ROSEMARY FEIT COVEY’s print “Quiet Desperation” currently on view at Katzen Arts Center at American University.
Grouping of artwork in Katzen Art Center’s exhibition “Good Form, Decorum, and in the Manner: Portraits from the Collections of the Washington Print Club Members” including ROSEMARY FEIT COVEY’s wood engraving, “Quiet Desperation”.
“Good Form, Decorum, and in the Manner: Portraits from the Collections of the Washington Print Club Members” features works ranging from the early masters of printmaking to contemporary artists. These prints question what it means to capture a person’s likeness across time and cultures.
About Katzen Arts Center:
Housed in the dynamic and multidisciplinary Katzen Arts Center, the American University Museum builds its programming on the strengths of a great college and great university. We focus on international art because American University has a global commitment. We show political art because the university is committed to human rights, social justice, and political engagement. We support the artists in our community because the university takes an active and responsible role in the formation of our contemporary art and culture.
We present exhibitions that mirror American University’s aspiration to be the premier Washington-based, global university. Our programming puts the best art of our region in a national and international context. Our collections enable us to present the art history of Washington, while our Kunsthalle attitude brings the most provocative art of our time to our place.
Katzen Arts Center, 4400 Massachusetts Ave NW, Washington, DC 20016
The long-time wood engraver and painter has spent the last 40 years at the Torpedo Factory with collections of her work on display around the world, yet the process of making her work hasn’t gotten easier. The challenge – the fear, “the edge,” in Covey’s words – is intrinsic to her work.
“You kind of have to skate this edge between being very uncomfortable and yet still being able to have the skills and be conscious yet almost unconscious at the same time,” Covey said. “As soon as you relax, the thing starts to not work. It can work, but it won’t have life to it.”
Given Covey’s preoccupation with death, fragility and the darker side of the natural world, the sentiment might seem at odds with her work, but her wood engravings and paintings come to life precisely because of that tension.
“My work has that duality to some extent,” Covey said. “It used to be what people always considered very dark with themes connecting to medicine and death and fragility. But out of that came a series of work that surprisingly had great, larger appeal.”
Covey was born in Johannesburg, South Africa in 1954, a time of intense social and political upheaval. She left the country at age 10 with her family because her father had been invited to pursue a Ph.D. in the U.S.
“Sins of the Fathers” (Courtesy image)
Covey’s formative memories of South Africa are still tinged with nostalgia – the memories of a child unaware of the time in which she was growing up, happy in the self-contained world of her family.
It’s also a nostalgia for the early days of her artistic curiosity. At five years old, Covey was expressing an interest in creative expression both in class and at home, where she worked on crafts with her grandmother.
“She had big boxes of scraps and we made things together all the time, so leaving South Africa was hard for me because she and I spent all our time together,” Covey said. “She was the biggest influence on my life ever.”
Covey and her family ended up moving to Ann Arbor, Michigan, where her father finished his Ph.D. at the University of Michigan. The family then moved to Ashfield, Massachusetts, where Covey’s father had secured a position at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
In Ashfield, Covey’s passion for the arts continued to blossom. An art teacher at Williston Northampton School introduced her to print engraving at the age of 14; Covey returned years later, after college, to learn wood engraving from the same teacher.
Covey was set on the path. She knew she wanted to make art, but, like many artists, she found barriers at every turn. Her parents warned her about the scary, impractical path of an artist. Collectors and artists openly questioned her ability at portfolio showings.
The cynics only strengthened Covey’s determination. Covey’s early career was defined by finding a way around the blockades that were thrown up around her, she said.
Covey’s parents refused to pay for her college education, so she left Cornell University after two years. At 18 years old, she married a man who helped support her artistic ambitions, but after divorcing at 21, Covey found herself in need of a way to support herself financially.
“Then I’m on my own at 22 and I have to make a living,” Covey said. “My parents were like, ‘Now you’re on your own.’ So, coming [to Alexandria] I started doing commissions and slowly it became my career and way of making a living.”
