Items
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Black Vessel
The glaze breaks to rust on every edge. Mori calls this the vessel's way of showing where it has been touched. -
Pair of Cups
Made for the museum's tenth tea evening and then kept: one cup is a little taller, for the host. -
Ash-Glazed Bowl
Fired for four days in a wood kiln; the green runs are wood ash that melted into glass on the rim. -
Moon Jar
A round white jar slightly out of round, as moon jars should be. The glaze pooled warm where the kiln was hottest. -
Tall Vessel, Celadon
Mori throws her tall forms in two sections and joins them while the clay is soft; the seam is the faint ring at the shoulder. -
Leaning Arch
Carved from a single cedar log that fell across the Wrenfield road in the 2020 windstorm. -
Weight and Counterweight
Two steel plates leaning on each other, each keeping the other up. It stands in the museum garden and has rusted to the color of the hills. -
Seated Figure
A figure reduced to the weight of sitting: no face, no hands, just a body letting a chair take it. Reyes-Whitfield cast it from a carving in cedar. -
Dance at the Grange Hall
Calder's flash caught the hall mid-turn: the dancers blurred, the band sharp, and in the corner an old farmer asleep on the coats. -
Postmistress with Bicycle
Calder met Harlow's postmistress on the Grange road and asked her to stand still for one picture. She stood still for four. -
Main Street in Snow
Harlow's Main Street during the 1956 storm, from the second floor of the bank. The two figures crossing are the Paulsen sisters, on their way to open the bakery. -
Shift Change, Harlow Mill
Calder stood at the mill gate with her camera at waist height so the men would not notice it. Most of them look past her, toward home. -
Water Tower
One of the few Becker photographs with a structure in it. He liked water towers because they were the only things in the desert that admitted they were waiting. -
Dry Lake, Morning
Cracked lakebed in low sun, each plate of mud with its own shadow. Becker printed it dark so the cracks would read as lines on a map. -
Salt Flat
Becker waited three days for a sky with no clouds at all. The figure on the horizon is his assistant, sent walking until she was small enough. -
Sleeping Cat
The only animal in Strand's work: her own cat, Pim, drawn in the eleven minutes he slept on the windowsill. -
Kitchen Chair
A wooden chair pulled out from the table, as if someone has just stood up. Strand kept it in the studio so it could not be tidied away. -
Study for a Window
Strand drew the same kitchen window for most of one winter. In this study the light is doing all the work; the window frame is barely there. -
Wild Carrot
Queen Anne's lace, drawn from above so the flower becomes a map. Achterberg printed only twelve impressions before the plate wore. -
Seed Heads
Dandelion clocks at the moment before they come apart. The soft grey is aquatint; the seeds are scratched back to bare paper. -
Thistle
Achterberg drew every plant from life on the copper plate, without a sketch. The thistle came from the ditch behind the Grange hall. -
Interval Suite No. 4
A red square and a green square of equal brightness, side by side, so the border between them seems to flicker. The fourth of six prints about colors that cancel out. -
Yellow Measure
Bands of yellow, each one exactly as wide as the gap above it. Okafor called these prints rulers for color. -
Blue Interval
Four blues, nested and set slightly low, so the inner square seems to rise. Okafor printed the edition in one night so that the humidity would not change the colors. -
Tide Line
Lind cut these lines on her only trip to the coast, from memory, in a motel room in Astoria. Each line is a little thinner than the one above it. -
Irrigation Ditch
A strip of silver water running straight away from the viewer between two fields of alfalfa. Hollis called it the only straight line in the valley. -
Snowline
Tincup Mountain from the valley floor, the snowline drawn as one unbroken stroke. Hollis left the paper bare for the snow. -
Orchard, Late
Hollis painted the Paulsen orchard every October for thirty years. In this one the light has nearly gone, and the last apples read as small warm sparks. -
Ember
Layers of red and orange worked into hot wax until the surface glows from inside, like coals the morning after. -
Signal
A field of cadmium red interrupted once, off center, by a pale vertical line. Ortiz-Bell painted the line last, in one breath, and would not say what it signals. -
Grey Interior
Seven greys, each a little warmer than the last, laid side by side like planks. It hung in the Harlow Savings Bank lobby for thirteen years. -
Doorway in Ochre
The only Ekwall with a way in. The doorway is the canvas left bare; the ochre around it took him eleven coats. -
Three Rooms
Ekwall called his geometric paintings floor plans for houses he would never build. Here a black room, a red room and a grey hallway overlap, and none of them has a door. -
Hay in Rain
Early and looser than the field paintings, made in one sitting from the studio window. The grey strokes are rain; the ochre mound is the haystack that would not dry. -
Night Field
A single line of ochre holds the dark together. Lind said it was the porch light at the Halloran farm, seen from the road. -
Low Water
Painted the dry August after the dam went in, when the river showed its stones. Lind kept the palette to the colors of wet and dry rock. -
September Field
The first of the field paintings. Lind said she painted the field until it stopped looking like a field and started looking like September. -
Field at Dusk
Lind painted the field behind her Harlow studio at the same hour for a whole autumn. The bands are less a horizon than a temperature: warm ground, the rust of last light, and the blue that arrives before the stars. -
Aiko Mori
Japanese-American ceramicist. Mori fires porcelain and stoneware in a wood kiln she built on the Wrenfield road. -
Daniel Reyes-Whitfield
American sculptor. Reyes-Whitfield works in bronze, steel and wood from fallen trees, making forms about weight, balance and rest. -
Ruth Calder
American photographer. Calder ran the Harlow Gazette's darkroom for twenty years and photographed the town on her own time, usually without people noticing. -
Sol Becker
American photographer. Becker photographed the dry country south of Harlow in large-format black and white: salt flats, lakebeds and the few things that stand on them. -
Nell Achterberg
Dutch-American etcher. Achterberg drew wild plants from life directly onto copper plates and printed small editions for the Harlow Garden Club. -
Helena Strand
Norwegian-American draftswoman. Strand drew her own house, almost always in charcoal: its windows, its chairs and, once, her cat. -
Rafael Ortiz-Bell
Mexican-American painter. Ortiz-Bell makes large paintings of a single color, interrupted once, worked in oil and wax until the surface glows. -
June Hollis
American painter. Hollis worked in gouache on paper, painting the orchards, ditches and ridges of the valley in simplified, flattened shapes. -
Ines Okafor
Nigerian-American printmaker. Okafor taught at Wrenfield College for thirty years; her screenprints test how colors change one another when they meet. -
Tomas Ekwall
Swedish-American painter. Ekwall came to Harlow as a draftsman for the mill and stayed to paint hard-edged geometric abstractions he called floor plans for houses he would never build. -
Mara Lind
American painter and printmaker. Lind lived on a farm outside Harlow for sixty years and painted the same fields in every season, first as landscapes and then as soft bands of color.