About Jean
Biography
Jean is an award-winning sculptor whose work is in many private and public collections and exhibited nationally. Her figurative sculpture, infused with passion and vitality, is a celebration of the indomitable Spirit within us all. Her subjects express a variety of feelings, reflect on current events, or communicate warmth and playfulness. Jean's commissioned works of children and pets capture not just the likeness of her subjects but their true essence as well.
In a time when people grapple with how best to pass on values to future generations, her sculpture is moving them from pressing and immediate concerns to a more timeless dimension.
Jean is the founder of The Beaumont Sculpture Center in Newton, MA where she teaches figurative sculpture. She is a member of the National Sculpture Society and a juried member of the New England Sculpture Association and the Cambridge Art Association. She trained at the School of the Museium of Fine Arts, Boston, MA and the DeCordova Museum School in Lincoln, MA. Jean is also known for to many for her accomplishments as a senior executive in hi-tech corporations.
Education
Boston Museum of Fine Arts School, Boston, MA
DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park School, Lincoln, MA
The Art Institute, Manchester, NH
National Awards
2008
Marblehead Art Association, Sculpture Exhibition, Best in Show, Boston, MA
2007
Academic Artists Association Award for Sculpture, 57th National Exhibit, Springfield, MA
North Charleston Cultural Arts Department, So. Carolina, Outdoor
Sculpture Competition & Exhibition, Honorarium – 1 yr exhibition
2006
Newton Art Association, Celebrating the Spirit, Second Place
2005
Pen & Brush, 59 Sculpture Exhibitions, Silver Award (Second Place)
2004
Mill Brook Gallery and Sculpture Garden, 4th Annual Outdoor Juried Sculpture Exhibition, Concord, NH, Mildred F. Resch Memorial Award
1999
Tuft's Medical Center, On Your Own Time, Boston, First Place, Sculpture
1998
Tuft's Medical Center, On Your Own Time, Transportation Bldg, Boston, First PlaceSculputre
1996
The Manchester Institute, Student Exhibit, Manchester, N.H, First Place Sculpture
One Person Shows
2007
Newton Public Library, Generative Forces, Newton, MA
2006
Pen & Brush Gallery, Celebrating Form, NY, NY
2004
West Concord Sculptors, Concord, NH
Wren Gallery, The Spirit Within, Bethlehem, NH
2003
New Directions, The Spirit Within Long Wharf, Boston, MA.
Selected Juried Group Exhibits
National Sculpture Society, Literary Sculpture, NY, NY
Brookgreen Gardens, Pawleys Island, South Carolina
Chesterwood, Reflections of Nature: Contemporary Sculpture, Stockbridge, MA
North Charlestown, South Carolina, Sculpture Park, One Year Honorarium
Catharine Lorillard Wolfe Art Club 107 Annual Arts Exhibition, National Arts Club, NY, NY
Pen & Brush, 60th, 59th Annual Sculpture Exhibition, New York, NY
Allied Artists, 90th Annual Exhibition, National Arts Club, NY, NY
Boston Museum Of Fine Arts School, Then and No, Pooke Gallery, Natick, MA
New England Academic Artists Association Exhibition, Springfield, MA
Fredericksburg Center for Creative Arts, Art in Motion, Fredericksburg, VA
Period Gallery, Spiritual VII International Exhibition, Lincoln, NE.
The Cathedral Foundation, Visions IX International Juried Art Exhibition, Covington, Kentucky
Liturgical Art Guild, Contemporary Works of Faith '03, Columbus, OH
St. Paul’s Chapel, NY, NY, Artists Respond to 9/11
Lexington Art League, The Nude 2003, Lexington, KT
Rye Art Center, The Contemporary Portrait, Rye, NY
Museum of the National Center of Afro-American Art, Roxbury, MA
Mill Brook Gallery – Strike a Pose, Concord, NH
Copley Society of Art, Boston, MA
DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park, Lincoln, MA
Depot Square Gallery, Improvisations in 2D &3D, Lexington, MA
Press Articles
P R E S S
C O V E R A G E
Gallery & Studio, New York
June/July/August
Sculptors Dibner, Hutt, and
Promotepipol Celetrate the Figure
at Pen & Brush
After over a century of modernist deconstruction, some sculptors of the postmodern era are now endeavoring to restore wholeness and integrity to the greatest of all subjects: the human form. Three such artists, each of whom has won many prizes and is represented in numerous public and private collections, can be seen in "Celebrating Form", the 2005 Sculpture Award Winners' Show, at The Pen & Brush, Inc., 16 East 10th Street through June 11.
