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Past Exhibits - 2008
Something To Look Forward To This exhibition pays homage to the exceptional talent, unique vision, and courageous persistence of particular mature artists who have created dynamic abstract images and objects during extended and successful careers. Twenty-two celebrated African American artists over the age of sixty were invited to exhibit two works, created six to ten years apart. The submissions cover several forms of abstract art including multimedia, painting, sculpture, and furniture. The exhibition opened at Franklin & Marshall College, March 2004 in teh Dana and Rothman Galleries of the college's Phillips Museum of Art. This visually stunning, groundbreaking show is curated by Bill Hutson, the college's Jennie Brown and Betsy Hess Cook Distinguished Artist-in-Residence. Mr. Hutson presented a discussion entitled "Abstract Points of View: An Artist Conversation" on Dec. 4, 2009 in coordination with the School of Visual Arts. This exhibit features work by Betty Blayton, Frank Bowling, Yvonne Pickering Carter, Edward Clark, Melvin Edwards, Sam Gilliam, David Hammons, Gerald Jackson, Lawrence Compton Kolawole, Alvin Loving, Richard Mayhew, Sam Middleton, Mary Lovelace O'Neal, Joe Overstreet, Howardena Pindell, Helen Evans Ramsaran, John T. Scott, Sylvia Snowden, Mildred Thompson, Jack Whitten, William T. Williams, and Frank Wimberley.
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Response To Machiavelli Machiavelli proposed in his book, The Prince, that power, in and of itself, was the ultimate goal of the public sphere. This series of paintings responds to that premise, offering a moral perspective on political issues. The works are based on the words of some of history's greatest social and political philosophers, including Nelson Mandela, Gandhi, Mencius, Meister Exkhart, Baal Shem Tov, the Sufi masters of Islam, Martin Luther King, Jr., and many others. The paintings themselves are reactions to specific morally based social commentary by these great masters. After researching these issues, Block uses both figurative and abstract images to explore them in paint. Broken and slatted wood supports are contrasted with beautiful color, mysterious glyphs, and the cartoon-like representation of a better way - politics based on a response to the truly needy, and not an exercise in making the powerful more powerful still. Tom Block is an artist, writer, and theoretician best known for work that delves into the search for spiritual meaning in a post-religious era. He lives and works in Silver Spring, MD.
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Inside Outside the Ecstatic Body This exhibit featured three artists including the sculpture of Don Schule, who explores the corporeal make-up, structure, components, nature, function and energy of the human body. By making comparisons with the cellular nature of plants, he expresses the universality of all living things. Helen Redman's colorfully graphic paintings and works on paper depict the history fo the inside and outside of her own body as she has experienced pregnancies, menopause and advancing age, disease and surgery of a bowel obstruction, and adhesions caused by a ruptured appendix. Micaela Amateau Amato's "Ants and Luminous Insects" are gouache paintings on paper and canvas that depict other-worldly, spiraling patterns of microscopic insects and parasites that serve as a contradictory metaphor for the outsider in society, and the environmentally and spiritually diseased body.
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Acrid Dialectic: The Visual Language of LeRoy Johnson's work is concerned with the lives of African-Americans in the inner-city, particularly in Philadelphia. Using found objects and mixed media, Johnson "express[es] not only aesthetic values, but social, moral and spiritual ones as well." Theodore A. Harris is a contemorary collage artist who uses visual metaphor and symbolism to construct a social commentary about race, class, and inequality. By re-positioning images of American symbols, such as the capital building and the American flag, with images of war, historical memories, and violence against African-Americans, his collages become metaphors bursting with new meaning.
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Celebration of Visual Traditions: The Pennsylvania Council on the Arts and The Pennsylvania State University will present the 2008 Celebration of Visual Traditions: New Work of Diverse Pennsylvania Artists, a travelling biennial exhibition showcasing the work of some of Pennsylvania’s most talented artists from diverse multicultural communities across the state. The exhibition will begin its tour on May 30, 2008 at Penn State’s HUB Gallery, and will travel to different sites across Pennsylvania through March 31, 2010. To mark the start of this important exhibition, an opening reception was held on June 13, 2008 from 5-7 p.m. at the HUB Gallery. Jurors Faith Ringgold, acclaimed African-American artist, and Ann Shields, Director of the HUB-Robeson Galleries at Penn State, selected works by 24 artists from around the state. In its 14th year, the exhibition venues were expanded to include eight arts organizations across Pennsylvania— in State College, Harrisburg, Pittsburgh, New Kensington, Erie, Meadville, Lancaster, and Philadelphia—making it available to audiences all over the state. “It is our agency’s mission to foster the excellence, diversity, and vitality of the arts in Pennsylvania and to broaden the availability and appreciation of the arts throughout the state,” says Philip Horn, Executive Director of the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. |
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Updated February 17, 2009