Jennifer Cross Explores Transformation in ‘Going Through and Not Around’ at Sara Nightingale Gallery

Sara Nightingale Gallery will present “Jennifer Cross: Going Through and Not Around,” opening Saturday, November 15, from 5 to 7 p.m. The exhibition will run through December 15.

Jennifer Cross’s recent paintings are thinly veiled surfaces of color on which traces and configurations emerge. Recurring motifs in her work include flowers, real and imagined studio environments, personal and political dramas, and the passage of time. The paintings serve as a record of the artist’s shifting states of mind, encompassing both feelings of loss and elation. Themes of vitality, fragility, dislocation and impermanence drive her work, reflecting the fleeting nature of life.

The exhibition title was inspired by a 1994 Art in America review of Cross’s paintings by Gerrit Henry, who wrote, “(Cross’s works) are singularly weird, astonishing, morbid, fantastic and particularly her own … Hope, they say, lies in going through, and not around, our most abysmal challenges.”

Cross lives and works in East Hampton. She earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the University of Minnesota, graduating Phi Beta Kappa and summa cum laude. After traveling through Mexico and Central America, she moved to New York to pursue a Master of Fine Arts degree in painting from Pratt Institute.

She is the recipient of a Ford Foundation Grant, a Jerome Foundation Grant and a New York Foundation for the Arts grant in painting. Cross has participated in group exhibitions at Tripoli Gallery, Sara Nightingale Gallery, The Leiber Collection and the Southampton Arts Center. Her solo exhibitions include Katharina Rich Perlow Gallery in New York City, Peter Marcelle Projects, MM Fine Arts and the Arts Center at Duck Creek. Her work is held in the collections of Guild Hall Museum, the Islip Museum of Art and numerous private collections. This will be her first solo exhibition at Sara Nightingale Gallery.

For more information, contact saranightingale.com. Sara Nightingale Gallery is located at 26 Main Street in Sag Harbor.