"I have been Sculpting with my eyes my whole life but in clay for only the past ten years," states Jean Proulx Dibner, who is presently at work on an epic series of sculptures entitled "The Circle of Life," which, like a novel in three dimensions, follows a mother and daughter through various stages of life, starting from before the birth of the latter and culminating with the reversal of their roles, when the daughter becomes the mother's caretaker.
Two completed bronzes from the narrative in progress, "Anticipation",
in which the standing figure of the mother-to-be contemplates her newly bounteous body, and "Leaving the Nest", in which the young daughter is looking toward the future, while the mother gazes back, are included in the exhibition at the Pen & Brush. Both demonstrate the tactile, expressive fluidity of Dibner's style, which imbues telling moments of everyday life with monumental quality.
Also on view are indivudual sculptures such as "Remembered", and "Contemplation", which seem to condense a lifetime of experience into a single compelling image. In "Remembered", a broken bronze face, its upper portion missing and the corners of its mouth set sorrowfully downward, is suspended against overlapping marble rectangles suggesting the Twin Towers. In "Contemplation", the ideally bald head of a thoughtful man is supported under the chin by only a hand and an arm poised gracefully on a marble pedestal, simultaneously giving the piece an abstract quality and suggesting intellectual transendence.
Lee Hutt . . . Yupin Promotepipop . . .
Time Magazine
February 21, 2005
This was part of an article entitled Life is But A Dream, featuring five people who have forsaken their routine lives to pursue a passion.
Carving out a Brand-New Identity
Jean Dibner, 62
Sculptor
Newton, Mass.
IDENTITY CHANGE: Dibner has plunged into her art with the same
passion she showed in Corporate America.
Once upon a time, Jean Dibner was a senior vice president of Avid Technology, a digital film-editing company. Now she spends her days carving granite and clay as a sculptor - but she's the first to admit that the transition "didn't just happen." Yes, she volunteered for early retirement in 1999, thinking that after raising four children and sending them to college and being a major breadwinner, "it was time to do something that was really engergizing to me."
But there's a lot of ground to cover when someone switches from running worldwide businesses, traveling nonstop and working 60 to 70 hours a week to learning human anatomy and making works of art meaningful enough to be shown in galleries nationwide. "It was a whole process to clarify what I even wanted from sculpture," says Dibner. "Was my goal just to create beautiful sculpture and put it in my home? Or did I want other people to see it and enjoy it too?"
The journey from business executive to sculptor was similar to the transition she made in 1980 after 17 years of staying home with the kids. Back then, aptitude tests revealed that she would make a perfect engineer, and she plunged back into school for a degree in computer science at age 40. With degree in hand, she began a high-tech career that included stops at Digital, Apple and IBM. This time, however, she didn't need someone to tell her what she was interested in. While at IBM, Dibner started taking sculpture classes, riding the T to Boston's Museum School after work. Once she decide to accept an early-retirement package and devote herself to professional sculpture, she threw herself in headfirst. That meant, initially, a very rigorous study of the basics, including form and technique. Then she retreated to her studio and logged the long, lonely hours that separate the people who only talk about becoming artists from those who succeed at finding their own voice.
Those hours weren't as lonely as they might have been for some. Dibner's husband Andrew also left a technology career (he founded Lifeline, the personal response service) to work on his sculpture as well. Still, the change from having profit-and-loss responsibility for $300 million in revenue and 350 employees to waking up each morning and staring at clay in the basement took some getting used to. "You work so hard to get yourself where you are, and a part of your identity is the title," Dibner says candidly. "Sometimes I'll be somewhere now, and somebody will say, 'What do you do?' and I'll say, 'I'm a sculptor,' like they think it's a hobby, not something meaningful and serious."
But that's a small price to pay for leading the creative life. "So many people say, 'Gee, I'm so envious. I wish I had something like that,'", says Dibner. "But I believe that everybody does have some creative response to life. You just have to figure out what it is."
The Littleton Courier - August 2004
Jean Proulx Dibner – The Spirit Within
By George Manupelli
In an August showing at the Gallery at WREN, Jean Proulx Dibner, engineer turned artist, uses thin sheets of rough textured clay as capes and shrouds in this fine collection of sculptural pieces. Vertical slabs of black granite combine with an anguished bronze face to memorialize rescuers who lost their lives on September 11. A favorite at the opening was ‘Forgotten’, a small huddled figure, discarded, shaped like a crumpled paper bag. Proulx-Dibner’s signature piece, ‘The Letter’, has the dynamic surface and power of a much larger work, reminiscent of bronzes of Rodin.