Contact: Hamlett Dobbins, Director
Clough-Hanson Gallery, Rhodes College
(901) 843-3442
For Immediate Release:
Clough-Hanson Gallery, the department of art, the Lillie and Morrie Moss Endowment for the Visual Arts at Rhodes College are teaming up with arts quarterly Number Inc to present a symposium on the importance on art criticism in a creative community.
The symposium will take place in room 051 in the new Paul Barrett Library at Rhodes College on Saturday, February 14th from 1-3 pm.
The symposium will feature a panel discussion with the Lillie and Morris Moss visiting artist/curator/critic Michelle Grabner, Rhodes’ contemporary art historian David McCarthy and Terry Thacker, the chair of Watkins School of Art, Design and Film in Nashville. The panelists will discuss their connections with art criticism and its importance in an active arts community. This symposium is designed to create an open discussion between members of our community.
Late last year there were a series of informal round table discussions with a number of leaders from the local arts community. The group included heads of local arts non-profits, chairs of several college art departments, leaders of alternative art spaces as well as a number of commercial gallery owners. The aims of the discussions were to find ways to improve the creative climate in the community. Among the issues discussed was the need for more critical dialog in the form of essays or reviews. The need for these critical reviews extends beyond the need to communicate with the local audience but in bringing word of the extraordinary artists and exhibitions to a regional or national audience. One of the major issues with the Flyer, the Commercial Appeal, Number Inc and other publications is that it is difficult to find writers who feel qualified and are willing to write critically about the visual arts. The goal of this symposium is to raise the awareness of this important issue of critical writing in the community.
Michelle Grabner received her MFA from Northwestern University, Department of Theory and Practice in 1990. At NU she worked with the painters Ed Paschke and William Conger. She received a MA in Art History (1987) and a BFA (1984) from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. She is a Professor at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago where she has been teaching since 1996. Grabner and her husband Brad Killam run the artist project space called The Suburban in Oak Park. Since January 1999 they have worked with over one hundred and twenty artists. A book on her work published by University Galleries of Illinois State University titled “Remain in Light” was published in 2008.
David McCarthy has taught contemporary art history at Rhodes College since 1991. In 2004 he was a Senior Fellow at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. McCarthy is the author of The Nude in American Painting, 1950 to 1980 (1998), Pop Art (2000), and H.C. Westermann at War (2004), as well as numerous essays and reviews on American art since 1945. He currently holds the James F. Ruffin Chair of Art and Archaeology at Rhodes College, Memphis.
Terry Thacker has been an artist and educator for twenty years, receiving the title of Distinguished Professor in 1995. Active as a lecturer and reviewer, Terry has written for Art Papers and Number Inc, lectured at the Southeastern College Art Conference, and most recently spoken at the Frist Center for the Visual Arts. Thacker has shown in numerous national and regional exhibitions including solo exhibitions at Western Kentucky University, Murry State University, Alexandria Museum, and The Memphis Center for Contemporary Art. Current projects include a collaborative installation for the Parthenon. His work can be seen at Cumberland Gallery, Nashville, TN.
If you should have any questions please don’t hesitate to contact Gallery Director Hamlett Dobbins at Clough-Hanson Gallery (901) 843-3442, via email at dobbinsh@rhodes.edu.
Friday, January 30, 2009
Another super secret show at the Power House Memphis
The mass email for this didn't go out until late Thursday night.
Rashid Johnson
The Dead Lecturer: Laboratory, Dojo, and Performance Space
January 31, 2009-March 27 2009
Opening Reception Saturday, January 31, 2-5pm
Power House Memphis
45 GE Patterson, Memphis, TN 38103
Power House Memphis (PHM) is thrilled to present The Dead Lecturer: Laboratory, Dojo, and Performance Space, a site specific installation and happening created by rising American star, Rashid Johnson. Power House’s first exhibition of 2009 is an ambitious endeavor. Not only have most of the works been made within the actual space of PHM, but viewers will also see how Johnson has reenergized the space with his photographs, paintings, and signature mirror work. The artist’s quest to define and dispel the concept of blackness via experiment, combat or self-defense and ceremony, transforms the space into an experience rather than a mere installation. The inner sanctum of black intelligentsia is revealed to viewers, encouraging an understanding about the underlying myths and misconceptions of and about blackness. Utilizing found materials and creating assemblages made from shea butter, wood, mirrors, wax, steel and black soap, Johnson combines these ingredients to question the organic and fixed realm of the society in which we live. The tenor of this exhibition is one of contemplation and awe at the conspiracy of the universe that makes the intersection of past, present, and future a paradoxical dance.
