 Random image |
|
Goat Roper Rodeo, 2003
Comments: 0
Guest
|
|
|
|
|
The Lawrence Lithography Workshop
| Categories |
The life of Ron Adams has from his youth been inexorably linked to the graphic arts. He studied drawing, technical illustration, and commercial art at a broad range of schools, primarily located in Los Angeles. At the age of 29 he began working at the esteemed graphic workshop, Gemini G.E.L. Beginning his tenure as an assistant printer, Adams soon received the honor of Master Printer and the opportunity to work with many leading contemporary artists including Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Frank Stella, and Ellsworth Kelly. In 1973, he left Los Angeles for Editions Press in San Francisco before moving to Santa Fe, New Mexico, where he opened Hand Graphics, another nationally recognized press. There he collaborated with such artists as Judy Chicago, Luis Jimenez, John Biggers, and Charles White. After thirteen years as owner and director of Hand Graphics, Adams sold the business in 1987 to return exclusively to producing his own art. His expressionistic and physically exaggerated figurative realism gives an almost mythical strength to the common people and narrative situations that he renders so elegantly.
“At first glance his imagery calls to mind the work of Charles White, but it is Goya, Kollwitz, Durer, Le Bruhn, Francis de Erdley, and the Mexican muralists with whom he identifies…The penchant for hard work is also expressed in the exaggerated musculature of Ron Adams figures, the taut neck and bound shoulders, knitted brows, and sinewy, powerful hands of both women and men. Though his figures are usually alone and have a look of serious preoccupation, mediating details – a filmy pair of stockings hung over an open drawer, the arching rose stem held in a crow’s beak, a hummingbird hovering at the edge of a morning glory – suggest an appreciation of balance.”
-Kay Lindsey
“I enjoy attempting to create form and volume and quite often I take liberties in exaggerating my forms and gestures to express the mood or emotion I am trying to capture.”
-Ron Adams
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Susan Davidoff’s imposing plant silhouettes are records of her daily interactions with the landscape. Beautifully rendered, yet hauntingly stark, the images catalogue her natural surroundings through the use of materials collected from nature.
“The idea of a journey, most often an actual walk or hike, is the genesis for much of my current work. On my walks, I observe, sketch, photograph and collect the organic forms that serve as a basis for these works. The act of walking becomes a part of my work, and the images become symbols for the journey. The walks may be close to my home-the Chihuahuan Desert-or through tropical rain forests or alpine meadows.”
-Susan Davidoff, 2001
Davidoff received an MA and an MFA from New Mexico State University in Las Cruces. She has received awards from the Ford Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the National Society of Arts and Letters, among others. She has taught at Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts, and currently teaches at the University of Texas at El Paso.
|
|
|
|
|
Recognized for his graphic POP art style and satirical messages, Gobber has created a list of ideological enemies that have terrorized America and the world. He then juxtaposed it with a list of mainstream, “white collar” institutions that have corrupted and damaged the financial stability of our country. Printed in retro colors over a pale cream field designed to look like a faded and stained sheet of antique paper, the word colors bounce the eye from warm to cool while being contained within coffin-like shapes of a pale green and magenta decorative border that evoked the feeling of old wall-paper.
“The initial idea that led to the print Doers was simply two lists. One listed ideological enemies that directly or indirectly brought terror to the United States, the other listed white-collar criminals who caused serious damage to some of our major, most trusted financial institutions. Words of similar weights are placed across from one another to allow the viewer to compare and contrast ‘evildoers” and “wrongdoers”. The lists function not only as words, but as color and rhythm studies that bounce the eye from warm colors to cool while being contained inside the coffin-shaped, rebel flag like outer structure. The sober subject is then surrounded by a fresh green floral motif that winds around creating pleasant pattern and sinister missile shapes. Conceptually, if unable to read, Doers is merely a flag design for a new nation in our world.”
