Michael Alfano has been sculpting for over twenty years, with artwork in galleries, museums, parks, and private collections around the globe. At juried exhibitions, he has won over 60 awards, including the designation “Sculptor of the Year.” Among Michael’s commissioned works are portraits of world leaders, and public monuments at prominent locales, primarily in the Northeast. Originally from New York, Michael studied sculpting from the model at the city’s famed Art Students League. Today, he lives and works in Hopkinton, Massachusetts.

The driving force in my work is to bring the physical and sensorial experience of the world into focus. Layering images with textures, materials, and words, I seek to marry the conscious realm of ideas with the innate intelligence of the skin. Working with anatomical transparencies, maps, photo fragments, copper, and clay, these collages explore the dreamlike territory of memory and nostalgic longing recalled in my father’s reminiscences of Cuba. Here I search to reconcile, the body and the land, language, and identity, the personal and the political. 

Gilbert Boro was born in New York, New York in 1939. He first received his Bachelors in Fine Arts from Duke University before going on to pursue a career in Architecture with advanced degrees from Columbia University. After a successful career as an architect and sculptor in Boston, Massachusetts, Boro now lives and works in Old Lyme, Connecticut.

Boro’s vast body of work has been shown on a local and international level. While working as an Architect, Boro continued to nurture his creative energy by maintaining his passion for sculpting. Boro’s long career provides a wide range of works, with varied aesthetics and materials including stone, wood, metal and fiberglass. 

Boro is dedicated to the local arts community and runs Studio 80+ Sculpture Grounds, a collaborative work studio and sculpture garden open to the public. Boro fabricates his sculptures in the studio and displays many large-scale pieces on the grounds. With several thousands of visitors each year, the 4.5-acre sculpture grounds boast over 90 works by Boro and many contributing artists from around the globe.

Josie Campbell Dellenbaugh was born in Albany NY in 1948, the daughter of a surgeon and a watercolor artist.  In 1969 she received a B.A. in Fine Arts with a Biology minor from Chatham University, Pittsburgh PA.  That same year she married Geoff Dellenbaugh. They moved to New Jersey in 1974, where they raised their 3 children.
 In 1976 she began her studies of three-dimensional art at the Johnson Atelier in Princeton NJ.  In 1977 she took a course in the process of the bronze foundry at Rutgers College, Camden NJ.  She concurrently studied the technique of stone carving with hand tools at the Princeton Art Association.  In 2008, in the middle of a move to Connecticut, she attended a carving symposium in Marble CO,  where she learned the technique of carving with power tools.
 She attends annual workshops at the Carving Studio and Sculpture Center in W. Rutland VT, where she has the ability to work on large stone pieces. She maintains studios in Glastonbury CT and Center Harbor NH.
In 2018 she was invited to be demonstrating artist in the studio of Daniel Chester French at the National Trust property, "Chesterwood", his summer home in Stockbridge MA.

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Bo Gehring's background includes computer animation, 3D audio, and sculpture. For several years he has transformed tiny clips of music by Thelonious Monk and others into complex 3D sculptures in polished stainless steel, machined foam, and other materials. The largest of these to date is the 160' Monk Wall commissioned by the Katonah Museum of Art. About a year ago, Gehring began creating abstract video animations and now has adapted those techniques to make live portraits set to music by "flying" a video camera with a computer-controlled milling machine.

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Sculptor Gints Grinbergs works with a variety of metals, including copper, bronze, and stainless steel, to create open forms. Welding metal spheres and partial spheres, he creates modern structures, for indoors or out. Fascinated by pictures taken by the Hubble telescope and electron microscopes, Grinbergs makes associations with galaxies and molecular structures. The combination of a modern metal structure with rough, natural stone makes these works unique sculptural forms. Gints Grinbergs has a B.F.A. and a B.A. in architecture from Rhode Island School of Design and has studied at Massachusetts College of Art and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. His sculpture has been featured at the DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park, Michael Beauchemin Gallery, Boston, and Lever House Gallery, New York, NY.

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 I use traditional carvers’ hand tools, hammer, and chisels. The design of each artwork incorporates natural beauty and form. of the wood, clay, and stone. In my ceramic work, a variety of hand-building techniques are used, both slab and hand coiling. With wood, the existing shapes and textures often inform the figure that emerges. It is in cooperation with and respect for the materials of this world that this artwork is produced.

