Rehoboth Art League to host receptions Jan. 5

The Rehoboth Art League will ring in the new year with three exciting exhibitions throughout January and February: the 9th Regional Juried Photography Exhibition, The Lifted Veil: Photography by Phyllis Berger, and To the Water’s Edge and Back, featuring paintings from the late Edward Loper Jr.

The art league will host receptions for all three exhibitions from 5 to 7 p.m., Friday, Jan. 5, inviting anyone interested to visit the Corkran, Tubbs and Ventures galleries to see these new shows.

The Corkran Gallery will display the 9th Regional Juried Photography Exhibition from Jan. 5 through Sunday, Feb. 4. This show has been a part of RAL’s January exhibition program for eight years, making it one of the more contemporary offerings in the league’s history. The annual exhibit invites artists from Delaware, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, New Jersey and Washington, D.C., to submit their latest photographic work. This year, artists were selected from a pool of more than 100 submissions, and their work represents a wide array of techniques and content, from traditional modernist approaches to contemporary and alternative media.

The exhibit is juried and judged by the show’s 2023 first-place winner, Phyllis Berger, who also has a solo show in the Ventures gallery. Berger will award $900 in prize money to selected artists. She will host a free public gallery talk at 10 a.m., Sunday, Jan. 6, in the Corkran Gallery, to discuss her award decisions and her own career as an artist.

In the Ventures Gallery, Berger’s solo photography exhibition, The Lifted Veil, uses enhanced photographic images to create a narrative journey for viewers to explore. The photographs tell a fictional story filled with magic, mysticism and folklore, which serves as metaphor for her recovery from life-altering surgery. Berger is a faculty member at the Center for Visual Arts at Johns Hopkins University, where she started the photography program 26 years ago. Her work has been exhibited in three solo shows at the Evergreen Museum and Library in Baltimore as well as the Museum of Rochefort en Terre in Brittany, France; the Maryland Institute College of Art Biennale; The Baltimore Museum of Art; and the Banneker-Douglass Museum in Annapolis, Md.; and resides in many private collections.

In the Tubbs Gallery, the Rehoboth Art League will present an exhibition of works by Edward L. Loper Jr., a self-taught Delaware artist who created a unique perspective in the Loper tradition. Loper’s exhibition, To the Water’s Edge and Back, will be on display from Jan. 5 to Sunday, March 10. The show features work that represents the most complete display of Loper’s paintings and captures the artist’s journeys along the East Coast. Loper’s exhibiting artworks harness the subdued nature of large bodies of water and their surrounding areas. Soft blues and quiet reds accompanied by strong angular shapes mirror the meditative force near any shore. He also draws attention to the stark contrast of living farther inland. Paintings of bold outlines, complex structures and even characters appear. It is a vivid reminder that life is a journey of ebbs and flows between self and the greater collective.

The exhibitions are free and open to everyone during the regular gallery hours of 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., Monday to Saturday, and noon to 4 p.m., Sunday.

For more information, go to RehobothArtLeague.org or call 302-227-8408, or find Rehoboth Art League on Facebook and Instagram @RehobothArtLeague.