Summertime at Pie Projects - Joanne Lefrak and Martha Tuttle

June 18 – July 10, 2021

This two-person show featured scratched portraits in plexiglass by Joanne Lefrak and mixed media paintings by Martha Tuttle. Both artists play with light, shadow, and corporeal relationships. This exhibition is presented in Santa Fe in partnership with Albuquerque’s Richard Levy Gallery.

Joanne Lefrak scratches portraits of women into plexiglass surfaces. Lefrak’s subjects are middle-aged women who are fully empowered and in the prime of their lives. The shadows cast from the scratched renderings define each image making visible the beauty of persona, age, and the power of the women. In addition to being an artist, Lefrak is the Director of Education and Curator of Public Practice at SITE Santa Fe and a strong advocate for promoting women in the arts. Her work has been exhibited at MASS MoCA, ev+a in Ireland, Albuquerque Museum, and the New Mexico Museum of Art, among others.

Martha Tuttle uses traditional techniques to create mixed media paintings. She spins, weaves, and dyes wool and embellishes her handmade fabrics with an assortment of mediums such as graphite, stone dust, and natural pigments. Tuttle’s abstract compositions comprise a variety of hand-crafted materials of varying opacities. Her paintings reference physical connections to the natural world through texture and translucence. Martha Tuttle holds an MFA from Yale and currently has an installation at Storm King Art Center in New York’s Hudson Valley. Her work has been shown internationally and has been featured in Artforum, The New York Times, Hyperallergic, among other publications. Tuttle grew up in New Mexico and currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.