In Wiggle & Wave, Crown's highly coloristic, powerful paintings dialogue with Lubliner's playful sculptures made of found metal. Using different visual media, each artist explores the tensions and resolutions, harmony and discord, and the form and motion suggested by her subject.

Roberta Crown, whose earlier work was exhibited at the Queens College Art Center in 1989, focuses on color and form in a series of works inspired by the sea. A visit to New Mexico — an area that once was an inland salt lake connected to the ocean and inhabited by whales — led her to aquariums all over the country. A research trip to the Whaling Village and the Pacific Whale Foundation on the Hawaiian Island of Maui helped Crown develop ideas and sketches for the paintings in this exhibition. Her study materials, she says, “became the motion, color and shapes of a powerful, enormous, mysterious world of my own invention hidden from most of us on land.”

A graduate of Queens College (BA, MA 1970), Crown studied with such noted faculty members as watercolorist Barse Miller and painters John Ferren and Rosemarie Beck. Her work has been exhibited throughout the United States and abroad and has been shown in solo exhibitions in New York City and Washington, DC. Crown’s art also has been acquired for several corporate collections. The recipient of the Mary Karasick and the Leila Sawyer Memorial Awards, Crown serves as Executive Coordinator of the Women in the Arts Foundation, Inc.

Barbara Lubliner, a sculptor known for her flexible postmodern approach to the figural tradition, discovered the creative potential of metal when she took up welding to make armatures and stands for her concrete female figures. “Working with metal was liberation,” she recalls with delight. “I couldn’t help experimenting and playing with scraps of metal and found metal objects.” Works in Lubliner’s “Tickle Metal” series are made of found metal and all move, wiggle or vibrate. They playfully explore metal’s linear qualities, ability to activate space, and capacity to suggest form. As “metal amusements,” the pieces invite participation and play.

Trained at Boston University and at the National Academy of Design, where she studied with Barbara Lekberg and Gabriel Koren and received prestigious awards, Lubliner has exhibited in numerous venues since the early 1990s, including important solo exhibitions in the New York area. She has lectured widely and presented in many art and art experience workshops.

In Mono.logue, the Korean-born, New York-based artist Seongmin Ahn explores Asian ritual through works on paper. The exhibition presents abstract, paper-based works drawn from intensely personal experiences of this artist whose life and work are grounded in the meeting of the East and West. Ahn’s working processes, which she likens to philosophical deliberation and Buddhist religious rituals, produce visual counterparts to her struggle with chronic pain.

In her Meditation series, Ahn folds rice paper into orderly geometric patterns, which mimic the rhythm of each breath during meditation; she then dyes the creased paper by repeatedly spraying or dipping it in blue water or black sumi ink. In Weaving Pain, Ahn weaves strips of burnt mulberry paper dyed with Asian herbs, which she has used as medicine. In Untitled, she burns holes repetitively with incense stick, the number of holes referencing Buddhist beliefs.

Through these meditative processes, Ahn creates delicate, shadowy drawings and installations with a strong sculptural presence. Restrained, cerebral and elegant, they simultaneously evoke the esthetic and thinking of traditional Asian art and refer to post-World War II American abstract movements such as color field painting and minimalism. The works transform space, suggest calm, invite contemplation, and search for spiritual purity.

Ahn moved to the United States from Korea in the late 1990s. Soon afterwards, she contracted a chronic illness that baffled doctors. To alleviate her symptoms, she turned to meditation exercises, which proved critical to her physical and psychological recovery and eventually helped her transcend pain. Her meditative working process became as important as the art itself. As Ahn explains:

My works begin with my struggle with the physical pain – how to accept it as a part of my life, how to take advantage of it and how to transform those facts into a beauty of life. My experience with pain has given me time to look at myself inside and search for inner value. My tool is philosophical deliberation and various ways of ritual practice.

My repetitive working process is akin to religious rituals and serves as a visual documentation of enduring moments of my life with chronic pain. Through the process of folding papers, weaving them or burning holes with incense repetitively, I transform the enduring nature of pain into objects of contemplation and beauty. Also, engaged with physical labor I am aware of my existence, and try to imagine what underlies spirituality. I experience a state of Zen in a way of working.

Ahn is a graduate of the Maryland Institute College of Art (MFA 2001) and the Seoul National University (MFA, BFA). Her work has been exhibited throughout the United States and abroad and shown in solo exhibitions in New York City, Baltimore, and Seoul, Korea. Ahn’s art also has been acquired for several public and corporate collections. The recipient of prestigious awards and residencies, including a Pollock- Krasner Foundation grant, Ahn recently lectured at the Washington Arts Center in Arlington, Virginia, and at the Asian American Art Center at the Korea Society in New York.

How We Use Land began as an attempt to demonstrate how land is used in a specific urban environment, but developed toward a more universal interpretation of our relationship with the environment. The borough of Queens—a place of contradictions and extremes, where the diversity of people, nature, and industry is more evident and intertwined than almost anywhere else in the country—presents the ultimate challenge to the natural landscape. Documenting aspects of the American way of life projected onto the urban landscape of Queens County, Melhado attempts, in his words, to build "on the tradition of landscape photography as a uniquely American contribution to the history of art."

His strong attachment to the parks of Queens became the source for Melhado’s first portfolio of photographic images—included in this exhibition—and led to his compilation of undoubtedly the most extensive visual record of the county’s expansive landscape. Over a period of seven years, he produced more than 3,000 negatives that detailed virtually every aspect of 32 Queens parks. Melhado’s newest project builds on this Queens County Parks Series.