Covey immediately fell in love with Alexandria. The history and character of the city were captivating, and the detail of the streets was like catnip for a wood engraver, Covey said.
“Red Handed” (Courtesy image)
Wood engraving, at its most fundamental, involves carving an image into a block of wood, applying ink to the face of the block and pressing the ink onto a surface to leave an impression.
It’s a process that is easy to learn but difficult to master, partially because of the intense concentration it requires, Covey said.
“You can’t make a mistake and if you do, you have to incorporate it, which really creates that panic, nervous energy that I think propels work,” Covey said.
Prints created through wood engraving also need to be designed in reverse, since the print will be ultimately be a reverse image of the original design. The reverse engineering makes executing facial expressions difficult for many engravers, but Covey said her dyslexia helps.
“I have extreme dyslexia. I have problems with all kinds of simple tasks, but the reversing of things comes more naturally [to me] than it might [to others],” Covey said. “It’s very difficult to do facial expression and … to get a likeness of any sort when you reverse it, but it helps to have dyslexia.”
Covey came to the Torpedo Factory in 1976, two years after it opened as an arts center. Although she can trace thematic patterns in her work all the way back to those early days, her work has evolved creatively and procedurally.
Death and fragility are still at the core of her work, but Covey has started to find new ways to explore themes that have captivated artists forcenturies.
In collaboration with botanists, evolutionary biologists and entomologists, Covey now finds new inspiration in the natural world, the duality of decaying lifeforms and life under the microscope.
“Insects” (Courtesy image)
Her series called “Insects” came out of a residency at Blue Mountain Center in the Adirondacks. Combining printing and painting, Covey depicted the bodies of butterflies and dragonflies as beaten and bruised yet beautiful.
“[One entomologist] said, as a scientist, you see them under the microscope and they’re battered and beaten and their wings and their short life are scratched,” Covey said. “They’re not pristine. And what I had been noticing was that, as they lie dead, they strike these human poses.”
Another series of prints and paintings focused on fungi and lichens and the above ground beauty that masks monumental, monstrous rooted webs just below the surface, Covey said.
“I don’t do it, when I work with a scientist, to be an illustrator or scientific illustrator,” Covey said. “[I’m] not interested in that at all. I’m interested in what they can tell me that sparks my visual imagination.”
Covey’s science-inspired and research-driven work hasn’t been limited to just insects and mushrooms.
“David with Astrocytes (Brain Tumor 8)” was part of an intimate series of portraits that captured the eponymous David, a man Covey had met at her Torpedo Factory studio, in various stages of treatment for a brain tumor.
“He looked really haunted. … He’d had all this surgery and you could sort of see what happened behind his eyes, that something monumental had happened,” Covey said. “He hired me [and] I ended up working for him for three years to do a piece on his brain tumor experience.”
“David with Astrocytes (Brain Tumor 8)” (Courtesy image)
Collaboration has become an integral part of Covey’s process, whether it’s incorporating a partner’s scientific knowledge or pieces from fellow artists.
“The best thing in the world is to find other people that are crazy about what they’re doing and that fits with what you’re doing,” Covey said.
Her process has changed even as she uses the same tools. Covey said she’s still driven by the same unknowable passion to create that drove her when she was alone at 22.
“It’s the same exact thing and I still don’t know quite what it is,” Covey said. “You get the idea in your head and then you have to push it. And you’re hoping that you’re gonna push it and it’s going to be better than anything you ever did before. … Once I’ve done it, I’m not even concerned anymore. It’s getting it there.”
For Covey, the elusive “there” is a place she can’t stop working toward.
“That’s the goal,” Covey said. “You hopefully never stop.”
(Read the first entry in the City Creatives series: Alexis Gomez)
Inspired by evolutionary biology, ROSEMARY FEIT COVEY pushes the boundaries of printmaking in her solo exhibition “The Dark Re Imagined”. In this series of artworks she has collaborated with scientists and integrates fungus, lichens, animals, decay and broken insects.
