Richard Neal: Ever and Ever

Fredi Schiff Levin Lecture with the artist: Thursday, September 26 at 6pm

Like many of his generation, Neal has been a witness to the volatile historical events of the contemporary age and a student of the events that have led us here: the development of nuclear weapons and the dissolution of the nuclear family; America’s tragic history of slavery; political assassinations and burning cities; the ongoing battles for civil rights; sex and drugs and rock and roll.

Utilizing antique wood, copper electrical wire, plumbing parts, plastic dolls, manipulated photos, aluminum screens, books, denim, canvas, string, rope, cord, charcoal, pastels, paints, and parts of musical instruments, he carves, caresses, cauterizes and cajoles his creations into existence in an effort to stitch together a broken world.

Richard Neal was born in Washington, DC and grew up in Maryland. He earned a Master’s degree in Sculpture at the Cranbrook Academy of Art and he works at Chalkboard Studio in Barnstable, MA. His paintings were recently featured in a three-city tour of Cuba and his work is included in numerous public and private collections. He is the inaugural recipient of the Arts Foundation of Cape Cod Fellowship. The writer, André van der Wende has observed that “Neal is a master at creating distressed surfaces full of invention and the unexpected, tough and confrontational in their manufacture and effect.”

ABOUT THE CURATOR

David Wright is the Curator at the Wellfleet Historical Society Museum, where he has worked for 25 years. He is the author of The Famous Beds of Wellfleet—A Shellfishing History, and his articles appear regularly in New England print and on-line periodicals. He is also a working artist and teacher who has taught hand-building in clay at Truro Center for the Arts at Castle Hill and other Outer Cape venues. A singer and former nightclub performer,  Wright released the CD, Croon, Cry and Testify in 2005. Wright was a gallerist before turning to museum work and was the first to show the work of Richard Neal, in 1984 at the David Wright Gallery in Wellfleet, MA.