Edith Lunt Small exhibit at Dyer Arts Center

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Edith Lunt Small '74 art will be showcased at NTID's Dyer Art Center this January

Nothing is off limits to Edith Lunt Small’s imagination—and what she sees, she paints. And then she throws in a few shocking details into the mix to halt any sense of realism. “My favorite piece is called The Entry of Christ into Manhattan, based after artist James Ensor’s Entry of Christ into Brussels,” says the artist from her Pittsford home/studio. “I have Christ making his way on a donkey up Park Avenue, ignored by everyone. There are homeless people, transvestites, and because I was a vegetarian at the time, I put in some animals on their way to the slaughterhouse to feed our insatiable need for meat. Irony is very important in my work and in the work I love.”

The Dyer Arts Center at RIT’s National Technical Institute for the Deaf, will host the Edith Lunt Small Retrospective RIT ’52 with an opening reception and music by Margaret Explosion from 5 to 7:30 p.m. on Friday, Jan. 18. The show runs through Feb. 29.

Although Small graduated with a degree in applied art from RIT in 1952, where she was taught “three-dimensional-Michelangelo-like art,” she developed an affinity for comic books, medieval art and Japanese prints. “Edie is able to speak in the clear, uncluttered language of the folk artist, yet this work has a personal vision which allows her to comment on her own history in ways that cut right to the heart of the matter,” says one of her schoolmates Wendell Castle.

Small says it was also a boon when she switched from oils to acrylics due to her interest in details, flatness and speed. In Small’s prolific collection of paintings, wood carvings and furniture, she becomes both an artist and an observer—depicting everything from primitive landscapes, a painting of a funeral procession in front of St. Patrick’s Cathedral after 9/11, the Memorial Art Gallery and The White House to commissioned portraits and family dogs. She’s painted scenes on Martha’s Vineyard and 1987 Midtown Plaza (complete with the clock carousel and former B. Forman Co. and McCurdy’s stores).

But her heart is with the “innocents”—animals, birds, reptiles—who she says, “remain silent in their suffering due to the devastation in our environment by human carelessness.” One of her most provocative statements is called The Last Judgement, which she says could easily be called The Revenge of the Animals. “I used the Brooklyn Bridge as the backdrop where animals emerge victorious in a sea of people who have persecuted them in the name of religion and greed,” Small explains. And believe it or not, Small has painted clothes—coats, skirts, pants, even purses. “I hate to shop, so I add my own designs—everything from butterflies to dogs.” For more on the show, call 475-6855 or e-mail rbaker@ntid.rit.edu.