Lynda Roscoe Hartigan, the Rose-Marie and Eijk van Otterloo Executive Director and CEO, and the Peabody Essex Museum invite you to a private cocktail reception celebrating the Present Tense Initiative and the publication of Shelagh Keeley: ideas brushing against ideas: the library as refuge inspired by her recent PEM exhibition and commission.
Friday, February 28, 2025
6–8 pmJack Shainman Gallery | 46 Lafayette Street | New York City
The reception will be held in New York City at Jack Shainman Gallery’s new flagship location in the historic Clock Tower Building in Tribeca. Artist Nick Cave’s extraordinary Amalgams and Graphts will be on view that evening. Nick Cave presented an exhibition and a soundsuit invasion at PEM that brought the community together after the Boston Marathon bombing in 2013.
Jack Shainman Gallery has been dedicated from its inception to championing artists who have achieved mastery of their creative disciplines and are among the most compelling and influential contributors to culture today. Over the past four decades the gallery has earned a reputation for introducing international artists to American audiences and developing young and midcareer artists, who have gone on to gain worldwide acclaim.
The gallery’s new Tribeca iteration is situated in a multistory 20,000-square-foot space in the Clock Tower Building, a historic space completed around 1898 by the architecture firm McKim, Mead & White and listed in the U.S. National Register of Historic Places. Originally the home of the New York Life Insurance Company, the building’s transformation will allow it to assume a contemporary context as it is put in dialogue with 21st-century art and ideas.
At the core of Shelagh Keeley’s work is a drawing practice based on an embodied response to readings and research in poetry, politics, film and architecture. Throughout her 40-year international career, her practice has been focused on a vast body of drawing that expanded beyond the studio to create onsite, ephemeral wall drawings.
Shelagh Keeley lives and works in Toronto after living for 22 years in New York City and Paris. Keeley’s works have been presented by Goethe Institut / Max Mueller Bhavan Mumbai MoMA Library and Archives, New York; Museu Coleçcão Berardo, Lisbon; Museum Abteiberg Mönchengladbach, Germany; The Power Plant, Institute of Contemporary Art, and Ryerson Image Center, Toronto, Vancouver Art Gallery. Her work is in public collections that include MoMA, New York; Les Musées de la Ville de Paris; the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; the Peabody Essex Museum, Salem; the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and the Vancouver Art Gallery.
IMAGES Exhibition view of ideas brushing against ideas: the library as refuge, Peabody Essex Museum. Photo by Kathy Tarantola/PEM. Book cover for ideas brushing against ideas/the library refuge by Shelagh Keeley. Artist Shelagh Keeley. Photo by Kathy Tarantola/PEM.