Honoring the Past, Celebrating the Future, Ten Years of the Zuckerman Museum of Art
Don Russell Clayton Gallery and Malinda Jolley Mortin Gallery
January 25 – May 11, 2024
Curated by Cynthia Nourse Thompson
Since the opening in 2014, the Bernard A. Zuckerman Museum of Art has served as a vital academic resource and cultural center for students, faculty, and members of the community. Conceived by stakeholders as a means of bridging the university’s approximately 7,000-piece permanent collection and the thematic programming of its two expansive modern galleries, the ZMA supports and enhances internal and external communities through public programs, service activities, and leadership. The Museum’s intentionally collaborative environment encourages intellectual and artistic exchange by delivering meaningful content, dynamic programming, and experiential learning engagement opportunities. Featuring a thoughtful and careful selection of works from the Museum’s permanent collection, Reflections expands upon the Museum’s mission through a compelling lens: re-contextualizing and interweaving disciplines and diverse narratives to engage multiple audiences in the celebration of its ten-year anniversary.
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Image credit: Maya Gelfman and Roie Avidan, aka Mind the Heart! Project, Salt of the Earth, 2023. Archival pigment print.
Windgate Artist-in-Residence Exhibition
Maya Gelfman and Roie Avidan, aka Mind the Heart! Project and Leandra Urrutia
Malinda Jolley Mortin Gallery
June 4 - July 27, 2024
Curated by Cynthia Nourse Thompson
The Zuckerman Museum of Art is pleased to present the work of Israeli artists Maya
Gelfman and Roie Avidan known as Mind the Heart!, who served as the fall 2023 Windgate
Artists-in-Residence, and artist Leandra Urrutia, who served as the spring 2024 Windgate
Artist-in-Residence. Artwork created by the artists during their residency is featured
in this summer exhibition. Additionally, one artwork from each artist becomes part
of the museum permanent collection and will be utilized as a teaching tool to further
learning engagement and cultural enrichment opportunities across the KSU campus.
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2023
NIRVANA
Polly Apfelbaum
Don Russell Clayton Gallery
October 3 – December 9, 2023
Curated by Cynthia Nourse Thompson
Nirvana features large-scale installations of ceramics, prints, and textiles by artist Polly Apfelbaum. Best known for combining a variety of media with vibrant saturated colors and patterns to obscure the lines between painting, installation, sculpture, and everyday objects, Apfelbaum actively interrogates the boundaries between art, craft, and design. Rainbow Nirvana Houndstooth, a two-panel rug originally created for a group exhibition by the Dior fashion house at the Grand Palais in Paris, exemplifies this best. This work blends the French fashion house's signature houndstooth pattern with the artist’s own palette scheme, creating a monumental work that viewers are invited to directly become part of by standing upon it. In addition to recently created ceramic works, a suite of six woodblock prints titled Hudson River Valley Nirvana continues to play with an expanded spectrum of colors and complements the large-scale rug on view, marking the first time these works have been displayed together. Polly Apfelbaum will speak about her work and her artistic practice in a virtual lecture on Thursday, November 9 at 7pm.
The work of Polly Apfelbaum is framed by wider political contexts and the legacy of post-war American art. She chooses materials, such as textiles and ceramics, that are usually found in the domestic realm, and emphasizes their essential qualities, especially color, and texture. In this way, Apfelbaum assumes a political and feminist position, challenging hierarchies in cultural practice. Polly Apfelbaum graduated from the Tyler School of Art, Elkins Park, Pennsylvania. She has exhibited consistently since her first solo show 1986. Her work has recently been recognized with a Pew Center for Arts Grant, a Creative Capital Award, and the 2012 Rome Prize at the American Academy. She has also received a Joan Mitchell Grant, The Diebenkorn Fellowship, a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, an Anonymous Was a Woman Grant, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Recent solo exhibitions include: “Polly Apfelbaum” at Kunstmuseum Luzern, “For the Love of Una Hale” at Arcadia University, PA, “Waiting For the UFO's (a space between a landscape and a bunch of flowers)” at the Kemper Museum, Kansas City, and the Ikon Gallery, Birmingham, UK; “Happiness Runs” at Belvedere 21, in Vienna, Austria; “Face Geometry,” OTIS College of Arts and Design, Los Angeles, CA; and “Deep Purple, Red Shoes,” Be-Part, Waregem, Belgium. She is represented in numerous collections including: the Brooklyn Museum of Art, Brooklyn, NY; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, PA; Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, TX; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA; Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, PA; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY.
Huge thank you to RugPadUSA for their generous rug pad donation to support this exhibition. “At RugPadUSA we are dedicated to providing the best quality rug pads that are designed to last.”
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{UNDER}flow
A Group Exhibition celebrating the work of five Afro-Caribbean Artists: Josué Azor, Firelei Báez, María Magdalena Campos-Pons, David Antonio Cruz, and Didier William
Mortin Gallery
August 29 – December 9, 2023
Curated by Cynthia Nourse Thompson
This exhibition and associated educational programming celebrate the powerful work of five Afro-Caribbean Diasporic artists and are central to the academic mission of the museum and university. Underflow, another term for the word undercurrent, serves to metaphorically suggest underlying themes of fluidity and struggle [power and control, diasporic experiences, perceived histories, sexuality] that lie just below the surface both visually and conceptually in the works presented, unifying them in compelling ways. Although mutual geography is shared among these artists, each uniquely addresses their own personal affiliations with place and memory as presented through figuration, abstraction, and realism. Moreover, a shared interest in the representation of the body and the contentious relations it introduces between subject and power positions viewers to consider their own perspectives— particularly when placed under the eye of a confrontational gaze. “It is my hope that introducing new regional audiences to these important contemporary artists will prompt valuable discussions regarding conceptions of history, cultural geography, race, gender, and identity.”-Cynthia Nourse Thompson, Curator
Image Credit: Didier William, Baptism: We Cannot Drown Nou Beni, 2022. Acrylic, ink,
and wood carving on panel. Courtesy of Benjamin Blad.
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Image credit: Donté Hayes, Forgive, 2021. Ceramic, stoneware (black clay body). Courtesy of the artist. From the Fall 2021 residency at the Bemis Center in Omaha, Nebraska.
Image credit: Jamele Wright, Sr., ReBorn #5, 2021. Dutch wax cloth, found object,
Georgia red clay, paint, and grommets. Courtesy of the artist.
Windgate Artists in Residence Exhibition
Donté Hayes and Jamele Wright, Sr.
Mortin Gallery and Don Russell Clayton Gallery
June 6 – July 29, 2023
The Zuckerman Museum of Art is pleased to present the work of artists Donté Hayes, who served as the fall 2022 Windgate Artist-in-Residence, and Jamele Wright, Sr., who served as the spring 2023 Windgate Artist-in-Residence. Artwork created by the artists during their residency is featured in a summer exhibition at the Zuckerman Museum of Art. Additionally, one artwork from each artist will become part of the Zuckerman Museum of Art's permanent collection and will be utilized as a teaching tool to further learning engagement and cultural enrichment opportunities across the KSU campus. The 2023 Windgate Artist-in-Residence exhibition Is curated by Cynthia Nourse Thompson.
The School of Art and Design at Kennesaw State University is grateful to the Windgate Foundation for choosing to invest in the future of our students. The Foundation’s vision and contribution enabled KSU to develop the Windgate Foundation Artist Residency Program. This program is instrumental in providing our students with the experience of working with visiting professional artists in their field of study and growing as industry leaders. For six semesters through 2024, grant proceeds will be used to host professional artists at KSU, supporting the shared goals of the Windgate Foundation and the School of Art and Design to advance contemporary craft and strengthen visual arts education. KSU is fortunate to be able to offer students unique artist-in-resident experiences of this magnitude as part of their scheduled curriculum. The generous gift from the Windgate Foundation enables KSU to host internationally known artists to lead and inspire students through artmaking and to share that art and inspiration with the community at large. Through the Foundation’s continued support of the School of Art and Design, we can offer the highest level of artistic excellence and quality to our students, community, and visiting artists.
