Opening February 1st at the Hall
Silkscreen prints by Robert Shreefter
Missed Robert’s Artist Chat on 2/18? You can watch a recording of it below!
Virtual Exhibit
For dimensions and more info, please call (508)349-1800 or email Emily@wellfleetpreservationhall.org
Artist statement
This exhibit includes both older and newer work. All the works are silkscreen prints that often incorporate elements of monoprints and drypoint etching. My way of working is in series -- producing prints that are thematically and technically related. Each series is informed by some theme and bits of poetry and combining new techniques. I use these techniques to create layers of visual material that echo layers of narrative and biographic elements that I am working with.
While the themes and imagery are quite different from one body of work to another, I most often return to a process of mapping. The prints are not, of course, literal maps; they are maps that, while based on interior spaces I have inhabited, are more about emotional rather than physical space. The stories and narratives of these spaces are central to my art making. Coherent or linear narratives are not the aim; it is instead the memory and feeling of these stories/spaces that are mapped. As the mapmaker, the basis of this kind of emotional mapping is the fact that feeling, memories, spaces and places are very much connected.
About the artist
Robert Shreefter is an artist, artist-educator, curator and gallery director. For many years he was a professor at Lesley University, in Cambridge, MA. He was a faculty in the Graduate School of Education, where he co-directed the Graduate Art Education Program He served as the director and curator of the Marran Gallery and the Atrium Gallery at Lesley University, exhibiting the work of students, faculty and community artists.
Shreefter has taught and directed workplace/adult literacy programs, served as an artist–in-residence in schools, community organizations, literacy councils and libraries working with a variety of diverse populations including pregnant teenagers, homeless people, migrant Hispanic youth, special education students and incarcerated youth. He has also taught undergraduates and graduates at the Art Institute of Boston, studio and art education courses at the Massachusetts College of Art and the Harvard Graduate School of Education and Art New England. He worked with students and teachers in arts integration and literacy enhancement in Boston Public School’s Charles Sumner School in Roslindale and the Marshall School in Dorchester as part of five-year National Endowment of the Arts grant.
Shreefter is an active studio artist, concentrating on printmaking. His prints and handmade books have been shown in galleries at the University of North Carolina—Chapel Hill; Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art, Winston-Salem, NC; The Plum Gallery, Williamstown, MA; Lesley University galleries; Farm gallery, Wellfleet, MA; Castle Hill Center of the Arts, Truro, MA; and Provincetown Art Association and Museum, Provincetown, MA.
Currently, he is the Founding Member and curator of the Off Main Gallery in Wellfleet, MA a member-based, community-oriented gallery created to promote local artists from the Outer-Cape community.
