The New Yorker
July 2, 2007
Galleries - Downtown
Pearl Blauvelt / McDermott & McGough
The curator Bob Nickas has joined the self-taught artist Blauvelt (1893 - 1987) in a show with David McDermott and Peter McGough, contemporary artists whose anachronistic obsessions and dandy antics have often put them outside the mainstream. Blauvelt's drawings on notebook paper, made in the forties and fifties and discovered after her death in her former home in northeastern Pennsylvania, feature items like houses, clothes, and a carefully rendered hundred-and- fifty-dollar bill. McDermott & McGough's painting of seal and initial rings and curvy drawings derived from embroidery and needlepoint samplers are oddly fitting complements, even if you sense two very different impetuses at work.