Resident Spotlight 2010: Beatrice Wolert

Inaugural participant in EFA Project Space's 
Residency for Arts Workers as Artists

Beatrice Wolert is the Programs Director for CUE Art Foundation.

We asked each resident to tell us about their work and their experience during the residency, and more about their professional lives as both artists and arts workers. Here are Beatrice's answers...

What Beatrice has been working on:

I have been exploring ideas of masking and facades through layered masking tape drawings and through thickly impastoed paintings utilizing cake tips and decorating bags filed with oil or acrylic paint. I am exploring decorating with tips that create basket weaves, scallops, flowers, leaves and dots, all the while thinking about how decoration relates to meaning and value.

Beatrice's experience so far:

When I first learned that I have been accepted to the program along with 7 others, I immediately felt a collective responsibility and ownership. The idea that the program was to be a time for self nourishment and was intentionally structured very loosely, felt very comforting. I had set up goals for myself before my arrival, but the freedom to stray from them allowed me to take different directions and approaches in my work. I am enjoying the level of intensity I have set up for myself and the support I feel in working in an open environment with such a group of talented and knowledgeable artists. This environment allows for a close-knit community to begin forming bonds, it allows for critical dialogue, it allows for self reflection and meshes nicely with my own personal work ethic. I most value the time I have for self reflection and the time to really push my concepts further in such a concentrated time.

Beatrice Wolert is the Programs Director for CUE Art Foundation. She has been working with the Foundation since February 2004. Prior to her position there she was Associate Editor at Paperloop, Inc., New York from 1998-2003. She has been involved in the founding and development of CUE's programming and fostering partnerships with other like-minded organizations. Wolert is a first generation Polish American artist raised in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. She works between drawing and sculpture exploring process, fleeting moments, impermanence, fragments, serendipity, synchronicity, found objects and transformation of materials. She received a BA in Design from Adelphi University, Garden City, NY (1997) and an MFA in Painting from Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, NY (2003). She is a member of One Stone Collective who recently exhibited: Archetypes: The(se) Roles We Wear presented by Lehigh College; The Women's Center, Women's Studies, and Arts Lehigh, in Bethlehem, PA. She has exhibited in group shows at venues such NurtureArt, Feature Inc., Denise Bibro, HQ, A.I.R. Gallery, Artists Space, d.u.m.b.o art center and EXIT Art in New York; Woman Made Gallery in Chicago, and internationally at the Aratoi Wairarapa Museum of Art and History, Masterton, New Zealand. Wolert continues to live and maintain her studio practice in Greenpoint.