WILMINGTON, DE.- Since its inception in 2008, the Delaware Art Museum’s community-generated Outlooks Exhibition Series has demonstrated that our region is home to artists of national and international stature. The Museum presents its newest Outlooks exhibition, Reconstructed Elements: Richard H. Bailey, Helen Mason, Stan Smokler, on view September 5, 2015-January 3, 2016.

This exhibition brings together three contemporary artists who reshape raw materials into new forms. Richard H. Bailey, Helen Mason, and Stan Smokler use materials such as stone, rubber tires, and recycled steel. Their media and processes vary and their works range from stylized to abstract three-dimensional objects. Whether with intense black, jewel-like colors, or metallic surfaces, each artist gives rediscovered materials not just new design but renewed life.

RICHARD H. BAILEY
Richard H. Bailey is a stone carver who uses marble and semi-precious stones from quarries all over the world to create works inspired by animals and the human form. With both modern and traditional tools, he sculpts stone of varying colors and grains to shape figures and mosaics.

Born in Delaware, Richard Bailey maintains his carving workshop on the family farm near Smyrna, DE, where he grew up. He studied in New York City at the Arts Students League and The New School for Social Research; in Vermont at Goddard College and the Barre Granite Association; and in Carrara, Italy, at Carlo Nicoli Studios. He has exhibited his work nationally, and in Italy, England, Costa Rica, and Japan. Over 600 of his works are held in private and public collections, including the American Museum of Natural History and the Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church (both in New York City).

HELEN MASON
Helen Mason manipulates rubber tires into a fluid material, using their color, malleability, and textures to achieve a variety of effects. The folds, weavings, and knots of her many-layered compositions suggest mysterious and symbolic associations.

Helen Mason received her MFA from the University of Delaware and her BFA from The Rhode Island School of Design/Brown University. Among her honors are a NEA/DSAC Individual Artist Fellowship and a Gulbenkian Foundation Grant (Portugal). She served as Chair of the Art Department at the Tatnall School, Wilmington, DE, from 1977 to 1992. She has exhibited in museums and galleries nationally and in Germany, Japan, and South Korea. Her works are in many public and private collections, including the Delaware Art Museum (Wilmington, DE), the High Museum (Atlanta, GA), and the Kalamazoo Institute of Art (Kalamazoo, MI).

STAN SMOKLER
Stan Smokler heats, welds, bends, and twists cast-off steel pieces and found objects into new forms. Fascinated with how the materials interact and create new dimensions, the sculptor concentrates on how the newly designed forms occupy space.

Smokler received his BFA from the University of Pittsburgh and his MFA in sculpture from Pratt Institute. He currently teaches at the Delaware College of Art and Design and maintains studios in New York and Kennett Square, PA., where he is also head of the Marshall Bridge Welding Workshop He has had over 40 solo exhibitions and has shown in over 70 group exhibitions nationally. He was invited by the Cultural Council of Segovia (Spain) to participate in an artists’ workshop in 1986 and was a YADDO Fellow in 2011.