Amy Reidel, Independent Artist, and Margaret Rieckenberg, Associate Curator for Barrett Barrera Projects stopped by to speak about the happenings at the various galleries of BBP, and specifically about the exhibition "Stretch Marks" which has been extended through November 27th.

Amy Reidel is a St. Louis-based artist who has exhibited work regionally and nationally. She has been a resident artist at ACRE (Artists' Cooperative Residency and Exhibitions) based out of Chicago, the David and Julia White Artists’ colony in Ciudad Colon, Costa Rica and at the Luminary Center for the Arts in St. Louis. She has exhibited work at venues including the Contemporary Art Museum-St. Louis, ACRE projects gallery in Chicago, and the Amarillo Museum of Art. Her work can be viewed online in the curated artist registries and viewing programs at White Columns and the Drawing Center in New York City. In 2014, 2019 and 2020 Reidel was awarded Artists’ Support and COVID-19 relief grants from the Regional Arts Commission of St. Louis and the Washington University/Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum. In 2016 she received the Critical Mass Creative Stimulus award. Reidel is currently a faculty member at Washington University and St. Louis Community College as well as Co-Founder of All the Art: The Visual Art Quarterly of St. Louis (2015-2020).

Stretch Marks is an exhibition that highlights expressive mark-making as a means to explore the material in the maternal and the experience of having a body and therefore a mother. Representations in painting, drawing, photography, fiber, sculpture, and ceramics reveal bodies in transitional states, stretching themselves, often reaching through time toward other bodies that precede or continue their own material existence.

The artists in this exhibition investigate subjects that include the experience of being a mother; our relationship to the Earth; materiality and tactility; abjection and the grotesque; portraiture and self-portraiture; domestic space; familial relationships; cultural identities; and feelings of love, horror, faith, and loss as they relate to maternal bodies.

With many references to the landscape—and trees in particular—the images in these artworks allude to the longstanding conceit of nature and the Earth as a mother, as well as how we often envision family lineages as both branches of a tree and roots. Another repeating motif in the exhibition is images of hands, suggesting tactile manipulation and the presence of touch. Connecting these many images and ideas is a critical attention to generation—both as an act of creation and a form of inheritance—with works that reflect on time, family, birth, and making in their myriad incarnations.

One of Amy Reidel's Mombies

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