Press Release:
Jean Carruthers Wetta
Paintings
April 7 – May 12, 2018
Reception for the Artist Saturday, April 7, 5-7 pm
Artist Talk with Clint Willour 5 pm
Moody Gallery is pleased to announce Paintings, its first solo exhibition with Jean Carruthers Wetta. A selection of her work between 2001 and 2018 will be on view. Wetta’s oil paintings portray classic subjects including landscapes and still lifes. In 1998 Clint Willour curated a traveling retrospective of her work at the Galveston Arts Center and Eleanor Jones Harvey, Senior Curator at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, wrote an essay for the catalogue. In it she said, "Perhaps most compelling about Jean Wetta’s work is its underlying mystical and spiritual sensibility. Far from being straightforwardly representational, her works are invested with metaphor and mysticism.”
Jean Carruthers Wetta (b. 1944) is a Texas artist currently living and working in Islands Heights, New Jersey. She received a Bachelor of Arts degree in Fine Art from Webster College, St. Louis, Missouri and Master of Arts degree in Painting from Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge. After graduate school, she moved to Galveston where she was an integral part of the Galveston Arts Center, hired to be the first instructor of painting and drawing in 1972. She taught painting and art history at College of the Mainland and was the Director of their art gallery from 1980 until 1985, when she retired to become a full-time studio artist. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally and is part of many museum collections including the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the Art Museum of Southeast Texas, the Art Museum of South Texas, and the Tyler Museum of Art, Texas. The gallery has represented her work since 2015. Wetta was previously represented by McMurtrey Gallery in Houston for nearly 30 years.
Paintings will be on view at Moody Gallery April 7 – May 12, 2018. A reception for the artist will be held Saturday, April 7 from 5:00 – 7:00 pm and an Artist Talk with Clint Willour, Curator Emeritus, Galveston Arts Center, will take place at 5:00 pm. Moody Gallery is located at 2815 Colquitt, Houston, Texas 77098. The gallery hours are Tuesday through Friday, 10:30-5:00, and Saturday, 11:00-5:00. For more information, please contact Moody Gallery at 713-526-9911 or by email at info@moodygallery.com