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Rob Lorenson received his BFA from the University of Northern Iowa in Cedar Falls and an MFA from Northern Illinois University in DeKalb.  Since 1999 he has lived and worked in southeastern Massachusetts. His works have been included in a number of Exhibitions including Pierwalk in Chicago, The Sarasota Season Of Sculpture and the Convergence International Arts Festival in Providence, RI. His work is included in over 200 public and private collections from small table top pieces to 16' large scale sculptures.

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Ruth Aizuss Migdal is a first-generation American. She was born in a Jewish Immigrant neighborhood on Chicago’s Westside where education and culture were highly valued. She took great advantage of all the cultural opportunities available there. She saw movies of Shakespeare’s plays at the Circle Theatre at Roosevelt Road and Spaulding, movies of operas were at another theatre on Madison and Kedzie Avenues. She was allowed free access to every opera, ballet, and theatre performance at the opera house, from her junior year of high school through her education at the Art Institute of Chicago by volunteer work at the concession stands before the performances.

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Nick Santoro is best known for 25 years of carving stone sculptures and teaching students how to use hand tools to shape marble and limestone. 

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We exist at a crossroads of presence and illusion; we circulate in a threshold of being in between. It is where interactions effect ones scope to live, impact, and evolve. When certain places, objects, or events have special significance we connect with that item or space and create memories. We give reason emphasizing the importance of bounding a form with meaning. I question what happens in that space between spaces and from those moments my practice investigates the remnants or echos from objects or environments. I aim to use those fragments, ruins, and negative space from events as a tangible component in making. Examining the art-objects relation to memory, the vessel, and how art can act as a conduit to examine the evolution of one's self or the world around them. Often focusing on political, environmental, and existential themes, I explore how sculpture can exist “in” space or “as” space.

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Gabriel Warren - "My sculpture has been informed by big ice for decades. In 1999 I became the first sculptor from any country to be sent (in my case by the NSF) to Antarctica. I was sent again in 2006, becoming one of only eight to be a ʻrepeat offendersʼ. 

In 2001 I resided for five weeks on Canadaʼs largest icebreaker in the Autumn, as the sea froze over in the Lancaster Sound / Parry Channel area of the Northwest Passage. In 2014 I resided as a team member of a science party on the Greenland Ice Capʼs “Lake District”, researching climate change. 

I try to position my art at an intersection of art and science. It is my aspiration that my experiences in both polar regions afford me some authority about matters both visual and intellectual. If I include a visual pattern or refer metaphorically to a glaciological phenomenon, it is because I have actually seen it, or been told personally by an expert. Of course, I take liberties to make what I do Art, but it is always erected on a solid foundation in the natural world. 

The diptych currently at Studio 80 + Sculpture Grounds is a member of my series “Piesterion”, which loosely refers to cores drilled out of ice sheets, caps, and glaciers."

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Craig Anderson, an artist based in South County, Rhode Island, is inspired by his coastal surroundings. He strives to create contemporary metal sculptures that exude movement, contradictory rhythm, and uncomplicated beauty.
Craig has spent over twenty-five years in television creating, shaping, and producing shows in the electronic medium for networks including HGTV, Food Network, CBS, and Comedy Central. Then, during a trip to Paris in 2010, he was inspired to shift his passion for creating the medium of steel. Upon his return, he studied metal sculpture at Silvermine Arts Center in New Canaan, Connecticut. In 2012 he established his studio, 42 Metalworks, where he works full time. Craig is a member of the New England Sculptors
Association. His work has been shown at One Way Gallery in Narragansett, RI, IMAGO Gallery in Warren, RI, Eustis Estate Museum in Milton, MA, and Newburyport Art Association in Newburyport, MA. Additionally, his piece entitled Wind Water will be part of an upcoming exhibit with SculptureNow @ The Mount in Lenox, Massachusetts during the summer of 2020.

Ashby Carlisle lives in Old Lyme, Connecticut, the birthplace of American Impressionism.  Approaching Carlisle’s studio, you will hear the soft sound of distant waves breaking on the beach.  To the right is a peaceful woodland, on the left an iridescent glow radiates from the marsh.  Inside, her studio is filled with warm sunshine.  Reading the workspace in detail, you are captivated by her collection of vines lyrically dancing across every surface looking like sentences written in an unfamiliar language. 

