This touring exhibition organized by Plains Art Museum in Fargo, North Dakota features mixed media works on paper and oil paintings by artist T. L. Solien. Known for cartoon-like and surreal imagery with references to art and cultural history, Solien explores his life, mind, and emotional states as modern man, artist, husband, and father.
Read MoreMary Bero in Innovators and Legends through September 7, 2014
Mary Bero's work is in the nationally traveling exhibition INNOVATORS & LEGENDS: Generations in Textiles and Fibers. Organized by the Muskegon Museum of Art, Innovators and Legends explores the explosion of fiber as a fine arts movement during the latter half of the 20th century with over 75 works by 50 artists. The exhibition tells the story of the ongoing transformation of fiber arts from the functional and decorative to the innovative and experimental, and the creative potential of the wide array of diverse materials and techniques being used today. Contemporary themes such as narrative, identity, ecology, recycling, and political thought are explored, while continuing to draw upon the beauty and visual richness achieved through color, pattern, texture, and form.
The idea for the exhibition was conceived by Geary Jones, a Grand Rapids, Michigan based artist and teacher and has traveled to the Schweinfurth Memorial Art Center in Auburn, New York, the Art Museum at the University of Kentucky in Lexington, Kentucky and the University Art Museum of Colorado State University in Fort Collins, Colorado. Currently at the Figge Art Museum in Davenport, IA, Bero's work was featured on for the building's banner.
Read MoreBill Reid on The Arts Page - June 2014
A Studio visit with sculptor Bill Reid is featured on MPTV's "The Arts Page" with Sandy Maxx. Watch Bill Reid in action on The Arts Page! Click HERE to see the studio visit!
Read MoreMark Mulhern receives WVALA Award - June 2014
Recently, Mark Mulhern received the Wisconsin Visual Art Lifetime Achievement Award at the Museum of Wisconsin Art. His MOWA exhibition "Pulling Back the Curtain" illustrated his interest in the "process of creation." Locating and removing elements from his compositions is a major component of his process.
Read MoreBreehan James & Trent Miller in Shepherd Express - June, 2014
At Tory Folliard Gallery, two new exhibitions hold court beginning May 30. Native daughter of Wisconsin, Yale Master of Fine Arts and assistant professor at Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design Breehan James presents “Way of the Wilderness,” a study of favorite locations in her family’s Wisconsin hunting camp and the Boundary Waters of Minnesota. With tree-reflecting brooks and forest floors crocheted by fallen leaves, James’ canvases capture the repetitive patterns of nature and instill in the viewer a similar meditative calm.
Trent Miller’s exhibition makes a humble request: “Meet Me at the Edge of the World.” Miller is already a step ahead when it comes to breaking out of the artistic mainstream, seeing as he uses Emery Blagdon’s Healing Machine as a visual point of departure. Outsider artist extraordinaire, Blagdon spent 36 years putting together more than 400 paintings, baroque wire mobiles and found items into a surreal, shed-sized installation that he believed to have curative powers. Miller favors similarly carnival-esque colors and hypnotic structures.
Read MoreMichael Velliquette, Madison Children's Museum - Summer 2014
Michael Velliquette currently has a piece on view at the Madison Children’s Museum created during a collaborative workshop he facilitated in April. Participants of all ages cut patterned and painted paper into creative shapes inspired by feathers, leaves, and fur. The pieces were then used to cover a pair of large paper faces and which currently hang in the Hamilton street-side window galleries. The work, titled “Happy Heads” will be up through the summer.”
Read MoreBill Reid featured in Left of the Lake, June 2014
Sculptor Bill Reid was recently featured in Left of the Lake Magazine, a printed quarterly serving the creative communities from Chicago to Milwaukee. Below is the article by Peg Rousar-Thompson.
Read MoreBeth Lipman - The Ringling Museum of Art through September 7, 2014
Beth Lipman, Crib and Cradle, glass, adhesive, and light
Beth Lipman's show "Precarious Possessions" will be on exhibit at the Ringling Museum of Art in Sarasota, Florida through September 7, 2014. The still life has long been used in painting as a visual metaphor for considerations of materiality, the conspicuous consumption of wealth, and the fleeting nature of life. Beth Lipman (born 1971) uses the vocabulary of the still life, particularly the table setting with its various vessels, foods, and associated objects, in complex sculptures created in clear glass. For Lipman, the still life operates as a commentary on our current consumer culture.
Read MoreBen Grant Interviewed by Greymatter Gallery - April, 2014
Briefly describe the work you do.
My paintings explore the potential for meaning in simple, bold, and colorful combinations of shape and dimension. I look at my paintings as an evolving whole whose constituent components will continue to shift, drop out, or be added to as I explore the boundaries of my process. I paint the modular units that make up the pieces separately and then combine them in the studio to create strings of information that take on the form of a visual syntax. As I combine the elements of my pieces, I am building relationships that speak not only to the internal logic of the single piece, but also to the larger structure of the abstract language that is present in the whole body of work.
Read MoreRon Isaacs - Plywood Constructions in "This is Colossal" - April 2014
Starting with layers of Finnish birch plywood artist Ron Isaacs builds elaborately designed constructions onto which he paints, in a trompe l’oeil fashion, the delicate details of leaves sprouting from clothing or the textured surface of twigs and bark. Each piece merges three recurring subjects found in most of his works: vintage clothing, plant materials, and found objects. Isaacs shares via his artist statement:
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