New York City, Mazur moved to Massachusetts in 1953 and received his BA from Amherst College. He received his BFA and MFA from Yale University in 1959 and 1961, respectively, and he was later heralded by The Boston Globe as one of the greatest painters and printmakers that New England produced in the second half of the 20th century. Mazur first exhibited in 1960 and quickly earned acclaim, receiving a

Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation grant, John Simon Guggenheim Foundation award and an American Academy of Arts and Letters fellowship in just two years. Mazur was invited to represent the United States in the 1975 Venice Biennale, but he declined to participate in protest of the Vietnam War. Over the next 50 years, he was the subject of more than 80 solo exhibitions and included in numerous group shows. In 2000, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston held a retrospective which traveled to Stanford University Art Museum, the Jane Vorhees Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University and the Minneapolis Institute of Art. Mazur’s work is held in several prominent collections, including the British Museum, London; Cincinnati Art Museum; Cleveland Museum of Art; de Cordova Museum, Lincoln; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Art Institute of Chicago; McNay Art Museum, San Antonio; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Philadelphia Museum of Art; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven; and Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University, New Brunswick.

INSTALLATION IMAGES

On view: “Along the Shoreline" at Albert Merola Gallery

Albert Merola Gallery of Provincetown, MA presents

Michael Mazur: Along the Shoreline,

featuring oil paintings, monoprints, and other work.

For many years Michael Mazur painted in his studio on the water in Provincetown. His studio was, literally, often “on the water,” as it sat on the harbor beach, and the tides would wash up underneath. This proximity to the shoreline would infiltrate his work, and in fact, one of his signature series is titled "Rocks and Water."

The exhibition opens June 15 and runs through July 4, 2018

Opening: June 15, 7 to 9 pm

424 Commercial Street, Provincetown

For directions and more information, visit the Gallery's website.

Article: Michael Mazur’s Inferno of Dante: The Artist and Me Plus Dante and Suzanne

 Michael Mazur’s Inferno of Dante: The Artist and Me Plus Dante and Suzanne.

By Eric M. Zafran 

Michael Mazur’s “Inferno: Canto II, Twilight.”

From “A Perspicacious Tenure, Suzanne Boorsch at Yale.”

Looking back over my life and career, I realize that I was very fortunate in who I met and the choices I made. The first lucky move was choosing to attend Brandeis University, in Waltham, Massachusetts. It not only had the Rose Art Museum, where I became an intern and got my earliest professional museum experience, but also had outstanding art history and studio art departments. Unusual was the school’s requirement that art history majors take courses in studio art. Thus it was that I found myself in 1965 in a life-drawing course being taught by Michael Mazur. I knew nothing of him as an artist, but he was a demanding yet understanding teacher. He quickly recognized that I was hopeless at life drawing and so recommended that I transfer instead to his printmaking class. At the time, I had no idea that this was Mazur’s first year at the university (where he would remain for ten years) and that he (a student of leonard Baskin) was already recognized as a distinguished printmaker, who would eventually become quite renowned. For me, he was a rigorous professor whom his students wanted to please, and it was he who provided me with an introduction to the techniques of woodcut, engraving, and etching. This proved invaluable knowledge, as I do not think anyone who has not handled the tools and engaged in the process can really appreciate the works of Durer, Rembrandt, Goya, or Picasso. Mazur gave his students great freedom to develop their own approach and experiment with these various media. I responded to the challenge and selected a large metal plate to produce an elaborate etching and aquatint that to me still retains a certain direct intensity and brings to mind my involvement with the printmaking process and my interaction with a brilliant artist.

This experience was to have long-lasting influence on my development. I went on to New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts and had my first job in the Print Department of what was then Parke-Bernet Gallery, followed by an internship in the European Paintings Department of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. At the Metropolitan Museum, I met the incredible staff of the prints department, which included, at that time, A. Hyatt Mayor (who became my master’s thesis advisor) and Suzanne [Boorsch], who would become a good friend and colleague. Suzanne remained there until moving to Yale, and I went on to a variety of curatorial positions, ending up as her neighbor in Connecticut, at Hartford’s Wadsworth Atheneum. I was so pleased to discover that among Suzanne’s many distinguished acquisitions at Yale was Mazur’s remarkable portfolio of etchings, The Inferno of Dante, illustrating the translation of his friend the poet Robert Pinsky. 

