As Everywhere of Silver exhibit to open at SAMA
Artist Nicole Renee Ryan is honored to announce her upcoming exhibition with landscape painter Rita K. Haldeman, celebrating the Southern Allegheny Museum of Art’s 25th anniversary. In As Everywhere of Silver,named for the Emily Dickinson poem, Ryan will debut around 30 paintings that draw fantastical inspiration from the isolation and nostalgia heightened by the pandemic. The exhibition opens Friday, May 7, at the museum’s Ligonier branch and is on view through August 5.
Nicole Renee Ryan in her Mercer, PA studio
Ryan, an accomplished painter from Mercer, PA, cites childhood memories and her early love of fiction as formative sources for her practice, particularly stories that explore hidden worlds, like the poems and drawings of Shel Silverstein and Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden.
Ryan follows an organic process to develop her dreamy, surreal landscapes; she works in cycles, often painting for multiple series at once and shaping several large and small pieces at any given time. She created many of the works in As Everywhere of Silver during the isolation of the pandemic, which she says deepened her interest in the role of art in helping people imagine the world they would like to inhabit.
“These works play with the liminal space between land and sky as each reflects the other—it’s not clear where one element begins and the other ends,” says Ryan. “My paintings transform my memories of the cloudy, hilly landscape of my childhood into dreamlike worlds, and I hope they inspire a sense of whimsy, nostalgia, and possibility.”
Nicole Renee Ryan, The Past Rises Up To Meet Meet Me, (repainted) 2021, As Everywhere of Silver
In addition to the 30-odd works presented on wooden panels, the exhibition will feature Ryan’s first installation piece that will expand the elements of her fanciful landscapes to inhabit an entire wall.
“Each of my paintings is an invitation to step into a new world,” says Ryan. “The installation extends and reimagines that concept so that the viewer’s eye is what collects these disparate elements into a cohesive landscape. It will create a more active and fantastical experience in the museum.”
As Everywhere of Silver also features works by Rita K. Haldeman, a noted painter whose realistic landscapes provide a thematic counterpart to Ryan’s works. Haldeman serves as a directory artist with the Southern Allegheny Museum of Art and has exhibited across the U.S.
Ryan is the recipient of the New York Student’s League residency, a Virginia Center for the Creative Arts fellowship, and a Flight School Fellowship from the Heinz Endowments. Her surreal landscapes have been exhibited in New York City, Chicago, Miami, and Western Pennsylvania; among recent acquisitions, one collector to note is Bill Benter of the Benter Foundation. An artist on the rise, Ryan looks forward to the upcoming exhibition and other projects in the works that will allow her to deepen her practice and reach new audiences.
Artist Bio
Nicole Renee Ryan is a watercolorist, oil painter, and muralist from Mercer, PA. Ryan paints imagined landscapes, but surprisingly, she’s not all that interested in traditional landscape paintings; she uses the landscape as a means to explore the concept of memory. Her interest in the importance and fallibility of memory arose during college while pursuing her degree in psychology from Washington & Jefferson College.
Her goal is to recreate a place she felt she had been at but can’t quite pinpoint. As memories move from reality to abstraction, it becomes easier to misremember things, or think they may have just been a dream. This hazy area is Ryan’s source of inspiration. She uses color and shape to create ethereal landscapes that illustrate the purgatory between memory and imagination, the real and the unreal.
In 2015 Ryan was awarded a residency at the New York Student’s League at Vytacil and a fellowship at Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. She was nominated for Pittsburgh Emerging Artist of the Year for 2016. In 2017 she was awarded a Flight School Fellowship through the Heinz Endowments. She has exhibited paintings in the Heinz History Center and The Butler Museum of American Art. Her works have been exhibited in NYC, Chicago, and Miami. Her last solo show, Land of Little Thoughts and No Worries, was hosted at the Westmoreland Museum of American Art.