About: Art Loop reception from 5-8pm. Local author P. Finian Reilly will have a Book Launch for Ice's End.
In Across the River, artist Garrity presents a body of work that explores the landscapes on both sides of the Delaware River: her native Wilmington, Delaware, and her current home in Salem County, New Jersey. Through a series of oil paintings and watercolors, the exhibition captures a visual dialogue between memory and place, rooted in everyday observation and long-term engagement with the river’s edge.
The series features the Delaware River landscape in southern New Jersey, and summons the strangeness and the wonder, as well as the beauty of local sites. Repetition, continual reinterpretation, daily discovery, and an infatuation with Helms Cove’s combinations of coastline, mudflats, sky, river, and light infuse the work with a contemporary Romantic sensibility.
Since 2021, Garrity’s daily painting practice, creating a small watercolor every day, has supported the development of a personal landscape vocabulary made up of unequal parts memory, invention, and observation. The mudflats offer endless inventiveness of shape, color, and line, especially through the flattening of the picture plane, which leaves ample space for experimenting with surface shapes and drawn lines of paint. She often returns to the composition of a pile of wreckage, rocks, or tidewrack in the foreground.
Across the River invites viewers to experience this familiar landscape anew through repeated looking, shifting light, and a deep sense of place shaped by both sides of the water.
Garrity has a BFA from the University of Delaware, Newark Delaware (1986), and an MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois (1988). After graduate school, Garrity’s career took a turn to arts administration with Program Coordinator positions at Expressways Children's Museum, Chicago, IL, and at Please Touch Museum, Philadelphia, PA. Garrity is currently Grants Manager at WXPN, University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, PA. Previously, Garrity was Associate Director for Education at Rutgers-Camden Center for the Arts, Camden, NJ, where she directed arts education and community arts programs from 1990-2023. She has taught professional development workshops for teachers and served on the Art Faculty of the Bucks County Community College, Newtown, PA. Awards received include an Applause Award for Accomplishment in Education from the Markeim Art Center, Haddonfield, NJ; the Hometown Hero Award from the Campbell Soup Foundation, Camden NJ, in recognition of significant contributions in improving the lives of Camden’s youth; a Discover Jersey Arts Leadership Award from ArtPride NJ; a New Leaf/Marion Parry Travelling Fellowship; The Isobel MacKinnon Excellence in Drawing Award from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL; and the Alumni and Friends of the Art Department Award, for Outstanding Achievement in Art, University of Delaware, Newark, DE. Garrity has exhibited regionally and nationally, most recently in the exhibitions, Passages-8 Women Painters, Stedman Gallery, Rutgers-Camden Campus; When the Morning Comes, Cerulean Gallery, Philadelphia, PA, and Salem County Romantic, Perkins Center for the Arts, Collingswood, NJ. Garrity's work is included in private collections. Garrity lives with her husband, painter, Bruce Garrity, in Penns Grove, Salem County, NJ.