The subject had interested the artist since he had first read Dante as a student in 1957, but it was not until the early 1990s, when working in close collaboration with Pinsky, that Mazur produced a powerful series of monotypes of which a number were incorporated into the book published in 1993. As Mazur has observed, “We were both focused on the original. Dante was the visionary after all. We collaborated with him. We are two Jews who saw in the poem not the dogma of the church but a great contribution to the humanistic tradition in literature… Overall the tone was one of sadness and loss. This had to be communicated through both language and image.”

While the published version of The Inferno was very successful, Mazur felt that his images needed to be seen as individual plates, accompanied by text translations, rather than captions, and so he began working on a new set of etched illustrations, which were first exhibited at the castle of Dante’s patron, Cangrande della Scala, in Verona, Italy. Over a six-year period, from 1997 through 2002, a set of forty-one etchings was completed for the present grand two-volume portfolio, in which the images are juxtaposed with handsomely printed pages that have the text in both Italian and English.

Previous illustrators of Dante’s text, including the rather theatrical Gustave Dore, with whose works I had coincidentally been much concerned, depicted in realistic fashion Dante and Virgil on their journey through Hell. Here, instead, as the poet and critic Lloyd Schwartz has rightly noted, “Everything we see is, as it were, through [Mazur’s and Pinsky’s] eyes. Mazur’s images compel us to identify with the poet’s primary experience: the bewildering sense of space -- swirling, often mysteriously dislocated; the stupendous grandeur of the infernal architecture; the grotesque tortures of the sufferers and their profound pain.”

To capture these fantastic visions, Mazur employed the rich texture of the black-and-white etchings, printed on bright white paper, to portray the hallucinatory subjects in a near-abstract fashion. There are far too many brilliant images to detail in a short appreciation, but for me the series is truly launched by the plate accompanying canto 2, Twilight, which makes brilliant use of light and dark to evoke the words:

Day was departing, and the darkening air
Called all earth’s creatures to their evening quiet
While I alone was preparing as though for war…
I commenced: “Poet take my measure now;
Appraise my powers before you trust me to venture
Through that deep passage where you would be my guide.”

As if rising from a mountaintop, the spirit of the poet, surrounded by birds in flight,
ascends through a starry sky toward a haloed space set within a glowing circle.

 The series of images concludes in startling and thrilling fashion with a final “landscape” for canto 34, titled Once More the Stars. It depicts, in a burst of swirling blue -- the first time color appears in all the prints -- the hill of Purgatory, which, as Schwartz writes, “looks very much like the false hill of ascent in canto 2. But this time, the image through the lens is heavenly -- stars swimming in the firmament.” The poet’s text reads in part:

Through a round aperture I saw appear
Some of the beautiful things that Heaven bears,
Where we came forth, and once more saw the stars. 

Michael Mazur died in 2009 at the age of seventy-three, and I am sorry that I never got to thank him for his profound influence on me or praise in person his powerful works. Hopefully, this short text will acknowledge his achievement and prove that his memory is still vividly alive both at Yale and wherever great art is appreciated.

# # #

Editor’s note:
Images: Use Twilight from this page. Caption: Michael Mazur, etching, Twilight, from Il Inferno di Dante.

On view: Michael Mazur's L'Inferno di Dante at the de Saisset Museum

Michael Mazur and the power of interpretation

Ambitious portfolio gives Dante’s Inferno a contemporary appeal

In 2016, the Saisset Museum was fortunate to accept into our collection several bodies of work by artist Michael Mazur (1935-2009) through a generous gift of the Estate of Paula Kirkeby.  The donation included Mazur’s ambitious portfolio L’Inferno di Dante, which is currently on view at the museum. In this series, Mazur creates a harrowing vision of hell through a series of etchings that layer rich texture, technical detail, and nuanced meaning.

Mazur and The Inferno

Michael Mazur maintained an almost life-long interest in and study of Dante Alighieri’s The Divine Comedy (1320), specifically being drawn to The Inferno, – the first of the three sections to this epic poem.

During a gap year in the midst of his undergraduate studies at Amherst College, Mazur lived in Italy and studied Italian – in part so he could read the poem in its original language. Upon returning to the States, he created a set of illustrations based on The Inferno during his senior year of college. But this was only the beginning of his study and interpretation of the classic text.

