Sidney Miskin Gallery: Mercedes Matters

I went to the Sidney Miskin Gallery located at Baruch’s Administrative Center to see an exhibit called “A Retrospective Exhibition” by Mercedes Matter from 12:45pm to 1:15pm on November 3. Our tour guide was Sandra Karskin who took us around the relatively small gallery. She gave us a brief background on the era of modern art and described how Matters was a modern painter. Matters started painting abstract art at a young age and continued painting until a very late age. We were shown her works of art starting from the paintings she did at her teens until her eighties. She used many different and bright colors in her paintings and our tour guide pointed out that most of her her art featured shapes and fruits of many kind. As she grew older, her paintings grew more abstract, we cannot make out the fruits and shapes as well as before, and her very late works was done in charcoal without any other colors other than black and white. I felt that this workshop took me out of my comfort zone because I had never been in an actual gallery before. It was very interesting and I learned a lot about Mercedes Matters, her works of art and how business and art are connected. I would recommend it to other students because it would be a good opportunity to learn about a subject that many are not exposed to often.