League Lineages: In the Line of Water Exhibition

Curated by Jillian Russo, League Curator-at-Large 2022, and Naomi Campbell, Art Students League of New York Ground Floor Gallery, NY. Lineages with Irwin Greenberg, Naomi Campbell, and Naomi Campbell’s students.

June 6 - September, 2022

Naomi Andrée Campbell, Waiting for the day, 2022. Watercolor, work on paper, 18 x 25 in diptych

This exhibition, the fourth installment in a series exploring the historic lineages connecting teachers and students at The Art Students League, features three generations of watercolor painters: Irwin Greenberg (1922–2009), Naomi Andrée Campbell, and Campbell’s students Bonnie Schertz, Stephen Durkee, Patrice Kirkins, Nora Katz, and Gus Knowlton. While Greenberg’s work was inspired by his love for New York City’s everchanging streetscape and its people, Campbell and her students create work that considers the relationship between the watercolor medium and perception through the body and its environment.

As Campbell puts it: “My exploration of watercolor expanded over the fourteen years I have been teaching at The League, leading to an expressive investigation of the contemporary form and figure through art and behavioral neuroscience. My recent series represents singular instances of everyday life working from home during the COVID pandemic in New York. This work explores the dramatic changes in perception and the act of seeing that take place during confinement and isolation. In the visual monotony of confined living spaces, our appreciation of everyday objects redefined themselves, merging figure-ground ways of seeing into a new order that translated my Japanese influences: Shizen—natural order with purpose—and Yūgen—implying more by showing less.”