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In this space, you discover Carlisle’s passion for the luminous light so beloved by the Impressionist painters.  She has splashed translucent colors across the horizon of each three-dimensional landscape using dyed and torn papers.  Over these sculptural vistas are twisting, turning vines growing out of the earth.  The visual dynamics communicate the artist’s passion for making extraordinary art that challenges our curiosity about Man’s relationship to the natural world.

By day, welding is the skill David has used to earn a living. His welds conform to the straight lines and right angles of I-beams and concrete. Often he was so focused on the fierce tip of the electrode that he failed to notice the magnificent human and mechanical symphony of the job site happening all around him.

At night in his studio, he can weld figures which express the complex curves and stances of daily life. He can work his TIG torch to create musculature, instruments, and motion. Essentially, he layers beads of molten metal (bronze or steel) in the same way that clay is built up in modeling sculpture. Later he uses a series of grinders to carve, shape, and finish each piece.

Over the past 30 years, he has tried other mediums, but he enjoys working in steel and bronze the best. The internal strength of these materials allows him to capture that instant when a musician is bent over backward to reach a high note in the “midnight ramble” or a gymnast swerving and twisting on the pommel horse.  He continues to work in steel and bronze because he really enjoys welding. He likes the “arcing and sparking” of the grinders and electrodes and the smooth patterns of the orange liquid metal as it follows the blue tip of his torch.

In my lifetime, I have seen highways and structures built and age, fall into disrepair, shed their concrete skin, and show their steel bones. Rebar is the backbone of ferro-concrete method of construction. Surrounded by concrete, the tension inherent in the steel holds the concrete in compression adding strength to the static load.  The tension is directional.  Add energy through gravity, climate, vibration, and the structure expresses itself in ways although characteristic of the material are not reflective of its intended use.  I use rebar to explore and discuss the relationship between man and nature, use and reuse, between energy and tension, static and active, between inside and out, container and contained, between moment and time.

Joe Gitterman has sculpted for 50+ years yet it wasn’t until he retired from Wall Street that he devoted his full time to his art. Since his first exhibition at a local Connecticut gallery in 2011, Joe Gitterman’s career has taken off. His work has been bought by both private and corporate collections and he has received commissions from Robert Couturier, Norwegian Cruise Lines, The Riverside Building in London, the Robert A.M. Stern-designed Arris building in Washington D.C. and the Four Seasons Hotel in Houston, among many others.

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Gitterman creates abstract sculptures inspired by movement such as ballet and modern dance. Gitterman states, “I thought about the movements of the dancers as a series of frames in an old celluloid film, and how just one of those frames could convey a fantastic sense of motion. I thought that capturing this ‘single frame of motion’ in a solid piece of sculpture would be a wonderful challenge.”

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Sculpting models in copper, wax or acrylic, Gitterman chooses to cast in bronze or fabricate in stainless steel. The surface texture and color of each piece accentuates features such as sensual form or the suggestion of dynamic movement. Whether rendered in clean, crisp stainless-steel, vibrant color, or the leathery patina of bronze each abstraction and gesture references the fluidity of form and motion. Gitterman does not make editions thus each of his works is an original.

During the 1950’s, William Harby began painting expressionistic landscapes that later evolved into more abstract work. A trip to France during the 1980’s sparked a new desire to paint landscapes in foreign places. Harby felt that this became “an interesting and intense way to experience a new environment and its people.” Painting in both genres, Harby utilizes brushstrokes that are playful, yet controlled, adding a sense of atmosphere to his work.

Also well established as a sculptor, the artist has public art pieces installed throughout New England, including the Massachusetts Vietnam Memorial, Worcester, MA. Harby’s paintings have also shown frequently at institutions such as Galleria Terviana, Rome, Italy and Gallery 52, Brookline, MA.

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Artist Eric David Laxman sculpts substantial and elegant pieces. His chosen materials are metal and stone. He takes those raw composites and energetically transforms them into something at once very real and highly conceptual.

When he’s pulling out of steel or marble its core character, his intensity is almost primal. It’s clear he’s wrestling with the essence of a shape until it acknowledges itself. He’ll use plasma cutters, oxyacetylene torches, arc welders, benders, hammers …chisels if he has to - to liberate the thing within...

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“My first sculpture was inspired by two shadows on a wall. It was the beginning of a lifelong exploration of the relationship between seemingly unrelated forms and the connectivity or manifestation of the space between them; the juxtaposition of opposing forces creating another form altogether.”