My current work on fungus and lichens, broken insects and evolutionary biology is not scientific in the sense of medical illustration but a continuation of a life time artistically reacting to mortality’s hold on our subconscious. My earlier work was more overtly psychological. Now I glory in exploring texture and new methods of printmaking. After decades working alone I embrace collaboration. Working with other artists and scientists who all share passion for their chosen subjects and understand mine, they are generous in answering my questions with care and enthusiasm. As the young entomologist, Rebecca Cathleen Wilson told me in one of our many conversations, “we study insects because we love them but to do so we have to kill them, working with you gives them another life”. – ROSEMARY FEIT COVEY, 2019
Rosemary Feit Covey was born in Johannesburg, South Africa. Her work is housed in over forty major museum and library collections worldwide, including Yale University Art Gallery, the New York Public Library Print Collection, the National Museum of American History, Harvard University, and the Papyrus Institute in Cairo, Egypt. In 2012 over five-hundred of her prints were acquired for the permanent collection of Georgetown University Library, Special Collections. She is the recipient of a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship (Bellagio Italy), an Alpha Delta Kappa Foundation National Fine Art Award and a fellowship to Georgetown University Medical Center as the 2007-2008 Artist-in-Residence. Her solo museum exhibitions include the Butler Museum of American Art, the Delaware Center for Contemporary Arts and the International Museum of Surgical Science in Chicago. In 2014, a retrospective of her prints, paintings and installation work was held at Johns Hopkins University’s Evergreen Museum. Her larger public art has been installed world wide, including at Burning Man and at Culture Summit 2017 in Abu Dhabi. Articles on her work have been featured in magazines including Art in America, Juxtapoz, and American Artist Magazine. She has fully illustrated books for Simon & Schuster and William Morrow as well as for fine art presses.
While an artist in residence at Georgetown University Medical School, Feit Covey wrote one chapter and illustrated the text for the book, Maldynia: Multidisciplinary Perspectives on the Illness of Chronic Pain, published by CRC Press. Previously she worked with a brain tumor patient for three years chronicling his illness artistically. This work was featured on Studio 360, Public Radio International, and in articles for The Los Angeles Times and CR Magazine. Since 2017 she has collaborated with evolutionary biologist Paul Andrews working on a ground breaking book using evolutionary biology to understand depression and evaluate pharmacological and psychological treatments for depression. This work will be published by Oxford University Press in 2020 or 2021. An article on this work appeared in Sci-Art Magazine in 2018. Currently, she is working with two botanists and an entomologist who have greatly aided in inspiring and informing her most recent series of work.
She is represented by Morton Fine Art in Washington, DC.
About Morton Fine Art
Founded in 2010 in Washington, DC by curator Amy Morton, Morton Fine Art (MFA) is a fine art gallery and curatorial group that collaborates with art collectors and visual artists to inspire fresh ways of acquiring contemporary art. Firmly committed to the belief that art collecting can be cultivated through an educational stance, MFA’s mission is to provide accessibility to museum-quality contemporary art through a combination of substantive exhibitions and a welcoming platform for dialogue and exchange of original voice. Morton Fine Art specializes in a stellar roster of nationally and internationally renowned artists as well as has an additional focus on artwork of the African Diaspora.
Artwork by: OSI AUDU, JULIA MAE BANCROFT, ROSEMARY FEIT COVEY, NATALIE CHEUNG, NATHANIEL DONNETT, VICTOR EKPUK, KATHERINE HATTAM, NATE LEWIS, ANDREI PETROV, MARIO ANDRES ROBINSON, and VONN SUMNER
Spring 2019 Survey of Select Morton Fine Art Artists
March 6 – March 30th, 2019
Opening Reception
Friday, March 8th from 6-8pm
EXHIBITION LOCATION
Gallery B
7700 Wisconsin Ave, Ste E
Bethesda, MD 20814
HOURS
Wednesday – Saturday 12pm – 6pm
Want to view artwork in DC? Come by our permanent gallery space:
Morton Fine Art
52 O St NW #302
Washington, DC 20001
Hours: Wed – Sat 12pm-5pm and Sun-Tues by appointment
Please also view our exhibition “Starshine and Clay” featuring the artwork of KESHA BRUCE, MAYA FREELON and AMBER ROBLES-GORDON at Workhouse Arts Center in Lorton, VA through March 31st, 2019.
