Tickets
General Ticket: $10
Members: Free, RSVP Required
Peter Solow joins us for our final Insight Sunday of the year. An esteemed visual artist in both oil painting and drawing, Solow is also a beloved educator of the East End. Join the pedagogue for an inspiring discussion that takes a deep dive into his work Piazza Signoria, which is included in our exhibition Here & There: The First Churchennial.
Hear how “the act and process of drawing [is] a creative, transformative, experience,” and how those ideas about the art making process are at the heart of Solow’s work. The discussion will then open to a thoughtful Q&A with the audience.
Piazza Signoria, which is part of a larger body of work known as A Field Guide to Florence, is one of the largest works in our exhibition. It can be seen during our exhibition hours, Thursday – Monday, 11 AM – 5 PM, up on our mezzanine level.
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Born in 1952 in New York City, Peter Solow was raised in Manlius, New York a suburb of Syracuse. Solow graduated Cooper Union with a BFA and went on to receive his master’s in art education from Goddard College.
At Cooper he studied with Dore Ashton, Nick Marsicano, Stephen Posen, John Walker, Wolf Kahn, Paul Resika, Jack Whitten, Sue Gussow, Andrew Forge, James Brooks and Rueben Kadish. For Solow this experience, which opened a door to the world of art and a constellation of ideas and questions, providing him a foundation for his rich and textured approach to making art. It continues to act as a catalyst for his work.
After graduation, Solow spent his formative years living in New York City working at odd jobs, making art, and working to put the lessons learned at Cooper into practice. Building not only on this art making experience but also on the city itself he continued to discover his predilections and passions, deepening his understandings about art, and solidifying his ideas about artist process. His years in New York were transformative. While in New York he began to exhibit his work both in the city and United States
In 1990, he moved to Sag Harbor, New York on the east end of Long Island where he still resides.
A seminal event in Solow’s artistic and personal life was a visit to Italy in 1984. It was truly a transformative experience, especially his time in Florence and his first encounter with both the city and Italian Renaissance and pre-Renaissance painting. Since that first visit he has returned numerous times including an extended stay with his family in 1992.
Mr. Solow is best known for his oil paintings and drawings. More recently while not abandoning these traditional mediums, he has experimented with mixed media composites integrating painting, drawing, photography and digital technology. His subjects range from the streets and interiors of New York, to the landscape of central New York State and the East End of Long Island and the piazzas and landscapes of Italy. Irrespective of the subject and medium what unifies his work is its continued dialog with and about process and his very personal approach to drawing which is essential to his work.
While Mr. Solow draws inspiration from a variety of sources Giacometti, Manet, Cassatt, Rembrandt, Van Gogh, Matisse and Mondrian his work is also connected to the American Experience, including in visual art of Hopper, Homer, Franz Kline, Stieglitz, Dorothea Lang, Bernice Abbott, Francesca Woodman, the music Copland and Armstrong and the poetry of Walt Whitman.
He has had an extensive teaching career both in the visual arts and academic subjects including in the International Baccalaureate program and is the former coordinator of The Donald Reutershan Education Trust created in support of Visual Arts and Architecture Education.