“Illustration, like translation, is risky business…At worst, illustrations can sidetrack the reader by introducing ideas or images that change the meaning of the text, skew its tone, diminish its impact. At its best, though, illustration is a reinvention.’’  - Michael Mazur

In 1992, Ecco Press (a New York-based publishing imprint of HarperCollins) launched a project inviting twenty poets to contribute translations of Dante’s Inferno – each poet translating a different canto. Mazur attended several public readings of these new translations, including a presentation by his friend, and later U.S. Poet Laureate, Robert Pinsky. After the reading, Mazur inquired if Pinsky intended to continue to translate the entirety of the Inferno, expressing his interest in illustrating Pinsky’s translation. Collaboration soon ensued.

In the coming months and years, Pinsky would fax his translations to Mazur who in turn read the translations, cut out individual passages, and created illustrations for each canto. Approximately a third of the way through this collaboration, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux (an American book publishing company that is today a division of Macmillan) contacted Pinsky and Mazur and expressed interest in publishing the series together as a book.

Mazur created monotypes as the studies for the books illustrations so that if a study ended up seeming more “powerful” than a later illustration, Mazur could use the study instead.

"Michael Mazur's approach to the Inferno gave me inspiration and guidance in understanding Dante. The monotypes, nourished by the artist's intense engagement with the poetry, are themselves acts of translation, embodying vital principles."
—Robert Pinsky (quote from the preface to I'll Tell what I Saw: Images from Dante's Divine Comedy)

In total, Mazur amassed over 200 unused studies. The resulting book was widely distributed and Mazur began to exhibit and sell the monotypes.

He soon decided, however, that he wanted a more permanent set of prints to represent his interpretation of the cantos and settled on creating a new series of etchings based on the original monotypes. In the resulting series of etchings, which were created over a span of six years (1994-2000), Mazur pairs his etchings with sheets of vellum on which is printed the excerpts from the cantos to which he is responding – in both the original Italian and Pinsky’s 1994 translation. These etchings and accompanying vellums were distributed in two structures: a bound book and as loose-leaf pages.

The de Saisset Museum was gifted the loose leaf version by the Estate of Paula Kirkeby. The entirety of the series -- all forty-one etchings and thirty-nine vellums -- are currently on view in the exhibition Michael Mazur’s L’Inferno di Dante.

Mazur, who passed away in 2009, considered the Inferno his most ambitious work. While other notable artists have created illustrations of, or at least related to, the Inferno, others had not produced a chronological series depicting each canto as Mazur accomplishes here. And unlike other artistic renditions of the Inferno that choose to show Dante and Virgil in third-person perspective, Mazur places viewers directly in the place of the travelers. We see Dante’s world as if we are seeing through his eyes.

 Mazur and California

Mazur, though a predominantly East Coast artist (with ties to New York and Massachusetts), had a California connection that later directly linked him to the de Saisset Museum and Santa Clara University. Paula Kirkeby, founder and owner of the fine art press Smith Andersen Editions in Palo Alto, CA, worked with Mazur, both exhibiting his work and inviting him to residencies at the press.

Over time, he created a series of monotypes at Smith Andersen Editions, two of which are part of the de Saisset Museum’s permanent collection. Since 1984, the de Saisset Museum has housed Smith Andersen Editions Archive, and these monotypes by Mazur came to us as part of the then-growing archive. Today, the archive holds close to 270 works on paper by the diverse artist who worked with Kirkeby and her master printers.

Smith Andersen’s former Master Printer, Kathryn Kain, visited the de Saisset Museum in the fall of 2017 with her students from SCU’s Department of Art and Art History Introduction to Printmaking class. She wanted students to see the current exhibition of L’Inferno di Dante and study Mazur’s incredibly detailed and compelling etchings. Kain who recalls working with Mazur at Smith Andersen Editions, guided her class in studying the etchings and discussing the nuanced printmaking process, and accompanying techniques, Mazur employed to create these compelling works.

Final weeks to see these incredible etchings

Michael Mazur’s portfolio L’Inferno di Dante is on view through June 16, 2018 at the de Saisset Museum in the exhibition Michael Mazur’s L’Inferno di Dante.

May 8, 2018

https://www.scu.edu/desaisset/blog/blog-posts/michael-mazur-and-the-power-of-interpretation.html