Says Melhado:

As a photographer my concerns have always revolved around examining the identity of things, more specifically identifying qualities inherent in the human condition as often reflected in our environment. . . . In previous landscape work, such as the Queens County Parks portfolio, I presented a landscape that was as much about place as it was about challenging the perceptions of urban parkland. . . .

In How We Use Land, my interest is in the representation of Landscape not as a place but as an object, a material we shape in ways that reflect our concerns. The work does not attempt to criticize the utilization of land in the urban environment, but instead poses the question of how is land best used? . . . The question is as much about how land is used in the urban environment as it is about how the psychological condition of a civilization is reflected in the landscape. This is a unique aspect of urban land that makes it infinitely more diverse than the great unspoiled wilderness, to the extent that there remains such a thing. . . In this portfolio the landscape is the subject used to explore ways in which our identity is projected onto the outside world.

Largely self-taught as a photographer and informed by the work of the great American photographers—he credits Edward Weston for revealing to him "the difference between making art and being an artist" —and contemporaries like George Tice, Bruce Davidson, and Andre Serrano, Melhado focuses his work on landscapes, still lifes and portraits. He uses large-format-view antique cameras of various sizes (4x4, 8x10) and a 12x20 inch century-old banquet camera, and processes and prints his work—all in black and white—himself, to insure the highest reproduction quality.

Melhado is a graduate of the C. W. Post branch of Long Island University (MFA 2003) and Queens College (M.Ed. in counseling 1996, BA in psychology and painting 1986). He also studied painting and printmaking at the Arts Students League. Melhado teaches photography at Post and conducts workshops on large-format photography and darkroom techniques. He has received prestigious awards from the Queens Council on the Arts, the International Photography Institute, Editor’s Choice Awards from the International Library of Photography (1999 and 2000), and Awards of Excellence from "Best of Photography Annuals" (1996 and 2000).

Melhado’s work has been exhibited throughout the New York area and elsewhere in the United States, and published in Photography Quarterly, B&W Magazine, Portfolio One, and Best of Photography Annual. Relevant to the current exhibition are his Queens County Parks: Forty Photographs from Thirty Two Parks (New York, Silverprint Gallery, 2002); A New Beginning, a portfolio of 15 landscape photographs from this series; and How We Use Land (Silverprint Gallery, 2005). Other portfolios include Manifestations of the Spirit (visual details in the urban landscape) and Northern Light (winter still lifes, portraits, and domestic scenes). He is currently working on a portfolio of portraits and still life images entitled The Difficulties of Being.

Light Listened – the exhibit title inspired by a Theodore Roethke poem – presents selections from the work that Mandelbaum has created since her 1998 Painting and Glass Art exhibition in the Art Center. Techniques vary; some works were executed in the traditional leaded glass method, while others are individual paintings on single sheets of antique glass often intended for residential use. The exhibit also includes watercolors (one of the artist’s favorite media for developing ideas and visual language for her works in glass), as well as a selection of presentation drawings and documentation of her architectural art-glass projects.

The exhibition also features Colors of the Sky, a work of painted glass panels more than five feet high, installed in the Rosenthal Library’s west windows overlooking the Manhattan skyline. This installation will remain on permanent view.

I work in glass and paint with color and light. My work in the traditional leaded glass method is an adventurous and exciting art made out of a rigid glowing material held together by lead and the flow of my brush. There is something infinite about this art, with colors that change because of the weather and the sky.

My intention is to make beautiful work with meaning, often to help create a holy space. I had started as an expressive painter. However, in the mid-seventies I discovered stained glass and was excited to use my painterly modes of expression, line, color and form to create new free work in glass.

Since 1981 I have been creating architectural stained glass and permanent kiln-fired glass painting, collaborating with professionals in the fields of art and architecture and religion. It is a great pleasure to design my glass with the architect and for the people who use the building. I have been delighted to make architectural work that is creative and non-traditional. Some have won awards. At the same time, I am always aware of the seriousness of architectural purpose and that I am helping to create a permanent prayerful experience or secular space for people’s real use.

Mandelbaum is a graduate of Indiana University (MFA in painting 1963) and has studied with major glass artists, as well as at the Stained Glass School at North Adams, MA and the Pilchuck Glass Center, WA. She has been Resident Artist at the Contemporary Kalani Honua Center in Hawaii (1995) and has taught glass painting and architectural glass at Ellen Mandelbaum Glass Art Studio since 1981. Before she turned to glass, she also taught painting, drawing and modern art history at Hunter College and Pace University in New York City.

Mandelbaum’s architectural commissions since 1993 include glass for many churches and synagogues across the U.S. Her work for Christ United Methodist Church in Honolulu won the "Bene" and Best of Show award from the Ministry and Liturgy Magazine in 2001, and her work for Adath Jeshurun Synagogue in Minneapolis received the 1997 Religious Art Award of Excellence from the American Institute of Architects. She has also received awards from Modern Liturgy Magazine (including Visual Award of Excellence, 1987 and 1989); the AIA Interfaith Forum on Religion, Art and Architecture (Award for Stained Glass Design, 1986 and 1987); and the Stained Glass Association of America (Associates’ Exhibition "Judge’s Choice," 1985). In addition, her work can be seen in the South Carolina Aquarium and Greater Baltimore Medical Center. Mandelbaum’s art has been exhibited throughout the United States as well as in Canada, the United Kingdom, Ireland, New Zealand, Japan, France and Germany. Her work is represented in public, corporate and private collections in the United States and abroad, and has been featured in articles in Stained Glass Quarterly, Architectural Record, Home Magazine, The New York Times, Jewish Week, and in monographs, exhibition catalogs and reviews. Her own discussions of art have been appearing in print since 1968.