Rivers Community Celebrates Centennial Arts Night

10/24/2015

As Rivers’ Centennial year begins to wind down, the Rivers community will gather to celebrate the arts on Friday, October 30, with an evening concert in Kraft Dining Hall and a gallery reception with alumni artists in Bell Gallery, both in the Campus Center.

The concert, which begins at 7:30 p.m., will feature four Upper School ensembles: the Select Combo 1, Men's and Women's Choruses, Chamber Orchestra, and Big Band. The groups will perform music ranging from jazz compositions by Charles Mingus to traditional American folk songs to a selection from Aaron Copeland’s “Rodeo.”

Prior to intermission, David Saul, chair of the Visual Arts Department, will give a gallery talk about the artists featured in the exhibit which was recently installed. During intermission there will be a reception in the gallery with an opportunity to talk with the artists—John Cyr '99, Cate Mathers-Suter '97, and Gary Haven Smith '68.

John Cyr is a New York-based photographer and assistant professor of photographic imaging at Suffolk County Community College. He earned his MFA from the School of Visual Arts and his work has been featured in various publications including the New York Times, BBC News, ARTnews, and TIME. Cyr's photography is represented in many notable public and private collections, including George Eastman House International Museum of Photography, the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History, and the New York Public Library.

Cyr’s exhibited work includes a number of photographs from his “Developer Trays” series. “I am photographing available developer trays so that the photography community will remember specific, tangible printing tools that have been a seminal part of the photographic experience for the past hundred years,” said Cyr in his artist’s statement. Other works include photographs of New York’s Gowanus Canal and its polluted oil slicks, as well as commercial sites and urban landscapes surrounding the canal. Finally, there are three silver gelatin prints, “rendered to a point of maximum, readable density in order to force a moment of image discovery upon their viewers.”

Cate Mathers-Suter’s earliest training took place at Rivers with Jeremy Harrison and at Fenway Studios under Robert Cormier. After earning a BFA at Rhode Island School of Design, she received grants to live and create art in Cuba, then moved to Madrid to work as an artist. In 2007 she received her MFA from the Slade School of Fine Arts in London and was a finalist for the Celeste Prize. Her one-person-show, “Naturally Man-Made,” was acclaimed by the Boston Globe as “otherworldly” and “satisfyingly enigmatic.”

Her exhibited work “explores the relationship between environments created by man and those that exist in the natural world,” according to her artist’s statement. “I experiment with this dynamic in landscape as well as in still life.” Three pieces are still life drawings of organic matter restrained by cubic and rectangular prisms. Her second series was created during artist residencies in northern Iceland, Wyoming, and Vermont. The last two images are from a series of collections. “I have always been fascinated by the things the average person collects and the things he discards. I am not sure which says more about who we are. For the past two decades I have gathered and sketched small objects that I find evocative of people, places, and experiences from my life.”

Gary Haven Smith received his degree in Fine Arts from the University of New Hampshire in 1973. He has earned numerous awards, including a Pollock- Krasner Grant, and he was awarded a Lifetime Fellowship from the New Hampshire State Council on the Arts. Exhibiting with galleries in New England, New York City, and Japan, Smith’s works are also included in private and public collections nationally and internationally.

“My interest lies in an engagement with art that connects ancient natural materials with our present day technological lives,” he states. “My early carving was done using only hand tools and this process has evolved to using diamond technology, computer imagery and elaborate mechanically driven systems designed to help cut the stone in elaborate ways. Lately, I have become enthralled with working with glacial boulders that I find in gravel pits. These boulders that have been rolled and tumbled by the glaciers and then buried have their own wonderful legacy. I help continue their journey by interacting with them by cutting and carving them.”

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