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Lesley Dill Wilderness: Light Sizzles Around Me
Organized by the Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa and made possible by Humanities
Iowa and the National Endowment for the Humanities
Mortin Gallery and Don Russell Clayton Gallery
March 14 - May 13, 2023
Wilderness, Light Sizzles Around Me features a uniquely inspired group of sculptures and two-dimensional works more than a decade in the making. The exhibition represents Dill’s ongoing investigation into the significant voices and personas of America’s past. For Dill, the “American” voice grew from early America’s obsessions with divinity and deviltry, on fears of the wilderness “out there” and the wilderness inside us. The extremes of both shaped history and gave pulse and heat to the words of activists like John Brown, Sojourner Truth, Mother Ann Lee, and Dred Scott. Dill writes, “These personas and their times stir something deep in my own family history and sense of self. I am compelled to this restrictive time-period of limited access to a diversity of written word, and the bravery of these figures’ response.” The book Lesley Dill: Wilderness, Light Sizzles Around Me by Scheidegger & Spiess, Zurich is available in conjunction with the exhibition and features essays by Nancy Princenthal, Andrew Wallace and others. This exhibition is organized by the Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa.
Lesley Dill has had over one hundred solo exhibitions. Her artworks are in the collections of many major museums, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art New York, and the Whitney Museum of American Art. In 2017 she was named a fellow of The John Simon Guggenheim Foundation and is a Joan Mitchell Foundation Creating A Living Legacy artist and grant recipient. Her opera, Divide Light, based on the poems of Emily Dickinson, was performed in San Jose in 2008. In 2018 the opera was re-staged in New York City and captured in an award-winning film by Ed Robbins. Dill was the recipient of the Emily Dickinson Museum’s 2019 ‘Tell it Slant’ Award. In her work, Dill transforms the emotions of the writings of Emily Dickinson, Salvador Espriu, Tom Sleigh, Franz Kafka, and Rainer Maria Rilke, among others, into works of paper, wire, horsehair, foil, bronze and music—works that awaken the viewer to the physical intimacy and power of language itself. Dill’s exhibition Wilderness: Light Sizzles Around Me, organized by the Figge Art Museum, is currently traveling to 7 venues through Winter of 2023. The exhibition amplifies voices of the North American past as they wrestle with divinity, deviltry, and freedom, including Mother Ann Lee, Black Hawk, Sojourner Truth, John Brown, Emily Dickinson, Horace Pippin, and Sister Gertrude Morgan. Dill is represented by Nohra Haime Gallery in New York and Arthur Roger Gallery in New Orleans. She lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. This exhibition is Organized by the Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa, and was made possible by Humanities Iowa and the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Image Credit: Lesley Dill, Emily Dickinson and the Voices of Her Time, 2016. Oil paint,
hand-cut paper and thread on fabric-backed acrylic painted paper. Courtesy of the
Lesley Dill Studio, Brooklyn, NY.
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Under Pressure: Prints from the Collection of the Zuckerman Museum of Art
Clayton Gallery
January 14 - February 18, 2023
Curated by Geo Sipp, Director of KSU's School of Art and Design and Professor of Art
Printmaking is an extraordinary art form, particularly as it embraces myriad techniques
in the process of image development. From our permanent collection, including works
from the archives of the Southern Graphics Council International, this exhibition
provides a broad overview of printmaking from the 15th century to the present day.
Curator, Geo Sipp will provide an onsite curatorial tour of the exhibition on Wednesday, January 25, at 12:30 pm as part of our Last Wednesday Lunch program.
Featured Image: Shawn Bitter, Unrequited, 2019. Screenprint and archival inkjet. Gift
of the artist. Bernard A. Zuckerman Museum of Art Permanent Collection.
Co-curated by Vanessa K. Davidson, Curator of Latin American Art, The Blanton Museum of Art, The University of Texas at Austin, and Cynthia Nourse Thompson, Director of Curatorial Affairs, Bernard A. Zuckerman Museum of Art
Recollections features six seminal works by Colombian artist Oscar Muñoz. The Zuckerman Museum of Art is pleased to host these works which were featured in the artist’s first retrospective in the United States, Invisibilia, curated by Vanessa K. Davidson of the Blanton Museum of Art. Oscar Muñoz is one of the most innovative artists working in Latin America today. Best known for his evocative use of ephemeral materials to interrogate the stability of the photographic image, Muñoz poetically equates its intrinsic fragility with the fallibility of memory and the precariousness of life itself. Although his radical artistic practice combines photographic processes with drawing, painting, printmaking, installation, and video, the artist does not consider himself a photographer. In opposition to Roland Barthes's belief that photography is definitive and absolute, Muñoz’s works defy fixation, thus calling into question memory, erasure, permanence, and the resolute. Davidson thoughtfully reflects, “Muñoz’s works exist between forgetting and remembering, in other words, there is a constant battle between a thing that materializes and then fades away, falls apart. Although the images Muñoz creates often change or disappear, they stay transfixed in our minds.” Deeply rooted in the Colombian context, Muñoz’s artworks nevertheless have universal resonance. This exhibition is co-curated by Vanessa K. Davidson and Cynthia Nourse Thompson.
In her poignant essay from the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, ‘Whatever happened to Beauty? A Response to Danto’, scholar Kathleen Marie Higgins states, “I want to suggest that Beauty typically, perhaps especially in times of loss, urges not stillness but renewed love of life.” Featuring the work of ten renowned artists, The Gravity of Beauty is an eloquent and often quiet contemplation on the potential of beauty to transform perceptions of loss while simultaneously questioning its ability to serve as a respite in times of grief and suffering. The exhibition ultimately reveals shared conceptions of our humanity. It poses questions such as how can we engage in or with beauty without feeling we betray the losses we have sustained? How do we emotionally find and connect with beauty at a time when we are suffering? Perhaps then uncovering consolation in Arthur Danto’s belief that beauty is a catalyst that can transform raw grief into tranquil sadness. Artists include Amber Cowan, Hironaka & Suib, William McDowell, Rona Pondick, Shelley Reed, Jon Eric Riis, Jennifer Steinkamp, Barbara Takenaga, and Darren Waterston.
Image Credit: Darren Waterston, Plate I, from the portfolio, A Swarm, A Flock, A Host: A Compendium of Creatures, 2012.
The Windgate Artists in Residence Inaugural Exhibition
June 4 – July 30, 2022
Mortin Gallery
The Zuckerman Museum of Art is pleased to present the work of artists Amy Pleasant, who served as the fall 2021 Windgate Artist-in-Residence, and Anthony Goicolea, who served as the spring 2022 Windgate Artist-in-Residence. Artwork created by the artists during their residency is featured in a summer exhibition at the Zuckerman Museum of Art. Additionally, one artwork from each artist will become part of the Zuckerman Museum of Art permanent collection and will be utilized as a teaching tool to further learning engagement and cultural enrichment opportunities across the KSU campus. The 2022 Windgate Artist-in-Residence exhibition was co-curated by MA Art & Design Museum Studies students Brandy Barker and Liliana Said under the direction of Cynthia Nourse Thompson.
The School of Art and Design at Kennesaw State University is grateful to the Windgate Foundation for choosing to invest in the future of our students. The Foundation's vision and
contribution enabled KSU to develop the Windgate Foundation Artist Residency Program.
