Cynthia Brants: Beyond the Circle
The Old Jail Art Center has organized an exhibition of the work of Cynthia Brants (1924-2006), who was associated with the Fort Worth Circle, a group of artists who were active in the mid-20 th century. As the title of this exhibition hints, she moved “beyond the Circle” as she continued to work for fifty years more. Brants was a strong painter and an innovative printmaker who also experimented in small-scale cast-bronze sculpture and model-making. This exhibition will feature her painting from the last half of the 20 th century, into the 21 st. The works range from a 1946 still life, done the year she set up her first studio in her hometown of Fort Worth after graduating from Sarah Lawrence College, to a 2003 winter landscape depicting her final home in Granbury, Texas. Margaret Blagg, executive director of the museum and curator of the exhibition, commented, “Brants’s fertile intellect produced subject matter that runs the gamut from mythological subjects, to floral still life and landscape represented in refracted form, to bucolic and genre scenes depicted in evolving styles. Above all, she was dedicated to the tenets of Cubism, a style created by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque a full forty years before she began her career. Brants’s paintings give a nod to Cubism, but are fully her own.”