"Artist Tara Geer, known for her raw, almost sculptural charcoal drawings, has been on a roll this year. Her large-scale works were the focus of a compelling Guild Gallery show in downtown New York this past spring, titled “Unstill World” (April 20–May 27), juxtaposed with sculptural designs by four Japanese fiber artists placed strategically throughout the gallery.
On July 22, the Arts Center at Duck Creek—a 19th-century barn in East Hampton—will open “Tara Geer: Sown in the Half Light,” an exhibition of large drawings (through August 20) that features a mix of unusual bulbs, stems and wildly scribbled panels. It marks the first public, large-scale installation of her work.
Geer counts a wide range of styles as influences, ranging from traditional Chinese landscape painting and early Japanese calligraphy to Mexican “retablos,” small, colorful paintings typically executed on tin. She has been a teacher in the art and art education program at Columbia University’s Teachers College for the past three decades, all while continuing to sketch her charcoals.
Geer’s works are held in several museum and public collections, including the Morgan Library & Museum, the Parrish Museum, and the William Louis Dreyfus Foundation, among others. Her work with the six-woman activist collective Victory Garden is in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the New York Historical Society, the Beinecke Library at Yale University, and the Canadian Museum. After a recent walkthrough of the Guild Gallery show with the artist, we caught up with her for a virtual visit to her West Harlem studio on the eve of the new show."- Eileen Kinsella
