The Ellen Adler Art Gallery brings the visual arts, painting, sculpture and design into the core of the center and acts as a living, breathing celebration of the vital relationship between theater arts and the plastic arts. This new center of activity celebrates the relationship between theater and the visual arts and creates a space for conversations, interactions and collaborations. Theater is unique among the arts in that it lives fully in both the ears and the eyes. We go to hear plays and also to see them. The history of great painters who also designed sets and costumes for the theater is one of many sources of inspiration for this program.
The gallery’s new installation is “Conversations in Art: The Still Center Where Painting, Music and Theater Meet” focusing on the work of Pablo Picasso, Romare Bearden and Marc Chagall. Said Artistic Director Tom Oppenheim who curated the exhibit, “These painters, so devoted to their own visual art, were actively engaged with the performing arts at large in very much the same way Stella Adler expected actors to actively engage in the arts beyond theater. They all have specific work devoted to dance, music and theater. And their work in turn provided inspiration to performing artists.”
The show draws inspiration from the books Picasso and The Theater by Olivier Berggruen & Robert Hobbs, The Art of Romare Bearden by Ruth E. Fine, An American Odyssey: The Life and Work of Romare Bearden by Mary Schmidt Campbell and Marc Chagall and the Jewish Theater by Susan Compton. The show can be seen in the Ellen Adler Gallery, on the center’s 2nd floor.
Other select recent exhibits include: Ellen Adler (2020), Resiliency, an exhibit of community art made during the pandemic (2021) and most recently a Chekhov dramaturgical exhibit (2024).