On a sunny Friday morning at the Maria L. Baldwin Community Center in Cambridge’s Baldwin neighborhood, Wendy Prellwitz shows a group of people how to make a watercolor monotype print.
She layers the paint onto a clear polycarbonate plate that she’ll press onto wet watercolor paper. (Since she’s not painting directly onto the paper, she’ll need a lot of paint.) As she guides the group, she reminds them it’s better to paint from observation rather than to trace over a photograph. “What you really want to do,” she says, “is to interpret things and not get too caught up in details.”
Moving into the next room, Prellwitz grabs a piece of paper that’s been soaked in a bin of water. Ever so gently, she puts the paper on top of the plate, rolling it through the press. The result has both the effervescence of watercolor and the one-of-a-kind vibe of a print.
Those qualities are on full display at the Chandler Gallery in the organization’s other building out front. In “Watercolors & Monotypes: County Mayo, Ireland,” an exhibition on view through April. 29, a selection of watercolors and watercolor monotypes show the beauty of that region through the eyes of seven artists.
The exhibited artworks came out of printmaking workshops Prellwitz and other local artists attended at the Ballinglen Arts Foundation on the west coast of Ireland. All of the show’s artists have an affiliation with both the American and the Irish arts centers.
The show marks a return to regular displays of visual arts after a tumultuous post-pandemic recovery.
An arts center decades in the making
Prellwitz played a starring role in this exhibition, but she’s long been in a supportive one. An architect by trade and an artist by passion, she’s lived in the Baldwin area for almost 50 years and first got involved with the organization in the mid-1990s. At the time, she and the nonprofit’s then-executive director Terry Delancey set out to create an arts center to supplement the Center’s youth afterschool programs (which make up the bulk of its services).
There was a run-down carriage house behind the existing Center. After purchasing the property from Harvard and getting a special permit to use the carriage house for arts programs, they were ready to move forward. But a lawsuit from a neighbor disrupted those plans for some time. EStill, eventually the center won the lawsuit, and moved forward withafter many years they were able to build the new arts building, designed by Prellwitz’s. Her architecture firm, Prellwitz Chilinski Associates, designed it.
The doors to that new building –– complete with a kiln and printmaking equipment –– finally opened in 2010. Around the same time, exhibitions continued in the Chandler Gallery. The community center even hired a part-time curator in the early 2010s to professionalize itstheir exhibitions.
But then 2020 came, and “COVID just smacked it all down,” Prellwitz said. Since the schools were closed in the early pandemic days, the need for the community center’s afterschool programs vanished almost overnight. The nonprofit pivoted to emergency services, providing care to the children of essential workers and even delivering diapers and other goods to local families. With that new focus, art exhibitions went on the backburner.
It’s been a gradual recovery ever since. Given afterschool’s importance to the Maria L. Baldwin Ccenter’s mission, that came back relatively early. The nonprofit’s adult education services and exhibitions are still not quite fully ramped back up. Prellwitz said she felt that the Chandler Gallery “wasn’t being used much at all” save for an exhibition of artist Roz Summer’s work. That inspired her to propose this current exhibition, which she hopes will marks the real return of regular curated exhibitions to the arts center.
“At the moment, we don’t have a formal plan for how we want to proceed with shows in the gallery,” said Jess Leach, director of communications and outreach at the Baldwin Community Center, “we do want to continue to have that space be a gallery space and be a space for the community to interact with art. And we’re excited to see how that fits into our vision.”
“Our mission and our values are rooted in lifelong learning and creativity,” Leach said, “and I think the gallery is just one piece of that.”
A stronger
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