Register for the WebinART here!
Please join us 12 September at 1PM for an opportunity to review the art and the legacy of Pucker Gallery artist Brother Thomas Bezanson with Brattleboro Museum Curator Emerita, Mara Williams, artist Samuel Bak, and Gallery Director Bernie Pucker.
We will share works from the present exhibition while reflecting on Brother Thomas' idea that art is not complete until it is shared with others. He was on The Path to the Beautiful and we will try to better understand his journey.
The exhibition The Universe of True Beauty: Porcelains by Brother Thomas will be on view at Pucker Gallery from 9 September through 15 October 2023.
Brother Thomas Bezanson (1929-2007) was an internationally renowned ceramic artist. He was a master of form and complex glazes. In 1959, Thomas became a monk of Weston Priory, Vermont, a community of Benedictine men.
Brother Thomas was a visiting lecturer at Alfred University School of Ceramics in Alfred, New York in 1976. In 1978 he was invited to travel to Japan where he met five Japanese potters, designated “Living National Treasures” by the Japanese government. He was awarded a grant by The National Endowment for the Arts in 1984. The following year he became artist-in-residence at Mount Saint Benedict Monastery in Erie, Pennsylvania, where worked until his death in 2007.
Toward the end of his life, Thomas worked with Pucker Gallery and The Boston Foundation to create a legacy that would benefit other artists through the sale of his work. The Brother Thomas Fund was established at The Boston Foundation in 2007. Brother Thomas Fellowships are awarded to a diverse group of Greater Boston artists working at a high level of excellence in many disciplines—with the goal of enhancing their ability to thrive and create new work. All Fellows receive no-strings-attached awards of $15,000 and are selected biennially through a rigorous multidisciplinary process of nominations and review by a panel of Boston area nonprofit arts leaders and practitioners.
Brother Thomas was the author of numerous articles, monographs, books, and lectures on art and its spiritual aspects. Over the past 40 years, Brother Thomas’s work has been exhibited in more than fifty solo exhibitions. His pots are held in numerous significant public collections including Art Institute of Chicago; The Metropolitan Museum of Art; Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; and Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. International museum collections include Japan, Canada, England, France, Germany, Switzerland, Italy, Israel, and the Vatican.
Mara Williams assumed Emerita status in 2021, after curating exhibits at the Brattleboro Museum & Art Center for thirty-three years. Her area of expertise is modern and contemporary art. Recent solo exhibitions include: Gathering Light: The Art of Stephen Hannock; Wolf Kahn—Landscape of Light; Secrets by Gloria Garfinkel; Andy Warhol—Selections from the Jon Gould Collection. Group shows have included the work of Jean-Michel Basquiat, Janet Fish, Mary Frank, Keith Haring, David Hockney, Maya Lin, James McGarrell, David Nash, Robert Rauschenberg, Ursula von Ridingsvard, Michael Singer, Tseng Kwong Chi, and Barbara Zucker, as well as a host of regional and emerging talent.
As a partner in Arts Bridge LLC, Williams leads exhibition teams for institutions developing new large-scale museum projects. She led a team at Norwich University to conceive and build the inaugural exhibits and media productions at the Sullivan Museum & History Center; she was the exhibition developer and project manager for the Vermont Historical Society's interactive exhibit and film, Freedom & Unity: One Ideal, Many Stories; she developed Bravo! A Century of Theatre in Fairfield County; and a number of exhibits for the Vermont Folklife Center.
She holds an A.B. in theatre from Boston College; an MFA in museology from Syracuse University and has completed doctoral course work and passed comprehensives in comparative arts at New York University.
She is Chair of the Wolf Kahn Foundation. She has served as chair of the Vermont Arts Council and as a board member of the New England Museum Association, as well as three terms on the Senate Curatorial Advisory Committee for the U.S. Capitol.
Samuel Bak was born on August 12, 1933 in Vilna, Poland at a crucial moment in modern history. From 1940 to 1944, Vilna was under Soviet, then German occupation. While he and his mother survived, his father and four grandparents all perished at the hands of the Nazis. At the end of the war, he fled with his mother to the Landsberg Displaced Persons Camp, where he enrolled in painting lessons at the Blocherer School in Munich. In 1948, they immigrated to the newly established state of Israel. He studied at the Bezalel Art School in Jerusalem and completed his mandatory service in the Israeli army. In 1956, he went to Paris to continue his education at the École des Beaux Arts.
In 1959, he moved to Rome where his first exhibition of abstract paintings was met with considerable success. In 1961, he was invited to exhibit at the Carnegie International in Pittsburgh, followed by solo exhibitions at the Jerusalem and Tel Aviv Museums in 1963. It was after these exhibitions that a major change in his art occurred. There was a distinct shift from abstraction to a metaphysical figurative means of expression. Ultimately, this transformation crystallized into his present pictorial language.
Bak has exhibited extensively in major museums, galleries, and universities throughout Europe, Israel, and the United States. He has been the subject of articles, scholarly works, and over twenty books, most notably a 400-page monograph entitled Between Worlds. This year his biography entitled Art & Life: The Story of Samuel Bak was published. A 2020 exhibition at University of Nebraska Omaha led to the Samuel Bak Museum: The Learning Center, which opened Phase One at UNO earlier this year. Phase Two envisions a brand new, state-of-the-art, free-standing facility to house over 500 works donated by Bak.
Bernard Pucker is the director of Pucker Gallery, which he founded with his wife, Sue, on Newbury Street in Boston in 1967. Pucker Gallery represents over fifty artists from around the world, presenting approximately ten exhibitions annually, often paired with artist talks, virtual “WebinARTs,” and other public events.
Bernie is currently a Board Member at the Japan Society, Boston, and the Jewish Publication Society. He also serves on the Leadership Council for Facing History and Ourselves, as well as the Artistic Advisory Board for the Terezin Music Foundation. Previously, he served as President of Solomon Schechter Day School; President of the Newbury Street League; and a Board Member for the Friends of Copley Square and The Unity Project, among others.
Bernie received his MA in Modern Jewish History from Brandeis University and his BA in History and English Literature from Columbia College.