News Release

Paintings and Original Prints by Mark Brennan on display in November as part of Cape Cod National Seashore’s Perspectives series

Courtesy Mark Brennan

News Release Date: October 25, 2023

Contact: Linzy french, 508-957-0710

WELLFLEET, Mass. – Cape Cod National Seashore’s Perspectives: Seeing Cape Cod National Seashore Through Art, exhibits the work of artists who have captured the essence of Cape Cod through a series of month-long exhibitions at the park’s Salt Pond Visitor Center. For the month of November, the park is pleased to host Wellfleet’s Mark Brennan. Visitors can stop by Salt Pond Visitor Center in Eastham throughout the month of November to view Brennan’s artwork on display.

Mark Brennan lives in Brooklyn, New York and Wellfleet, Mass. Stylistically he owes a debt to traditional East Asian painting in his elongated watercolors. His small pictures encased in boxes have affinities with an array of distinctly American artists; one can draw references to William Trost Richards, Martin Johnson Heade and John Frederick Kensett, to William Harnett and John Peto, Georgia O’Keeffe, Joseph Cornell and Vija Celmins. Like the early Hudson River School and many 20th century abstract artists, he unapologetically experiments with altruistic and transcendent functions for art, both in his work and in his curatorial enterprises.

In the 1980s he participated in the florid East Village art scene while working for Andy Warhol in the Interview circulation department. Shortly before Warhol’s death, he suddenly abandoned both relationships to travel North America, living in the back of a station wagon. Upon his return to New York, he began teaching public school in District 9 in the Bronx. A weekend activity, painting, gradually expanded into an avocation.

Brennan is a member of Openings Artists Collective in New York.

Past Perspectives exhibits have included historic images; landscape artwork developed by Nauset Regional High School art students; national seashore-inspired quilts; Wampanoag culture; and art and literature inspired by the beauty of the national seashore.

For more information about the artist, visit: https://www.markbrennan.us/