Sunne Savage Gallery and Coastal Chic Interiors Featured on NSTV
Norwell Spotlight TV stopped by Coastal Chic Interiors in Norwell Center for our art reception! NSTV interviewed Mary Bess Engel, owner of Coastal Chic, and Christina Godfrey, Director of the Sunne Savage Gallery. Watch the full interview here.
Coastal Chic Interior & Sunne Savage Gallery Invite You to a Summer Party!
Liz Puleo Shares Experience Exhibiting at Boston Children’s Hospital
LEGO Master Liz Puleo has shared her experience exhibiting at Boston Children’s Hospital in Brick by Brick and meeting children there who love LEGO as much as she does with Brick Nerd.
“It was a humbling experience to say the least, I was not prepared to see so many children younger than my own dealing with such burdens. They were incredible, so strong, and unwavering. Hearing their stories and struggles brought me to tears on more than one occasion, but it was their positivity and incredible outlook that made my heart burst. To see a blind girl, who had brain surgery that week, sit in front of me and tell me how much she loved building with LEGO and telling stories with minifigures was astounding. I was so impressed and blown away by her tenacity for life.”
We’re so honored to have been a part of this project and look forward to many more at Boston Children’s Hospital.
Introducing Refraction by MASARY, Now at Boston Children’s Hospital
In the Spring of 2022 Boston Children’s Hospital (BCH) engaged the Sunne Savage Gallery to assist with a sculpture commission for the Multi-Faith Chapel at 300 Longwood, Boston, MA
After considering many local artists, an international RFQ was posted on the CodaWorx platform. Christina Godfrey, Gallery Director, worked closely with Elisabeth Gordon, BCH Art Program Manager and the 12 BCH Chaplains to review the strong and diverse pool of applicants. One artist group outshined the rest with their experience, thoughtfulness, and creativity: MASARY.
Days after the installation of the finished work titled Refraction, MASARY gave an artist talk in the Chapel on the Spring Equinox, March 19th. Rabbi Susan Davis welcomed guests and introduced the space. After casual but poignant speeches by MASARY and fabricator Jaywalk Studio, attendees witnessed Refraction’s seasonal lighting evolution. A video of Refraction can be seen here and the artist’s statement below:
“Through light and reflection, Refraction represents a connection point open to all practices of faith, spirituality, and relationships with the universe. Installed in the Boston Children’s Hospital Chapel, the artwork is composed of 263 individual acrylic pendants suspended from the ceiling, creating a cloud-like formation overhead. The pendants are transparent, and each has a special material – dichroic film – applied to one-side. This material allows all of the pendants to refract light: as light passes through the pendants, it bends, changing color and shape. This takes place both for the natural sunlight through the room window and with the programmed lights for the artwork.”
“The programmed lighting is based off of the four seasons, recognizing the natural cycles of light in how it gives Earth life and how seasons can symbolize transformation. The programmed lighting color palette changes at each equinox (in March and September) and solstice (in June and December) – the days the earth changes seasons. Inspired by the Chapel and the unique community that intersects with it, this artwork highlights the Chapel as a welcoming environment for all to find their own light.”
Refraction is the third commission completed in partnership with Boston Children’s Hospital. We’re currently working on a fourth sculpture commission and continuing to co-curate the Mini Museum in the Hospital’s Hale Building. The Sunne Savage Gallery is proud to be a part of these impactful and rewarding projects.
Photography by Aram Boghosian.
Call for Art! Boston Children’s Hospital Signature Sculpture
Boston Children’s Hospital (BCH) is seeking a well-qualified artist or team of artists to create an exterior sculpture.
The Hospital is looking for a unique, uplifting, and iconic sculpture concept. Submissions should be whimsical, more realistic than abstract, and explore the notion of scale.
The commission opportunity begins with a Request for Qualifications hosted on the CodaWorx platform. The deadline is Friday, December 15th.
More information can be found here.
Allison Esley’s Agate Windows Installed in Boston Children’s Hostpital
We’re so excited to share a new permanent installation at Boston Children’s Hospital!
Installed in the interior garden on the 8th floor of the hospital’s Hale Building, four unique window exhibits by Allison Esley are bringing a burst of color to the wooden “tree house” designed by MikYoung Kim Design. The installation includes three stationary windows and one interactive rotating window engineered by Dillion Works. Christina Godfrey installed the final works.
Allison Esley is a self taught abstract artist living and working in New Orleans, Louisiana. Her works are heavily influenced by color theory, science and the natural world. Since 2015, she has been developing a distinctive style of layering and mixing colorful inks with resin to create abstract agates and other paintings meant to inspire creativity and wonder.
