Sultzes to exhibit collages, stoneware at Museum of Art

Two Dennysville artists will exhibit their work at the Bates College Museum of Art in an upper-gallery exhibit, Phil Sultz: Painted Collage; Jan Sultz: Stoneware Forms, June 5-Aug. 15.

An opening reception will be held June 5 at 7 p.m. in the museum located in the Olin Arts Center. The public is invited to attend free of charge.

Philip and Jan Sultz, husband and wife, are artists living in Dennysville since 1990. The recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship Grant in Painting in 1975, Philip Sultz will exhibit more than 50 painted collages. “My work is not narrative or realist. It’s based on the structure I find in nature. I feel strongly akin to nature, to its dualities and its complimentary forms,” said Phil Sultz, whose key motivation is to build composition and color. According to Ed McCormack, a reviewer for ARTSPEAK magazine, “Subtlety is everything in Sultz’s small, gemlike arrangements of cut paper and matte pigment. He is an artist who can practically stop your breath or break your heart with a slight shift from mauve to mustard.”

From 1966 to 1989, Phil Sultz taught painting, drawing and anatomy at Webster University in St. Louis, Mo., where he was named professor emeritus in 1993. He has exhibited at the Allan Stone Gallery in New York since 1976 and taught painting and drawing at the Rhode Island School of Design and the Kansas City Art Institute. He attended Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan, Albright Art School in Buffalo, N.Y., and the Academia di Belle Arti in Rome.

After nine years in Maine, Phil Sultz says: “I think I know how it feels to be a monk. I work every day in my studio. I’m isolated, but this kind of isolation is liberation. I have a wonderful freedom to goof up and to then find a solution and to be shocked by what I come across. I can get into my thoughts and form-making in a deeper sense.”

Jan Sultz will exhibit close to 40 stoneware vessel forms, “some with expanding space, some enclosing,” Jan Sultz said of her pieces, “thrown and modulated, glazed with combinations of rock and ash and clay, fired in clear and smoky atmospheres.”

Jan Sultz has exhibited at the Allan Stone Gallery in New York since 1978 as well as the Eastern Bay Gallery in Brooklyn since 1993. She also has been affiliated with the Lill Street Gallery in Chicago, the Elliot Smith Gallery in St. Louis, Mo., and America House in New York. She has exhibited in group shows throughout the United States. A ceramics teacher at Webster University, St. Louis, from 1966 to 1989 and the Kansas City Art Institute from 1958 to 1962, Jan Sultz studied painting and ceramics at the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan, where she received an M.F.A.

In addition to the Sultz show, the lower gallery of the museum will exhibit To Helen With Love: Watercolors by William Thon and continue to display Collection Highlights, featuring paintings, prints, drawings and sculpture, including work by Marsden Hartley.

The Museum of Art, closed Mondays and major holidays, is open Tuesdays through Saturdays from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., and Sundays from 1 to 5 p.m. Admission is free. For tour scheduling and general information, call 207-786-6158.