The charcoal drawings on wooden planks in Whitfield Lovell’s show ‘Recent Tableaux’ evoke the ghost stories of African American history by playing with two types of found object. The drawings seem to coax out the figurative presence of anonymous turn-of-the-century subjects from the mundane household furnishings that once surrounded their lives.
From the resplendent towers in Chihuly in the Light of Jerusalem 2000 to the overhead sculpture made of more than two thousand handblown forms in the lobby of the Bellagio Resort in Las Vegas, the audacity and inventiveness of Dale Chihuly’s vision come across on every page of this 348-page volume. A splendid companion to Chihuly, which offers a general overview, this new book, with its focus on his most imposing creations and its essays by Barbara Rose and Dale M. Lanzone, will delight all art lovers, collectors, curators, and artists.
Three years ago, photographer Greg Gorman created for powerHouse Books the most personal work of his career. This epic artist’s project features carefully selected young men—not big or overly built—who exemplify for Gorman a perfected state, allowing him to frame grace, beauty, and elegance in the form of the male nude. Included amongst the 212 portraits are many of Gorman’s friends and acquaintances, as well as professional models, many of whom had never posed nude before. The initial release of the book went on to become a best-seller.
Robert Gordy is a quintessential visionary. A dreamer. An undauntable dweller in that violet-skied, chimerical world of aesthetic fantasy. Rarely has there been much attention given to this facet of his art; it seemed so latent over the years. But his 1981 survey, assembling twenty years of his paintings and drawings into a remarkable cohesive whole, tacitly proclaims that it is the principle facet and cannot be overlooked any longer.
By the time Robert Gordy died in 1986 at age 52, he had already created two of the most original and influential styles ever to emerge from New Orleans. During his later, briefer (five year) stylistic period, he produced a long series of psychologically intense, Expressionistic portraits that represented the AIDS epidemic. He created those riveting, distorted faces of men with a then-unusual printing technique known as monotype. Monotypes are one-of-a-kind renderings produced by swiftly painting designs directly onto a Formica printing plate, then placing paper over the plate and rolling it through a printing press as if it were an etching. Gordy pioneered the now-popular method locally.
This catalogue was produced in conjunction of Connell’s retrospective exhibition, Daughter of the Bayou, which was curated and organized for travel by the staff of the Meadows Museum of Art at Century College in Shreveport, Louisiana.
The Arthur Roger Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of the world’s foremost glass artist Dale Chihuly. The leader in the art renaissance in glass making, Chihuly has carried out a lifelong exploration of the fluid capabilities of glass.
Now mounted in a sumptuous exhibition at the University of Arizona Museum of Art, “Robert Colescott: Recent Paintings” first went up at the Venice Biennale a year and a half ago. The work of UA professor emeritus Colescott, these extravagantly colored, politically charged narrative paintings were the U.S. entry in the 1997 international art fair. Colescott was the first American painter since Jasper Johns in 1988 to be thus honored, and the first ever African-American artist to represent the U.S. with a solo show.
John Scott and Ellis Marsalis discuss and demonstrate the use of improvisation in their work. Arthur Roger Gallery, January 28, 1998.
John Waters, famed underground director of such outrageous, cult classics as Pink Flamingos, Polyester, Hairspray, Cry Baby and Serial Mom, “re-directs” forgotten art films, obscure melodramas, lurid pot-boilers and his own early films in the form of photographic story boards made up of stills. The resulting work is this brilliant twist-off from Waters’ absurd, comic view of life, and the images are as funny and delightfully edged as the very best of his films. Waters shakes the fantasies of normalcy into a new, often delicious, taste of Heaven. 165 photos, 150 in color.