Quirky Circus: Bunnies, Robots, Toys, and All

Featuring work by Ellen Anthony, Phyllis Famiglietti, and Cynthia Sparrenberger

Online Viewing Room (Up through March 30)

Metropolitan Pavilion - 125 W 18th Street
VIP preview: Thursday, February 28, 2024
Regular show dates: February 29 - March 3, 2024
Booth 16D

Press Release

Quirky Circus: Bunnies, Robots, Toys, and All

M.David & Co. is proud to present Quirky Circus: Bunnies, Robots, Toys, and All, featuring work by Ellen Anthony, Phyllis Famiglietti, and Cynthia Sparrenberger. 

My first experience with Outsider Art (though I prefer the term Vernacular) was when I spent time in Atlanta, became close to Bill Arnett, and then became friends and had the opportunity to exhibit Thornton Dial, Lonnie Holley, and Quilters of Gees Bend at my Gallery.

I was not aware of these artists beforehand and their communities. 

In the subsequent years I have come to see their influence on so many of the leading contemporary artists and come to realize the term "outsider" has been more complicated.

Outsiders come from many different demographics, and a new one has emerged for me once again: that of women of an age and a demographic that were denied or chose not to pursue careers or formal education (while always creative and making work) as artists because of society's constraints and expectations many of that demographic faced at that time.

Ellen, Phyllis and Cynthia are prime examples of this demographic and new "community". 

Ellen Anthony has no formal training as an artist. After a shoulder injury in 2018, at age 71, she began painting and has recently taken some workshops. Her aesthetic and approach is outsider—incorporating household objects and materials at hand: coathangers, olive oil cans, broomsticks, etc, her puppets, her constructions are direct from her to heart, free of market influence of knowledge of the contemporary art world. 

Phyllis Famiglietti worked as a film editor until she retired and began making art from found objects—roller skates, transistor wires, doll parts.  She has recently taken some workshops but has no formal art training. Her reclaiming of these found or lost objects - and recontextualising these discarded objects while fusing them with humor and poignancy are her way of owning her identity and self - as direct, instinctual, simple, and complex as that. 

Cynthia Sparrenberger had a year of art school at 18 and for personal reasons could not continue. After a gap of 38 years working and raising a family she attended New York Studio for a year but her desire, her sensibility to find her own way did not fit into a traditional educational system. Her use of unconventional materials, iconic, intuitive (often childlike and simultaneously sophisticated) going between sculpture, works on paper, handmade books akin to James Castle, started long before any awareness of his work. Her approach to her art and how she has lived her life is reflected in the originality and soulfulness of her practice .

It is my hope that the quality of these artists' works and their uncompromised devotion to their practices will find the greater audience they deserve in the context of the Outsider Art Fair.

- Michael David 

Ellen Anthony began making Bunraku puppets and wacky contraptions midlife that became Quirky Circus, a silent one-woman puppet show that ran from 2000 to 2012. After a shoulder injury in 2018, she picked up a paint brush and began moving colors around. In 2021 she began making constructions from discarded junk: wood, wire, wax, electrical cable, cotton, and sinew. Her work emerges from inner explorations. She exhibits on Cape Cod.

Phyllis Famiglietti finds magic in found objects…"they contain a certain type of energy from a previous life". Wires, springs, hinges, switches, homeless pieces that once belonged to something or someone, somewhere at sometime, have filled many of her drawers and cabinets for years. With both pathos and humor, she combines and assembles these objects to create small 3D pieces. Her work speaks to aging, decay and abandonment, but at the same time reveals an optimism and an ulterior beauty. An award winning video editor, filmmaker and collagist, Phyllis has exhibited in numerous galleries in New York and New England. After forty years in NYC, she now lives and works in Boston.

Cynthia Sparrenberger is an American mixed media artist working within formats that range from books, to film, to works on paper, whose subject matter deals with the illusory, transitory and transcendent. Specific within this range of unique imaginary worlds, she expansively depicts the broad-ranging vulnerabilities of the human condition with all of its imperfections, alienation and childhood existential angst, always tempered with humor. Her childlike images, executed with collage, acrylic paints, oil stick, and graphite convey complex emotional states through the simple, ironic, and heartfelt imagery.