This program is instrumental in providing our students with an experience of working
with visiting professional artists in their field of study and growing as industry
leaders. For six semesters through 2024, grant proceeds will be used to host professional
artists at KSU, supporting the shared goals of the Windgate Foundation and the School
of Art and Design to advance contemporary craft and strengthen visual arts education.
KSU is fortunate to be able to offer students unique artist-in-resident experiences
of this magnitude as part of their scheduled curriculum. The generous gift from the
Windgate Foundation enables KSU to host internationally known artists to lead and
inspire students through art-making and to share that art and inspiration with the
community at large. Through the Foundation's continued support of the School of Art
and Design, we can offer the highest level of artistic excellence and quality to our
students, community, and visiting artists.
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About Anthony Goicolea
Anthony Goicolea is a first-generation Cuban American artist who was born in Atlanta, Georgia, and now lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. Anthony utilizes a variety of media- including painting, photography, sculpture and video installation- in the creation of his compelling and many times foreboding visual narratives. Goicolea will discuss his work in these varied mediums and the principal ideas and explorations addressed in his work which include personal history, heritage, identity and cultural tradition. These are reflective of his own personal familial experiences— his extended family fled Cuba, not long after Castro came to power, and immigrated to the US. His works are also powerful and engaging contemplations on displacement and alienation.
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About Amy Pleasant
Amy Pleasant received a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (1994) and an MFA from the Tyler School of Art, Temple University (1999).She has held solo exhibitions at Geary Contemporary (NYC/Millerton, NY), Laney Contemporary (Savannah, GA), Institute 193 (Lexington, KY), Jeff Bailey Gallery (Hudson/NYC), whitespace gallery (Atlanta, GA), Augusta University (Columbus, GA), Indianapolis Museum of Contemporary Art (IN), Birmingham Museum of Art (AL), Atlanta Contemporary (GA), Auburn University’s School of Liberal Arts (AL), Rhodes College (Memphis, TN), Candyland (Stockholm, Sweden), and the University of Alabama at Birmingham (AL) among others.
Group shows include Brackett Creek Exhibitions (Bozeman, MT), Hesse Flatow (NYC), SEPTEMBER (Hudson, NY), Mindy Solomon Gallery (Miami, FL), Tif Sigfrids (Athens, GA), Hemphill Fine Arts (Washington, D.C.), Adams and Ollman (Portland, OR), Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts (AL), Cuevas Tilleard Projects (NYC), The Dodd Galleries (Athens, GA), Zuckerman Museum of Art (GA), Knoxville Museum of Art (TN), Weatherspoon Museum of Art (NC), Hunter Museum of American Art (Chattanooga, TN), Columbus Museum of Art (GA), National Museum of Women in the Arts (D.C.), The Mobile Museum of Art (AL), and the U.S. Embassy, Prague, Czech Republic.
Her work has been reviewed in publications such as World Sculpture News, Sculpture,
The Brooklyn Rail, Art in America, Artforum, Art Papers, Bad at Sports and BURNAWAY.
Awards include a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship (2018), South
Arts Prize for the State of Alabama (2018), Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters and
Sculptors Award (2015), Mary Hambidge Distinguished Artist Award (2015), Cultural
Alliance of Birmingham Individual Artist Fellowship (2008), and Alabama State Council
on the Arts Individual Artist Fellowship (2019/2003).
Her first monograph, The Messenger’s Mouth Was Heavy, was released in 2019, co-published by Institute 193 and Frank.
Pleasant also co-founded the curatorial initiative The Fuel And Lumber Company with
artist Pete Schulte in 2013.
Her work has been reviewed in many publications including Art in America, Art Papers, Artforum, The Brooklyn Rail and Sculpture. Add: Exhibition Closing Reception date and information: Friday, July 29, 5:00 pm to
7:30 pm
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Project Wall East: Kayte Terry
August 28, 2021—July 30, 2022
The ZMA is pleased to present a newly commissioned work by Philadelphia artist Kayte
Terry.
Terry’s work examines the literal and figurative boundaries of the body. Through photography, video, collage, installation and object-making, she unravels issues of illness, family, memory, longing and loss. The patchwork of materials she uses form a personal language that speaks to the fuzzy intersection of personal desires and cultural expectations as seen in the work on display. As a queer woman living with a cluster of auto-immune diseases, she is interested in making the invisible illness visible, as well as finding beauty in pain and restriction. Most recently, she explores inter-dependency and love, particularly through d/s, communal and ethically non-monogamous relationships. Terry often pieces together materials that are imprinted with the shape of the body such as socks, gloves, and her own skin with materials like shower curtains, balloons and fashion magazines. The patchwork of these materials form a personal language that speaks to the obscured intersection of her own personal desires and feminine cultural expectations.
About the Artist
Kayte Terry studied Art History and Women’s Studies at Simon’s Rock College of Bard and received her MFA in Studio Art at University of the Arts. She has also studied abroad with the School for International Training in Fortaleza, Brazil and at the Santa Reparata International School of Art in Florence, Italy. Kayte has been in group shows in New York, NY; Philadelphia, PA and Seattle, WA, including the show Adorned: Beauty in Excess at Joy Pratt Markham Gallery at the Walton Arts Center in Fayetteville, AK. Most recently, Kayte has been a visiting artist in grad programs at Mass Arts in Boston, MA and University of the Arts in Philadelphia, PA. Kayte is also a member of the art collective Little Berlin in Philadelphia, where she has curated several shows.
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Project Wall West: Jamele Wright Sr.
August 28, 2021— July 30, 2022
Curatorial Project Director: Emily Knight
The ZMA is pleased to present a newly commissioned work, ReBORN #4.02 by Atlanta artist
Jamele Wright, Sr.
Wright creates abstract works that explore the Black American vernacular experience that also generate dialogue regarding the Black American experience in the South. Wright collects and combines found materials, Dutch Wax cloth, and Georgia red clay to create conversations surrounding family, tradition, and the spiritual relationship between Africa and the South. The ZMA is thrilled to support a local artist of merit through this commission.
From February 22 to July 30, 2022, the ZMA is pleased to present an additional new
work by Wright on the Project Wall North by the artist, in association with the large-scale
commissioned work.
About the Artist
Born and raised in Ohio, at the age of 22, Jamele Wright Sr. moved with his family to Atlanta, Georgia. While raising a family, Jamele produced art, jazz, and poetry events throughout Atlanta. Realizing that many young artists were not being represented, he started a gallery called the Neo-Renaissance Art House. After curating the gallery for over a year, Jamele was inspired to pursue his own artistic career. After several solo and group exhibitions, Mr. Wright graduated from Georgia State University with a B.A. in Art History. He concentrated on African and African American Contemporary Art. Jamele graduated with an MFA from the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan, New York. He completed a fellowship at Project for Empty Spaces in Newark, New Jersey. In August 2020, Wright was one of three artists selected for a collaboration between MARTA Artbound and Decatur Arts Alliance to create public artworks for the East Lake, Decatur, and Avondale MARTA stations. Wright's work will be featured in the upcoming Marietta Cobb Museum of Art (MCMA) exhibition, The Four Elements: A Group Exhibition, on view from April 10, 2020, through June 20, 2021. The artist is represented by September Gray Fine Art Gallery in Atlanta, Georgia.
“My work is concerned with the Black American vernacular experience. The work entails collecting found materials, Georgia red clay, and Dutch Wax cloth, by creating a conversation between family, tradition, the spiritual and material relationship between Africa and the South. My process is influenced by the way Hip Hop gathers different cultures through sampling and is charged with an energy channeled and passed through the Pan African lineage. The “In Transit” Series and my textile work is inspired by the Great Migration of Black Americans, who left the familiar in the hope of something better.”
