Featured Member:
Grace Bentley-Scheck’s Artistic Pathway To Rendering Urban Structures
As a printmaker, member Grace Bentley-Scheck captures the aesthetic form and details of urban buildings and architecture. Often focused on New York City, Boston, and Providence, her collagraph prints offer viewpoints that convey color, light, and texture in a way that takes you to the place and moment that she experienced.
Through the collagraphy process, her prints are built in layers analogous to the creation of the structures that she focuses on. Beyond representing what she sees, her work reflects aspects of the structure’s daily use, historic evolution, and presence relative to where they are situated. A small collection of her prints can be seen on the 19 on Paper website.
Growing up in Troy, NY, in the 1950s, Grace Bentley-Scheck’s pathway to art and printmaking started with her high school knack for trigonometry. One of her earliest encounters with buildings and architecture came as she worked with her father, a civil engineer, to check the structural calculations for a building housing a nuclear reactor from its plans.
“After seeing all of these plans, knowing that they are buildings. I asked what the building would look like. I got interested in the relationship between the three-dimensional building and the two-dimensional plan.”, she recalls.
Despite her significant aptitude, not all of Grace’s efforts to follow her academic and artistic interests went easily. Facing frequent gender role stereotyping and discrimination, her determination led to creative strategies.
“My father told me I wasn’t worth educating because I’m only a female…The day after he said that another girl and I enlisted in the military. They make you wait 24 hours before you sign anything. Both daddies had hysterics over it. They promised us that we could go to college if we would not sign the papers…so we said, ‘OK!’”.
However, a ten-cent bus ride to a tuition-free state university proved to be a “too big and too far” option for her father to allow. He thought that she would confine her choice to the Troy-based all-women Russell Sage College that had a liberal arts focus, but Grace had a different idea.
“I didn’t want to go to Russell Sage. So, I applied to R.P.I. because I really liked math, and they accepted me by return mail. Then, they told me the scholarships come from industry, and industry doesn’t invest in women because they just have babies and waste their education.” In engineering and architecture education and the associated science and mathematical foundations, Troy’s Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) is well-respected worldwide and became coeducational in 1942.
In the 1950s and 60s, despite these obstacles and several more, Grace went on to earn a BFA and MFA in Ceramics from the State University of New York at Alfred University, held two high school teaching positions and got married. “It isn’t a good idea to tell me I can’t do something”, she advises.
After moving to Oswego, NY, to follow her husband’s job opportunity, she was underemployed and began caring for ailing family relatives back in Troy. During her travel and free time, Grace reconnected with her interest in buildings, their uses, and their evolution.
“Seeing places that were familiar but had been changed by urban renewal. Spaces were opened up that hadn’t been there before. I just got really intrigued with that.” Grace photographed what she observed, and later translated those images and recollections into a series of prints which was the start of her current decades-long artistic journey.
Since 1972, Grace has lived in Narragansett, RI, and maintains a fulltime printmaking practice in her home-based studio, Sassafras Press. Her prints have been exhibited throughout the United States and Europe and are part of the collections of several museums and corporations.
Learn more about Grace’s life and work in her February 2018 interview with journalist Helena Touhey of The Independent, a southern Rhode Island-based newspaper.