The healing gardens in the Boston Children’s Hospital Hale Building integrate green space and human-centered design into the clinical experience. They provide a much needed playful, immersive, and restorative experience to help foster health and well-being.
We’re so proud to have been a part of this project. If you’d like to inquire about a large-scale installation please contact Christina Godfrey at christina@sunnesavage.com.
Bringing Southern Comfort Home
We love a commission and we recently completed the installation of a seriously stunning one.
Why do we love them so much? It’s all about the process! From finding inspiration with the client and selecting an artist, to watching a work come to life and then bringing it home, we love every second.
That’s why we’re so excited to share it with you.
This commission depicts the view from the client’s land overlooking North Carolina’s Blue Ridge Mountains.
It began with horizontal photograph of the vista at dusk and artist Charles Tersolo edited the composition into a vertical format while retaining compositional elements of importance to the client.
Over a period of 4 months, he applied layers and layers of paint to the canvas in a unique process he’s perfected to develop the richness seen in the finished painting.
The final composition is a showstopper that encompasses the light, depth and familiarity that the client requested.
Visit Tersolo’s website at charlestersolo.com.
The Commission That Has Us Spinning in the Wind
Every commission starts with a conversation about the color, texture, and scale of the final work. This one needed to be big, bold but balanced, and ethereal. In this case, the final product exceeded all expectations. Morgan Dyer worked her magic to bring the client’s vision to life, and then we worked ours to have it framed and installed.
Dyer uses an interesting method of pouring paint and then painting intuitively into the pours. She often pours directly over unstretched canvas and is inspired in part by the rocky shores outside of her studio on Bearskin Neck in Rockport, MA.
Money Island Commission Comes Home
In 2021, we connected a client with John Vinton, a Boston based artist known for his gestural seascapes. The client requested a large-scale painting of their beloved summer home on Money Island, one of Connecticut’s Thimble Islands.
Vinton, who was already familiar with the islands from John Frederick Kensett’s 19th century seascapes, was up for the challenge. He began by taking a guided boat tour of the islands with the client to familiarize himself with the geography, light, and color palette. After the trip he explored the landscape with a series of studies. The completed work, Summer Warmth, brings the clients’ memories home by capturing more than just an image of the island, but how it feels to stand on its shores. But Vinton hasn’t stopped there. He’s been working on a whole new series of paintings inspired by the islands.
You can see available works from the series, and learn more about them, in the presentation linked here.
To find out how to commission a work of your own contact Christina Godfrey at christina@sunnesavage.com.
Boston Children’s Hospital Commission Installed
We’re proud to announce the completion of seven resin sculptures by Gianna Stewart for Boston Children’s Hospital. The sculpture’s are installed at the reception desks on each the seven patient floors of the hospital’s new Hale Building.
Pairing each sculpture with the floor’s design themes of harbor, transportation, lake, mountain, forest, space and nest, Stewart creates unique visual experiences for patients and visitors to the floors.
Each sculpture is composed of 24 layers of resin, fimo clay, glitter, color pigment and natural elements. The sculptures, which took a year to conceptualize and fabricate, will be on display for the public when the building opens later this summer.
Amundi US Project Wins IFMA Award
In May 2022, our Amundi US project won the “Excellence in Building Synergies award” at the IFMA Boston Chapter’s Annual Awards of Excellence. This award is presented to a project team for their work on a project that brings opposing forces together with creative thinking and innovative solutions.
The Sunne Savage Gallery worked closely with Tom Murphy, Director of Facilities at Amundi US, to inventory and appraise the firm’s art collection prior to an office restacking. The Gallery collaborated with Unispace and Amundi US to reframe and place 175 works of art through 4 floors at 60 State Street.
In combination with the stellar design work completed by Unispace, the Sunne Savage Gallery reinvisioned the Amundi art collection by removing damaged pieces, reframing existing work and refreshing the collection with additional artwork by talented local artists.
Maine Modern Masters with Moss Galleries
When we found out our friends at Moss Galleries were curating a show of Maine modernists, we just had to help out and wow, it’s a beauty! With 40 works by 20 artists spread out through two galleries, you won’t see another show like it this summer.
We brought works by Rockwell Kent, John Marin, Charles Woodbury and Abraham Bogdanove to the show. Be sure to see the show in person! It’s on view from July 8th to August 20th.
New Landmark Sculpture Installed at Clipership Wharf
Volkan Alkanoglu’s landmark installation Islands has been installed at East Boston’s Clippership Wharf. Located on the Harborwalk just steps from Maverick T station, it is a true destination sculpture that offers opportunities for play and photography against the backdrop of a stunning view of the Boston skyline.
