The Green Door Gallery Presents
Teressa Marie Valla
ASCEND
October 8 – October 31, 2021
The Green Door Gallery is delighted to reopen its doors with ASCEND, an exhibition of Teressa Marie Valla’s paintings, sculptures, rugs and mobiles. Imagine an iconographer – Russian monk style, but with a modern twist – who, instead of looking at figures of ancient saints shrouded in dignity, would look at nature, flowers, light, birds and leaves, and you will understand why Teressa’s organic, luscious and often playful compositions exude such a sense of mystery and awe. Come stroll through her mystical garden: its golden gates open on October 8th!
“The never-ending renewal and promise of nature”, by Ann Landi
There are several aspects of Teressa Valla’s background that contribute to a fuller understanding of her art. She was raised in northern Vermont, a place she describes as cold, sparsely populated, and mountainous but, she adds, “surrounded by gorgeous trees and ponds and filled with wildlife.” The colors and memories of that time seem to me readily apparent in the lush greens and vibrant blues of paintings like Vital Acropolis and Kalimera Clarity.
Upon moving to New York she found herself eagerly standing in the highest parts of theaters, observing and drawing. Later, she worked in the costume department of the New York City Ballet, an experience that led to a fascination with stage performances; she continues to draw in the dark, in theaters, whenever she has the chance.
She also spent years at the Art Students League in New York, making life studies from the figure and learning from disciples of Hans Hoffmann, Robert Beauchamp, and James Gahagan, who was famed for his philosophy of “push and pull” to create dynamic abstract compositions.
There is clearly a lyrical impulse that runs especially through the paintings, a love of the undulating, sinuous line that ties many of her compositions together and recalls both the curvilinear shapes in nature and the fluid gestures of a dancer’s body.
Valla tells a story of first arriving in New York, where she was a student at New York University, and finding a pine tree in Central Park. For the past couple of decades, she has been weaving pine needles into her paintings. “They became a symbolic part of my art,” she says. “The pine tree is an evergreen, a representation of everlasting life.” Other shapes from nature find their way into her three-dimensional works, like ceramics, as well as small sculptures that incorporate volcanic ash and catalpa pods. As she notes, the catalpa becomes almost like brushstrokes, bristling with energy and nervous tension. The small ceramics have their own vibrancy, again reminiscent of shapes in the natural world, like squirming aquatic plants and creatures.
Like most of us, Valla found herself deeply affected by the fears and restrictions of life during COVID-19. Looking for ways to transcend the situation, she began to incorporate gold leaf into her paintings, not because it’s a precious material but because gold represents light, a positive force in the universe. Her paintings also became increasingly spare, as she applied color and then rubbed it out again, part of a process her unconscious dictated during this difficult time. And yet vestiges of landscape and a buoyantly linear impulse remain. And those, too, seem emblematic of hope and the desire to find solace in earth and sky, in the never-ending renewal and promise of nature.
Ann Landi has 20+ years of reporting on the art world for ARTnews, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and magazines like Smithsonian and Art & Antiques. She is the founder and editor of Vasari21.com
For more information on the artist: www.teressavalla.com
Greendoorgallery.org
Instagram: @green.door.gallery
206 Skillman Avenue, Williamsburg, Brooklyn (Graham Avenue L train stop)
Santa Fe Offers Respite for Artists.
New York Times
October 7, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 3:40 p.m. ET Santa Fe, NM (AP) — Painter Teressa Valla was supposed to be doing work for an upcoming show in Italy. Instead, she roamed the streets of New York, taking photographs.
In the days following the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, she felt numb, distracted, ill at ease. In need of a respite, she found the prospect of one in New Mexico.
The Essex reporter
Published on Apr 21, 2021
Time spent growing up in Essex helped shape the way one artist, currently living in New York, views the world. That view has helped her become featured in one of the Big Apple’s premier museums.
Chosen through a crowdsourcing process that received tens of thousands of submissions, Teressa Valla had one of her photographs selected by a jury of a dozen people to be on display at the Museum of the City of New York’s exhibition that looks back on New York during the beginning of the pandemic.
Valla’s picture was one of just four picked to be in the “Getting Around” theme of New York Responds: The First Six Months – an exhibition that presents objects, photographs, videos, and other artworks that document and interpret the COVID-19 pandemic, the racial justice uprisings, and the responses of New Yorkers as they fought to cope, survive, and forge a better future.
Not only that, but her image, titled “Absolutely Essential Eyes,” was one of just a few chosen to don a promotional banner hanging outside the museum.