— Jamele Wright, Sr.
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Leonardo Drew: Cycles, from the Collections of Jordan D. Schnitzer and His Family
Foundation
February 20—May 7, 2022
Curated by Loretta Yarlow, Director of the University Museum of Contemporary Art, UMass, Amherst
The Jordan Schnitzer Family Foundation is honored to present the exhibition Leonardo Drew: Cycles, from the Collections of Jordan D. Schnitzer and His Family Foundation and to publish the accompanying exhibition brochure as part of an ongoing effort to share work from the collection and to support critical dialogue. Jordan Schnitzer states, “I often speak of how difficult it is to be an artist. And the struggle to challenge, risk, transform and innovation are certainly at the heart of Leonardo Drew’s visual language. His work is immersive and personal without being leading. It is up to the viewer to interpret and participate in the communion of physical form and individual history. Leonardo’s work makes tangible a refuge that allows for self-reflection and perhaps space in which to contemplate the constructs of beauty.”
Leonardo Drew: Cycles, from the Collections of Jordan D. Schnitzer and His Family Foundation, features many of Drew’s sculptures as well as numerous prints and works in handmade paper. Leonardo Drew’s prints, at once powerfully large yet fragile, test the versatility of the medium, transforming cotton paper pulp and pigment into what suggests densely populated cities, a forest, or an urban wasteland. They sometimes look like maps of geographical landscapes viewed from above, while others are reminiscent of the night sky and distant galaxies. Evocative of fire, soil, sky, and water, there are strong perceptions in both microcosmic and macrocosmic scale. Organic forms within the composition undulate with various textures and luminosities, pushing the boundaries of its materiality. Much like his sculptural installations in wood, Drew starts with a raw material, transforming and reconstructing its essence until it resembles debris. Through this process, the artist articulates diverse histories of chaos, and cycles of birth and death. Examples of the Drew’s sculptures will also be on view. Using a variety of off-the-shelf materials (wood, cardboard, paint, paper, plastic, rope, and string) combined with natural materials such as branches or tree trunks, Drew subjects these elements to processes of oxidation, burning, and weathering. These labor-intense manipulations mimic natural processes and transforms these objects into sculptures that address both formal and social concerns, as well as the cyclical nature of existence.
New York Times art critic Roberta Smith describes Drew’s work as “popped, splintered, seemingly burned here, bristling there, unexpectedly delicate elsewhere. An endless catastrophe seen from above. The energies intimated in these works are beyond human control, bigger than all of us.”
Leonardo Drew was born in 1961 in Tallahassee, FL, and grew up in Bridgeport, CT. His talent and passion for art was recognized at an early age, and first exhibited his work at the age of 13. He attended the Parsons School of Design and received his BFA from the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in 1985. Recent solo museum exhibitions include shows at de Young Museum, San Francisco (2017); SCAD Museum of Art at the Savannah College of Art and Design (2013); Beeler Gallery at the Columbus College of Art & Design (2013); Palazzo Delle Papesse, Centro Arte Contemporanea, Siena (2006); Royal Hibernian Academy, Dublin (2001); and Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington DC (2000). Drew’s mid-career survey, Existed, premiered at the Blaffer Gallery at the University of Houston in 2009. The exhibition went on to the Weatherspoon Art Museum in Greensboro, NC, and the de Cordova Museum and Sculpture Park in Lincoln, MA.
Drew’s work is included in numerous public and private collections. Public collections include the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville; and Tate, London. He has collaborated with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company and has participated in artist residencies at ArtPace, San Antonio, Texas, and The Studio Museum in Harlem, among others. In 2011 he was awarded the prestigious Joyce Alexander Wein Artist Prize by The Studio Museum in Harlem. Madison Square Park Conservancy in New York City has commissioned Leonardo Drew to create a monumental new public art project for the Park, titled “City in the Grass.”
The Jordan Schnitzer Family Foundation
At age 14, Jordan D. Schnitzer bought his first work of art from his mother’s Portland, Oregon contemporary art gallery, evolving into a lifelong avocation as collector. He began collecting contemporary prints and multiples in earnest in 1988. Today, the collection exceeds 19,000 works and includes many of today’s most important contemporary artists. It has grown to be one of the country’s largest private print collections. He generously lends work from his collection to qualified institutions. The Foundation has organized over 110 exhibitions and has had art exhibited at over 160 museums. Mr. Schnitzer is also President of Harsch Investment Properties, a privately owned real estate investment company based in Portland, Oregon, owning and managing office, multi-tenant industrial, multi-family and retail properties in six western states. For more information about the Jordan Schnitzer Family Foundation, please click here.
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Walk In Beauty
January 11—February 12, 2022
Location: Don Russell Clayton Gallery
Curated by Cynthia Nourse Thompson
Walk In Beauty an exhibition highlighting Native American artists, features prints
from the permanent collection of the ZMA alongside prints produced by Crow’s Shadow Institute of the Arts [CSIA]. CSIA is a renowned studio focused on contemporary printmaking that is located on the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation in the foothills of Oregon’s Blue Mountains. Walk In Beauty presents a careful selection of works by outstanding Native American artists of diverse backgrounds and talents. The exhibition title refers to the Diné (Navajo) dictum “walk in beauty” which translates to creating beauty and harmony. CSIA provides a creative conduit for educational, social, and economic opportunities for Native Americans through artistic development. Prints published by Crow’s Shadow Press can be found in major collections including: Library of Congress, Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Portland Art Museum, Eiteljorg Museum, Wellin Museum of Art, Davis Museum at Wellesley, and the Whitney Museum of American Art.
In collaboration with the Bentley Rare Book Museum, the exhibition also includes a unique selection of Cherokee artifacts from the Department of Museums, Archives and Rare Books at KSU. These rare items includes an 1860 printing of the New Testament translated into the Cherokee language; a map of the Cherokee Nation engraved by English engraver and cartographer Thomas Kitchin (1718 – 1784), who may have engraved it from an Indigenous drawing; and a facsimile copy of the Cherokee Phoenix dated December 25, 1830. The Cherokee Phoenix was the first Native American newspaper in the United States. The Bentley Rare Book Museum’s issue of the Phoenix includes numerous articles of interest, including a speech excerpt by pro-removal president Andrew Jackson, opinion pieces by white citizens exposing the immorality of Indigenous removal, and a printed account of the Cherokee Nation’s legal action to declare political sovereignty. The ZMA is pleased to feature these printed artifacts alongside and in conversation with contemporary prints by Native American artists.
Photo 1: James Lavadour, Crow’s Shadow Series , 2008 - 2010 Monotype on Rives BFK paper Courtesy of the artist and Crow's Shadow Institute of the Arts, Pendleton, OR Photo 2: Thomas Kitchin Map of the Cherokee Nation, 1760 Paper and ink. Courtesy of the Bentley Rare Book Museum, Kennesaw State University, Kennesaw, GA
2021
Fall 2021 Exhibition Series
This Mortal Coil and The Labor of Remembrance Prints and Textile Works by Louise Bourgeois are two interrelated exhibitions in dialogue, seeking to mitigate emotional suffering and corporeal pain. The ideology of craft collectively employs active and investigative methodologies, alongside devout and obsessive tendencies to facilitate one’s redemption. This impassioned approach to making by hand, with the inherent connection of ritual and process to that of materiality and craft, draws one to consider the ability of compulsive labor to serve as a remedy for grief. Conceptions of anguish, memory, and extreme vulnerability are displayed in extravagant and brutal force to reveal how histories, both shared and individual, articulate the human condition. The themes addressed in these two exhibitions are more relevant than ever, in response to current shared grim realities and global struggles and their relationship to loss, [in]justice, and mortality. Thus, the works selected illuminate empathy, grief, and loss, as shared universal themes.
