Full Circle: Grace Knowlton And Haile Binns

Open Gallery With Grace Knowlton: 11/27 and 12/17

Open Gallery With Haile Binns: 11/12, 11/26 and 12/17

Haile Binns is an American artist whose wooden canvases shows the beauty of nature through color, texture and movement. The foundation of her work is the welding of natural and industrial materials. Through earth and rock texture, contrasting color, and sharp emotional marks her work discovers the variegation within nature, and strives to express the possibility of balance in precisely those places we tend to fear and marginalize as a culture. What emerges onto her canvas is all soil and movement – textural stories of brutality, decay, ferocity, and change.

After Grace Knowlton graduated from Smith College in 1954, she moved to Washington and studied painting with Ken Noland. Unsatisfied with that surface, she started pouring rubber into flower pots to make relief forms for the paintings; the forms gradually evolved into free-standing, round clay sculptures. The closed form’s sealed–in space suggesting hidden-away mysteries fascinated her. Then it became the form itself. She began to place different sized spheres in groups which could be moved around, changing the relationships. Her early clay spheres were acquired by Storm King Sculpture Park in 1965. When Storm King expressed an interest in work of a larger scale, Ms. Knowlton shifted to concrete, which enabled her to create larger and more durable pieces.

In 1970’s the Newark Museum bought out her first gallery show in New York City – seven large concrete spheres, which they placed in their sculpture garden. She has shown in various galleries such as Hirschl and Adler, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Lesley Heller Workspace, Bates College Museum, Neuberger Museum and the Katonah Museum, among others.

In the ‘70s Grace began photographing white interior corners and printing the images in platinum. She went on to photograph subjects as diverse as seeds, bones, chairs, and sawhorses, looking for the abstract values of line, form, composition and structure.

Her work is in the collections of (among others): The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; Brooklyn Museum of Art New York, NY; The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX; Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; Newark Museum, Newark, NJ; Storm King Art Center, Mountainville, NY; Victoria and Albert Museum, London, England and the Yale University Museum of Art, New Haven, CT.