The Church: Insight Sunday w / Photographer Mary Ellen Bartley & Her Project, ‘Morandi’s Books’, 10.19th

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INSIGHT SUNDAY
with MARY ELLEN BARTLEY

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 19th, 2025
12 PM

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TICKETS:

General Ticket: $10

Member Ticket: Free, RSVP REQUIRED

Photographer Mary Ellen Bartley will share the inspirations, evolutions, and challenges she faced while working on her project Morandi’s Books. Bartley’s 2020 residency at Casa Morandi in Bologna initiated Morandi’s Books, which offers a contemplative look into the personal library of Giorgio Morandi, the twentieth-century Italian painter renowned for his quiet and precise still life compositions. A six-week residency at The Church during the pandemic offered Bartley space for expanding the series which reflects Bartley’s deep engagement with Morandi’s restrained visual language while expanding her ongoing exploration of books as vessels of both form and feeling.

Learn about Bartley’s process and ideas at our first Insight Sunday of the autumn. Following the discussion there will be a thoughtful Q&A.

Bartley’s work will be on view as part of Here & There – The First Churchennial, our fall exhibition and can be seen ahead of the talk during our exhibition hours Thursday-Monday 11 AM to 5 PM beginning October 5th.

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MARY ELLEN BARTLEY

Mary Ellen Bartley is known for her photographs exploring the tactile and formal qualities of the printed book and its potential for abstraction. In her minimal, poetic style, Bartley photographs books as sculptural forms, capturing their textures, edges, and subtle presence. Her images are painterly in tone and meticulous in composition, reflecting both a reverence for the printed object and a deeper inquiry into time, memory, and perception. Her photos are alive with questions— about what we do and don’t see and the stories we tell. Yet the spirit of her work provides a reflective response, a respite, from an increasingly noisy and chaotic world. 

Mary Ellen Bartley was born in New York, receiving her BFA from Purchase College, SUNY, and currently lives and works in Sag Harbor. Bartley has been invited to work in the libraries of celebrated artists such as the experimental theater director and artist Robert Wilson, the painters Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner, the designer and bibliophile Karl Lagerfeld and the 20th century master Giorgio Morandi, whose quiet still life paintings have been an essential source of inspiration from the beginning of her practice.

Her work has been exhibited at numerous institutions including the Queens Museum, NY; The Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; The Morgan Library and Museum, NY; and in a solo show at Museo Morandi in Bologna Italy.

Bartley has taken part in numerous artist residencies, including at Casa Morandi, Bologna, Italy; 7L, Lagerfeld Library, Paris; The Queens Museum, NY; Visual Studies Workshop, Rochester, NY; The Watermill Center, as well as The Church, Sag Harbor.

Bartley’s work is in numerous collections, including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY; MOMA library special collections, NY; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis MN; The Morgan Library and Museum, NY; Bibliotheque Nationale de France, Paris: and Mambo, Museum of Modern Art Bologna.

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The Church was established in 2019 by artists Eric Fischl and April Gornik. Housed in a deconsecrated 19th-century church, its doors were opened in April 2021. Our mission is to foster creativity and to honor the living history of Sag Harbor as a maker village. The East End represents an exceptional artistic legacy, spanning the practices of indigenous art of several centuries ago, Abstract Expressionists of the mid-20th Century, and the many celebrated writers, makers, musicians, and visual artists of the recent past and current moment. Core programming includes visual art exhibitions, concerts and events, educational programming, workshops, lectures, and an artist’s residency.