The David Winton Bell Gallery will showcase Six Painters June 13 - July 12

Six Painters, a new exhibition at the Bell Gallery, will be on display from June 13 through July 12, 1998. It features works by members of the Rhode Island Chapter of the National Museum of Women in the Arts.

PROVIDENCE, R.I. -- The David Winton Bell Gallery will present Six Painters, an exhibition drawn from the membership of the Rhode Island Chapter of the National Museum of Women in the Arts, from June 13 through July 12, 1998. The exhibition includes paintings by Hyun Chang, Nancy Friese, Kathryn Hagy, Gayle Wells Mandle, Penelope Manzella, and Anne Elizabeth Tait. The juried exhibition was curated by Jo-Ann Conklin, director of the Bell Gallery.

Stylistically diverse, the exhibition includes abstractions, expressionistic landscapes, urban views that border on the surreal, and psychologically charged dreamscapes rendered in a cartoon style. According to Conklin, "Any number of interesting exhibitions could have been drawn from the submitted works; this was simply one of many options."

An opening reception will be held at 5:30 p.m. Friday, June 12, at the gallery, which is located in the List Art Center, 64 College St., in Providence. The gallery is open Monday through Friday, from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. and Saturday and Sunday from 1 p.m. to 4 p.m. It will be closed July 4 and 5. For further information call 401/863-2932. Both the opening reception and the exhibition are free and open to the public.

Hyun H. Chang was born in Korea and immigrated to the United States in 1976. She studied art at the University of Wisconsin, New York University, and Rhode Island School of Design. Her diaristic narratives - with titles such as Test of Courage, For Love and Marriage, and Women Trying to Destroy Her Shadow - are rendered in a simplified style of painting and in dark, often monotone colors that accentuate the surreal, dreamlike quality of the images. Chang's work will be included in a two-person show at Mario Diacono Gallery, Boston, in June.

Nancy Friese has taught printmaking and painting at the Rhode Island School of Design since 1981. She holds an MFA from Yale University School of Art and is the recipient of numerous awards including three grants from the National Endowment for the Arts. Her work is included in the collections of Aetna Life & Casualty, Fidelity Corporation, and the Grunwald Center for Graphic Arts at UCLA, among others. Friese will show several recent landscapes created in Pont Aven, France, and Providence.

Kathryn Hagy grew up on the West Coast and recently moved to Providence, where she is pursuing an MFA at the Rhode Island School of Design. Her works have been included in two Pacific Northwest Annuals at the Bellevue Art Museum in Bellevue, Wash. Working with abstract compositions, Hagy employs organic shapes - droplets, circles, leaf- and cloud-like forms - and a sophisticated palette.

Gayle Mandle studied art at the Corcoran School of Art and Washington Studio School and recently received her MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design. Her collages and paintings are executed in a manner associated with abstract expressionism. The exhibition will include five new pieces based on the artist's views of her role as mother, daughter, wife, and friend. Each is created on a canvas bag acquired from the U.S. Postal Service that has been cut open into kimono- or crucifix-shaped panels.

Brick buildings - mostly factories that have fallen into disuse - appear in Penelope Manzella's paintings. In some instances the buildings are the subjects, but more often they present a backdrop for mysterious, quirky or humorous happenings. Dogs pose on tables; chimneys on buildings ape the form of men standing below. Manzella has been exhibiting since 1977 and has had one-person shows at Virginia Lynch, AS220, Wheeler Gallery, and Kristina Wasserman Gallery, among others. She received a BFA in painting and sculpture from Columbia University.

Anne Tait will be represented by several round paintings. Most often these works, which have titles like Partition, Spawn and Milky World I, resemble views of a micro- or macro-cosmos: Cells divide, sperm swim, constellations swirl into view. Squirt seems to be something of a departure from this theme: The striped panel is covered with a pattern of googly eyes which jiggle as the painting rotates. Tait received her MFA from American University and a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design. She has taught at Island Arts in Newport and at the Chautauqua Institution. Her work has been shown in exhibitions at Minneapolis College of Art and Design; Chautauqua Institution; Watkins Gallery, American University; and Island Arts Gallery, Newport.