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Sherrie Levine’s works is included in the exhibition Shared Intelligence: American Painting and the Photograph which is currently on view at the Columbus Museum of Art through April 24th, 2011. The exhibition will travel to the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe, opening May 20 – Sept. 11, 2011

Shared Intelligence will be the first major museum exhibition to survey the fraught but highly productive relationship of painting to photography in 20th-Century American Art. It brings together approximately 75 photographs and paintings by such artists as Robert Bechtle, Chuck Close, Thomas Eakins, Sherrie Levine, Georgia O’Keeffe, Cindy Sherman, Charles Sheeler, Ben Shahn, Edward Steichen, and Alfred Stieglitz for whom the two mediums were essential to their practices.
In opposition to Modernist critics such as Clement Greenberg and John Szarkowski, who have tried to establish the autonomy of painting and photography, a crucial theme of this exhibition is the way in which the two mediums have always intersected and spilled into each other. The camera has been used repeatedly to reinvigorate painting, even as photography has been frequently enriched by a dialogue with painting.

Whereas in the beginning of the 20th Century photographers felt obligated to justify their use of the camera as a means of expression, today the question is no longer, can photography be the equal of painting but rather has the photograph, and photo-based images, supplanted painting’s position in the hierarchy of the art world. Certainly it is nearly impossible to imagine a contemporary artist whose work is untouched by the camera, if only as a means of reproduction. And yet the photograph’s role in modern art goes far beyond reproduction or even as a source of subject matter. Photographic seeing, the way the lens freezes, flattens, enlarges and crops the world conditions all visual representations. Above all there is no way of escaping the photographic archive, the camera’s service to the vast legal, scientific and economic systems of knowledge that categorize and regulates modern existence itself.

Central to the exhibition will be the role of the crop and the close up in the modernist figurative tradition. O’Keeffe’s early work cannot be separated from the photographic practice of her husband, Alfred Stieglitz and the other photographers he represented. Her use of the close up in her paintings, while not literally based on particular photographs, responded to and influenced the photographs of Stieglitz and of Paul Strand. Certainly Stieglitz and his collaborator, Edward Steichen, were profoundly influenced by contemporary painting and collage (Steichen began his career has a painter).

The exhibition will pair paintings and photographs in which the visual relationship is both compelling and intrinsic to the creative process. How did Ben Shahn translate his photographs of a store window into a painting of the same subject? What elements did David Hockney take from his photographs of pools and swimmers in order to create a painting of a boy diving into the water? How does Chuck Close obsessively grid out and copy his source material so that in the end the process itself becomes an essential part of the work’s meaning? The aggregate result of the exhibit will be to refute the idea that painting from a photograph is some sort of failure of imagination or technique—rather the two mediums enrich each other. Ultimately, the exhibition will emphasize the role of the artist as picture maker, rather than as either painter or photographer.

People, Places, Power: Reframing the American Landscape focuses on the complex interplay between personal, social, political, and economic forces in rural and urban America. The exhibition will be on view in the William H. Van Every Gallery at Davidson College from January 14 to February 25, 2011.

Among the various themes within the exhibition, attention will be focused on the necessary yet uneasy relationship that exists between power utilities and the public they serve. This topic is important to the town of Davidson–in which Davidson College is located–because it borders Lake Norman, a man-made lake created by the Cowans Ford Dam. The hydroelectric facility is owned and operated by Duke Energy, a Fortune 500 company headquartered in Charlotte, just twenty miles south of Davidson. Several other hydroelectric, nuclear, and coal burning facilities are located in communities surrounding the city.

On view will be works by some of the most acclaimed contemporary photographers working today, including Mitch Epstein, Lisa Kereszi, Victoria Sambunaris, David Hilliard, Andrew Moore, Ryan McGinley, David Taylor, Robert Bergman, David Maisel, and Alex Prager.

The Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art has recently acquired a work by Stuart Arends as part of a private collection that has been donated to the museum.  The work will be included in the exhibition, Thirty Years of Collecting: A Recent Gift to the Museum. Scheduled to open September 4,  2010 the exhibition will run through January 23, 2011.

