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Rehoboth Art League Members’ Fine Art Exhibit opens July 26

July 14, 2019

Story Location:
12 Dodds Lane
Rehoboth Beach, DE 19958
United States

Rehoboth Art League’s 81st Annual Members’ Fine Art Exhibition will open with a reception from 5 to 7 p.m., Friday, July 26, at the art league in Henlopen Acres.

This exhibition showcases artworks by more than 100 Rehoboth Art League member artists in a wide variety of media including paintings in pastel, watercolor, acrylic, oil and mixed media; sculptures; both digital and darkroom photography; and more.

Following a long-standing tradition, a variety of awards for excellence, including the Sarah Ethel Tunnell Award for Best in Show, the Mary Hall Leach Award for outstanding work, the Louise Chambers Award for excellence in sculpture, and the Faucett Okie Award for an emerging Delaware artist, will be presented at the opening reception.

This year’s awards judge is Leslie Shaffer, interim executive director at the Delaware Contemporary. Shaffer completed her undergraduate studies in the history of art and architecture at Indiana University of Pennsylvania and received her master of arts degree in museum studies from John F. Kennedy University in Berkeley, Calif. She has held teaching positions at the Delaware College of Art and Design, Albertus Magnus College, and the Corcoran College of Art and Design, among others.

Shaffer has a long history in museums’ educational programs; has served as curator of education at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and executive director of Artspace in New Haven, Conn.

Shaffer will give an informative gallery talk about her award-winning selections at 2 p.m., Saturday, July 27, at the Rehoboth Art League. She will discuss the process of judging such a large exhibition and review some of the works chosen. She will also be available to speak to individual artists privately about their work. This gallery talk is supported in part by Delaware Humanities.

There will also be an opening reception from 5 to 7 p.m., July 26, at the Homestead for Ethereal Ireland, works by Beth Trepper.

She said, “For a country boasting 40 shades of green, it might seem odd to portray the beauty of Ireland in near-monochrome photography. But once I started to shoot these images, I was drawn to the timeless drama and haunting quality the infrared camera produces. Ireland is such an ancient, mystical place, steeped in history and folklore; the dreamlike properties of infrared, which converts green foliage to snowy white and people to ghost-like figures, seems to evoke the mood of my ancestral Irish heritage. I have traveled throughout Ireland nearly two dozen times. Each journey has brought new discoveries and familiar homecomings. Staying on farms in the wild Connemara region and the remote southwestern peninsulas has given me access to dramatic, breathtaking scenery, gregarious villagers and my very favorite pastimes: wandering aimlessly down a dirt road, stopping to talk to the animals or exploring the rugged coastline.”

Trepper’s eclectic portfolio comprises fine art, fashion, portraiture, figurative, documentary, landscape and entertainment images. In more than 400 solo and group gallery exhibitions, she has shown her work extensively throughout the U.S., Ireland, Europe and the Caribbean, and has numerous book, magazine and newspaper publishing credits. Trepper has won many photographic awards and in 2007 was inducted into the National League of American Pen Women in the Division of Arts. She was a founding member of the Brandywine Photo Collective in northern Delaware, a group of regional professional photographers. In 2017, she was awarded an Established Artist Fellowship from the Delaware Division of the Arts, a subsidiary of the National Endowment for the Arts.

All these events are free and open to the public. The Rehoboth Art League is at 12 Dodds Lane in Henlopen Acres. For more information, go to www.RehobothArtLeague.org.

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