This article is written by a student writer from the Her Campus at Montclair chapter.
On January 21, 2016, The George Segal Gallery hosted a reception to showcase a number of new acquisitions. The gallery itself is nestled into the fourth floor of the Red Hawk Deck, overlooking the Alexander Kasser Theater and amphitheater. Aesthetically blending in with the rest of campus’ combination of red and white, the gallery stuck to simple white walls, ultimately highlighting the vibrant works of art they displayed.
This night, the gallery boasted its procurement of, among others, two prints by the Spanish surrealist Salvador Dali gifted to the gallery by Chan Beals and Kate Nichols. Addressing the crowd who had come to see the gallery’s newest treasures, the curator, M. Teresa Lapid Rodriguez, said in a light-hearted tone, “Dali always has to work with double meaning.” This was apparent when one took a closer look at the work. One was Manhattan Skyline, a lithograph he created in 1976 depicting a portion of the New York City skyline dealing heavily with the primary colors and seemingly out of place elements such as the sea creature peeking out of the water in the foreground and the image of the woman in the swollen moon behind the Chrysler building. The other Dali print in the gallery was Tiger Lillies of the Theater Plus Moustache. This was another lithograph that, at a distance, looks like a regular clump of fiery orange tiger lilies. Up close, however, a mouth and moustache can be seen towards the bottom of the stems of the flowers. Behind these flowers there stands a sketch-like drawing of what looks like a cathedral with a dome roof and a cross standing atop of it.
In addition to these prints, there was a new piece by the namesake of the gallery, George Segal. This new installation was called Summer Cabin. It’s a sculpture made out of plaster, wood, glass, and paint that uses the space of the gallery to its advantage. With a female figure lounging in a wooden chair, a sculpted wall is fixed against the gallery’s actual wall with a door that is opened out and a cut-out in the shape of a window. Behind this open door and window, a forest scene is painted, complementing the warm colors of the female figure and the sculpted wall. Other artworks in the gallery were varied in both color in medium with one wall dedicated solely to Segal’s aquatint portraits where his subjects are either half or fully covered in shadow while another wall hosts an oil painting by Koichi Enomoto where there are clashes between geometric and organic shapes as well as between the whimsical and the more “serious” aspects of the images shown. This showing will be available until February 20, 2016.