Visit our permanent collection of sculpture displayed along Avery Point's shoreline walkway.

Deeply Rooted: The Tree of Life, is an exhibition of artwork that engages with the tree of life as archetype and idea, celebrating trees as majestic and magical. It features work by Texas sculptor Beverly Penn and New York painter Katie DeGroot. It includes Indian tribal art; watercolors by Abel Rodriguez, an artist of the Columbian indigenous Nonuya community; an etching by celebrated Indian artist Gulam Mohammad Sheikh; and works by Connecticut artists including UConn Master of Fine Arts candidates. The exhibition presents artworks by seventeen artists in a variety of media including sculpture, painting, drawing, printmaking, and photo collage.

The exhibition will open with a reception on March 30 from 5:30-7:30 pm with an artist talk by exhibiting artist Beverly Penn at 6:30 pm. The exhibition will remain on view through April 30. 

Beverly Penn, Professor Emerita at Texas State University creates delicate cast bronze sculptures of plant forms that reference taxonomic structures and the tension between the culturally contained and the wild. The artist is a recipient of numerous awards including a Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Grant, a Fulbright Fellowship in Barcelona Spain, and a Rockefeller Foundation residency in Bellagio, Italy. Penn's sculptures are in the collections of the Cooper Hewitt Museum, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington D.C. among many others.

Katie DeGroot is a painter interested in the abiding presence of trees as particular survivors and as members of a community. Her playful narrative paintings of lichen festooned tree branches emerge through her process of observational painting. The artist is the Director of the Summer Studio Art Program at Skidmore College. She is represented by Markel Fine Arts, New York, NY; Gut Gallery, Dallas, TX; and Gallery Gris, Hudson, NY. 

The Alexey von Schlippe Gallery thanks John H. Bowles and Kathryn Myers for lending works from their collections for the exhibition. We also thank the School of Fine Arts and Global Affairs at the University of Connecticut for their support. 

The exhibition is part of The Abrahamic Story of the Tree, a university wide series of lectures, exhibitions, and performances presented by UConn's Abrahamic Programs