Gwynn Murrill’s work bridges figurative and abstract sculpture. Her animal figures serve as points of departure for the exploration of form, becoming vessels, which reduced to their most basic lines and shapes, elegantly echo the essence of her subject.

Paring away everything that is not absolutely necessary to perceive her subjects in all their purity, Gwynn often sacrifices details leaving us with sculptures emanating primal characteristics and universal attributes. Gwynn’s signature bronze works are fluid in line and form, elegant, inviting to touch and instilled with vitality and a sense of being--either caught in an tacit moment of serenity and self-possession or brimming with the implied potential to pounce, twist, or take off at any moment.

April 6th, 1950 – April 18th, 2025

Renowned artist and educator Jane Rosen passed away surrounded by family and friends on April 18th, 2025 in Northern California. Born on April 6th, 1950, Jane was a bi-coastal artist known for her New York sense of humor, her fantastical but true stories, and for her insatiable love for friends, family and life. But most of all, for her love of nature and art in its purest study. A fiercely loyal person, she had decades of dedicated students, many who are now artists known in their own right.

Born and raised in New York, Jane spent years as an artist working and living in downtown Manhattan. She was deeply connected with nature, and based her art and her teaching on this connection. This deep link prompted her to relocate to a rural, coastal property in San Gregorio, California, allowing her to live in nature amongst a family of ravens, crows, foxes, a vulture, red-tailed hawks, red-shouldered hawks, and Acorn woodpeckers.

The 40-acre hill-top sanctuary that is her home will be a future place for artists to work and gather amongst the ancient redwoods and wild animals. As a great lover of the natural world, the legacy of her life’s work will live on in the future of this habitat. Jane was a master sculptor, deeply connected to both eastern and Renaissance traditions, and created unique glass and stone sculptures. Her proficiency with glass grew out of her teaching at Pilchuck and her partnership with master glass blower Ross Richmond.

Jane earned a Bachelor of Arts degree at New York University in 1972 and studied at the Art Students League until 1975. She studied drawing with Robert Beverly Hale, and was a student of Leonardo da Vinci throughout her life. Her credentials include professorships at U.C. Berkeley and U.C. Davis, Senior Faculty at the School of Visual Arts and Consulting Professor at Stanford University. Rosen received the National Endowment for the Arts Sculpture Award.

Jane was a singular force for good on behalf of the natural world. She worked, taught, advocated and lived to restore our connection with nature and animals. This taught her lessons that she communicated forward in her drawings and sculptures. In recent years, she supported over two million acres of Indigenous-led land conservation in tropical forests. This was done in partnership with the non-profit Art into Acres, founded by one of her students.

Rosen’s work is featured in numerous public and private collections including The Brooklyn Museum, Scottsdale Museum of Art, Mitsubishi Corporation, Luso American Foundation, and the U.S. Embassy in Tunis, Tunisia. She has been honored by the Academy of Arts and Letters in New York City, the Pilchuck Glass School as an Artist-in-Residence, and is a recipient of the Madein/Luso American Foundation Grant. She published a book called Dual Nature with Pointed Leaf Press in 2021.

We were privileged to know Jane, work with her, and love her. She is survived by her brother Joe Rosen, sister Lety Pemberton, daughter Lila Tretikov, niece Samantha Royalty, nephew Max Rosen, grandson Max Tretikov and her close life-friends Edith and Eduardo Marin. Jane loved all her dogs - Mayo, Mei Mei, Mei Rose, Bookie and Rookie. She is predeceased by her mother, Norma Rosen, and her father, Mel Rosen, both of whom she loved dearly.

In New York, she was represented by Michael Steinberg at Bienvenu Steinberg & C. and Gaines and Macie at Sears Peyton Gallery. She is grateful to her gallery family and the teams that supported her career including Chris and Molly at Winfield Gallery in Carmel, California; Gail and Shannon at Gail Severn Gallery in Sun Valley, Idaho; Maya and Katie at Maya Frodeman Gallery in Jackson, Wyoming; and Bill and Sarah at Traver Gallery, Seattle.

Her recent solo exhibition “Variegated Stones” closed on April 5, 2025 at Bienvenu Steinberg & C. in New York City and her work will be included in the upcoming exhibition "The Ark" at The Church in Sag Harbor, curated by Eric Fischl, opening June 21, 2025. This forthcoming international, historic exhibition epitomizes Jane’s spirit and her New York roots. Fischl shares, “The show is all about animals and sculpture. She is integral to it.”