This Mortal Coil August 28—December 11, 2021
Location: Mortin Gallery
Curated by Cynthia Nourse Thompson
A collection of works by seventeen prominent contemporary artists present a visual dialogue that was strikingly raw and at the surface of our emotional armature— one which most individuals work diligently to prevent illuminating. This imposing presence of fear and loss was conveyed through dramatic images, which while beautiful, were laden with sorrow and despondency. Each artist summons the viewer to pause and reflect on unbearable suffering, both individual and collective, and the frailty of the human condition. Works on display are presented through a timely and despairing lens, pleading empathy, suffering, and sacrifice as shared universal causes. Moreover, the quiet ferocity of devotion as presented through craft, materials, and process provoked one to somatic response beyond exercised humility. Although the artists in This Mortal Coil confront us with fearful depths lurking beneath our exterior, their perspectives beckon us to fathom its darkness and arise to find clarity and strength and the self-recognition that without this palpable dimness, light would not exist. Within darkness, there are moments of great beauty and certainty.
Featured artists: Janine Antoni, Louise Bourgeois, Sonya Clark, Gail Deery, Carson Fox, Markus Hansen, Donna Smith Jones, Anders Krisár, Rosemary Laing, Pixy Liao , Roberto Mannino, Martha McDonald, Oscar Muñoz, Tony Orrico, Dario Robleto, Piper Shepard, and Anne Wilson.
Featured image: Rosemary Laing , a dozen useless actions for grieving blondes #5, 2009 , C type photograph, Edition 2 of 8 , 2009 Courtesy Rosemary Laing and Galerie Lelong & Co., New York Archived Associated Programming:
The Labor of Remembrance Print and Textile Works by Louise Bourgeois
August 28—December 11, 2021
Location: Don Russell Clayton Gallery
Curated by Cynthia Nourse Thompson
Louise Bourgeois calls upon both subtle and obvious metaphors associated with textiles within her work: the spider, the needle, clothing, and flax. She has stated, “I always had the fear of being separated and abandoned. The sewing is my attempt to keep things together and make things whole.” This art of making, specifically a return to the physicalness of creating, is wholly present in Bourgeois’ needlework. She poignantly renders the construction of a diary, through entries realized in strands of thread and layered fabrics, as dimensional compositions. The careful presentation of a select grouping of her works, in association with those comprising This Mortal Coil, further establishes the relationship of craft with contemporary artistic practice while also rendering an impactful narrative.
Virtual Scholar Lecture with Sewon Kang & Felix Harlan: Lecture and discussion on The Print Work of Louise Bourgeois on Content and Process
The 9th Art: Frames and Thought Bubbles
January 23 – May 8, 2021
Location: Don Russell Clayton Gallery
The 9th Art: Frames and Thought Bubbles provides a comprehensive overview of comic
art, sharing examples of a wide variety of visual and narrative storytelling styles
from panels in early newspapers to contemporary comic images. The original drawings
and prints presented in this exhibition highlight the artistic skills of the master
artists who defined the comic art form and the contemporary artists who created some
of the most famous and influential characters in our shared cultural experience. This
encyclopedic exhibition, curated by Geo Sipp, director of KSU's School of Art and
Design and professor of art, feature a selection of American and Franco/Belgian comic
book art on loan from collections and individual artists.
The term “9th Art” acknowledges the reverence for which Franco-Belgian audiences regard comics in their culture. In France and Belgium, the term bande dessinée, which derives from the original description of the art form as drawn strips, analogous to the sequence of images in a film strip, have been given the honor of being referred to as the 9th Art since the 1960s. French film critic Claude Beylie first used the term in an article he wrote for the magazine Lettres et Medecins in 1964. Expanding on German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s Lectures on Aesthetics, in which major art forms are ranked, comics and bande dessinée have followed film and television into the realm of Fine Art. As such, The museum is pleased to present this prominent and extensive selection of works at the Zuckerman Museum of Art which challenge the construct of traditional narrative storytelling.
Installation image ofThe 9th Art: Frames and Thought Bubbleson view at the Zuckerman Museum of Art. Photo by Mike Jensen.
The Magician Manual, 2013 The Magician (2013) by author Chris Byrne, includes a dozen separate publications,
using a variety of techniques. Co-designed by Scott Newton and published by Marquand
Editions, Seattle. Edition of 20. Coming soon to the KSU Archives!
Spring 2021 School of Art and Design Faculty Exhibition
Installation image of theSpring 2021 School of Art and Design Faculty Exhibition at the Zuckerman Museum of Art. Photo by Mike Jensen.
Virtual Tour of the Exhibition
Celebrating Black History Month: Honoring African American Artists in the ZMA Permanent
Collection
February 1, 2021 - February 28, 2021Location: Virtual Exhibition Series
In recognition of Black History Month, the Zuckerman Museum of Art presents this series of virtual exhibitions comprised of artwork by African American artists from our permanent collection. Celebrating Black History Month: Honoring African American Artists in the ZMA Permanent Collection features work encompassing a variety of styles and mediums, expressing each artist’s plurality of vision and experience. This curatorial project offers our talented museum student assistants the opportunity to interact with academic peers and museum staff, engage in scholarly research, conceive, curate, and actualize independent exhibitions utilizing the prominent collection of the ZMA. Individual responses to the collection were realized as thoughtful and timely exhibitions, highlighting each student’s unique perspective and ability to form a personal narrative. All students were afforded guidance and support throughout the entire process from all ZMA staff, including curatorial mentorship from our director of curatorial affairs, Cynthia Nourse Thompson.
Aaron S. Coleman,Stockholm Syndrome,2013, ink on paper, color lithograph, gift of
the Southern Graphics Council International, courtesy of the Zuckerman Museum of Art.
Jonathan Beaumont Thomas: Sign of the Times Portfolio
In conjunction with the exhibition, The 9th Art: Frames and Thought Bubbles, the ZMA
presents a portfolio of intaglio prints by artist Jonathan Beaumont Thomas, titled
Sign of the Times.
About the Portfolio: “When I imagined that on seeing his pictures I should get a clue to the understanding of his strange character I was mistaken. They merely increased the astonishment with which he filled me. I was more at sea than ever. The only thing that seemed clear to me - and perhaps even this was fanciful - was that he was passionately striving for liberation from some power that held him. But what the power was and what line the liberation would take remained obscure. Each one of us is alone in the world. He is shut in a tower of brass, and can communicate with his fellows only by signs, and the signs have no common value, so that their sense is vague and uncertain.” -W. Somerset Maughan, The Moon and Sixpence, 1919, pg.133. No one has written more beautifully about the inscrutability of images and their possession of people than W. Somerset Maughan. Even today, in the great ocean of digital images, his words from a century ago speak to the vast and deepening uncertainty that lies at the end of the swim.
I spend a great deal of time collecting and organizing pictures, images of all sorts, searching for signs, for relationships, for indicators of value. I'm intrigued by the intense specificity and simultaneous randomness of the whole enterprise. The best description of my artwork is to say it is squeezed out of this process, one small drop of juice from one large piece of fruit. I have long been interested in the role of images in worship, conflict over idolatry, and the relationship between iconoclasm and shifts in communicative media. These interests lay the groundwork for a deliberate process of creating narratives that extricate themes embedded in the mass of images that I both consciously and subconsciously collect.
