March Artist of the Month

              Art At The Kent Library

Sponsored by The Friends of Kent Library

with Arts on the Lake

Exhibit: Oil and Watercolor Paintings

Show Dates: March 2nd-31st

 

Joan M. Kendall

    Joan is a former teacher of deaf and hard of hearing children with a Masters Degree in Deaf Education from Boston University. She developed curriculum and worked in schools for the deaf in Rhode Island, Illinois, Massachusetts and Connecticut. She taught developmental language and speech, and used art and illustration extensively to teach language and language concepts.

    After leaving a career in teaching, Joan began to pursue her love of art. After first exploring painting in watercolor, she took her first oil painting class at the Silvermine School of Art in New Caanan CT and fell in love with the medium.

She continued attending classes at the Silvermine School of Art with gifted and talented teachers. She has taken workshops with well known realist and contemporary impressionist painters both in the US and abroad. Among her teachers are Dmitri Wright, Maggie Signer, Jeanne McGuire, Larry Moore and Ian Roberts.

    She has traveled to France, Italy, Ireland, Portugal and New Zealand to study and gather materials and ideas for her work. She finds painting a never ending source of challenge, discovery and joy.

                            To purchase art please contact Joan at jmkendallart@gmail.com

Lipstick

Watercolor print on archival paper 16" x 20"

$200

Raven

Oil on Linen 9" x 12"

$350

Fire Cloud

Oil on Canvas 18" x 18"

$350

 

February Artist of the Month

              Art At The Kent Library

Sponsored by The Friends of Kent Library

with Arts on the Lake

Exhibit: Island Hopping

Show Dates: February 2nd-28th

 

Luis Fonseca

    Fonseca is a Bronx-based multidisciplinary artist with a BA in Photography. CCNY My

artwork is shaped by chance encounters, memories, and evolving ideas rather than a

fixed outcome. It began with an invitation for a solo exhibition at Kent Library in Putnam,

New York, a place I encountered while helping a friend install his show. Having worked

in libraries throughout high school and college, the setting prompted me to reflect on

past systems of knowledge and their contrast with contemporary digital information

retrieval. I realized that many younger visitors have never encountered a physical card

catalog, and that absence became the project’s conceptual anchor. While visiting

California, I encountered a carpenter’s workshop and met Michael, who owned an

authentic card catalog. He generously gifted me a portion of it, confirming the card

catalog as the ‘container’ for the project. The work then evolved into a dialogue between

the physical/analog, and the virtual/AI-driven, with ChatGPT assisting in the project’s

research and structure. The ‘content’ emerged from a personal moment of realizing my

ignorance. Preparing for a digital exhibition in Grenada, I realized I did not know where

the country was. This gap in geographic knowledge, despite formal education, became

the catalyst. With AI’s assistance, I assembled maps, lists of Caribbean sovereign

nations and dependencies, Dewey Decimal classifications, and QR-codes. The

installation presents a pebble-textured Caribbean map mounted on metal mesh. Each

island is illuminated by an LED activated by the viewer. Visitors may take a catalog

card.   I now have a better idea where Grenada is!

Island Paradise

12"x12"x3"

$150

Cool Vibes

12"x12"x3"

$150

Island Hopping

7'2"x7'x5"

Not For Sale