Workhouse Arts Center
2nd Floor – McGuireWoods Gallery
9518 Workhouse Road
Lorton, VA 22079
Hours: Wed – Sat 11am-6pm, Sunday 12pm-5pm
About Morton Fine Art
Founded in 2010 in Washington, DC, Morton Fine Art (MFA) is a fine art gallery and curatorial group that collaborates with art collectors and visual artists to inspire fresh ways of acquiring contemporary art. Firmly committed to the belief that anyone can become an art collector or enthusiast, MFA’s mission is to provide accessibility to museum-quality contemporary art through a combination of substantive exhibitions and a welcoming platform for dialogue and exchange of original voice.
Redefining the traditional gallery model, Morton Fine Art (MFA) replaces a single gallery space with two locations: MFA’s permanent fine art gallery space and *a pop-up project, a temporary mobile art galleryof curated group shows. Morton Fine Art established it’s trademark, *a pop-up project, in 2010.
If rare is the word when it comes to noteworthy exhibits of period prints, scarcer still are shows of contemporary printmaking.
Nearly two decades have passed since the last substantial example unfolded anywhere close to Hampton Roads — and for that you had to drive to the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond.
But in a year made remarkable by not just one, but two impressive displays of 17th-century prints at the Peninsula Fine Art Center in Newport News — including three dozen etchings by Rembrandt — fans of this seldom-seen medium are getting a great bonus.
Curated by Gayle Paul of the Portsmouth Art and Cultural Center, “In Print” features scores of works you may not associate with the mostly small, deliberately intimate prints of the past — and that’s because the regional and nationally known artists who made them used new tools and hugely expanded scale to reinvent them.
“This exhibit is about artists who create the image as an original print, then see it through the entire printmaking process,” Paul said.
“And they’re using advanced and improved printmaking technology to create works you couldn’t make just a few years ago.”
A year in the making, “In Print” explores works by numerous Hampton Roads and Virginia artists, as well as talents from Ohio, Tennessee and the West Coast.
Unexpected scale is a defining characteristic of the collection here, where your eyes may pop and your breath be taken away by the sheer size and ambition of such pieces as a 14-foot-tall installation by Washington artist Nicole Pietrantoni.
Cascading down from the wall just a foot shy of the gallery’s high ceilings, five hand-bound accordion-style books unfurl into the air and fall to the floor, their synchronized pages forming a huge vertical view of ocean swells rumbling in from a distant horizon toward the viewer.
Dark clouds trace ominous patterns in the sky overhead, while barely submerged rocks lurk just below the frothy surface.
Passages of words pour down the pages in fragments, riding the currents with the menacing conclusions of a climate change and water report.
“The scale is just spectacular,” Paul says, describing a work so large it nudges you back on you heels if you get too close.
“And it creates this giant image that’s not just seen but felt.”
That impact is made all the more striking by the much smaller, even intimate scale of “Precipitous” before it was unpacked.
“It arrived in an Office Depot box maybe 16-by-20-by-16 inches in size,” Paul said, “yet it expanded into this huge piece measuring 6 feet wide and 14 feet high.”
Even bigger and more muscular is “Black Ice,” a 20-foot-wide Arctic landscape engraved, painted and assembled by Alexandria artist Rosemary Feit Covey.
Though her “Gingko” and “Fish” images are substantially smaller, the same curious combination of elvish craftsmanship and robust size makes you stop to look — and if you do it closely you will find hundreds if not thousands of small wood engravings that have been pulled through a press, cut out and then collaged into complex and arresting images.
