My Mother’s Store 

Jack Ceglic 

on view: November 7 – December 13, 2014 
Opening reception: Saturday, November 7, 5-8 pm 

“It was a mom and pop store in a Jewish neighborhood on St. John's Place and Schenectady Ave. It sold groceries and fresh diary products - saw dust on the floors, milk in glass bottles, and customers who were referred to by their first name (a hamish store). It provided the family with food during the war, and a place I would hang out in and watch my mother tally a customers bill in pencil on a paper bag.  Brooklyn in the forties. Drawing in charcoal is important (my first art lessons). The beauty and placement of food, which eventually led to the feelings and movement of Dean&Deluca. The care that my mother showed her customers led to my portraits of people. The desire to sit on the marble countertop led to my sense of space and well being. These are my memories.” 
- Jack Ceglic 

FiveMyles is pleased to present this installation by Jack Ceglic, the co-founder and designer of Dean & Deluca. Seventy years ago Jack Ceglic’s parents ran an egg and butter store on St. Johns Place in Crown Heights, close to where FiveMyles is now located. At FiveMyles Jack Ceglic will create a rendering of his memory of his mother’s store. As Crown Heights is becoming an upscale neighborhood it is a pleasure for FiveMyles to be able to open a window into the area’s much earlier history.  

Jack Ceglic’s installation at FiveMyles features 25 drawings of the foods that was displayed on the shelves in his mother’s store. In the center of the gallery space he will  create a remembered interpretation of a corner in the store, where his father checked eggs for their freshness. The entire gallery floor, painted the color of butter and the yoke of eggs, punctuates the importance of the store in Jack Ceglic’s childhood. 

Jack Ceglic’s artistic output over the last fifty years span a wide range of sensory and material productions – portraiture, still life’s, food art, spaces and illustrations. A graduate from the Parsons School of design, he resides and works in New York City and East Hampton. During the last decade he has developed a specific form and conceptual language around figuration. It includes and extensive group of portraits done in oil, crayon, chalk, ink and mixed media. These works have been widely exhibited. 

A talk on the changing aesthetics in food retailing is scheduled for Sunday, December 13 at 4pm.

DIRECTIONS:

Take 2, 3, or 4 trains to Franklin Avenue. Walk two blocks against the traffic on Franklin. Walk ¾ block to 558 St. Johns Place. FiveMyles is within easy walking distance from the Brooklyn Museum.

acknowledgments:

FiveMyles is in part supported by the New York State Council for the Arts, Public Funds from the New York City Dept. of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council, Council Member Laurie Cumbo, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, the Greenwich Collection, the Gould Family Foundation, the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, the O’Grady Foundation, the New York State Council for the Humanities and the Lily Auchincloss Foundation.