Gerald Peters Contemporary is pleased to present Phyllis Sloane: Pop Portraits. Comprised of six screenprints from the late 1960s to early 1970s, the exhibition highlights Sloane’s mastery of color and pattern as well as her remarkable ability to capture the essence of her sitter.
Like many pop artists of the mid-twentieth century, Sloane began as a commercial artist. Having earned a BFA from the Carnegie Institute of Technology in industrial design, she was well acquainted with printmaking and shortly into her burgeoning career purchased an old printing press for her home studio in Cleveland, OH.
Her sitters were Cleveland personalities in the local art scene and although they may have been far from Hollywood, Sloane instilled the same sense of glamor and fashion as Andy Warhol did for his celebrity portraits of the time. Likewise, her flat compressed space likens to the still-lifes of another pop artist great, Tom Wesselmann. With an emphasis on two-dimensionality, bold colors, and pattern, Sloane’s portraits inhabit the pop sensibilities of the era while paying tribute to her friends and colleagues.
Sloane’s achievements included over 20 solo shows including a 2004 retrospective at the Las Vegas Museum of Art. Her work also is in the collections of the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Philadelphia Art Museum, and the New Mexico Museum of Fine Art and numerous private and corporate art collections.