“Wood engraving is a very old process,” Paul said, “but this is an entirely new way to do it.”
Old Dominion University artist Domenica Webb takes a similar tack with her oversize cyanotype prints, using an early photographic medium and direct printing to make otherworldly images of veils, dresses and blouses once worn by Webb or various family members.
Burned into the blue paper with sunlight, some images are then embellished with pins, stitching and buttons, too, adding the presence of the artist’s hand to these ethereal surrogates of her childhood and family.
“They’re beautiful,” Paul says, “and very personal.”
“In Print”
Where: Portsmouth Art and Cultural Center, 1846 Courthouse, 400 High St., Portsmouth.
PORTSMOUTH, VA – The Portsmouth Art & Cultural Center, located in historic Olde Towne Portsmouth, Virginia kicks off their exhibition season offering two new exhibits during an opening reception on Friday, March 2 from 5:00-8:00 p.m. Portsmouth Here & Now II celebrates the creativity of those who work or live in the Portsmouth community. In Print pulls artists from across the United States to present an exhibition that explores the innovative ways that contemporary artists have expanded upon printmaking techniques to create original fine art prints and mixed media works for the display. The First Friday music series features Matt Thomas on acoustic & harp guitar.
In Print offers some of the longstanding and popular printmaking techniques; lithography, intaglio or etching, drypoint, woodcut or wood engraving, aquatint and soft-ground etching. Over the last century, newer techniques such as serigraphy or screen-printing, collograph, mono-printing and photo-etching along with combinations of all of the above have enriched the printing techniques that artists use today. New surfaces have also expanded how artists print and present their work. Featured are many examples of these processes presented by prominent artists and printmakers Charles Beneke, Rosemary Feit Covey, Staci Katsias, Clay McGlamory, Althea Murphy-Price, Amanda Outcalt-Hoyt, Nicole Pietrantoni, Jenny Robinson, Tanja Softić, and Dominica Webb. In Print continues through May 28, 2018.
Artist ROSEMARY FEIT COVEY is featured in the upcoming print and online editions of the Winter 2018 issue of the James Renwick Alliance Craft Quarterly. You can get a sneak peek below. To see available work by Rosemary, please visit our website or stop in and see us at the gallery!
Morton Fine Art is proud to announce that ROSEMARY FEIT COVEY’s wood engraving “Vanity” is on display at the Yale University Art Gallery.
ROSEMARY FEIT COVEY, Vanity, wood engraving
Rosemary Feit Covey
South African and American, born 1954
Vanity
1988
Wood engraving
Edition 35/80
In this domestic tableau, the dressing room and table of Washington D.C.–based printmaker Rosemary Feit Covey are transformed into the stage set for a vanitas—traditionally, a type of still-life painting in which skeletons, skulls, and decaying objects serve to caution against the transience of earthly pleasures. One of the premier wood engravers of the contemporary period, Covey here makes an allegory of herself by drawing a parallel between the artist’s laborious process of direct carving into a wood block to render the black-and-white portrait and her similarly difficult work of maintaining the appearance of youth and beauty, with the aid of colorful makeup and jewelry.
Self-Portrait Prints from the Jane N. Haslem Collection
Curator’s Statement
Scholars have debated whether William Shakespeare’s well-known words “This above all, to thine own self be true,” spoken by the courtier Polonius to his son Laertes in the first act of Hamlet, were meant ironically. In any case, the words were not directed at artists. But when we look at an artist’s self-portrait, we assume that he or she is conveying something truthful—even if, indeed, the image is clearly ironic, as is Robert Arneson’s self- portrait as a classical bust, or if the artist refers to the biblical story of Salome, as does Larry Day, or if the figure appears in the age-old guise of an allegory of Vanity, as does Rosemary Feit Covey. Covey’s print, in fact, speaks to one of the fundamental reasons artists make self- portraits: to assert, in defiance of the skeletal figure lurking behind each of us, “I am here,” in the present, and—even more importantly—in the future, “I was here.”
