Zach Gallery

Brett Day Windham (born in Cambridge, England, raised in Providence, Rhode Island) is a multidisciplinary artist currently working with cyanotype. She received a BFA from Hampshire College, a certificate in painting from SACI in Florence, Italy, and an MFA in Sculpture from the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD). Her work has been exhibited and collected internationally, including at The Griffin Museum (Boston), The Barnes Foundation (Philadelphia), Smack Mellon (New York), the RISD Museum (Providence), the University of Maine Museum of Art (Bangor), and RMCAD (Denver). Windham received a Dean’s fellowship at RISD and was nominated for the Joan Mitchell MFA Grant. Residencies include The Select Fair Residency (Brooklyn, New York), The Chrysler Museum Glass Studio (Norfolk, Virginia), TSKW (Key West, Florida), Cascina Remondenca (Chiaverano, Italy), and Penland School of Craft. (Penland, North Carolina). Her work has been presented in Art New England, Elle Decor, V Magazine, Hyperallergic, The New York Times, Providence Phoenix, Whitewall Magazine, and Lenscratch. She lives in Rhode Island.

Windham’s work is based on ideas around color and collecting. Drawing on an intuitive sense of formal composition, she organizes collections of natural, commercial, and industrial remnants into multidisciplinary works that evoke a sense of mysticism and ritual. Her current work with hand-painted cyanotypes combines early-process photographs, paintings on paper, and objectless sculpture. Each object is collected, pressed flat until dry (if necessary), printed in the sun, washed and dried, and finally painted, a process that can take months to complete. The dried and flattened specimens allow for sharp detail and translucence that informs the painting. The use of inventive, abstract color is a way to bring this Victorian-era process into the present day: using modern Japanese, American, and British watercolors in vibrant cadmium, fluorescents, and pastels, the work simultaneously references contemporary painting and the antiquated art of hand-tinted photographs.

For Gathering the Chesapeake, Windham used flora and fauna specimens from the Chesapeake Bay, collected by Zach Gallery, the Academy Art Museum, and students from The Gunston School’s Chesapeake Bay Watershed Semester. Armed with these specimens, her research on growth zones and plant habitats, and open-source images from Google Earth, she conjured a place she had never visited: the Eastern Shore of Maryland. Zach Gallery is delighted to welcome Brett Day Windham to the Eastern Shore and present this body of work, as well as an opportunity for the community to engage personally with the artist and her process in a workshop at the Academy Art Museum in Easton.

Also, The Ebenezer Theater is hosting the final concert of Season Four of Gabriela Montero at Prager on Saturday, July 18, with violin virtuoso Charles Yang and Peter Dugan on piano.