Alexandra & Peter Heller Exhibit at Julian Scott Memorial Gallery

August 21, 2014

Johnson State College presents the artwork of Peter and Alexandra Heller in a show titled, Peter and Alexandra Heller: Paintings and Sculptures. This exhibit is up through Wednesday, September 24, 2014.

Numerous works by both artists fill the Julian Scott Memorial Gallery. This gallery is located in the Dibden Center for the Arts. Peter Heller’s works are in oil paint and Alexandra Heller’s works are of steel.

Informed by nature, the artworks create an experience for the viewer in which abstraction, perception and archetypal forms synthesize. This exhibit is open to the public weekdays and Saturdays from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Additional paintings are in the Dibden Wings Gallery and can be seen from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. weekdays and Saturdays.

A reception with Q+A period will be held September 4 at 3 p.m. For more info contact Leila Bandar at 802-635-1469 or Leila.bandar@jsc.edu

Images available upon request.

About the artists

About Alexandra Heller
Alexandra Noble Heller was born in New Haven, Connecticut, in 1932. Growing up in Groton, Massachusetts, where her father taught school, she attended high schools in Massachusetts and New York, studied sculpture at the Boston Museum School (1953 – 1955) and the School of Painting and Sculpture at Columbia University (1955 – 1957), where she met Peter Heller. She lived and worked with her husband in Maryland, (2 years), Berlin, Germany, (1 year), Florence, Italy, (1 year), New York City, (2 years), Burlington, Vermont, (4 years) where their two children, Stephen and Diane were born, Bard College , (2 years) and finally Johnson State College, where she taught sculpture for 5 years. In 1975 she left teaching to start The Brickhouse Bookshop at Morristown Corners, where she continues to sell books and create welded steel sculptures, and where Peter’s paintings and her sculptures are on display.

About Peter Heller
Peter Heller was born in 1929 in Berlin, Germany, the son of musicians Hans Heller, a composer (Jewish) and Ingrid Eichwede, a concert pianist. At the rise of Hitler the family fled to Paris, and thence to Southern France, where Peter attended school and made his first paintings. His father being incarcerated in a French prison camp for foreigners, Peter and his mother hid out in a goat hut until the end of the war (1945), when the family moved to New York City, and was taken in by an uncle, Richard Goetz, an art collector and cousin of Albert Einstein. Einstein’s letter of recommendation had been instrumental in gaining the family entry to this country. Peter attended the High School of Music and Art in New York, and then the School of Painting and Sculpture at Columbia University, where he met and married Alexandra Noble, a fellow student. Upon graduating, Peter taught art at the Potomac School in Washington D.C. (two years) at the University of Vermont (four years) at Bard College (two years) and at Johnson State College until his retirement in 1989. Thereafter he continued to work in his studio at Morristown Corners, Vermont, until his death in 2002.