The nine etchings that comprise the Sign of the Times portfolio are structurally divided into quadrants. That idea came from comics and the goal of unfolding a story. Within each window I challenge myself to create a relationship between elements that yields a type of small truth concerning the picture’s inhabitants, and perhaps their relationship to the viewer. Working in intaglio, at least for me, has always been such a battle of wills. It can be so uncompromising, scraping copper with steel. But what a thrill to work and maneuver the texture of a metal plate just enough to capture a creeping shadow against the wall, the cast of an oncoming storm or the glow of a candle lit room. It can also take a long time. And what does it mean to spend a long time making a picture of something so fleeting and inconsequential as a chaff of wheat shifting in the wind? -Jonathan Beaumont Thomas
Jonathan Beaumont Thomas,The Curtain, 8”x6” image, 14”x12” paper, intaglio, 2017. Courtesy of the artist.
About the Artist
Jonathan Beaumont Thomas is currently the Interim Associate Dean of Design and Media at the Maryland institute
College of Art, in Baltimore Maryland, where he was the Chair of the Printmaking Department
from 2010-2020. Previously, he taught at the University of Miami in Miami, FL and
Indiana State University in Terre Haute, Indiana. Jonathan received his MFA from Southern
Illinois University Edwardsville and a BS in Biology from Wake Forest University.
He has shown both nationally and internationally, including exhibitions at Trudi Gallery
in Los Angeles, the Bas Fisher Invitational in Miami, Untitled in New York, and Carol
Jazzar in Miami. He was an Artist-in-Residence at Anchor Graphics in Chicago, IL and
the Plains Art Museum in Fargo, ND and was the recipient of the Florida Individual
Fellowship Grant.
The Hand Print Workshop International: Process & Innovation
June 5 – July 17, 2021
Location: Don Russell Clayton Gallery
Dennis O’Neil [1946 - 2020] founded the Hand Print Workshop International [HPWI] in 1984 with a vision of furthering the innovation of screen printing through establishing international collaborations with artists. Dennis was an inspirational artist and collaborator who dedicated his life to this endeavor. In 1989 at the fall of the Soviet Union, the workshop embarked on a unique journey in partnership with Russian artists in Moscow. What began as a risky endeavor to conceive the Moscow Studio would ultimately become the center for collaborative screen printing in Russia for nearly a decade, featuring some of the most renowned Russian artists of the past twenty-five years. The workshop returned to the United States in 1997 and continued to support an active artist residency program locally, nationally, and internationally— including artists from Russia, Ukraine, Georgia, Chile, Israel, and Cuba. The experiences and lessons cultivated from the Moscow Studio influenced the studio’s work and role as a model for the future of contemporary printmaking practices. By creating support and opportunities during uncertain times, HPWI provided artists with a platform and a voice to express individuality and perspective on critical social justice and human rights issues.
The Hand Print Workshop International: Process & Innovation presents a dynamic selection
of twenty-five collaborative prints by nineteen artists. The exhibition visually chronicled
a studio committed to experimentation and discovery and contesting the boundaries
of contemporary screen printing through innovative new practices that embrace the
medium's artistic potential. Dennis was a champion of silkscreen printing, establishing
a legacy of cross-cultural connections and advancing printmaking as a powerful contemporary
art form. The works featured in this exhibition exemplified Dennis' visionary acumen,
commitment to mutualism, and love for the medium. Moreover, through these works, his
legacy endures.
Dennis O’Neil,Moscow Revisited, 2011, cold wax medium and oil paint, unique print, 26.5 x 32 Inches.
Skopelos Foundation for the Arts: A Site for artistic and cultural exchange Webinar
Dennis O’Neil: Process & Innovation Video
In Collaboration: selections from the ZMA Permanent Collection and SGCI Archive
June 5 – July 17, 2021
Location: Mortin Gallery
n Collaboration: Selections from the SGCI Archive, presents a rich selection of offerings
illustrating the notable and vital developments in the field of contemporary printmaking
practices. The SGCI organization has long maintained national and international recognition
in the discipline of printmaking, which now extends into the collaborative arenas
of both papermaking and book arts. This exhibition frames, in both a physical, historical
and visual sense, the context of this art-making discipline as punctuated milestones
chronicling its past.
In Collaboration celebrated the achievements made by contemporary artists who are challenging and redefining the medium to create works that are technically and conceptually diverse; innovative and consistently flawless in craftsmanship; and above all true to each of the artists’ concept and vision.
Rachel Simmons,GHOST SHIP, 2016, Ink on paper, screenprint, Created for the 2016 Southern
Graphics Council International Membership Exchange.
Artist Tony Orrico presents Prepare the plane, a performative piece with dental occlusions on paper made over the course of an 8.5-hour performance. The work is was on view on the Zuckerman Museum of Art's Project Wall North.
About Tony Orrico
Tony Orrico is a visual and performance artist, choreographer, and dancer. Merging the act of drawing with choreographic gesture and bio-geometrics, his work has reached mass circulation for its ingenuity within the intersections of performance and drawing. His work explores how consciousness and physical impulses manifest into visible forms. He often uses his own somatic research, Suspension Practice, as point of entry into his visual work. Orrico has performed/exhibited his work across the US and internationally in Australia, Belgium, China, Denmark, France, Germany, Greece, Mexico, The Netherlands, Poland, and Spain. His visual work is in collection at of The National Academy of Sciences (Washington DC) and Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporáneo (MUAC, Mexico City) as well as prominent private collections such as Grazyna Kulczyk, Kablanc/Fundación Otazu and Bergmeier/Kunstsaele, among others. He has presented at the CCCB, Centre Pompidou-Metz, The New Museum, Cranbrook Art Museum and Poptech 2011: The World Rebalancing. Orrico was one of a select group of artists to re-perform the work of Marina Abramovic during her retrospective at MoMA (2010). As a former member of Trisha Brown Dance Company and Shen Wei Dance Arts, Orrico has graced such stages as the Sydney Opera House, Teatro La Fenice, New York State Theater, and Theatre du Palais-Royal.
West Project Wall: Greely Myatt
January 23 – July 17, 2021
Curated by Cynthia Nourse Thompson
The ZMA presents three works by artist Greely Myatt to coincide with the exhibition on view in the Don Russell Clayton Gallery January 23 – May 9, 2021 titled The 9th Art: Frames and Thought Bubbles. All works by Myatt, Untitled Pages (Hagar) and (Beetle Bailey), 2011 and Oh $#*t 2014, reinterpret the recognizable graphic conventions of the comic strip and speech bubble as a reimagined visual language. Myatt is prominently known for his monumental installations and amusing sculptural works which often incorporate found elements.
Installation view of Greely Myatt'sUntitled Page (Hagar)andUntitled Page (Beetle Bailey) 2011, Painted and polished steel and air, 73 x 53 x 3”, Courtesy of the artist and David Lusk Gallery, Memphis and Nashville. Photo by Mike Jensen.
About the Artist
Greely Myatt was born and educated in Mississippi. He currently lives and maintains a studio in West Memphis, Arkansas. Myatt recently retired from teaching sculpture at The University of Memphis for thirty-one years and he is now Professor Emeritus. His works have been exhibited in numerous solo and group exhibitions across the United States, Europe and Japan. He has received grants and fellowships from the Tennessee Arts Commission, Arkansas Arts Council, The University of Memphis, The University of Georgia, Alternate Roots in Atlanta, and the Mississippi Arts and Letters Visual Arts Award in 1994. Myatt was an exchange artist to Israel in 1998. In 2009, work from twenty years of living and working in Memphis was exhibited across the city in nine separate venues. His work has been reviewed in Art Papers, Number Magazine, Art in America, ArtNews, Sculpture Magazine, American Quilter, and in online versions of ArtForum and Juxtapoz Magazine. He is represented by Sandler Hudson Gallery in Atlanta and David Lusk Gallery in Memphis/Nashville.