Appropriating a portion of the show’s title from a book of poems by LeRoi Jones, (now known as Amiri Baraka), Johnson invites us to explore time, space, reality and the complex “isms” of our own individuality. Johnson’s reference to Jones’, Dead Lecturer, conflates and pays homage to the work, while also offering a subtext that leads to the avant-garde aesthetics and theories of artist and poet, Marcel Broodthaers. Johnson questions the constraints and linearity of traditional art theory, by offering viewers his abstract, yet experiential observations about the art world and society as a whole. This installation transforms the Power House into a place that inquires about the metaphysical notions of race, identity, and culture while also casting off past beliefs systems. Ultimately, Johnson has created a unique and complex dialogue about the incongruous nature of the society we inhabit.
About the Artist:
Rashid Johnson (b. Chicago, 1977, live NY) is a conceptual artist whose works include a variety of media including sculpture, photography, and video. Johnson received his MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2005) and his BFA from Columbia College, Chicago (2000). His work has been exhibited at the Art Institute of Chicago, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Detroit Institute of Art, the Walker Art Center, the Cocoran Museum of Art, the Wadworth Atheneum Museum of Art, and the Renaissance Society at the Univeristy of Chicago. Johnson’s work is included in many private and public collection such as: the Art Institute of Chicago, ILArtist Pension Trust, NY, Brooklyn Art Museum, NY, Detroit Institute of Art. MI, Kunstmuseum Magdeburg, Germany, LaSalle Bank, Chicago, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL, Eileen Harris-Norton, Santa Monica, CA, The Rubell Family Collection, Miami, Seattle Art Museum, Speyer Family Collection, NY, Studio Museum, of Harlem, NY, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, NY. Johnson is represented by Nicole Klagsburn Gallery in New York City and Monique Meloche Gallery in Chicago.
The Power House is open Wednesday to Saturday from 12pm-6pm and Sundays from 1-5pm. The Tennessee Arts Commission and Arts Memphis generously sponsor the programs and exhibitions of Power House Memphis. The presentation of The Dead Lecturer: Laboratory, Dojo, and Performance Space owes a special thanks to Henry Turley Realty.
Tuesday, January 27, 2009
Jennifer Barnett Hensel at Material
Contact: Hamlett Dobbins, 901.219.1943, hamlettdobbins@hotmail.com or Jennifer Barnett Hensel at barnetthensel@gmail.com.
Material is excited to announce its forty-first exhibition and the first of 2009 season: Jennifer Barnett Hensel: 29 and Counting.
Jennifer Barnett Hensel: 29 and Counting will run for one night only with a reception for the artist on Friday, January 30th from 6-8 pm.
29 and Counting is a series of 29 new works painted during the first 29 days of January 2009. This show is a reflection on the annual life cycle and the tendency to measure one's life course in a yearly pattern. Meanwhile, the layers of life build upon themselves; accomplishments, failures, relationships, and memories-all creating intertwined associations. These works focus on those pivotal moments that are the markers of life-not within the confines of a yearly structure, but as a collection of every day happenings. Jennifer Barnett Hensel is currently pursuing her M.F.A. at the Memphis College of Art. Her life path brought her to Memphis by way of Cincinnati, Minneapolis and Boston, and in all of the 29 pieces, the viewer will find traces of these places in her work. She exhibits nationally and was recently featured in the Her Mark 2009 publication by the Women Made Gallery of Chicago, and she was recently selected for the 2009 North American Graduate Art Survey at the Nash Gallery in Minneapolis. This is her second solo show in Memphis.
For more information on the artist and her work please go to http://www.jenniferbarnetthensel.com/.
Material is located at 2553 Broad Avenue. Parking is available on both the north and south sides of Broad Avenue.
Jpg information: “barnetthensel.jpg” is Jennifer Barnett Hansel’s Corn Beetle Girl, Mixed media on panel, 8 x 8", 2009.
Friday, January 16, 2009
John Tallman Lecture and Reception
Contact: Hamlett Dobbins, Director
Clough-Hanson Gallery, Rhodes College
(901) 843-3442
For Immediate Release:
Clough-Hanson Gallery at Rhodes College is excited to announce its third show of the season: John Tallman, Contingent Engagement: A Recent Painting.
Contingent Engagement: A Recent Painting will run from January 23 through February 21, 2009.
The artist will present a lecture on his work in Blount Auditorium in Buckman Hall on Thursday, January 22nd at 7 p.m.
The reception for the show will be held in the gallery from 6 - 8 p.m., Friday January 23, 2009.
For John Tallman’s show for Clough-Hanson Gallery at Rhodes College he has focused on the idea of one painting. Several years before the exhibition at Rhodes College, John Tallman made a rubber mold of a painting he’d completed in 2005. This untitled, fluorescent red, acrylic on wood painting wasn’t one of Tallman’s favorites, nor did he consider it a throwaway piece. In the artist’s words, it was “right in the middle, average.” But there was something about this slightly off-square surface with its rounded edges that just felt right. The casual decision to use this painting for a mold started Tallman on a years-long investigation that makes up the body of work for this exhibition. Here we find him beginning at a not-so-simple point of departure and traveling at nearly an infinite number of directions at once. Using the mold of this particular painting, he creates a series of resin, plastic, or plaster casts. These are then used as singular objects, surfaces for painting as well as sites for investigations of a visual language.
