Janet Cook-Rutnik’s retrospective is a portrait of an artist who has shown a remarkable consistency of theme and philosophical outlook since 1970, an artist who has long been interested in the implications of the Edenic myths at the origins of Western culture and the fractures and fissures formed where those myths run up against the Caribbean imagination. Over the course of the artist’s career, learning to tend to that fertile area of consideration has resulted in works comfortable in their ambiguities and contradictions. What is paradise, anyway? A protective shell, yes, life-giving, but also a source of pain at the grief of the world. Behind the shadows cast by the fronds of Cook-Rutnik’s gardens, one meets a side of humanity inconsolable but enduring.

-excerpt from the catalog essay by David Knight, Jr.