John O’Hern Looks Back On His Groundbreaking Re-presenting Representation Exhibitions.
In 1992, the board of trustees of the Arnot Art Museum in Elmira, New York, revised the museum’s mission to have a “primary focus” on contemporary representational art.
I had discovered Steven Assael’s paintings and drawings at Barbara Staempfli’s gallery in New York in 1991, and I was pleasantly surprised to see an artist addressing contemporary issues with a mastery of traditional technique.
My mentors composed a list of artists for us to consider beginning with Andrew Wyeth and Lucien Freud and the caveat that the artists had to be academically trained. I told them we needed to explore the un-vetted or less-vetted because I had begun to discover great work that wasn’t being shown in museums.
Our curator, Rachael Sadinsky, showed us how exciting that area could be in her exhibitions Seven Visions: The Spirit of Religion in Contemporary Art and Jerome Witkin’s Dreams, Portraits & Murders.
I put my own curatorial skills to the test and mounted the first of seven biennial Re-presenting Representation exhibitions in 1993. The title was an awkward working title that stuck—we were RE-presenting representational work after its submersion under all the “-isms” of the 20 th century, and only representing the growing number of artists who were beginning to emerge from academies and not. My idea of “representation” spanned from the nearly abstract to the photorealistic in all media including glass. When asked to explain it I replied with scholarly precision, “It’s stuff you can recognize.”
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Denne historien er fra December 2018-utgaven av American Art Collector.
Start din 7-dagers gratis prøveperiode på Magzter GOLD for å få tilgang til tusenvis av utvalgte premiumhistorier og 9000+ magasiner og aviser.
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Guardians of the Temple – Simon Dinnerstein reflects on The Fulbright Triptych 50 years later.
The Palmer Museum of Art at Penn State University exhibits Simon Dinnerstein's The Fulbright Triptych haunts the visual lexicon of 20th century American representational art. Fifty years have passed since Dinnerstein completed the painting in 1974.
A City Perspective
Leslie Gaduzo has always been interIested in art. Since childhood, he has been drawing constantly, from single point perspective drawings at age 10 to complex architectural drawings.
Living Legacy
The Butler Institue hosts Allied Artists of America's 110th Annual Juried Exhibition.
Elegant yet Approachable
The second edition of the RTIA Show presents even more art to explore and expanded special programming.
Figuratively Speaking
New York has always been an epicenter of artists on the edge of excellence, pushing the envelope and finding their voices.
JAMES AYERS: The Importance of Play
Like many artists, James Ayers' work took a turn during the Covid-19 pandemic. Seeing the enjoyment his kids took from playing with paint in his studio and exploring their creativity inspired him.
GINA MINICHINO: Playing with Food
Gina Minichino started her journey in visual arts because of Charles Schulz. \"He was my earliest influence for drawing and the reason I wanted to be a cartoonist,\" she says.
Island Light
The Cuttyhunk Island Artists' Residency is held in a sprawling, 100-year-old house on an island off the southern coast of Massachusetts.
Solitary Forms
Hogan Brown has been working with Arcadia Contemporary for two and half years and is excited to be featured in his first solo show at the gallery. He doesn't take for granted the many talented figurative painters Arcadia represents and is thrilled to be among them.
Living the Dream
Counterintuitively, David Gluck was a painter before taking up tattooing little more than a decade ago. While skin is a completely different substrate and ink a far cry from oil paint, the skills must be transferrable to some degree because there is a wait-time of nine months to get an appointment with him.