These works, selected from a recent gift to the Gallery from Jane N. Haslem of sixty-eight printed self-portraits by twentieth-century American artists, range in mood from contented to haunted, in tone from earnest to sardonic, in composition from a straightforward head and shoulders to the complex scenarios of John Wilde or Peter Milton. They vary significantly in size, and they were produced by a broad gamut of printmaking media— woodcut, etching, engraving, drypoint, and lithography. Yet, with all of these variations, each print persuades us that it is true to the artist’s self.
Rosemary Feit Covey’s “Gingko,” mixed media on canvas, on view at Morton Fine Art. (Rosemary Feit Covey/Morton Fine Art)
Rosemary Feit Covey
Nature teems in Rosemary Feit Covey’s large mixed-media paintings. Hundreds of pink and red fish school in spirals, and uncountable yellow ginkgo leaves cover most of a deep blue background. Yet the Washington artist has doubts about the fecundity she depicts. Her Morton Fine Art show is titled “The Planet Is a Delicate Thing.”
Covey’s skills include woodblock printing, whose carving technique she incorporates into low-relief pictures that are partly engraved and partly painted. This array’s epic, “Black Ice,” is an immersive eight-panel tableaux; it fills the gallery’s longest wall with blue-and-white ice floes on a darker-than-wine sea. The dramatic Arctic oceanscape, like the polar bear on the adjacent wall, was inspired by a trip to northern Norway.
The artist doesn’t directly portray ecological disasters, although this show includes one of the bone-pile pictures she has exhibited at Morton before. But global warming menaces the polar scenes, and those fish are fleeing the oil from the 2010 Deepwater Horizon blowout. Covey’s responses to such disasters are both expansive and exquisitely detailed.
Rosemary Feit Covey: The Planet Is a Delicate Thing On view through July 9 at Morton Fine Art, 1781 Florida Ave. NW. 202-628-2787. mortonfineart.com.
In The Planet is a Delicate Thing, internationally renowned artist ROSEMARY FEIT COVEY explores the balance between climate, the environment, and human life through large-scale mixed media works. Covey, who uses natural landscape and seascape as inspiration for her work, reminds us how delicate and nuanced life can be. The Planet is a Delicate Thing celebrates COVEY, experimental printmaker and artist, who is widely collected internationally and in the DC metropolitan area and has artwork in numerous permanent museum collections around the globe.
About ROSEMARY FEIT COVEY
ROSEMARY FEIT COVEY was born in Johannesburg, South Africa. In a career spanning four decades she has exhibited internationally and received countless awards. Ms. COVEY is the recipient of both a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship and Alpha Delta Kappa Foundation National Fine Art Award. Her work is featured in numerous major museum and library collections, including the former Corcoran Gallery of Art, the New York Public Library Print Collection, the National Museum of American History, Yale University, Johns Hopkins Evergreen Museum, Harvard University, Tweed Museum, and the Papyrus Institute in Cairo, Egypt.
In 2012, five hundred of her prints were acquired for the permanent collection of Georgetown University Library, Special Collections. ROSEMARY FEIT COVEY is represented by Morton Fine Art in Washington, DC. The Planet is a Beautiful Thing is Ms. COVEY’s fifth solo exhibition at MFA.
About Morton Fine Art
Founded in 2010 in Washington, DC, Morton Fine Art (MFA) is a fine art gallery and curatorial group that collaborates with art collectors and visual artists to inspire fresh ways of acquiring contemporary art. Firmly committed to the belief that art collecting can be cultivated through an educational stance, MFA’s mission is to provide accessibility to museum-quality contemporary art through a combination of substantive exhibitions and a welcoming platform for dialogue and exchange of original voice. Morton Fine Art specializes in a stellar roster of nationally and internationally renowned artists as well as has an additional focus on African American and African art.
Morton Fine Art: curator's notes 