North Project Wall: Jess Jones
August 1, 2020 - July 17, 2021
Curated by Ginger Wolfe-Suarez
Jess Jones is a textile artist based out of Atlanta, GA. Over the past decade she has conceptually
and materially experimented with found and re-used textiles through aesthetic, layered,
and stitched compositions. Weeping Quilt (Yo-yos) is a newly commissioned, site-specific
installation that engages both contemporary and historical ideas of craft, labor,
and the re-use of found textiles. Because many of these quilting pieces were found
in various states of completion by the artist, there is an aspect of finished and
unfinished; of pulling together pieces that were abandoned or never finished by their
makers. This work uses large volumes of undulating color made from small gathered
circles of fabric. The individual circular pieces were commonly referred to by quilters
as 'Yo-yos' in a quilting style that is associated with the 1920's, but still used
by modern quilters. Her works presents the opportunity to discuss ideas about creative
authorship, and what constitutes a finished work. Jones's work engages material culture
through re-imagining what has been left behind, and tactile memory as a space for
cultural and creative possibility in American art.
Installation view of Jess Jones,Weeping Quilt(Yo-yos), created in 2020. Image courtesy of the artist. Photo by Mike Jensen.
The Susan O'Malley Project is a site specific installation featuring the work of artist Susan O’Malley. Her work explored generosity, positivity, and sincerity, and the profound possibility of listening as a kind of artistic practice. O’Malley was an artist and curator of Mexican-Irish descent whose work often interwove cultures and perspectives, engaging various aspects of production and dissemination throughout material culture. Her work appeared on fences, posts, and signs in areas that were being heavily gentrified. Throughout her practice, she met people in our society in their space as they were, as they are. Many of the works in this solo project are curated from a series titled Advice from My 80 Year-Old Self. In this series, O’Malley explored intergenerational knowledge sharing by asking members of the public what advice they would give their younger selves. O’Malley explored positivity and the human capacity for happiness, but she also explored profound loss and grief throughout her artistic career. All of her work was cohesive in its capacity for human connection across cultural space.
Installation view of Susan O'Malley's work,It Is Possibleat the Zuckerman Museum of Art. Photo by Emily Knight.
Stronghold is a site-specific installation by Georgia-based artist, Robert Sherer,
created to be experienced by walking over the work. Sherer eloquently and urgently
represents human experience primarily through the forms of drawing and painting. Throughout
the past three decades of his art practice, the artist has experimented in material
and process while navigating complex topics relating to the LGBTQ community and the
HIV crisis. Stronghold was initially conceptualized in relation to his own memories
about being bullied in childhood which is a topic that affects youth throughout our
region. Sherer's work has often included autobiographical narratives while exploring
ideas of experimental portraiture and alternative forms of history-sharing. This work
represents cultural growth, suffering, engagement, and hope.
Stronghold was commissioned by the museum in an effort to support living artists in
the South-East.
Installation view of Robert Sherer'sStrongholdat Zuckerman Museum of Art. Photo by
Shane McDonald.
A Peculiar Proximity to Spiritual Mysteries showcased various key contemporary works
from the permanent collection of the Zuckerman Museum of Art. Curated by artist Pablo
Helguera and Ginger Wolfe-Suarez, the experimental exhibition drew on many rare works
of art as well as some that have never been exhibited. The exhibition featured alternative
methods of display, supplementary learning experiences, and sound recordings. Preparation
for this exhibition included research and curatorial assistance by Michelle Lopez,
registrar/collections manager, as well as collective dialogue and collaboration with
the ZMA staff.
The curators initially researched artists of diverse cultural backgrounds in the permanent
collection of the ZMA and then chose artists to highlight. The highlighted artists
employ a range of techniques to explore issues of identity, race, and cultural origin.
They often reference geography, translocation, cultural traditions, translation, political
history, and collective memory. Language and storytelling are also common threads
woven throughout the exhibition.
Issues explored by these artists regarding race, place, and migration continue to
be pressing for museums and institutions around the world.
Artists include Tia Blassingame, Mildred Beltre, Canute Caliste, Nayda Collazo-Llorens, Frederick Schiller Cozzens, Jesus De La Rosa, Ruthann Godollei, Sheila Goloborotko, Rogelio Gutierrez, Antonio Jacobsen, Eddy A. López, Athos Menaboni, Ayanah Moor, Michelle Murillo, Grace Rosario Perkins, Robert Sherer, Bernice Sims, Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, Keith Smith, and Henry Ossawa Tanner.
Looming Chaos is a solo exhibition of artist Zipporah Camille Thompson that explores her use of weaving to engage ideas of chaos. The artist conceptualizes chaos as the consuming cyclical processes of life driven by a universal yearning for wholeness. Through object and material choice, Thompson materializes the destruction, disorder, and confusions of the world, weaving them into structure and order. Thompson’s weaving practice allows her to reconcile the deterioration of the environment, tumultuous personal histories, and the complexity of her own identity as fodder for creation.
Zipporah Camille Thompson is a visual artist and sculptor based in Atlanta, Georgia.
Thompson explores ritual and alchemical transformations through the unknown and through
universals, including death, catastrophe, chaos, and the cosmos. Metamorphosed, shapeshifters
and hybrid landscapes reflect various archaeological, psychological, and ecological
perspectives, as well as a personal investigation of self and identity. She received
her MFA from the University of Georgia and her BFA from the University of North Carolina,
Charlotte.
The exhibition is a cumulative project of the inaugural Tina Dunkley Curatorial Fellows
at Clark Atlanta University (CAUAM). The multi-institutional, cross-regional curatorial
fellowship is a collaborative project between Clark Atlanta University Art Museum,
the Zuckerman Museum of Art, and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Created
by Dr. Maurita Poole (CAUAM), the fellowship is meant to foster the next generation
of museum professionals.
Image Courtesy of the Zuckerman Museum of Art, photo by Mike Jensen.
UNBOUND brings together a multigenerational group of artists whose work takes an inventive and experimental approach to abstraction. Using Kobena Mercer’s definition of ‘discrepant abstraction’ — hybrid and partial, elusive and repetitive, obstinate and strange, including almost everything that does not neatly fit into the institutional narrative of abstract art as a monolithic quest for purity, UNBOUND pushes against parameters of an imagined black aesthetic that relies on figural representation, disrupts notions of purity associated with abstraction, and widens the boundaries of painting to include forms and materials not traditionally associated with the medium. Rooted in the formal, the works consider the essential elements of abstract painting: color, form, gesture, line, and space, through unorthodox use of materials that break the confines of a rectangular canvas, and implode the boundaries between painting, sculpture, and installation. The works on view hang, stretch, tether, and dangle off the walls, breaking free from the bounds of figuration, and complicating the boundaries of painting itself.
Artists include: Anthony Akinbola, Romare Bearden, Krista Clark, Sam Gilliam, Eric
N. Mack, Joe Overstreet, and Tariku Shiferaw.
The exhibition is a cumulative project of the inaugural Tina Dunkley Curatorial Fellows
at Clark Atlanta University (CAUAM). The multi-institutional, cross-regional curatorial
fellowship is a collaborative project between Clark Atlanta University Art Museum,
the Zuckerman Museum of Art, and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Created
by Dr. Maurita Poole (CAUAM), the fellowship is meant to foster the next generation
of museum professionals.
Image courtesy of the Clark Atlanta University Museum of Art.
