A List of General Observations about Well Read, a group exhibition at NURTUREart

1. There are 10 artists.
2. 7 of the artists are women.
3. 3 of the artists are men.
4. There are 19 pieces by women.
5. There are 7 pieces by men.
6. In terms of scale 3 works dominate and 2 of them are by men. Three of the 4 largest pieces are by men. Vandana Jain’s 3 painting gain scale by being presented together. They come across as a set.
7. Nicholas Knight’s Intangible (Cezanne) (2006), Gabriel Fowler’s Intersection (2003), and Cui Fei’s Manuscript of Nature V (2002/2006) are the largest pieces in the show. Matt Siber’s Untitled #24 is next after those.
8. Knight’s and Fowler’s work in terms of size and position become the focal points of the show. Fowler’s work appeared on both the press release, the webpage, and (the only work illustrated) in the Brooklyn Rail review of the show.
9. In the Brooklyn Rail review, Shane McAdams writes: “Howard’s overall evenhandedness precludes a focus on a single work or artist. Nicholas Knight’s wall graphic, ‘Intangible (Cézanne),’ however, stands out out as the visual centerpiece of the show, if only in terms of scale and positioning.”
10. There is no work on canvas in the show.
11. There are only 4 works that use oil paint (Molly Springfield’s 2 pieces on panels, just say it is (2003) and and have I ever told you (2003), and Duston Spear’s 2 pieces on paper, Whites (2005) and Ogre, Dear Leader II (2005).
12. There are just 7 painting in the show.
13. There are 3 printed pieces.
14. There are 2 books.
15. There are 6 works that could be said to have been fabricated
16. There are 2 works that use the wall as a ground.
17. Depending on how you define “collage,” there are as many as 19 (out of 26) works that employ collage. I am defining it as cutting and pasting but I’ve included works that involve these procedures but in a nonliteral way.
18. Depending on how you define “found,” there are many works in the show that employ found materials or found forms of some sort. It might be more accurate to argue that the work in Well Read complicate received notions of what constitutes found material.
    
19. 21 works in the show feature language or some literal grammatical objects—they use language in some way.
20. At least 7 works in the show use or take from books. (It may actually be 8, but I am uncertain about Nicholas Knight’s In Practice (Berra) (2003).
21. At least 10 works in the show could be described as “diagrammatic.”
22. At least 16 works in the show involve “splicing” procedures (a cutting apart, splitting, a cutting out) of some sort.