Dowd Gallery to exhibit art by Mara Baldwin

01/28/2025

Fumble-stitched girl scouting patches. Throwaway factory frame inserts. Illustrations for Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s 100-year-old lost novel Herland. Collective tombstones of the Shakers.

Studio artist Mara Baldwin finds props to express the human experience everywhere.

“I make work about people without depicting them by scrambling found objects, textures and highly rendered surfaces to create lonely interiors and blueprints of remnant or newly imagined worlds,” said Baldwin, of Ithaca and Red Hook, N.Y., who has taught at Bard College since 2022. “I pay attention to the historically under-recognized depth of female experience.”

Her intricate patterns elegantly drawn in ink will be displayed at SUNY Cortland’s Dowd Gallery starting on Monday, Feb. 3. Her exhibition, titled “Parts & Labor,” will run through Friday, March 7, at the gallery, in the Dowd Fine Arts Center at the corner of Graham Avenue and Prospect Terrace.

All Dowd Gallery events are free and open to the public. An opening reception is set for 5 p.m. on Thursday, Feb. 6, in the gallery.

Baldwin will give an artist talk in the gallery at 5 p.m. on Thursday, Feb. 20.

“My work focuses on the impossible dream of utopia and asks if a perfect life can include feelings of failure, loneliness and dissatisfaction,” Baldwin said.

Working in a multi-disciplinary, research-based studio practice, Baldwin uses paper and textiles to create serial and narrative forms. Through labor-intensive mark-making, textile manipulation and sculpture, she examines the roles of imagination and effort as necessary tools of both the artist and the utopian. Her pieces explore the ghostly trace of women’s past lives, the earnestness of present-day feminism/feminisms and queerness, and the aspirational hopefulness — and often contradictory aims — of utopian liberation.

“While all utopias fail, I find solace and value in the queerness of utopian dreaming,” she said. “Drawing serves as a perfectly imperfect medium for this pursuit, welcoming flaws, drafts and deviation.”

'From the Vault: Chapter I'

In conjunction with and concurrent to “Parts & Labor,” Dowd Gallery will showcase works of art from the SUNY Cortland permanent collection in an exhibition titled “From the Vault: Chapter I.”

The display, selected by Allison DeDominick, who teaches at SUNY Cortland and Ithaca College, will include pieces by the following artists represented in the permanent collection: John Wood, Jim Thorpe, Evan Summer, Kent Rush, Joan Miro, Marini Marino, Le Corbusier, B Kummart, Michael Heizer and Robert Goodnough.

The works were selected as examples of abstraction in contrast to Baldwin’s meticulous and mesmerizing drawn works on paper.

Gallery hours are 10 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday and 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. on Thursday. Walk-ins are welcome, or to schedule a visit or arrange group tours, contact gallery Director Scott Oldfield at 607-753-4216.

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