The displayed image of "Absolutely Essential Eyes," the picture taken by Teressa Valla that was selected for the Museum of the City of New York's exhibition New York Responds: The First Six Months.
Courtesy Photo
“I'm honored and grateful to be included in this historic collection,” said Valla. “I jumped out of my seat when I saw the email because of the unexpected opportunity to participate.”
On display through May 9, “Absolutely Essential Eyes” captured a Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) bus driver looking backwards with a fist in the air – his raised eyebrows alluding to a big smile being hidden by his mask. The photo and the three others in the “Getting Around” theme of the exhibit remember how New Yorkers got around safely during the lockdown last summer.
Valla described the setting for the picture, saying she had barely left her home between March and June of 2020 – getting food delivered to help remain inside.
“There were literally sirens for months outside my apartment. It was just terrifying,” said Valla.
Teressa Valla Museum of the City of New York.
But then one day, she decided to head out towards the 79th Street Boat Basin Marina near the Hudson River where it was likely there wouldn’t be anyone around. While walking past an MTA bus on her way, something caught her ear before something else caught her eye.
“There were two men talking, and they were laughing. I said, oh people are laughing; how unusual,” Valla recounted with a chuckle. “So I'm literally walking by them, and I stepped back and I asked them if I could take their photographs. It was that human quality that I just wanted to hold onto. ‘Can I have a minute of your laughter?’”
Valla would submit the photo for the museum exhibition’s consideration a few months later and then found out in late October that it was chosen to be showcased both inside the gallery and online.
More recently, Valla has been communicating with the MTA in an attempt to get in contact with the subject of her photo – wanting to make sure the bus driver has seen it and to let him know it’s on display at the museum.
“I really want this person to be honored,” she said. “It's really about honoring other people – honoring the essential workers who have been so critical. He’s doing the right thing: wearing the mask, being concerned about other people. These are the human qualities that I wanted to reflect in this photograph, and it just summed it up so succinctly.”
Essex’s impact on the artist
Valla contributes how she lives daily life and how she sees the world around her – helping frame her artwork – to her time spent growing up in Essex.
She moved to Vermont from Massachusetts when she was 10 years old and went through the Essex school system before studying liberal arts, with a focus on anthropology of textiles, at the University of Vermont. She remembers a pine tree by her Forest Road home that she claimed as her own – sitting among the needles to think and reflect. Valla now imbeds pine needles into her paintings.
About the Artist
Teressa Valla has her paintings, sculptures, and photography showcased in public and private collections all around the world. Throughout her work, one can identify themes of dance, community, nature, and architecture.
Growing up in Vermont, Valla experienced a strong connection to earth at a young age, and this bond with nature has served as a stimulus and source of comfort, both personally and artistically.
Learn more at teressavalla.com.
“The years in Essex were so significant because it really helped shape my foundation in the appreciation of the human attitude in Vermont,” said Valla. “It was an outward care for people. And then, as an artist, there's an inner reflection – an inward process. It's so fundamental for the process of creativity for me to be outward and inward simultaneously – reflecting on life and then creating from that into a personal vision.”
A Safe Haven
Pasatiempo, The New Mexican’s Weekly Magazine of Arts, Entertainment and Culture
November 9 - 15, 2001
By Teri Thomson Randall For the New Mexican
Painter Teressa Valla was the first to arrive in Santa Fe on Oct. 22. “I felt relief as soon as I got off the plane,” she said.
Valla watched the World Trade Center burn from the roof of her apartment near the Museum of Natural History in upper Manhattan. Since the attacks, she said, she has been surrounded by the constant sounds of sirens, the acrid smell, the soberness of the city and a heavy sadness. At first she felt numb and did everything she could to stay in control, she said. But grief eventually overcame her. Seven firemen from her local fire station had been killed. “I found myself crying a lot, vacillating,” she recalled during a recent interview at the institute.
Dreams of Art and Life
Lilly Wei, 2012
Exhilarating bursts of intense, riotous color and cornucopian abundance are some of what you see when you first view Teressa Valla's arresting, voluptuous paintings. They are a kind of visual magic realism, a melange of the abstract and representational, the real and the fantastic merged and metamorphosed, the surfaces a tapestry of thick, sinuous skeins of color with areas of silken transparency.