“All of Meyer’s works... set up a dialogue between parts and wholes, masses and volumes, surfaces and their scars. …These are works of graphic purity and tactile richness at the same time. …As much as his work “discovers” affinities to nature, to architecture, to symbol, and to narrative, its most persuasive attribute is its capacity for touch.”

Patricia Rossoff, Sculpture Magazine

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Much of his attraction to sculpture as an art form is this physical interaction between the artist and the materials with which he works. There is a balance of give and take between flesh and metal that requires a physical as well as mental/emotional process for the artist, and Newton thrives on this exchange. “I am so grateful, particularly at this stage of my life, to have found this way of working, and to [be able to] do it. My body is stronger now than it has been since I was a much younger man. I struggle with these. It’s a wrestling match – who’s going to win. This grappling with the material is intensely physical.” He utilizes sheets and bars of raw steel, cutting, welding, and oxidizing the metal. White-hot flame, sparks, molten metal take shape under Newton’s focused aesthetic. It is a dance between the artist’s creative vision and the gifts and limitations of the medium of steel. The results reflect the dynamic between the technical mastery and sheer physical effort needed to manipulate large pieces of metal,with a sensitivity to the integrity of the medium. The resulting sculptures are both symbol and embodiment of the state of becoming. 

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"I have created sculptures using imaginary architectural elements for twenty-five years. The sculptures have dealt with mythic and scientific issues, using architectural forms as a vehicle. The subjects of the works range from temples and labyrinths to observatories and sun dials; they are all metaphors for human curiosity and searching - human beings have always chosen special places to celebrate and explore the unknown. The sculptures bridge time and ideas with ancient and new materials and forms. The works are executed using materials and techniques such as stone cutting and traditional bronze and iron casting as well as modern technologies like inert gas welding of aluminum and stainless steel, vaporization casting, plasma metal cutting and computer imaging. Artists have always used modern tools and techniques, going back to the introduction of perspective for a more scientific understanding of anatomy and visual phenomena; the computer is another tool in this process. Computer simulations help develop forms and explore functional astronomical and environmental situations. I have been using the computer as an electronic sketch bookto visualize ideas and view them from a multiplicity of angles. I rarely go from a sketch (traditional or computer) directly to a finished work, so the images produced feed into the process in the way that the handling of various materials help shape the idea. The decisions of size and scale as well as all of the visual adjustments for aesthetic reasons are always determined in the making of my sculpture.

The capacity of the computer to measure and organize information has also been used to make paper pattern templates for cutting out metal parts for a sculpture. It is a valuable tool for making measurements for sculptures that have astronomical functions such as seasonal clocks and sun dials.

I strive to create art that comes alive and engages my audience at many levels.  My joy is in developing the character and vitality of each work, whether figurative or abstract, and charging my medium itself to breathe life.

I work freely across a wide spectrum of ideas and forms, which leads to discovering and sharing new points of view, materials, and methods.  These fuel my delight in invention and enrich the widening and deepening range of projects and processes that are my grandest adventure.

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Richard Warrington is an internationally known, diverse, and impressionistic sculptor who creates two and three-dimensional hollow form and silhouette sculptures using powder-coated aluminum, stainless steel, corten steel, and bronze.

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Mark Attebery worked previously in stained glass with over one-hundred glass works installed throughout California. In addition to visual arts, he's had a busy career as a composer. He received numerous music commissions from dance companies including the Oakland Ballet and Malashock Dance Co.

Mark received awards from the San Diego Arts Commission, the Ann & Gordon Getty Foundation and Meet the Composer Inc. The American Ceramic Society included Mark's recordings of experimental clay musical instruments in a CD & Book titled From Mud to Music. He teaches at Ethical Culture Fieldston School in New York. Mark fabricates his forged and welded steel sculptures in his Nyack, New York studio. His work is exhibited throughout the United States.

Sodalyte, calcedon, crystals, Smalti glass, Italian marble. These are just some of the exotic materials that Gwen Basilica brings together to form her irresistibly touchable sculptural glass works of art.

Glimmering, shimmering, smooth, rough, dark, bright, transparent, opaque — Basilica never tires of exploring and experimenting with glass.

Whether she's creating a small fine art piece to hang in a private home or a monumental public installation, Basilica says, "The glass speaks to me. I let it guide me — it does the talking."