Islands examines Boston’s dynamic history by drawing inspiration from the city’s historic expansion projects of the 20th century. It is composed of five brightly colored vertical structures that represent the five harbor islands that were transformed into the East Boston peninsula we know today. With a focus on viewer interaction, visitors are invited to walk through the installation as well as sit within each structure or rotate them to form new layouts within the overall work.
After hosting a call for art, Volkan Alkanoglu’s proposal for Islands was selected by a panel of Boston’s community leaders. Volkan specializes in large-scale installations that seek to transform our perceptions of and interactions with public space.
Islands was commissioned by real estate firm Lendlease in partnership with the Sunne Savage Gallery. It is the second large-scale installation commissioned for Clippership Wharf, a Lendlease project. We hope to see you there!
New American Public Art’s Pillar Installed at Clippership Wharf
New American Public Art’s large-scale installation Pillar has been unveiled at Boston’s Clippership Wharf. Pillar is a milestone for New American Public Art (NAPA). It is the studio’s first purely conceptual work but maintains their obsession with human curiosity and interaction. We’re thrilled to see this project come to life as one of two public art commission we’ve worked on with Lendlease at Clippership Wharf.
Pillar’s roots are set deep into East Boston’s history, where prehistory and the colonial period meet. The towering, geometric form evokes two kinds of trees: the ancient forests of scaled Lepidodendron trees that blanketed the prehistoric landscape and the Eastern White Pines that enabled New England’s thriving ship-building industry in the 1600’s.
These narratives are literally woven into Pillar. An intricate web of fiber optics is woven into the triangular gaps on the surface of the work. The tight coils of the fiber optic cables were inspired by naval braids and ancient mycelium fungi, the first organism capable of decomposing fallen Lepidodendron’s. While the parametric pattern of holes interspersed across the work evoke the Lepidodendron’s thick scales and the design of the “King’s broad arrow”– a mark used in the 17th century to reserve pines larger than 24 inches in diameter “for the King.”
Pillar’s multi-layered concept and design makes it a work that will reward the curious and create a new hub for social engagement on Clippership Wharf. Designed to engage physical, digital and social creativity, it is intended to have the greatest impact in visitors’ memories and the media they produce there.
Founded in 2014, New American Public Art is “a design-and-build studio at the intersection of public art, architecture, and technology.” NAPA’s works can be found across the United States, including their installation Color Commons on the Rose Kennedy Greenway in Boston, MA and forthcoming installation Kempelen’s Owls in Austin, TX. Not merely content with helping to innovate the aesthetics of public art, NAPA open sources all of their designs and code to further the pursuit of a truly open creative economy.
Monumental Carole Bolsey Commission Installed at Hudson Yards
Carole Bolsey’s monumental painting Hudson River Backwater will be installed at the Hudson Yards Grill, a restaurant opening at the new development Hudson Yards in New York City. An astonishing 7’ 6” x 26’ 10”, Hudson River Backwater is a landmark commission for Bolsey and will impart a distinctive sense of place at the Hudson Yards Grill. We are proud to have partnered with VisionART Consulting for this project.
Bolsey’s rapturous water lilies immediately bring Monet to mind but their true origin lies in an invented backwater on the Upper Hudson River. In Bolsey’s own words, “the light is North American… the air is clear and crisper than in Monet’s gentle Giverny.” Her bold brushwork and intense color palette delineatesher assertive and dynamic artistic vision.
The painting places the viewer’s eye at water level, as if seated in a canoe, like those that occupy the upper third of the painting. The canoes provide scale and focus, and also signal a human presence that is distinctly egalitarian. Canoes are New World watercraft invented by the Americas’ Native peoples. By incorporating them into the work, Bolsey recalls the long history of the Hudson while also referencing modern-day recreation.
Hudson Yards, a 1,000,000 square foot mixed-use development of residences, shops and restaurants will open publicly on March 15th. Michael Lomonaco, chef of Porter House and formerly of Windows on the World at the World Trade Center, will open Hudson Yards Grill, a 275 seat All-America restaurant. “It’s a no-tablecloth, family restaurant,” Lamonaco says. “It’s very approachable and hospitality-oriented, and will appeal to a large population that’s going to live and work in the area.” Chefs Thomas Keller, David Chang, and Jose Andres (among others) are also opening restaurants in the development, making Hudson Yards an international foodie destination.
Carole Bolsey lives and works in Massachusetts. She received her B.A. in painting at Bennington College, VT and studied at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Switzerland and the Accademia di Belle Arti in Italy. She has taught at Harvard University’s Carpenter Center for Visual and Environmental Studies and Graduate School of Design, and the Rhode Island School of Design. Her works are in numerous private, public and corporate collections.