NISDA soaked with talent
BY MARLI GUZZETTA INDEPENDENT ARTS EDITOR
On the dewy campus of the Nantucket Island School of Design and the Arts last Wednesday evening, students, teachers, friends and family traded smiles and laughter spilling into and out of rooms that cupped art as if it were a sacred wine that made everyone a little bit happier, a little bit more introspective.

Clockwise from top left: Alice Sousa discusses her installation in the silo; one of Adrienne Smelko's necklaces; Kinder Arts teacher Morgan Beryl (left) modelling once of the pieces by Smelko (at right); Sousa's clay dories, displayed at the bottom of the silo.

In the main hall, young jewelry artist Adrienne Noel Smelko stood before a wall of slide projections depicting the fleshy, tropical plants in Tahiti that inspired a line of gorgeous, "temporal" (a.k.a. "perishable") jewelry made of indigenous plant life. Several young women at the party modeled Smelko's Rhode Island School of Design thesis works - necklaces of metals that cascaded like waterfalls or hung and drifted like vines.

"People commented on the organic shape of it, and I think it's interesting to contrast the shape and the material of it," said one of the models.

One of those models was 22-yearold Morgan Beryl, a recent New York University graduate who is passing her love of pottery to the youngest students as NISDA's kinder teacher.

Every summer, NISDA comes alive with a new group of artists, who paint and eat and sketch and talk and mold and drink together on the site of the former farm.

In the NISDA kitchen, a dishwasher runs off some of the artifacts of all this activity, while Beryl sits down to discuss her work.

"I'm very married to functionality in my own personal work," she said. "Very natural, organic. Very little glaze. I use clay that can show off the body."

Beryl left her Williamsburg home to travel to the island, beginning what she thinks might be a period of indulgent wanderlust and continued study. She's teaching pottery to the kids in NISDA's summer classes - focusing on hand-building and the fundamentals of technique, like the importance of water and air.

Water and air saturate the inside of the gracefully rusting silo on NISDA's property (a relic of the site's previous life and now something of a massive, artistic totem). On the wet, sand floor of the silo, artist Alice Sousa has arranged several groupings of little, clay dories. The boats are actually artifacts from her memories of childhood in the Azorean islands, where she would see the fishing vessels at sea. Their forms are now synonymous in the artist's mind with the concept of home and family, so she arranged the ships to represent the comings and goings of family members, toward and away from one another.

"I was working with the ideas of togetherness and separation," Sousa said.

Exhibiting the dories on the floor of the massive silo, with sunlight filtering down, gives them a spiritual undertone - a sentiment that is amplified by the divinely inspired exhibit in the gallery just off the silo, where Betsy Ross exhibits her work. It's also where Joy Anglund has hung works like stations of the crosses she bore after a year in which she lost three family members, including one of her own children.

MICHAEL GALVIN/The Independent

"It was devastating and very, very painful," Anglund said. "The work emphasizes a shift from grief into a very certain spirituality."

During her difficult time, Anglund befriended two priests, both of whom were artists.

"They came into my life and encouraged the art and helped me to heal," said Anglund.

Votive candles and the smell of incense heightened the sense of spiritual transformation as the series moved from the initial, darker collages riddled with smoky and bloodred imagery in shadow boxes - to the more colorful collages in gold frames, extolling the liturgical colors of green, white and red.

"At the end of the series, there's a feeling of joyfulness and peace," Anglund said.

The movement from shadow box to framed image suggests a resurrection from the depths, which Anglund said she achieved in creating. Her children, husband and parents joined her at NISDA; their smiles and laughter became pieces in the human collage created by the inelegant and perfect joining of so many creative

MICHAEL GALVIN/The Independent Alice Sousa's generations of dories.

voices under one resonant roof. I