Born and raised in New London, she and her husband, Tony, both graduated from New London High School in 1974.

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Artworks and installations in an environmental context allow the individual to have a new experience of perception. My focus is to create sculptures and installations where the normal experience of viewing is altered by walking through, around and into the sculptural space.

My artwork has ranged from abstract, architectural structures to recent representational animals and imaginary creatures.  The actual location and surrounding environment directly influence my art and are often its source and inspiration.  Consistent in my approach is realizing the works in a larger-than-life scale.

Craig has been studying, making and teaching sculpture since 1981. Born and raised in Connecticut, Craig was influenced by the New England countryside changing with the seasons and filled with rolling hills, valleys cut by rivers and streams, outcroppings of colored stone, and towering deciduous and conifer trees. In contrast, his small urban town was a typical rust belt community suffering from years of boom and bust. A factory town in its glory days, it found itself home to people of many different cultures who brought their skilled labor to the industries. After the factories left, the town and its people fell into a depression the effects of which impacted Craig’s life, views and work. His concerns and philosophy are global, and he believes art is for all people. His sculptures are informed by these influences and by poetry, existential thought, psychiatry, mythology, perception, physics and the human figure.

Bryan Gorneau is an award-winning sculptor and mixed media artist from the Connecticut shoreline. Gorneau plays with events and visuals of pop culture, incorporating elements of traditional Americana like famous images, photographs, street signs, and historic headlines to invite the viewer to rethink various cultural concepts and the status quo. By using clear resin epoxy he has been able to encase delicate material that would otherwise disintegrate, making it completely archival and timeless. Although Gorneau uses different processes throughout his sculpture and mixed media, continuity in his body of work is created through personal exploration of process and methodology.

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All of Gorneau’s art is infused with a youthful curiosity and creative exploration as he deftly dismantles both objects and ideas, seeking to find a new way of understanding and portraying the world around him. Through his work, Gorneau highlights and preserves many of the “headlines” that have punctuated our society’s cultural identity, while redefining their messages from his personal artistic perspective.

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My sculptures strike a balance between abstract form and female identity. Rooted in gesture, these simplified figures embody layers of distilled emotion and archetypal presence. They acknowledge contradictions, combining strength and subtlety, movement and stability, ancient and contemporary outlooks. Many of my works also investigate habitation, place, and the environment. The sculptures range from intimate to large scale, created with a range of materials including wire mesh, steel, resin, bronze, and found objects.

My current work explores human-bird personae, recalling mythological winged figures related to the soul. Inspired by stories and images from many world cultures, these hybrid beings incorporate archetypal and psychological content familiar from religion and fairy tales. Alternately grounded or borne aloft, they reflect on essential human desires and raise questions about our conflicting responses to nature.

Sarah Haviland’s abstract-figurative sculptures and public art installations have been exhibited widely in galleries, parks, museums, healthcare, and educational settings, including commissions at the Flatiron Prow Art Space in NYC; Grounds for Sculpture in Hamilton, NJ; Pratt Sculpture Park in Brooklyn; NYU Langone Medical Center; and the National Marine Museum in Taiwan. Awards include a Creativity Grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, fellowships from the New York and New Jersey State Arts Councils, and residencies at Sculpture Space, Skowhegan, and Yaddo. Sarah Haviland earned a BA from Yale University and an MFA from Hunter College, and maintains a studio in the Lower Hudson Valley. Her most recent honor is a US Fulbright Award for travel to Taiwan in Fall 2018.

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Conrad Levenson has been an assemblage artist for over forty-five years. Applying his passion for reclamation and recycling to the creation of sculpture, he takes scrap materials and old objects and transforms them into works of art. In the process, he strives to identify and capture their embedded energy, spirit and character, giving each one new form and meaning in a voice that is uniquely his own.

His studio is located in the Hudson Valley Town of Stanford, New York. It is a rural community that provides both inspiration and access to artifacts and decaying materials, weathered and rusted, ripe for transformation. The property includes a workshop and a two-acre garden, where he has created spaces and settings for the display of his sculptures. His works connect the built environment and natural landscape and provide both visual and cultural bridges between the past and the present.

