New Growth Art Exhibit

NEW GROWTH
Bent-wood sculptures by Susan Manspeizer

February 21 through May 8
Artist reception, Sunday, February 21, 2 to 4 pm

Summit, NJ: Reeves-Reed Arboretum announces its first art exhibition of the 2016 season – NEW GROWTH: bent-wood sculptures by Susan Manspeizer.

Westchester artist, Susan Manspeizer, with a career spanning three decades, has produced an exhibition, NEW GROWTH, celebrating nature's life-affirming vitality and maturity, characterized by vibrant, deftly-formed bent-wood sculptures of color, beauty, form and grace. A gardener as well, Manspeizer "likes the process of living, of plants going from the bud of a flower to maturity and eventually decay. We are constantly growing and reinventing ourselves....leaving behind something in order to move forward in life." This philosophy of rebirth or new growth is so in tune with life experienced in a garden and especially at the Arboretum.

In the early '80s, after years of painting figurative imagery, Manspeizer freed her line from the canvas. Her sculptures are made of wood, and this once-living material is repurposed - transformed and given new life. She bends and coaxes the wood into seemingly impossibly folded and looping rhythmic constructions of saturated hues and undulating contours, and the finished pieces, whether free-standing or wall-hung, seem to soar in space.

NEW GROWTH: bent-wood sculptures by Susan Manspeizer, opens at the Wisner House Gallery on Sunday, February 21, with a public reception from 2 to 4 pm, and will run through May 8. All the works are for sale, and the artist will donate 30% of all purchases to Reeves-Reed Arboretum.

About Reeves-Reed Arboretum: Celebrating over 40 years as an historic public garden, education resource, and non-profit conservancy, Reeves-Reed Arboretum engages, educates and enriches the public through horticulture and environmental education, and the care and utilization of the gardens and estate. Open 7 days a week from dawn till dusk, the Arboretum is listed on both the National and New Jersey State Historic Registers. Funding for RRA has been made possible in part by the NJ Historical Commission, a division of the Department of State, through a grant administered by the Union County Office of Cultural & Heritage Affairs, Dept. of Parks & Community Renewal.

REEVES-REED ARBORETUM....more ways to experience nature!