Arts & Eniertainment

Nelson packs up a collage
for exhibit at FerndalA
Lawrence Street Gallery.

— —

Moving On

THE LIVING

ROOM

JCC gallery director steps down to pursue
her own career as a hands-on artist.

TouR

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"It or
diEADOW
BROOK

SUZANNE CHESSLER

Special to the Jewish News

S

ylvia Nelson has devoted more
than 12 years of workdays to
many kinds of artists, but she is
about to give her work time to just
one — herself.
Nelson, director of the Janice
Charach Epstein Gallery at the Jewish
Community Center in West
Bloomfield, has decided to retire from
administrative responsibilities and
instead expend her energy completing
and placing her own paintings and
collages.
Although she'll continue at the JCC
until a replacement has been found
and trained, Nelson already has been
asked to be part of a group exhibit,
Invitational '05, running July 5-29 at
the Lawrence Street Gallery in
Ferndale. Her position at the Epstein
Gallery made her 'eligible for the
upcoming show, which consists of
work done by mentors, muses, peers
and former students of the artists
managing the co-op space.
Nelson, who shares a mall studio .
with two other artists, was brought
into the invitational by one of her
studio mates.
"I submitted two collages for the
exhibit, and the people planning it
will choose one," says Nelson, 59, of
Farmington Hills, who adds dimen-
sion to her pieces by using recycled
materials.
"One collage, called Escape, is a tex-
tured painting with butterflies appear-
ing to be exiting the piece through a
crack. The other collage, called M2,
has a combination of pastels with

orange letters referenced in the title.
"Whatever I do generally combines
a lot of materials. I'm enamored of
the shapes of letters and numbers, and
I keep clippings from magazines and
newspapers so that I can work them
into different projects."
Although Nelson has been using
personal time to develop her artistic
interests, including the crafting of
jewelry from found objects, she only
has shown one project at the gallery.
Nelson, mindful of conflict-of-
interest issues, allowed herself to make
a tzedakah box for a group show that
was a fund-raising effort for the space.
Nelson's box, titled Tzedakah Is a
Four-Letter Word, was covered with
words related to philanthropy — give,
hope, love and care.
"I ran the words together and used
red to emphasize that tzedakah comes
from the heart," Nelson says.

200 Exhibits

The director's artistry, always abstract,
has come from her heart since child-
hood, when favorite elementary
school field trips took her to muse-
urns. She remembers the first affirma-
tion of her work as a teacher's recom-
mendation that a painting of hers be
placed in an art show.
After majoring in painting at the
University of Michigan, Nelson was
hired to plan Woodward windows at
Hudson's in downtown Detroit. One
year after graduation, she married real
estate developer David Robert Nelson
and decided to stay out of the work-
force while their three children were
still young.