Screen Shot 2019-09-02 at 3.59.28 PM.png

Screen Shot 2019-09-02 at 4.03.06 PM.png

Screen Shot 2019-09-02 at 4.08.23 PM.png

Screen Shot 2019-09-02 at 4.02.18 PM.png

Screen Shot 2019-09-02 at 3.46.24 PM.png

Screen Shot 2019-09-02 at 4.03.49 PM.png

Screen Shot 2019-09-02 at 4.02.51 PM.png

Screen Shot 2019-09-02 at 4.16.02 PM.png

Screen Shot 2019-09-02 at 4.21.39 PM.png

Screen Shot 2019-09-02 at 4.27.21 PM.png

Screen Shot 2019-09-02 at 4.29.10 PM.png

Screen Shot 2019-09-02 at 4.30.26 PM.png

Screen Shot 2019-09-02 at 4.32.43 PM.png

Screen Shot 2019-09-02 at 4.33.53 PM.png

Screen Shot 2019-09-02 at 5.48.08 PM.png

Paul Feeley, artist and key figure in Bennington College’s Art Department during the 1950s and early 1960s, was instrumental in the rise of Bennington, Vermont, as a cultural outpost for the New York art world.

Committed to the art of his contemporaries, he exposed his students -- Helen Frankenthaler among them -- to many of the most significant artists of his time. At Bennington, he organized the first retrospective exhibition of Jackson Pollock and Barnett Newman, as well as shows by David Smith, Hans Hoffmann, and many others.

He rejected "heart-on-the-sleeve" painting and made his students speak at length about the smallest details of a piece so that they would understand the importance of thinking and decision-making. In his own wide-ranging work, beginning in the mid-1950s, Feeley painted compositions of curving shapes exploring symmetries, edges, textures, surfaces, and depths in bright and subtle colors, confounding figure-ground relations. in the 1960s he began to sculpt architectural forms by interlocking two or three undulating, colorful panels, taking his ideas still further in the many sketches he left behind. Whether in two or three dimensions, Feeley's works are poised in the balance of our turning world.

He began teaching painting at Bennington College in 1939, but left in 1943 to serve in the military and was among the first Marines to enter Nagasaki after it was bombed. He returned to Bennington in 1946 and taught until his death in 1966.

In 2015, Bennington College dedicated the Paul Feeley Painting Studio in VAPA in his honor.