-Archie Scott Gobber
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Benito Huerta’s work has gone through a number of phases, with no sign of becoming static or staid as he continues to develop his artistic practice. But some themes do run through his body of work, including the appropriation of popular imagery and a commitment to political involvement. Huerta’s work moves between “high” and “low” art, appreciating the value of each but remaining critical, ever alert to the realities that lurk behind easy phrases and signs.
"In his paintings and drawings, Benito Huerta recycles a vocabulary of images reflective of the complex culture in which he operates, reusing discarded materials and adapting others to unlikely function, as well as conveying the rich layered texture of the simultaneous experience. The spirit of gleaning and saving discards for possible future use is part of a survival mentality, a frugality that allows for extravagance."
-Marilyn Zeitlin, Executive Director, Washington Project for the Arts
“I think that Gustave Courbet sums it up best in the Realist Manifesto of 1855: ‘…to be in a position to translate the customs, the ideas, the appearance of my ephch, according to my own estimation… in short, to create a living art.’”
-Benito Huerta, artist statement
|
|
|
|
|
|
Elizabeth “Grandma” Layton came late to art, starting to draw at age 68. Her experiences with “blind contour” drawing, in which the artist draws an object without looking at the drawing itself, were therapeutic for Layton in ways that decades of psychiatric treatments were not. Using herself as her primary model, Layton initially pictured her own private struggles. But the range of her work quickly grew to encompass a range of social and political issues, including racism, sexism, ageism, war, and environmental destruction. She was particularly interested in the capacity of art for both personal and social change. Layton’s accessible though thoroughly modern style reached thousands through two nationally touring exhibitions as well as many other shows and publications.
"Elizabeth Layton is able to tackle difficult content because she doesn’t give a damn about the art world. She has unselfconsciously mastered the fusion of personal and political that so many progressive artists strive for. By using her own image to stand for all of denigrated, invisible, abused humanity, she has raised universal from the particular."
-Lucy R. Lippard, In These Times, 1985
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
“Duality, like the binary structures of the computer, is necessary for communication; to define what we are by what we are not. This is exemplified with Rosser’s use of negative and positive space, and solid and fluid forms. The co-existence of these factors raise questions about our own age and how we communicate and process information… The forms resonate across the horizon in a discourse of exchange, be it biological, ecological or physiological, each are dependent on the transmittal of salient information, where the slightest slippage alters knowledge and direction.”
-Shannon Fitzgerald, Forum for Contemporary Art Asst Curator
Rosser attended Cardiff College of Art in South Wales and Goldsmith’s College at the University of London, England. He currently teaches at the Kansas City Art Institute where he is the William T. Kemper Distinguished Professor of Painting, Chairman of the Painting/Printmaking Department.
|
Miriam Schapiro first gained attention for her leadership in the Feminist Art Movement of the 1960s and 1970s. In 1971 she and Judy Chicago organized the Feminist Art Program at the California Institute of the Arts. Along with twenty one students the two of them created Womanhouse, an internationally acclaimed project that introduced the art world to self-consciously feminist artistic practice.
“Femmage” is the witty and apt term that Schapiro has devised as a variant on “collage” (pictures assembled from assorted materials). As “femmage,” this activity has been practiced for centuries by woman, who has used traditional craft techniques like sewing, piecing, hooking, quilting and appliquéing. The extensive use of fabric swatches, patchwork and embroidery, both formal and iconographical elements in Schapiro’s femmage, is part of her conscious effort to re-establish her connections with this older and–from the feminist point of view–more authentic tradition with which she, as an artist, identifies.
Norma Broude, Feminism and Art History, 1982
|
Roger Shimomura’s paintings, prints and theatre pieces address socio-political issues of Asian America and have often been inspired by 56 years of diaries kept by his late immigrant grandmother.
“I have relied heavily upon family oral history as well as on the published and unpublished stories written by my late grandmother...I have also referred to old family photographs, and most important, Mrs. Shimomura’s personal diaries, maintained by her for 56 years. This vast collection of materials has been integrated into my personal accumulation of videos, films, slides, writings, audio tapes, and other materials related to cross-cultural matters”.
