Garden Club

Above: Nancy Gruskin – ‘Pansy, Box, Egg Cups’, 2024, monotype on paper, 16 x 20″

Wendy Edwards • Nancy Gruskin
Stacey McCarthy • Roberta Paul

May 10 – July 26, 2025

Opening Reception:
Saturday, May 10 • 2-5pm

Flowers are blooming, the grass is greening, trees are budding, and it is finally spring in New England! Drive-by Projects will be celebrating the return of light and growth with Garden Club, an exhibition including Wendy Edwards’s lush, gestational paintings, Roberta Paul’s poignant floral still lifes, Nancy Gruskin’s monoprints of beautifully mundane objects, and Stacey McCarthy’s exuberant window installation.

Join us on Saturday, May 10, 2025 to honor the season and view the work of four fabulous artists.

Abstracted organic flora forms and body parts have been dominant themes in my artwork for years. They overlap in luscious surfaces that juxtapose complex spatial relationships. The combination of a lush palette of colors and sensual paint application enables me to synthesize flowers and organs into a complex visual metaphor for powerful forces in my life. I convey fertility relationships between interior and exterior anatomy and stages of gestation as entangled shapes. Working from both direct observation and improvisation, my interpretation is from a distinctly personal and feminist perspective and is a reassessment of the history of this painting genre. References include historic medical illustrations depicting fetuses, brains, and female organs. Cultural awareness of feminist perspectives is now part of American 20th century history, and acknowledgment of past masters is of critical importance in viewing the world from various perspectives and in understanding the history of sharing global visual engagement.
Wendy Edwards

In my paintings, I am both collector and curator. An object might grab my attention because of its shape or its color or its decorative surface. Sometimes the object is in my studio (a ceramic pot, a scrap of fabric, a collage in my sketchbook); sometimes the object is something I’ve seen in someone else’s collection (a vessel at the Met, a wallpaper sample on Pinterest, an illustration in a botanical encyclopedia). As the artist-curator, I get to decide how these objects interact and how I want to present them to viewers. I like to think of my work as two-dimensional collections, reminiscent of museum display cases and 16th-century cabinets of curiosities.
Nancy Gruskin

I hold a deep reverence for the natural world — both wild and cultivated. I enjoy nature with equal parts awe and fear. Gardens, particularly flowers, are a recurring theme in my work. Flowers say: I love you. I’m sorry. I’m with you. I’m proud of you. I miss you. They ask us to pay attention and be present.

In lieu of flowers is a window installation composed of drawings I’ve been making since 2015. Each piece documents a larger narrative and time. Designed to be viewed from multiple angles, added to, and reorganized, the work invites reflection and creates space for hope.
Stacey McCarthy

Visual autobiography has always played a role in my work. Time, memory, love, grief, family and childhood have been the source of inspiration for several decades. Whether figuratively or conceptually the tie and pull of family has played a dominant and leading role in my conversation with my paintings. Some works are easier to read and other pieces are not so subtle and need to be decoded. As I strive to make the personal, universal, I seem to need a connection to the past to help me into the future.

The Bloom series is more oblique than previous works as I have found myself dealing like everyone with Covid, and what that means to be making art during this time. When I began the work, the flowers made me think of Picasso’s Guernica…the outstretched art of the vanquished soldier with a flower in his opened hand represented the idea that there is hope!. Almost two years later I still want to believe this is true.
Roberta Paul