Lee Cott, Troubled Land, Alewife: Fresh Pond Gas, 2022, archival pigment print, 21 x27; Tanja North Sport, No. 15 (Reaching Out, Summer), 2024, mixed media, 30 x 22

Tanja North Sport’s Reaching Out Series
In contrast to earlier work, which dealt more with environmental themes and relationships between the built environment and the natural world, content for the Reaching Out series is rooted in the inner landscape. Though recent works draw inspiration from the natural world and include layers that suggest trees or sky, the series began with a wholly abstract approach to convey emotion and inner experience as directly as possible. Layers of watercolor paint and various drawing media reflect psychological layers and processes. The series follows major life changes through marriage and parenthood, and the experience of navigating and coping with unexpected challenges. Contrast between scribbled, dark layers and more open, radiant ones relates also to the practice of mindfulness, to the contrast between inner struggle and peace. What the work has taught me is that the confusion, conflict and pain that are part of life actually make the moments of ease and beauty more beautiful; in order to be there for joy, you have to be there for the rest of it. No matter what our personal journeys may be, we all know suffering and relief from suffering; I hope these works strike an empathic chord. —Tanja North Sport

About Tanja North Sport
Tanja North Sport spent many years in Baltimore and on the Chesapeake Bay as an environmental educator and then classroom teacher, where she painted a mural at Masonville Cove Environmental Education Center commissioned by the Port of Baltimore. Her Bay Composition series of works in watercolor was represented by CAOS on F gallery in Washington, D.C. and received mention in the Washington Post. Tanja currently teaches art at Middlesex School in Concord, and exhibited works from the Reaching Out series in the faculty show, Parallel Practice, at the Ishibashi Gallery in January, 2024.

Lee Cott’s Troubled Land : Alewife
I wonder if this is what the planners had in mind; continual traffic jams, housing built too close to the highway and adjacent to railroad tracks and a large electrical sub-station. TROUBLED LAND: Alewife / Fresh Pond documents the character of the Fresh Pond, Cambridge community that has been developing since the 1960’s in a formerly industrial neighborhood. I imagine this area once held great promise but now seems like a dream unfulfilled. —Lee Cott

About Lee Cott
Lee Cott lives and works in Concord, Massachusetts. His photography is informed by his career as an architect and is inspired by his love of art and design. His photographs have been published in Design and Environment
magazine, Fraction and Black & White Magazine. He has exhibited at juried shows at the Griffin Museum of Photography in Winchester MA, the Rhode Island Center for Photographic Art in Providence RI, The PhotoPlace Gallery in Middlebury Vt, The ASmith Gallery in Johnson City TX, The Concord Art Association in Concord MA, The Cambridge Art Association in Cambridge MA and the Chautauqua Annual Exhibition of Contemporary Art. Lee Cott was introduced to photography while studying architecture at Pratt Institute and Harvard University in the 1960’s. He has studied at the New England School of Photography, The Maine Media Workshops, The Griffin Museum, the Santa Fe Photo Workshops and at Nobechi Creative. After a 45-year career as a founding principal at Bruner/Cott Architects in Cambridge, Massachusetts and professor at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, he now works full time as a fine arts photographer.

Lee Cott + Tanja North Sport

Exhibition Reception Date:

January 16, 5:30pm

Exhibition Opening:

January 16

Exhibition End Date:

February 16

Exhibition Year:

2025

“I wonder if this is what the planners had in mind; continual traffic jams, housing built too close to the highway and adjacent to railroad tracks and a large electrical sub-station,” photographer Lee Cott muses of his grayscale urbanscape series, TROUBLED LAND: Alewife. Through the lens of a career spent primarily as an architect, Cott captures a part of the Cambridge community in his work, currently featured in the latest Members Gallery Exhibition at Concord Art.

While Cott’s photography explores concrete, exterior landscapes, fellow exhibiting artist Tanja North Sport explores abstract, interior landscapes. North Sport’s featured series, Reaching Out, “began with a wholly abstract approach to convey emotion and inner experience as directly as possible,” the artist describes. North Sport turned to her watercolor paint and drawing media to make sense of significant and unexpected challenges she had encountered in her personal life; her creative process became meditative in itself. As North Sport notes of her work, “Contrast between scribbled, dark layers and more open, radiant ones relates also to the practice of mindfulness, to the contrast between inner struggle and peace.”

Cott and North Sport come to Concord Art with experience as both artist and educator, roles which became inextricably connected. “Coaching students in the creative process and distilling principles and methods that seem the most vital helps me in those ways too,” says North Sport, who currently teaches art at Middlesex School and previously worked as an environmental educator. North Sport adds, “Teaching art history also keeps that broader, conceptual lens present for me.”

Throughout his seventeen years on the faculty at the Department of Urban Planning and Design at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design, Cott continued to create photographs, as he had since he was in school himself. After graduating from Pratt Institute in the 1960s, Cott joined the Peace Corps for two years in Colombia and always kept two cameras with him: one loaded with black and white film, the other with Kodachome Color slide film.

As explorers of external and internal worlds, Cott and North Sport’s work converges in a quiet celebration of curiosity. The exhibition invites audiences to wander through the literal and metaphorical paths depicted in each artist’s series. Lee Cott + Tanja North Sport is on view at 37 Lexington Road through February 16th.