Bette Alexander: The Music In Us provides an overview of Bette Alexander's mid- and late-career artworks. Over a four-decade period, she has created paintings, drawings, and installations and explored diverse subjects ranging from human figures and ritualistic objects to landscapes, long-gone synagogues of Europe, abstractions, and current events, such as the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School. She has been especially concerned with the role of women in society, showing them sometimes as mothers, but more typically as overlooked and socially isolated. However, she also painted happier subjects such as dancing couples, verdant gardens, and religious processions. What ties all this diversity together, perhaps, is Alexander's search for perspectives on the human condition and her emotional take on how we belong to nature, culture, and each other. Some of the artworks are on wooden board or canvas, and some are three-dimensional, but most were created on heavy paper using oil paint, oil sticks, and acrylic pigments. Working on paper encourages immediacy, a quality prized by Alexander. Tacking paper to the wall allows the artist to physically press and contour the thick textures. "I can be part of the paper," she says.
The images are arranged chronologically, from 1980 to 2021, but Alexander works on various themes simultaneously and sometimes revisits them; therefore it is a rough chronology. Similar subjects have been generally grouped together even if sometimes produced years apart. Interspersed are short texts that provide information about Alexander's life and artworks, as if one were walking through a retrospective exhibit.