He is a member of the International Sculpture Center, the Sculptors Guild, Westport Arts Center, Arts Mid-Hudson, Barrett Art Center and the Red Hook Community Arts Network.  His works are in private collections across the country and regularly exhibited throughout the region with the Sculptors Guild, at their Gallery and on Governors Island; the Sculpture Expos in Red Hook, New York; Studio 80 + Sculpture Grounds, in Old Lyme, Connecticut; the Red Devon in Bangall, New York; the Ice House on the Hudson in Poughkeepsie, New York; and the McDaris Gallery in Hudson, New York.

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"My work centers around people and what it means to be human. Our experiences make us who we are, and my work seeks to portray in sculpture those experiences. My work is also an expression of faith in that I believe men and women are made up of a spirit and flesh. If I can reveal the power the spirit in all of us through the physical nature of clay I would feel I have been successful."

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Tom Pearson (Third Rail Projects Co-Artistic Director) is an artist working in dance, theater, and performance as well as film, poetry, visual art and new media. He is best known for his original works for theater, including the long-running immersive theater hits Then She Fell and The Grand Paradise, and as a founder and co-artistic director of the New York City-based performance company Third Rail Projects. Pearson’s work draws from depth psychology, archetypal studies, and deep dream practices as well as the ceremony of his native Tsalagi (Eastern Band Cherokee) heritage and its focus on the right relationship and story as medicine. He holds an MA from New York University in Performance Studies, and he has received two Bessie Awards for choreography, a Kingsbury Award for writing, and an IllumiNation Award from the Ford Foundation and National Museum of the American Indian for his work in Native Theater. He helms the Global Performance Studio, Third Rail’s international program for cultural listening and exchange. Pearson was recently named among the 100 most influential people in Brooklyn culture by Brooklyn Magazine and awarded artist fellowships in Saint Petersburg, Russia from CEC Artslink (Back Apartment Residency), in the U.S. from the Center for the Arts at Wesleyan University; and in Italy from the Bogliasco Foundation. He has been named Creative-in-Reference for Olin College for 2019-2020. His published work is available at tompearsonnyc.com. His performance and artwork can be found atthirdrailprojects.com.

David Smalley has had over 50 solo, two-person, and invitational exhibitions of sculpture in the US, Britain, and Japan in his 40 year career. His work is primarily in metal, and many of the works are kinetic (mobiles). His works are in private and public collections in New York, Connecticut and elsewhere. He recently installed his largest commission to date: a suspended kinetic sculpture for Northwestern Connecticut Community College, commissioned by the State of Connecticut. Smalley's works are impeccably crafted and engineered. He pioneered the use of computer technology as a tool for creating sculpture, and founded the Center for Arts and Technology at Connecticut College, from which he retired in 2002.

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Martha was born in 1953 in Kansas City, Missouri, the youngest in the family, and the only girl.  The family moved from Kansas City to St. Louis, Missouri, followed by Carmel California, and Seattle Washington, all by the time Martha was eight years old.  The Walkers moved to Sweden for three years, starting in 1961, spending one full year in a remote forest location.  After this, Martha landed back in the United States, attending both junior high and high school in Miami Beach, Florida before her move to Brooklyn, New York, where she attended Pratt Institute from 1971-1976, majoring in sculpture and drawing.  Martha stayed in Brooklyn, going back for her Masters Degree at Pratt Institute from 1999 – 2001, where she graduated with honors.  She is now a Brooklyn native, married with two children. 

The unusual travel history of her youth was precipitated by her parents’ desire to travel.  Her father, Leonard was a nuclear physicist opposed to the arms race, opting instead for medical research.  (Leonard was credited with the original use of radioactive isotopes as a means of tracking infection and cancer in the lymph system.)  His research laboratory was a place that Martha frequented, viewing microorganisms under the microscope, something that she sites to this day as an influence on her abstract visual perspective.  Additionally, Martha’s middle brother, David, was an avid painter, who “raised the bar” for her artistically.

Other influences on Martha came from frequent relocations as a child.  The most obvious was the disparate geography that she observed, from the American Plains to the Pacific Coast and mountain ranges, along with the rich Swedish forests, followed by the Atlantic Ocean and sandy beaches in Florida.  However, cultural influences were also important.  In almost every new place, Martha became aware of what it meant to be an outsider, looking in, especially in Europe, where she became acquainted with Jewish children whose parents were survivors of the Holocaust.  This had a profound effect on her, even as a nonreligious Jew, resulting occasionally in work with themes of Jewish identity and the Holocaust.