ARTIST STATEMENT
I discovered Woman Made Gallery in a call for art in Art Calendar Magazine in 1997. It was just what I needed to find. I had finally been able to study studio art and work on my own for about 8 years. I was still thinking (as I often still do) “It’s great to be making this, but will anyone want to see it?” Woman Made became my place of affirmation. I sent a small sculpture to Ancient Artefacts in a New Light in 1997, amazed that others were also into these ideas. My daughter lives in Chicago and I was able to make the trip and go to the opening. As has happened again later, and no wonder, my “Small Mechanism” piece got placed upside down on the pedestal. I enjoyed Janet Bloch’s grace in allowing me to reposition it. I was able to attend a couple more openings. I got to meet Beate Minkovski at the 9th International. I admire her and appreciate the work has done, the knowledge and advice she has generously shared. I have always felt connected and sustained by Woman Made, by seeing the work online and hearing what’s going on. It’s my ideal of the way such an organization should be.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Cherry Rahn has lived in Upstate New York since 1981. With her family, and often students, she has spent many academic terms and occasional years in other cities and abroad, mostly in the UK. Her background includes being a Modern Dancer, a newspaper proofreader, and an assistant editor in a publishing house. She wanted to be a visual artist all her life. It took her about 35 years to get started. Cherry’s first solo show was at Hobart and William Smith Colleges in 1989, with sculpture. Since then she has worked in plaster, Hydrocal, cast bronze and aluminum, from six inches to six feet in size. Content included portraits, historical figures, satirical figures, abstraction, pseudo-technology and installation. She also had the pleasure of doing set design for community theater and schools. After about 20 years, she got to do what se started out to do – painting. She has worked with gouache and acrylic, landscapes, cafe scenes, “Tablescapes”, and her present underwater abstractions, “Through Two Inches of Seneca Lake”.
© Cherry Rahn