The Riverside Press-Enterprise
`Spirit Voyager' exhibit celebrates 70-year art career
“Andrée M. Mahoney: Spirit Voyager,” an exhibit of mixed-media painting and ceramic sculpture, opened Friday at the Claremont Lewis Museum of Art.
The exhibit, celebrating Mahoney’s 70-year exploration of the richness of life through art, runs through April 23.
Mahoney came to Claremont in 1950 to study art at Scripps College and honed her skills in the Millard Sheets Studio. She later earned her Master of Education and Master of Fine Arts degrees from Claremont Graduate University in the 1960s and then served as professor of art at Chaffey College for more than 30 years, according to a news release.
The exhibition is curated by the artist’s daughter Monica Lynne Mahoney, and an opening reception is scheduled 6-8 p.m. today.
In “Spirit Voyager,” Mahoney takes viewers on a journey through universal symbols and metaphors that navigate land, sea and sky to connect with the cosmos through her view of the world, according to the news release. Her work is also grounded in feminist ideology.
The child of a military family, Mahoney, who was born in 1932, moved several times across the United States in her youth. Sea voyages on military cargo ships became the foundation of some of her earliest memories and would later provide metaphor and material for artistic production, according to the news release.
As a Scripps College student, Mahoney studied ceramics with Richard Petterson and painting with Millard Sheets, Phil Dike and Henry Lee Mcfee. Jean Ames, the college’s only female art professor at the time, was also a mentor.
As a studio assistant with Millard Sheets Studio, Mahoney worked with Sheets and Susan Lautmann Hertel on the Garrison Theater mosaic mural at Scripps College from 1958 to 1962. She also worked with Martha Underwood on numerous mosaics on Home Savings and Loan buildings, all part of the region’s post-war public art program.
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Mahoney employed feminist ideologies in her work, particularly ceramic sculpture in which she sculpted clay into sensuous forms to explore the power and constraints of women’s bodies and roles in society, according to the news release.
In the 1980s, she turned toward conflict resolution and the birth of her boat series, which fused early memories with nautical metaphors.
She has exhibited her work throughout Southern California, with solo exhibitions at San Bernardino Valley College’s Gresham Gallery and the Wignall Museum of Contemporary Art at Chaffey College in Rancho Cucamonga. Her work also has been featured in galleries across the West and is represented in private collections from California to New York.
Her home, once a National Forest Service fire lookout tower, was transformed into an artist’s showroom by her late husband, sculptor Jerome Edward Mahoney.
The Claremont Lewis Museum of Art is in the historic Claremont Depot at 200 W. First St., next to the Metrolink station. The museum is open noon-4 p.m. Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays, and admission is free every Friday.
For information, go to clmoa.org.