About Meredeth Turshen
Meredeth Turshen is an artist, a teacher, and a writer. Her art studies began early, at the age of ten, starting at the Art Students League in New York. She studied art at Oberlin College, and has been to various workshops over the years, including those at Pratt Institute, the Printmaking Council of NJ, Rutgers Center for Innovative Printmaking, and the CT Center for Graphic Arts. She has lived in Hoboken and taught at Rutgers University for over 25 years. She regularly exhibits in the New York metropolitan area with Viridian Gallery and the National Association of Women Artists. She says that her career in art, along with teaching and writing about social policy are her passions; she sees both as necessary to her existence.
Turshen often reflects on nature, landscapes, and interior environments, and represents them in abstract and figurative compositions. She has worked in a variety of media, including oil, encaustics, monotypes, and pastel. For the Life Distilled exhibition, she was inspired by household décor, floral arrangements, and potted plants. Her collages reveal familiar, mundane objects through a new lens, juxtaposing sharp lines with organic forms.
New Brunswick Art Salon 2020: “Life Distilled”
Artist Personal Website: www.meredethturshen.com
Email: turshen@rutgers.edu
Artist Statement
For this exhibition, I was inspired by the challenge of incorporating images of household décor, floral arrangements and potted plants into collages that are simultaneously representational and non-figurative. The collages reveal familiar objects through the lens of a modern artist, giving quotidian scenes a new twist.
My art studies began at age ten at the Art Students League in New York with Saturday classes for children and continued, after majoring in studio art at Oberlin College, in workshops at Pratt, the Printmaking Council of NJ, the Rutgers Center for Innovative Printmaking, and the CT Center for Graphic Arts. For the past ten years I have been spending a month at Vermont Studio Center, a stimulating residency where artists meet and inspire one another. Some have asked how I combined a career in art with teaching and writing about social policy. Both are passions; one seems as necessary to my existence as the other.
Exhibitions
Individual Exhibitions
2020 “New Views of Old Hoboken” Hoboken Historical Museum, Hoboken, NJ
2017 “M&Ms” hob’art cooperative gallery, Hoboken, NJ (2-person show)
2016 “The Lie of the Land” Edward Williams Gallery, Fairleigh Dickinson University, Hackensack, NJ
2015 “Fugues” Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ
2010 “Sudden Appearances” Viridian Gallery, New York
2010 Princeton University Women’s Studies Gallery, Princeton NJ
2009 “Transcriptions” Port Washington Library, Port Washington, New York
2009 “Post Scriptum” Ceres Gallery, New York
2008 “Inscriptions” Viridian Gallery, New York
2007 ETS Chauncey Conference Center, Princeton, NJ (2-person show)
2006 “Meditations on the Horizon,” Sovereign Bank, Hoboken, NJ
2005 “Moments and Movement” Symposia, Hoboken, NJ
1994 Hoboken Gallery, Hoboken, NJ
1993 Rutgers University, Labor Education Center, New Brunswick, NJ
1991 Bernard’s, Hoboken, NJ