Featured Works

Amy Bennett's Delivery (2019) is on view at the Museum of Fine Art Boston through 2025.

Amy Bennett's painting Delivery, 2019 was acquired by The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston as a promised gift of The American Academy of Arts and Letters.

The American Academy of Arts and Letters announced today the ten artists who will receive its 2020 Awards in Art, including Amy Bennett. 

Paintings, sculptures, video, photographs, and works on paper by 28 contemporary artists will be exhibited in the galleries of the American Academy of Arts and Letters on historic Audubon Terrace (Broadway between 155 and 156 Streets) from Thursday, March 5 through Sunday, April 5, 2020. Exhibiting artists were chosen from over 150 nominees submitted by the members of the Academy, America’s most prestigious honorary society of architects, artists, composers, and writers. The recipients of the Academy’s 2020 Art and Purchase Awards will be selected from this exhibition.

Peering into scenes painted on tiny panels, some barely larger than a note card, the viewer observes the intimacy and isolation of Amy Bennett’s one-inch high figures. Their fictional lives, set in richly colored and seemingly idyllic suburban neighborhoods and homes flooded with morning light, are disturbed by marital discontent and parental ambivalence. Family members often inhabit the same rooms, but absorbed in laptops or yoga routines, they never interact; mothers, attentive to their children’s needs, struggle to dress or sleep while infants are latched to their breasts, echoing psychosocial theorist Lisa Baraitser’s claim that the maternal care is “an ethics of interruption.” 

Inspired by life in the Hudson Valley town of Cold Spring, painter Amy Bennett’s series “Nuclear Family” distills scenes of everyday life into uncanny snapshots of domesticity.

Currently on view at Miles McEnery Gallery through Aug. 16, the works presented in the exhibition explore themes of family on small, finely detailed canvases that wrap around the gallery walls like tiny windows. The paintings, replete with interior rooms and suburban landscapes, capture with serene clarity the quiet, quotidian elements that otherwise drift by throughout the course of the day.

Shortly after my review of Amy Bennett’s exhibition at Miles McEnery Gallery appeared on the Hyperallergic Weekend, I got an email from Mollye Miller, who, I later learned, is a photographer and poet living in Baltimore. In fact, she and I were published in the same little magazine, Prelude, edited by Stu Watson, but not in the same issue. But all of what I know of her came after I read her email.

For more than a decade, Amy Bennett has been building a loyal following for her highly detailed views of a fictional world that resembles our own. She is an observational painter who works from models that she painstakingly constructs. For one group of paintings, Bennett transformed an 8-foot-square of Styrofoam into a lush green landscape that contained more than 450 buildings set within rolling hills and valleys, complete with streams and lakes. Each of the buildings was designed, built, and painted by the artist, who then depicted this self-contained world from different angles, often from a bird’s eye view. Tending to working on a small scale, she made paintings that remained true to the miniaturized perfection of her artificial, slightly askew world. All sorts of tensions arose.

Featuring works by gallery artists Inka Essenhigh, April Gornik, Amy Bennett, and Isca Greenfield-Sanders, new book Landscape Painting Now: From Pop Abstraction to New Romanticism presents a global survey of landscape painting in the 21st century. Including work by more than 80 outstanding artists, the book highlights the thriving genre of landscape painting in the contemporary world, while also reflecting upon its origins.

“Nuclear Family,” an exhibit of new work by Amy Bennett on view at the Brattleboro Museum & Art Center (BMAC) through June 16, features small paintings that tackle large topics, including marriage, child rearing, and female identity.

The Bruce Museum is pleased to present:

Downsized: Small-Scale Sculpture by Contemporary Artists

3 November 2018 - 27 January 2019

An artists panel discussion will be held on Thursday 8 November from 6 – 8pm

by Leah Ollman

Amy Bennett makes paintings that call little attention to the elaborate process of their creation, but what may seem like conventional landscapes come with a back story that gives us far more to absorb and ponder than what’s visible on the wall.

For "Small Changes Every Day," her recent series at Richard Heller Gallery in Santa Monica, Bennett started with an 8-by-8-foot hunk of plastic foam and built a model of an undisturbed patch of verdant terrain. She painted a portrait of the land as seen from above, a handsome Eden dotted with ponds and etched with streams.

by Juliet Helmke

If not for rapidly rising Brooklyn rents, Amy Bennett’s last series of paintings might never have come to fruition. “Space- and money-wise, my husband and I felt pushed out,” the artist, who earned her MFA at the New York Academy of Art in 2002, explains. Hunting for a new place to call home, the painter found herself spending hours “just image-searching specific towns and looking down at them in Google maps.” By the time the couple and their young son decided on Cold Spring, in Upstate New York, she “had the impulse to build my own town.” But for Bennett, that meant doing so at 1:500 scale, or what she calls “Monopoly size.”