Today we’d like to introduce you to Alexander Ciesielski.
Alexander, can you briefly walk us through the story – how the Guild started and how it got to where it is today.
The Guild of Boston Artists is a non-profit art gallery promoting representational painting and sculpture of enduring beauty by leading New England artists. We are committed to fostering a love of fine art through our gallery exhibitions and educational programs. The Guild is unique in that it is the only nonprofit art gallery in Boston solely committed to exhibiting traditional painting and sculpture by living New England artists.
The Guild was founded in 1914 by some of the most prominent painters of the period. Among the founders were Edmund Tarbell, Frank Benson, and William Paxton. Its original membership consisted of 44 charter members, one third of which were women, a mark of inclusion unheard of at the time. These artists came together to form the Guild as an artist owned and operated gallery with a mission to promote paintings in the academic representational mode. The gallery is known to this day for its high standards of quality and presentation.
In the 1930s the gallery became a non-profit arts association and has since added a roster of educational and community events including Children’s Art Discovery Classes, ArtTalks, Paint-Outs, as well as a series of talks, lectures, and panels that are generally free and open to the public. These events are organized alongside a full schedule of art exhibitions that can either be solo shows or group exhibitions built around a theme, subject, or medium. Each year, we also hold an Awards Exhibition for our members as well as an Annual Regional Juried Exhibition, in which non-members can compete for prestigious awards and recognition by the Guild.
In 2014, we celebrated our Centennial Anniversary with Mayor Marty Walsh as the Honorary Chairman of our Centennial Committee, a great honor for our historic Guild.
We’re always bombarded by how great it is to pursue your passion, etc – but we’ve spoken with enough people to know that it’s not always easy. Overall, would you say things have been easy for you?
All organizations have their ups and downs. Most significant for us, I think, was the financial crisis of 2008. Art sales, like sales of most luxuries, took a major hit. Much credit is due to our former director, Bill Everett, whose careful guidance and competent stewardship got us through this challenge.
We’d love to hear more about your business.
The Guild is unique in that it is the only nonprofit art gallery in Boston solely committed to exhibiting traditional painting and sculpture by living New England artists. By traditional, I mean rooted in the teachings and philosophies of the official art academies of the 18th and 19th centuries, which themselves were inspired by the studio practices of the Renaissance. In 1914, when the Guild was founded, the artists of the Boston School who formed the Guild were witnessing the arrival of European Modernism in America and with it a preference for abstraction. This gallery was created as a place to protect and support contemporary representational painting and to give it a home in Boston where it could thrive. We take great pride in the fact that the original membership of the Guild included women artists to a degree unheard of at the time. Nearly 1/3 of the original membership was female. And they were generally the most successful painters during the Guild’s first exhibition. In a time when opportunities for women are being examined and in many cases undermined, we are proud of our historic support of female artists.
We continue to show the absolute best painters and sculptors in New England working in this tradition. In addition, many of the artists that make up the membership are academically descended from the founders, carrying on a legacy that is over a hundred years old. In this way, the Guild is living history. The styles represented at the Guild have slowly evolved to represent a deeper understanding of what academic painting can encompass. Today, we continue to represent painters working in the Boston School tradition, but our membership has grown to include other impressionist and post-impressionist styles, Cape Ann painters, Luminists, and Tonalists. It really is exciting to me as Director to see how these artists find their own voices and new perspectives within a mode of creation that has been deemed by some to be passé and nostalgic.
What were you like growing up?
I have always been drawn to the arts that much is for sure. I grew up in Pittsburgh, which has a vibrant and often underappreciated cultural district with many world-class theatres and museums. As a young kid, I was an avid reader of fiction and gravitated more towards the classics or the classically inspired. I played both the violin and the piano. I loved the theatre and quickly became involved in my school’s musical theatre program while taking private voice lessons. My mother held season tickets to the Pittsburgh Broadway series and I never missed the chance to join her. But it was actually on a family trip to Italy, my mother’s dream for my parent’s 20th anniversary, that I actually became most interested in the visual arts. In the renowned halls of the Vatican Museum, the Uffizi Gallery, the Accademia, and the Guggenheim in Venice, I became aware of the great passion I had for art history and the paintings of various eras and movements. This was the turning-point for me. I would later pursue an undergraduate degree in English Literature and Art History at NYU, with each major informing the other. I later pursued a master’s degree in Art History from Boston University.
Contact Info:
- Address: Guild of Boston Artists
162 Newbury Street
Boston, MA 02116 - Website: guildofbostonartists.org
- Phone: 6175367660
- Email: alex@guildofbostonartists.org
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/guildofbostonartists/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/theGBAnewbury
- Other: http://theartguide.com/gallery/guild-of-boston-artists
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