World Business
Andrew McDonnell
Teressa Valla also demonstrated with her two works a considerate versatility that helps the viewer reflect on the means and the expressive resorts of abstract painting. Hers was a more deliquescent sort of abstraction, reminiscent of De Kooning after about 1978, and perhaps of Helen Frankenthaler, or other painters concerned more with vibrancy of color and less with the somewhat lugubrious ethic of early abstract expressionism. Windswept Thought added to this more colorful approach a structural economy that is necessary, and an instrumentality of all the better work in this idiom, where it is so important to manifest structural cognizance and control.
Good as gold
Esther Klein Gallery
3600 Market St.
Philadelphia
http://www.kleinartgallery.org./
Like medieval artisans, Teressa Valla uses gold to ennoble ordinary subject matter. The small mixed-media paintings on paper that she’s showing at the Parallels Gallery are smothered in gold, which provides a lush background for brightly colored, leaflike shapes.
Valla gives the pieces physicality by embedding objects that resemble leaf stems or pine needles in the gold surface. The total effect, which suggests stained glass or enamel work, is scintillating.
The Pleasures of Urban Gardening
Knickerbocker
By GARY SHAPIRO | September 1, 2005
EAST VILLAGE SOUND In the All People's Garden on East 3rd Street on Monday, the Hungry March Band was entertaining the neighborhood. This baton-twirling brass brotherhood of musicians had swung down the block from Tribes Gallery, where a crowd was celebrating the birthday of legendary saxophonist and composer Charlie Parker (1920-55).
Musicians, poets, and artists at the Tribes Gallery looked down from the second floor to watch the Hungry March Band perform in another garden, the one behind the gallery. The band's songs that evening included an uplifting jazz composition called "Bumper to Bumper," composed by trumpeter Jeremy Mushlin. "I just got married a week ago," said Mr. Mushlin, whose other interests include performing Jamaican ska music. "So I think my music has wedding energy." Others in the Hungry March Band included twirler Sara Valentine, who was also a curator of the children's component of the Howl! Festival.
Among the poetry that evening, Michael Carter read a poem called "The Spiral" from the balcony, while the band down in the garden accented his poem with extemporaneous music.
Inside the gallery, T. Charnan Lewis curated an exhibit called "Birds of a Feather Flock" inspired by Charlie Parker, whose nickname was "Bird." The show included "Here for You," a kinetic mobile made of seed pods, wax, and silver leaf by Tribes Gallery director Teressa Valla; a self-portrait by Ryan Compton titled "Owl Eyes"; and Basquiat-like works on canvas by Brian Leo, who has a show called "Garage Pop Surrealism" opening September 9 at Capla Kesting Fine Art in Brooklyn.
Ms. Lewis received her M.F.A. from Maryland Institute College of Art in 2004. She told the Knickerbocker that many artists in the show, including Mr. Compton, attended MICA. "It's a Baltimore invasion of New York."
What's a birthday celebration without cake?
Charlie Parker would have been 85. The gallery's intern, Virginie de Rocquigny, was turning 21. The icing on the chocolate chip cake wished them both a happy birthday.
Zabar’s, la fin d’un café social et d’une portion de mythologie
PARTAGE Fondé par Louis Zabar en 1934, ce troquet de Manhattan a long- temps été un extraordinaire lieu de socialisation. La pandémie a tout changé. Témoignages de celles et ceux qui regrettent cet «arbre à palabres» new-yorkais
STÉPHANE BUSSARD, NEW YORK t @StephaneBussard
Installé à l’angle de la 80e rue et Broad- way à Manhattan depuis 1934, Zabar’s est devenu au fil des décennies une institu- tion incontournable de New York. Une vaste épicerie fine et quincaillerie d’un côté, un café de l’autre. Dans l’Upper West Side, quartier aisé de Manhattan, le troquet a un charme particulier. Il a longtemps joué le rôle de «café social»: une seule table au milieu et des hôtes qui sont presque dans l’obligation de conver- ser. Un personnel avant tout latino qui sert les spécialités du coin, notamment juives ashkénazes: bagels, poisson fumé, babka et rugelach. Mais la pandémie de Covid-19 est passée par là et a radicale- ment transformé le lieu.
Ancrage dans la communauté
Sensible à la mission socialisante de son établissement, le copropriétaire
Saul Zabar, fils du fondateur Louis, un Juif ukrainien qui émigra aux Etats- Unis, aurait apparemment aimé conser- ver cet îlot d’humanité au cœur de la frénésie new-yorkaise. Mais son conseil d’administration en a décidé autrement: fini la table unique au sein de l’établissement. C’est désor-
mais un bar où l’on achète tout
à l’emporter. Tout un symbole.
