The Music In Us chronicles the artistic journey of Bette Alexander. With singular devotion, she has painted both abstract and figurative work, driven by her love of texture and color and her curiosity about the world. Painting has always been her North Star, sustaining her through a life full of ups and downs.
Alexander's artwork grew as her life evolved, reflecting her experience as a world traveler and social observer. She has taken on overlooked elderly women, genocidal oppression, prisoners in confinement, and the foibles of country life. Born Jewish, she has a fascination with ritual objects and the varieties of religious expression, from the lost synagogues of WWII to the colorful Christian Timkat festival of Ethiopia. Most recently, psychological themes related to COVID-19 and isolation have appeared in her art.
Spanning more than forty years, these seventy works show an artist with a gift for expression, finely tuned to the currents of life around her.
"Bette Alexander: The Music in Us provides an overview of Bette Alexander's mid- and late-career artworks. Over the four-decade period she has created paintings, drawings, and installations, and explored diverse subjects ranging from human figures and ritualistic objects to landscapes, long-gone synagogues of Europe, abstractions, and current events. Interspersed throughout the catalogue are short texts that provide information about Alexander's life and artworks, as if one were walking through a retrospective exhibit"--