September 04, 2010 – January 23, 2011

JOHNNIE WINONA ROSS

The Harwood Museum of Art is pleased to present a selection of works by Johnnie Winona Ross in honor of  Tamarind Institute’s 50th Anniversary.  Ross’ involvement with Tamarind began with a February 2003 residency, when he began to work out concepts on paper before moving to linen.

Ross exhibits regularly in New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Dallas, and throughout northern New Mexico.  He has been the recipient of numberous awards and grants, including a Fulbright Artist in Residence and a Gottlieb Foundation Support Grant.

DAVID TAYLOR, “WORKING THE LINE”
Thursday, July 15, 5:30–7:30 pm

Join photographer and Guggenheim Fellow David Taylor along with a panel that includes curator Mary Anne Redding, Border Patrol agent Paul Wells, Tohono O’odham Nation member David J. Garcia, essayist Hannah Frieser, and publishers David Chickey and Darius Himes for a discussion of current issues along the U.S.-Mexico border as reflected in Taylor’s new book,Working the Line (Radius Books, Spring 2010).  David Taylor is represented by James Kelly Contemporary in Santa Fe.

This free event will be held in the New Mexico History Museum Auditorium at 113 Lincoln Avenue in downtown Santa Fe. A selection of Taylor’s border images will be on view in the Triangle Gallery next to the auditorium.

Johnnie Ross, Dark Creek, 2008, acrylic & marble on bleached linen

Place and process are integral to the works of Arroyo Seco artist Johnnie Winona Ross, who is known for his reductive and luminous paintings that are comprised of layers upon layers of paint brushed, dripped, scraped and burnished to an extraordinary finish. The horizon, the quality of light, the seepage of

water or traces of ancient cultures on a canyon wall-these elements of the landscape all inform Ross’ grid-based paintings. This small but compelling exhibition, the artist’s first solo museum show since moving to New Mexico in 1999, will consist primarily of never-before-exhibited paintings.

Previously working in Maine, he was pulled to New Mexico by “the light, the culture, the archeology, the desert, mountains. It was austere, real, exposed, but mysterious, it was not a casual place that you just were. It was… spiritual…” His paintings can consist of up to 150 layers of paint that upon close inspection reveal a “history” of the painting’s creation. He describes his process in this way: “Repeating the mark, or the drip, scraping, burnishing, builds a physical history within the painting…. When you see worn stone steps, whether at an Anasazi site, or the Met, it is interesting to consider the scores of people that have used or are using the steps in roughly the same way; or seeing the keys on an old piano, worn with use. You realize that you are

just part of the stream of history, a large or small part, but you are only moving through.”

Johnnie Winona Ross was born in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1949. He

received his B.A. from Washington University in St. Louis in 1971, and his M.F.A. from University of Illinois in 1973. From 1977 to 1999, he taught at Maine College of Art. He participated twice in the Roswell Artist-in-Residence program (1974-75 and 1994-95), which influenced his decision to move to New Mexico in 1999. Ross exhibits regularly in New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Dallas, and throughout Northern New Mexico. He has been the recipient of numerous awards and grants, including a Gottlieb Foundation grant.

The exhibition opens at the New Mexico Museum of Art August 13, 2010 and runs through January 9, 2011.  An opening reception from 5:30 p.m. to 7:30 p.m. will be hosted by the Women’s Board of the Museum of New Mexico.

Peter Sarkisian, Extruded Video Engine, 2007, vacuum formed thermal plastic and video projection 17 x 25 x 5 inches

Peter Sarkisian currently has a mini retrospective exhibition on view at the University of Wyoming Art Museum through May 8, 2010. The exhibition titled Peter Sarkisian 1996-2008 will then travel to the Jordan Schitzer Museum of Art at the University of Oregon at Eugene and the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Art, Taipei.

John Sonsini, Pedro Climico, 2009, oil on canvas 72 x 48 inches.

John Sonsini’s Portraits from Los Angeles is currently on view at the Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art at Utah State University. The show will run through May 29,  2010.