Les prix ont doublé, voire tri-
plé. Or c’était aussi cela Zabar’s: un café et un bagel à moins d’un dollar chacun, abordables pour les Upperwestsiders modestes vivant dans de petits appar- tements aux loyers bloqués. Mary, une sans-abri et diplômée universitaire, y venait souvent. Aujourd’hui, l’adresse a perdu son âme. Marjorie, enseignante, donnait des cours privés aux élèves en difficulté avant la pandémie. Vivant chi- chement, elle venait socialiser à Zabar’s. En août dernier, entr’aperçue dans les rues de Manhattan, elle avait l'air per- due. La pandémie l’a visiblement écra- sée, la reléguant au statut de sans-abri.
Zabar’s a été à l’image de New York, le creuset de destins improbables, d’ha- bitants du quartier pour lesquels un café matinal était indispensable à leur ancrage dans une communauté, d’Amé- ricains de passage et de touristes qui
découvraient cet inattendu arbre à palabres urbain. Cette agora d’un style unique n’empêchait pas les clans. Mais ceux qui pouvaient passer de l’un à l’autre acquéraient une vision assez holistique de Manhattan. Philip Goo-
Léonard de Vinci et la Renaissance. En Suisse, ils ont eu cinq siècles de paix et de fraternité et qu’est-ce que ça a donné? La pendule à coucou!» Il y avait aussi ce vieux commerçant qui vantait ses exploits quand il vendait encore des cigares cubains interdits aux diplomates de passage à New York.
Zabar’s a été à l’image de New York,
le creuset de destins improbables
Face à Fred, il y avait souvent Renée Feller. Avec elle, on parlait des affaires du monde et puis un jour, après lui avoir décrit la difficile réintégration d’un condamné à mort libéré et rencon- tré un peu plus tôt, ses réveils automa- tiques à 3 heures du matin, elle lâcha: «Moi aussi, je me réveillais systéma- tiquement à 3 heures du matin.» Ah bon, pourquoi? «C’était à Auschwitz.» Renée Feller s’était longtemps barri- cadée pour fuir la douleur du passé
avant de suivre plusieurs thérapies. A Zabar’s, elle a toujours été une per- sonne très enjouée. Devenue femme rabbin qui célèbre à New York, aux Etats-Unis et dans le monde entier, des mariages interreligieux, elle soulignait les similitudes des rituels, entre la tente houppa érigée pour les mariages juifs et la mandap pour les mariages hin- douistes. Aujourd’hui, à 89 ans, elle le reconnaît: «Zabar’s me manque terri- blement.» Teressa Valla a fréquenté le café dès la moitié des années 1980. «Comme artiste vivant seule, aller à Zabar’s, c’était comme me relier au monde. Le fait de ne plus pouvoir y aller pour converser, ce fut comme si l’une de mes principales artères avait été sec- tionnée.» Teressa a toutefois gardé le contact avec plusieurs «Zabariens» qui se rencontrent parfois au Verdi Square, une place à la 72e rue. Mais elle est pes- simiste: «Je ne pense pas que Zabar’s va réinstaller un jour la table accueillante et universelle qu’on a connue.»
Le café de la 80e rue, c’était une grande famille avec ses disputes et ses contradictions. Chaque décès d’un habi- tué, c’étaient des échanges nourris pour se remémorer le défunt. Une histoire de famille qui pourrait bien se limiter désormais aux albums de souvenirs. ■
REPORTAGE
dman, décédé en 2015, tenait toujours le haut du pavé. Avec sa voix qui portait dans tout le café, ses prises de position très libérales (progressistes)
sans concession, il en agaçait certains. Or ce scénariste et réalisateur de films dont We Shall Return (1963) était la cari- cature du New-Yorkais qui aime racon- ter les tourments de sa vie. Il contait son passage au sein de la Marine américaine dans le Pacifique durant la Seconde Guerre mondiale. Il montrait des pho- tos de sa petite-fille, diplômée de Yale, dont il était très fier.
Cigares cubains
A un coin de la grande table, il y avait aussi Fred, un introverti plutôt conser- vateur. Son truc, c’était la lecture et l’humour pince-sans-rire. Pensant à la Suisse, il aimait rappeler une scène du Troisième Homme, l’ouvrage de Graham Greene: «Durant trente ans, en Italie, ils ont eu les Borgia, la guerre civile et la terreur. Cela a produit Michel-Ange,