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Princeton NJ Back to School Announcements

New Exhibition at Anne Reid ’72 Art Gallery: Lily Stockman's Say It With Flowers

Princeton Day School is pleased to announce “Say It With Flowers,” a new exhibition opening at the Anne Reid ’72 Art Gallery with artwork by PDS alum Lily Stockman, class of 2001. The exhibition will open on Monday, January 9^th, and run until Thursday, February 2^nd. There will be an artist’s reception on Saturday, January 14^th from 6:00-8:00 pm, open to the public.

A 2006 graduate of Harvard University, where she studied painting, botany and Latin, Ms. Stockman ‘01 was awarded a National Geographic Expeditions Council youth grant and traveled across eastern Mongolia on horseback documenting nomadic steppe culture through film, video, and drawings. In 2010, she moved to India, where she documented industrial food storage facilities in a year-long painting project. Currently living in Brooklyn, Ms. Stockman is pursuing her Masters of Fine Arts at NYU, where she is also adjunct faculty in the painting department.

“Say It With Flowers” features Ms. Stockman’s paintings and, as its theme, examines the trajectory of botany as artistic pursuit from the widespread fad of botanical art and flower pressing in 19^th century America and Britain to the very modern trend of locavore blogs and digital photographs of flowers in rooftop gardens in urban areas today.

Ms. Stockman remarks: “As we become more dependent on and saturated with technology, I see a voracious hunger among a stratum of mostly educated, young, urban women to explore the world through quasi-scientific, wholly domestic pursuits. They are also avid digital photographers, bloggers and techies; they seem to straddle both worlds. Or maybe it is because they are such technophiles that they are also such devoted naturalists. Technology and botany, it seems, go hand-in-hand.”

Susan Reichlin, Ms. Stockman’s art teacher at Princeton Day School remembers, “Lily astonished all at PDS with her precocious drawings, prints and paintings, and she was also a stimulus to lively discussion and intriguing thought in all settings, artistic and academic. In fact, her linoleum print from seventh grade featuring an elegant heron standing amid flowing water currents is part of the middle school’s permanent art collection.”  Ms. Reichlin goes on to note, “it will be fascinating to see these new paintings and to follow the career of this young artist who has the ability, confidence and resolve to persevere and flourish following the artistic path that she has chosen.”

This exhibition is open to the public from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday when school is in session, and by appointment on weekends. For an appointment or more information about the Anne Reid ’72 Art Gallery, please call Jody Erdman, Art Gallery Director, at (609) 924-6700 x1772, or visit www.pds.org.