Events at the Schuylkill Center invite people to play, learn, and grow with nature as part of their everyday lives. Our events range from festivals to classes to volunteer opportunities to hikes through our 365-acre nature preserve. Explore our events calendar to find your next outdoor adventure.
Winterbloom Opening Reception
February 1 @ 1:00 pm - 3:00 pm
Free
Join us to celebrate the opening of Winterbloom, a solo gallery exhibition of new works by Claire Downes Whitehurst. The artist will present a talk in the gallery at 2pm. Light refreshments will be served.
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About Winterbloom
On view from February 1 – March 29, 2025, Winterbloom is a solo gallery exhibition by Claire Downes Whitehurst at the Schuylkill Center for Environmental Education. During a time of winter dormancy and hibernation in the forest, this exhibition presents colorful, visionary abstractions drawn from Whitehurst’s attunement to forms and patterns found in nature.
Winterbloom is curated by Heather Moqtaderi, Interim Director of Environmental Art. The exhibition opens with an Artist Reception and Gallery Talk on Saturday February 1, 2025 from 1pm-3pm. Claire Downes Whitehurst will give an Artist Workshop on Saturday, March 1 from 1pm-3pm.
About the Artist:
Claire Whitehurst is a painter, printmaker and sculptor. She received her BFA from the University of Mississippi, and her MFA in Painting from the University of Iowa. She draws from the landscape and atmosphere of the deep South, exploring queer space, religious iconography and architecture through form, color, and composition. Her work plays with the relationship between image and object.
In 2018, she was the recipient of the Stanley Fellowship for International Research at the University of Iowa. She worked in the Dordogne region of southern France where she studied polychromatic cave paintings and engravings. Her research focused on the relationship between surface and image, and the compositional complexities of abstract narrative.
She has exhibited nationally and internationally, and a book of her drawings and poetry was published in 2021 through Drum Machine Editions in Asheville, North Carolina. Her work has been featured in numerous publications including New American Paintings, Oxford American, ArtMaze Magazine, and the Graphite Journal in collaboration with the Hammer Museum along with many others.
