‘Celestial +Terrestrial’ by Dorothy Alig

The original impetus for this exhibit came from a rereading of Edna St. Vincent Millay’s 1912 poem “Renascence” in which she describes being buried underground and being reborn into a newly appreciated world—“a glad awakening,“ she calls it. Eighteen months ago that sounded a lot like what I expected post-covid but the damn virus never got fully under control so the allegory fell apart. But I was still into Edna St. Millay. Was she naïve? Maybe. She wrote Renascence when she was 20! But she knew something. She understood the difference between being sort-of alive and fully alive. I took some of the visual cues from Millay’s poem and made paintings based on her references to the landscape and the sky. As the problems on earth (war, disturbing politics, a pandemic) became more severe the urge to look to the universal sources of wonder became even more compelling. Night skies, Verdant landscapes, the changing seasons—in troubled times these things you can count on.