The group exhibition it's your world for the moment brought rare and never-been-seen work of historical and cultural significance to the Southeast while also supporting the commissioning of new work made within our region. The precariousness of our geographic and shared spaces was explored through ‘environmental portraits’, explorations into ecological sites, and art-making tactics that incorporate cultural and symbolic meanings of both our natural and cultural spaces. Each artist featured in this exhibition has inexhaustibly created works of art uniquely positioned in the present while having a simultaneous relationship with the past and future. Their work collectively engages concepts of water and land in all of its complexity and precariousness, while rigorously engaging ideas of our climate and shared geography. Each artist included has explored our lived human experience here on Earth.
Featured artists: Allison Janae Hamilton, Yoshua Okón, Erin Jane Nelson, Ana Mendieta, and Optics Division of the Metabolic Studio (Lauren Bon, Rich Nielsen, and Tristan Duke).
The group exhibition it's your world for the moment brought rare and never-been-seen work of historical and cultural significance to the Southeast while also supporting the commissioning of new work made within our region. The precariousness of our geographic and shared spaces was explored through ‘environmental portraits’, explorations into ecological sites, and art-making tactics that incorporate cultural and symbolic meanings of both our natural and cultural spaces. Each artist featured in this exhibition has inexhaustibly created works of art uniquely positioned in the present while having a simultaneous relationship with the past and future. Their work collectively engages concepts of water and land in all of its complexity and precariousness, while rigorously engaging ideas of our climate and shared geography. Each artist included has explored our lived human experience here on Earth.
Featured artists: Allison Janae Hamilton, Yoshua Okón, Erin Jane Nelson, Ana Mendieta, and Optics Division of the Metabolic Studio (Lauren Bon, Rich Nielsen, and Tristan Duke).
Read KSU Professor Elizabeth Giddens' essay about Erin Jane Nelson and the ideas that
motivate her work:
Ecocritic Elizabeth Giddens interviewed Erin Jane Nelson in her studio in February 2020. They discussed Nelson’s concerns about how climate change is affecting human communities as well as the natural world. Nelson shared her intellectual and intuitive approach to several pieces in the ZMA show It’s your world for the moment. She also described features of her technique such as hapa-zome printing.In her essay Solastalgizing the Georgia Coast, Giddens interprets Nelson’s practice through the lens of ecocriticism and highlights the themes of solastalgia, anthropomorphism, and posthumanism that emerge from her sculptures, collages, and wall panels. Access the essay HERE. It is also available on Giddens’ web page.
Image: Erin Jane Nelson, Jekyll, 2018. Image courtesy of the artist and the Zuckerman Museum of Art.
SDGs in it's your world for the moment
In collaboration with CIFAL Atlanta, a former center housed in KSU's Division of Global Affairs, the ZMA identified ways that the art in it's your world for the moment corresponds
to Sustainable Development Goals defined by the United Nations.
Please see the document below for more information.
2019
Cloud Chamber
December 3 - 15, 2019
Curator: Ginger Wolfe-Suarez
Cloud Chamber is a group exhibition of textile work in the Melinda Jolley Mortin Galleries
at ZMA,. Concepts in this group exhibition include the relationship between handcraft,
technology, and intergenerational exchange.
Painting Who? is a small exhibition that focuses on paintings that take on a personality
of their own. They occupy real space and also demonstrate the illusion of space. They
consciously, unapologetically, and simultaneously refer to the history of painting,
the act of making a painting, and the contemporary world. In this layered and loaded
territory, they reflect both the past and the present.
Asking the question “Who is this painting?” rather than “What is this painting about?” opens up the possibility of considering the object as a complex character in a larger narrative. It allows the gallery to be interpreted as a theatrical space in which stories are played out and plots are thickened. On this big white stage, relationships between the paintings can be explored and personalities can be assigned. This approach applies action to a group of otherwise static objects and it emphasizes the role of the gallery environment. But most importantly, it gives us a different way to think about painting, an alternative lens through which to read and interpret what we see.
Artists include: Jeff Conefry, Moira Dryer, Gracie Devito, Chris Hood, and Wihro Kim
Fruitful Labors
August 24 - November 10, 2019
Curator: Kerstie Tepper
Fruitful Labors focuses on strategies for coping. Ranging from the absurd to the essential, these tactics include conversation, repetitive labor, intergenerational storytelling, and healing practices. Each of these approaches relies on a particular belief system.
Stanya Kahn, who is represented in this project with two videos, is an observer of life who offers wry, off-the-cuff commentary on failure and responsibility. Lenka Clayton’s sculptural work also ponders responsibility through the investment of unnecessary, yet poetic labor. Through disassembly, alteration, and reassembly her objects of clothing consider use and misuse of human and machine. Kaitlynn Redell’s photographic series, Not Her(e), falls within the sphere of the domestic labor where she directly addresses the invisibility in her constancy and support through a contemporary rendition of Victorian photography techniques.
Shana Moulton takes the idea of invisibility in the direction of the imaginary. Her assumed character, Cynthia, receives messages from household objects that lead her to the Galactic Pot Healer for restoration. Equally mysterious, Michelle Laxalt refers to the power that can be invested in small objects and repeated behaviors. In her sculptural installations, the artist references her grandmother’s superstitions—long held beliefs that remain intact despite more orthodox forms of religious training. Shanequa Gay explores the contemporary relevance of an ancient world of rites, practices, and sisterhood that she visualizes in multiple media. The photographs in this show depict women who unapologetically confront and adopt various archetypes as they embody deities of the artist’s creation.
Sonya Yong James: One Hundred Blossoms and the Sweetest Scent
August 25, 2018 - December 20, 2019
Curator: Sarah Higgins
Sonya Yong James’ year-long solo exhibition on the ZMA stairwell project wall, One Hundred Blossoms and the Sweetest Scent is a large-scale mixed-media installation.
Taking inspiration from the tale of Little Red Riding Hood, artist Sonya Jong James weaves together fiber, flowers, roots, and found objects to explore the themes of this fable and their evolution over time. She says, “The girl and wolf inhabit a place, call it the forest or the human psyche, where the spectrum of human sagas converges, and their social and cultural meanings play out.”
Louder than Words
February 2 – May 5, 2019
Curator: Teresa Bramlette Reeves
This exhibition features artists who, in a variety of ways, privilege silence, non-linguistic sounds, symbols, and gestures over words as tools of communication. Within the often-performative space of their work, they may surrender their own power in order to shine a light on the condition of powerlessness. They may use their bodies to convey complex emotions or simulate sensations that focus your experience. Some, who work within the imposed condition of deafness, reveal the gaps inherent in communication—what is missing, misunderstood, intentionally ignored, or entirely invented. An emphasis on action over words reveals an opportunity for silent protest, suggesting the possibility of fearlessness in the nonverbal. In other work, sounds and words are muted, restricted, and undermined. The loss of this information is then made palpable, drawing attention to questions of intention and what this choice may mean socially or politically.
Sahwha/Resurgence
February 2 – May 5, 2019
Curator: Joe Thomas
In observation of the KSU’s Year of Morocco in 2020-21, the ZMA presents Sahwha/Resurgence: works by Hicham Berrada. Originally trained as a scientist in Morocco, the work of Paris-based artist Hicham Berrada exposes the beauty that can result from disruptive interactions. Represented in this exhibition by six video works, these collisions of chemicals in solution or man-made interventions in the environment create an efflorescence—or rebirth—into something new, a quality conveyed by the Arabic word sahwha. The resulting dreamlike visions represent a resurgence of something mundane or unappreciated into something eerily beautiful.
2018
Tomashi Jackson: Interstate Love Song
Sarah Emerson: Are We the Monsters
Time Like the Present
Class Pictures
Figure Forward
2017
Kennesaw State’s 1st Biennial National Arts Program Exhibition
