Gelah Penn

Penn was born in Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania in 1951, She studied art briefly at Brandeis University, then catalogued early films for the American Film Institute for a year. She appeared in surveys including: "The Persistence of Line" (2008) and "Degrees of Density" (2009, Kentler International Drawing Space); "Drawing Itself" (Brattleboro Museum and Art Center, 2009); "Textility" (Visual Arts Center of New Jersey, 2012); "Materiality: The Matter of Matter" (Center for Maine Contemporary Art, 2017); and "The Stubborn Influence of Painting," (Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art, 2021). Penn's curatorial projects include the exhibitions "Diphthong" (Fiterman Art Center, 2015), "object'hood" (Lesley Heller Gallery, 2015) and "PLACE: Monumental Drawings" (Equity Gallery, 2016). ==Work and reception==

Sculpture critic Patricia Rosoff wrote, "Penn's work embodies essentially Modernist principles: resolutely abstract, it firmly renounces narrative, representation and autobiography." Others identify a similar contradiction between its use of durable (if lightweight) materials and the impermanence of the installations. Her process involves an initial site visit or photographs, followed by rudimentary, exploratory sketches. She then constructs loose, preparatory concentrations of activity in her studio. Reviewers find diverse connections in Penn's installations, likening them to writing, musical scoring, graffiti or doodling, natural events and organisms. The 40-foot, mostly black installation Clash by Night (2009) was described as a "cocoon" whose spiraling swirls and loops of tubing, netting and shadow converged in a corner. High Tide transformed a skybridge in a Philip Johnson-designed gallery space, creating a dialectic between individual parts and unified whole, and disposable matter and architectural permanence. Prologue was a 33-foot-long work composed of the artist's characteristic materials connected by horizontal linear elements, which moved in a step-like rhythm of quiet progression and busyness along the length of a stairway wall. The "Stele" series (2020) featured cruciform arrangements, ethereal materials and shadows, and a sharp verticality suggesting figural presences. Penn's Notes on Clarissa is an ongoing project inspired by the tragic 18th-century Samuel Richardson novel Clarissa, a story of seduction and betrayal, told primarily through letters. She has presented the work in various forms, including an installation of 99 individual collages that reworked photographic exhibition cards from her prior installations, each collage alluding to one letter in the novel. John Mendelsohn deemed the project exemplary of Penn's art—a work "made of fragments, with the concomitant impulse to make something cohere from them. To use Robert Smithson's phrase, the pieces 'rise into ruin', as scraps from life are salvaged and given a new life, but retain a feeling of the abject and the vulnerable." ==Collections and recognition==

Penn has been awarded residencies from MacDowell (1989), the Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program (2010) and Yaddo (2014). She received a Tree of Life artist grant in 2016 and a Connecticut Artist fellowship in 2017. Her work belongs to the public collections of the Arkansas Arts Center, Brooklyn Museum Library, Cleveland Institute of Art, Columbus Museum and Weatherspoon Art Museum. ==References==