On the Grounds 2024
Natalia Arbelaez, Nicole Cherubini, Re Jin Lee and Katy Schimert

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On the Grounds 2024 includes the work of four artists: Natalia Arbelaez, Nicole Cherubini, Re Jin Lee, and Katy Schimert who are each presenting multi-part installations within the landscape that surrounds the Al Held Foundation studio complex. Although conceived and presented as discrete, independent projects, they are united by material, context and distinct interpretations of what can be considered totems.

All four artists are working with clay but with very different approaches, forms, and intentions. Their works are framed by a landscape created by Al Held over a period of 40 years and they respond to, and are to be viewed within, this shared site that they reinterpret and recast for their own purposes. They do not hide or blend in with their surroundings but rather actively engage features of the natural and built environment, collaborate with the plants and animal life that inhabit the property, and employ site lines and visual relationships that enhance their particular meaning and convey specific intent. As objects crafted by artists within a landscape created by an artist, they exist as iconic and highly evocative symbolic structures in conversation with the site they occupy.

River Valley Arts Collective has been proud to partner with the Al Held Foundation on a series of outdoor installations on the foundation's grounds as well as exhibitions presented in Al Held’s former drawing studio and, more recently, performances staged in Held's painting studio.

On the Grounds 2024 is organized by Alyson Baker in collaboration with the Al Held Foundation in Boiceville, NY. The Al Held Foundation is not open to the public, however pre-scheduled and by-appointment guided tours are available.

About the artists:

Natalia Arbelaez is a Colombian American artist, born and raised in Miami, Florida to immigrant parents. In 2016-17, she was a Rittenberg Fellow at the Clay Art Center in Port Chester, New York, and was awarded the Inaugural Artaxis Fellowship that funded a residency to Watershed in Newcastle, Maine. Her work has been exhibited internationally, displayed in museums and galleries, and included in various collections, such as the Everson Museum, MAD Museum, Fuller Museum and The ICA Miami. She has been recognized by the prestigious National Council on Education for the Ceramic Arts (NCECA) as a 2018 Emerging Artist and was a 2018-19 resident artist at the Ceramics Program at Harvard University, where she researched pre-Columbian art and histories. Arbelaez was an artist in residence at the Museum of Art and Design in New York City, where she researched the work of historical and influential women ceramicists of color and continued this research as a 2021 and 2023 Visiting Artist at AMOCA in Pomona, California. She received her Bachelor of Fine Arts from Florida International University and her Master of Fine Arts from The Ohio State University, with an Enrichment Fellowship.

Nicole Cherubini (born 1970, Boston, MA) is an artist and educator whose sculptures explore systems of hierarchy in relation to gender, ownership, and socio economics. In doing so, she seeks to subvert and challenge ideas of purpose, labor, material, and aesthetics. Her work has been featured in solo exhibitions at institutions including the Institute of Contemporary Art (Philadelphia, PA), the Jersey City Museum (Jersey City, NJ), the Nassau County Museum of Art (Roslyn Harbor, NY), the Pérez Art Museum Miami (Miami, FL), the Santa Monica Museum of Art (Los Angeles, CA), The Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery (Saratoga, NY) and University Art Museum (Albany, NY). She has participated in numerous group exhibitions at institutions including the Cranbrook Art Museum (Bloomfield Hills, MI), the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston (Boston, MA), the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art (Kansas City, MO), MoMA PS1 (Long Island City, NY), Museo de Arte Raúl Anguiano (Guadalajara, México), the Museum of Fine Arts (Boston, MA), the Rhode Island School of Design Museum (Providence, RI), the Rose Art Museum (Waltham, MA), Sculpture Center (Long Island City, NY), the Studio Museum in Harlem (New York, NY), Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery (Saratoga, NY), The University of Arkansas Museum (Fayetteville, AR), the Walker Art Center (Minneapolis, MN), Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (North Adams, MA), and Permanenten: The West Norway Museum of Decorative Art (Bergen, Norway). Her work is held in numerous private and public collections, including Cranbrook Art Museum (Bloomfield Hills, MI), Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Cambridge, MA), Museum of Fine Arts (Boston, MA), Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston (Boston, MA), Museum of Arts and Design (New York, NY), Pérez Art Museum Miami (Miami, FL), Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery (Saratoga, NY), Progressive Collection (Mayfield Village, OH), Tishman Speyer Collection (New York, NY), Tufts University Permanent Art Collection (Medford, MA), and University Art Museum (Albany, NY). Cherubini was an artist in residence at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum (Boston, MA). She is a recipient of the Art Matters Foundation Grant, New England Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Sculpture, National Endowments for the Arts Fellowship, The Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award, among others. Cherubini has lectured and taught at numerous institutions including Rhode Island School of Design (Providence, RI), School of the Museum of Fine Arts (Boston, MA), Cranbrook Academy of Art (Bloomfield Hills, MI), Corcoran College of Art (Washington, DC), Pratt Institute (Brooklyn, NY), Hunter College (New York, NY), and currently, at University of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia, PA). Cherubini earned her MFA from New York University (New York, NY), and her BFA from Rhode Island School of Design (Providence, RI).

Re Jin Lee’s work is a unique assembly of individually rolled-out clay slabs and coils created by a 'hand and clay' collaboration inspired by the contemplative process of ceramics and belief in the power of simplicity. A native of São Paulo, Brazil, and of South Korean heritage, Lee draws inspiration from the amalgamation of modern Brazilian architecture, such as the works of Oscar Niemeyer and Lina Bo Bardi, Portuguese colonial architecture, and traditional Korean arts. Initially venturing into the field of fashion design and styling while residing in the United States, she eventually discovered her passion for art and design. Her recent solo and two-person exhibitions titled In Bloom (2023), The Sublime and Formed (2022 and 2021) were curated by Cas Friese at Arden + White Gallery, New Canaan, CT. Lee’s work has been included in group exhibitions Where Land Meets Sea curated by Jane Yang D’haene, Stroll Garden, Los Angeles, CA (2023); Art + Nature + Home, curated by Kate Orne for Upstate Diary at Foreland, Catskill, NY (2021); and Pictures and Vessels curated by Rami Kim, Keystone Gallery, Scott City, KS (2015). Lee earned her degrees in Art, Fashion, and Design from FASM (São Paulo), Central Saint Martins, London College of Design (London), and Istituto Europeo di Design (Milan).

Working across a variety of media, including ceramics, sculpture, drawing, and film, Katy Schimert (b. 1963) uses fragments of personal experience as conceptual impetus. The intersection of the fine and decorative arts is a formal point of departure for the artist. Densely layered, her work suggests sequences of cosmic events occasionally populated by ethereal human figures. The results are visually complex and formally succinct investigations, allowing her work, in various media, to meld together as an ongoing visual essay. Schimert is a 2020 recipient of the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation fellowship and a 2023 artist in residence at The Joan Mitchell Center in New Orleans, LA. She was featured in Drawing as Practice at the National Academy of Design, NY; Making Knowing: Craft in Art, 1950-2019 at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; and participated in Moon Shot at the Moody Center for the Arts at Rice University, Houston, TX; 1997 Whitney Biennial and the 1995 São Paulo Biennial. She has exhibited extensively, with solo exhibitions at Derek Eller, New York, David Zwirner, New York, University Museum of Contemporary Art at U-Mass, Amherst, and The Renaissance Society, Chicago, among others. Schimert serves as Professor and Department Head of Ceramics at Rhode Island School of Design.