-Roger Shimomura, October 1993
He received his B.A. from the University of Washington, Seattle, and his M.F.A. from Syracuse University, New York. He has had over 100 solo exhibitions of his paintings and prints, as well as presented his experimental theater pieces at major venues across the country. He is the recipient of over 30 grants, including 4 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships in Painting and Performance Art. Shimomura has been a visiting artist and lectured on his work at over 200 universities and art museums across the country. In 1999, the Seattle Urban League designated a scholarship under his name that since has been awarded annually to a Seattle resident that is pursuing a career in art. In 2002, the College Art Association presented him with the “Artist Award for Most Distinguished Body of Work”, for his 4 year, 12 museum national tour of the painting exhibition, “An American Diary”. The following year he delivered the keynote address at the 91st meeting of that association in New York City. In May of 2006, he will be honored with the Distinguished Alumnus Award from the University of Washington, the highest honor that school bestows upon their graduates.
In the fall of 1990, he was appointed the Dayton Hudson Distinguished Visiting Professor at Carleton College, Northfield, Minnesota. At the University of Kansas where he taught since 1969 he was designated a University Distinguished Professor in 1994, the first so honored in the history of the School of Fine Arts on that campus. In 1998, he was the recipient of the Higuchi Research Award, the highest annual honor awarded a faculty member in the Humanities and Social Teaching Award for sustained excellence in teaching and dedication to students at the University of Kansas. In 2004 he retired from teaching and started the Shimomura Faculty Research Support Fund, an endowment to support faculty research in the Department of Art.
Shimomura's personal papers are being collected by the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C.
|
Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, an enrolled Flathead Salish, is one of the most acclaimed American Indian artists today. She has been reviewed in all major art periodicals. Smith has had over 80 solo exhibits in the past 30 years and has done printmaking projects nationwide. Over that same time, she has organized and/or curated over 30 Native exhibitions, lectured at more than 175 universities, museums and conferences internationally, most recently at 5 universities in China. Smith has completed several collaborative public art works such as the floor design in the Great Hall of the new Denver Airport; an in-situ sculpture piece in Yerba Buena Park, San Francisco and a mile-long sidewalk history trail in West Seattle.
Smith calls herself a cultural art worker which is also apparent in her work. Elaborating on her Native worldview, Smith's work addresses today's tribal politics, human rights and environmental issues with humor. Critic Gerrit Henry, (Art in America 2001) wrote: "For all the primal nature of her origins, Smith adeptly takes on contemporary American society in her paintings, drawings and prints, looking at things Native and national through bifocals of the old and the new, the sacred and the profane, the divine and the witty."
|
|
|
|
|
Akio Takamori’s figurative pottery is among the most distinctive in contemporary American and Japanese ceramics. Often characterized as a hybrid between Eastern and Western art, its fusion of Japanese graphic expression with the modern search for self-identity conveys an eroticism that is mischievously candid and optimistic without showing shock or embarrassment.
The vessel form has become very important to me. It provided me with a good deal of surface to paint on, also it is a dimensional form that has an inside and outside. For me the vessel has become the shape of the human body. I have learned much from historical ceramic figures in China, Japan and the Mediterranean. They all hold so many human stories behind them...Physicality exists on the other side of spirituality and intelligence. Physicality could be an entrance to instinct and intuition, where we might find something beyond spirituality and intelligence.
-Akio Takamori, spring 1996
Takamori grew up in a small industrial town on Kyushu, the southernmost island of Japan. He studied at the Musashino Art College in Tokyo before apprenticing with a traditional folk potter producing utilitarian ware. He came to the United States in 1974, where he earned a B.F.A. under Ken Ferguson at the Kansas City Art Institute in 1976, and an M.F.A. from Alfred University in 1978. Currently, Takamori is a Professor of Art at the University of Washington in Seattle.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
111 images in 32 categories.
| Currently active users: 2 |
There are currently 0 registered user(s) (0 among them invisible) and 2 guest(s) online.
|
|
|
|
