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Dennis Haggerty –
Various Small Envelopes September 7 - December 14, 2024 RECEPTION September 7, 2024, 3-6pm
HAVE WORK BY DENNIS? Anyone who is in possession of envelope paintings or sketches: we encourage you to get in contact with us as we will be adding documentation of these works here on the website throughout the duration of the exhibition, in an effort to gather some of this body of work in one place. Please email us with any enquiries, and to visit by appointment, including virtual visits. |
Artist Dennis Haggerty (1947-2012) was well known in both Chester County, Pennsylvania and Taos, New Mexico for his abstract-leaning landscape paintings. However, he is less formally recognized for his longtime practice of ‘envelope paintings’ and casual sketches made in social settings. For each of his exhibitions he regularly mailed invitations to friends and supporters in individually and elaborately painted DL envelopes – making dozens if not hundreds of these works for each show. He also had a reputation in and around the small town of West Chester, Pennsylvania and elsewhere for being extremely social and a regular at local bars and restaurants. His convivial spirit extended to his habit of making (often humorous) sketches while seated at the bar, using scraps of paper, napkins, whatever material was to hand, and then gifting these drawings to whoever might be a fellow traveler for the evening.
Haggerty’s voluminous and better-known output in oil painting has been widely seen. It has been interpreted as a reaction against artistic traditions of Pennsylvania’s Brandywine Valley school: if it is, it is a rather gentle one. The envelope works and sketches, on the other hand, sit squarely within more experimental 20th century practices such as mail art and arte povera, where artists used throwaway materials and also availed themselves of the postal system as a medium of communication beyond the gallery and market systems. Haggerty's acts of public sharing can be seen not only as a gesture of social bonding - the making of community forged through art - but also, as a harbinger of socially engaged artistic practices, having been as they were generated and embedded in one artist’s warm and intense personal engagement within his particular late 20th century suburban-American social sphere. From this perspective, aspects of his work can be seen as both an engagement with conceptual practices of his era and also as an anticipation of the more recently theorized and established realms of social practice art and relational aesthetics. Greater attention to these parts of Haggerty’s work is overdue – particularly in the context of a region whose arts organizations and funders remain fixed in the dominant long shadow of one particular dynastic, and repetitive, art family, often excluding or underestimating significant practitioners. This small exhibition presents 15 such envelope paintings and a few bar sketches which belonged to Charles Artinian, one of Haggerty’s many friends and father of Street Road founder Emily Artinian. This public showing is a gesture meant to invite greater visibility and a better understanding of the socially connective aspect of this artist’s work, a complex subject that for the most part has gone unarchived and only casually remarked. A conservative estimate would say that hundreds of these sketches and paintings must exist in private collections. An effort to collect and better understand this work would valuably contribute to a richer understanding of the art of this region. 
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