A celebration of her life and her ethos will be announced at a later date. Donations can be made to Hearts for Paws Rescue of California in her memory.

 Aware of his calling from a young age, Zúñiga learned his craft from his father, Manuel María Zúñiga, a santero, carver of santo religious figures in his native San José, Costa Rica. In addition to this early apprenticeship, he briefly studied drawing at the Academia de Bellas Artes de Costa Rica as a teenager, while repeatedly winning first and/or second place in sculpture and painting at the annual National Fine Arts competitions from 1929-32. His discovery of pre-Columbian art at age twenty, specifically that of the local Chorotega and Huetar Indians, would be key in his stylistic development. This fascination with the ancient Mesoamerican material production only grew once he moved to Mexico City in 1936 as he enjoyed long visits to the National Anthropology Museum in its old location on Calle Moneda. His move brought new opportunities: mentoring from painter Manuel Rodriguez Lozano, a job as assistant to sculptor Oliverio Martinez, followed by Guillermo Ruiz, and finally securing a teaching position at La Esmeralda (Escuela Nacional de Pintura, Escultura y Grabado) in 1939.

Only on the surface is my sculpture “realist.” In fact, it’s extremely abstract. It’s a metaphor for the wondrous—even miraculous—universal order of how things are put together. Forms are perceived and constructed as pushing out into space, mimicking the expansive nature of how the universe is designed. I work in traditional fashion, looking at life models, translating the skeleton in architectural terms and developing a structural framework in the gesture. The framework is linked to the organic spiral of muscles as they travel through this architectonic system. The end result is organic architecture.

Nicolas Africano was born in Kankakee, Illinois in 1948. Since the 1960’s he has lived and worked in Normal, Illinois.

Africano’s cast glass figure sculptures, while clearly contemporary, reflect an air of classicism in their stance, posture, dress and mien. The subject of his sculptures for the past several years has been his wife and muse, Rebecca. He paints her and sculpts her in different states of dress and undress. She is often in a state of private reflection, closed within her being, yet looking out to the world as if seeing eternity. Sometimes she gazes straight forward, at others her eyes are closed in thought. The figures wear long, classic, simple dresses painted in glass enamel paint, a gossamer whisper of a color, or leotards-wrinkles and all-of translucent gray glass, when they do not appear in their exquisite opalescent whiteness as nudes.

While Rebecca is the subject and object of the figures, Africano’s inner concerns are the hidden or silent subject of each of his sculptures, paintings, and drawings. The sculptures are as much about identity and gender roles as they are about beauty in its most sincere form. 

In the 1970s, Africano became known for his large-scale paintings with tiny figures of scenes from the artist’s life in wax relief, set against a background of uniform color. The artist was inspired at this time by narratives from the world of dance, music, and literature, such as the ballet Petrouchka and Robert Louis Stevenson’s “The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.” Through his paintings, he was exploring his own life. In the mid-1980s, his involvement with glass began, as did his creation of cast-glass sculpture.

Using the lost wax technique-primarily reserved for bronze, Africano cast his glass sculptures from intimate scale (approximately 24 inches in height) up to full scale, life-size figures. He works in white or opalescent glass as well as in colored glass. He continues to work on the sculptures after they are cast, cold working them-a form of sculpting or carving in glass and painting them in enamel paint to breathe life into them, defying the hard surface of the material, turning the figures into soft, sentient beings.

Born in 1942, Ed Mell spent an idyllic childhood in what was then the small western city of Phoenix. He attended Art Center College of Design in Los Angeles, and soon after graduation accepted a position in New York as an art director for a large advertising agency.

Seeking greater artistic freedom, he opened an illustration studio and met with immediate success, establishing his national reputation. Still, Mell felt that he hadn't yet found his voice as an artist.

Seeking a break from the city's pace, he accepted a teaching position the Hopi reservation in 1970. Time spent on Arizona's Colorado Plateau reconnected Mell with the land he loved and his artistic course was set. He relocated to Phoenix and began painting his well-known landscapes.

Mell's creative drive has led him to produce bronze sculptures and print series in addition to his oils. Ed Mell's work is found in many public and private collections including those of Tri-Star Pictures, Phoenix Art Museum, Kartchner Caverns State Park, Diane Keaton, Arnold Schwartzenegger, and Bruce Babbitt.