Born in York, Pennsylvania, Tallman went to college at Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia and did his graduate studies at the University of Washington. Since then he has been included in a number of exhibitions nationally and internationally. His work was included in Non-Declarative Art at the Drawing Center in New York in the fall of 2007. He has also shown his work in Belgium, South Korea, the Netherlands, and Australia as well as nationally in New Jersey, Ohio, and Washington. He will be included in the upcoming exhibition on Tennessee Abstraction at the Cheekwood Museum in Nashville. John Tallman currently lives in Chattanooga, Tennessee where he is active in the local arts community there.
If you should have any questions please don’t hesitate to contact Gallery Director Hamlett Dobbins at Clough-Hanson Gallery (901) 843-3442, via email at dobbinsh@rhodes.edu.
Jpg information: “Tallman.jpg” is acrylic on plaster, 12x13”, 2008. Image courtesy the artist.
Muralist Jeffrey Zimmerman Lecture
Jeffrey Zimmerman, a muralist from Chicago will be presenting a talk on his work to the Memphis community at 7 pm in Blount Auditorium in Buckman Hall on the Rhodes Campus. Zimmerman is the artist chosen by the selection panel for the Rhodes-Hill Mural Project. A brief introduction of the mural project (located at 195 Madison Ave. and scheduled for completion in spring 2009) will be given at the beginning of this presentation by the mural team members.More images of Zimmerman's work can be found at www.jazim.com/murals.html
Tuesday, January 13, 2009
Niki Johnson's "Saving Face" at UrbanArt
Contact Person: John Weeden, 901.454.0474
Opening Reception: Friday, January 30th from 6-8 pm.
UrbanArt’s ‘Work in Progress’ presents Niki Johnson’s
Saving Face — an exploration of social networks and modern collectible friendship
UrbanArt is expanding its practice to include ‘Work in Progress’ — a series of month-long artist residencies providing a forum to develop innovative art making techniques that may be translated into public art projects. The program gives selected local artists the opportunity to use the storefront gallery space of UrbanArt on 2549 Broad Avenue as a demonstration studio for one month with a hosted closing reception.
The first artist in the series is Niki Johnson, a recent graduate of University of Memphis BFA Studio Arts program. On January 5th 2009, Johnson began Saving Face, an installation inspired by the 19th century invention of the wallet-sized portrait. The highly personalized calling cards led to the invention of trading cards and changed the way that individuals disperse their visual imprints. Facebook continues the practice of modern-day calling cards as well as emphasizing "collectible" friendships via the Internet.
Saving Face tests the depth of involvement of Johnson’s Facebook contacts by asking them to step of out of the popularity counter of networking sites to invest in a physical connection of friends via parcel post.
During the closing reception from 6-8 p.m. on Friday, January 30th, Johnson will display a multi-media installation revealing the results of her social experiment.
Local artists interested in submitting proposals to be considered for the ‘Works in Progress’ residency should contact UrbanArt for proposal guidelines and project parameters at: info@urbanartcommission.org.
The mission of the UrbanArt Commission (501c3) is to create a dynamic, vibrant, nurturing community through art and design. The UAC is funded in part by the City of Memphis, ArtsMemphis, Tennessee Arts Commission and the Hyde Foundation.
Opening Reception: Friday, January 30th from 6-8 pm.
UrbanArt’s ‘Work in Progress’ presents Niki Johnson’s
Saving Face — an exploration of social networks and modern collectible friendship
UrbanArt is expanding its practice to include ‘Work in Progress’ — a series of month-long artist residencies providing a forum to develop innovative art making techniques that may be translated into public art projects. The program gives selected local artists the opportunity to use the storefront gallery space of UrbanArt on 2549 Broad Avenue as a demonstration studio for one month with a hosted closing reception.
The first artist in the series is Niki Johnson, a recent graduate of University of Memphis BFA Studio Arts program. On January 5th 2009, Johnson began Saving Face, an installation inspired by the 19th century invention of the wallet-sized portrait. The highly personalized calling cards led to the invention of trading cards and changed the way that individuals disperse their visual imprints. Facebook continues the practice of modern-day calling cards as well as emphasizing "collectible" friendships via the Internet.
Saving Face tests the depth of involvement of Johnson’s Facebook contacts by asking them to step of out of the popularity counter of networking sites to invest in a physical connection of friends via parcel post.
During the closing reception from 6-8 p.m. on Friday, January 30th, Johnson will display a multi-media installation revealing the results of her social experiment.
Local artists interested in submitting proposals to be considered for the ‘Works in Progress’ residency should contact UrbanArt for proposal guidelines and project parameters at: info@urbanartcommission.org.
The mission of the UrbanArt Commission (501c3) is to create a dynamic, vibrant, nurturing community through art and design. The UAC is funded in part by the City of Memphis, ArtsMemphis, Tennessee Arts Commission and the Hyde Foundation.
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