Made in U.S.A. takes a new look at American art of the 1950s and 1960s and shows us how American it was. This is a provocative study of those artists who appropriated everyday images form the world of mass media and suburban living and forced their viewers into a sometimes witty, sometimes bittersweet, confrontation with the realities of living in late twentieth-century America.
Exhibition catalogue for Strategic Ambiguity: The Obscure, Nebulous, and Vague in Symbolist Prints, December 6, 2012 to March 1, 2013 at the La Salle University Art Museum. The prints in this exhibition demonstrate how the Symbolist fascination with ambiguity seen in their choices of subject matter (i.e. half-human, half-animal hybrids such as harpies and sphinxes, gender ambiguity and androgyny) extended to formal strategies of representation that obscure form as well as content. This exhibition places Symbolist art in the context of Modernism by focusing on the ways in which artists experimented with print media and explored technical means of suggesting formal ambiguity (i.e. flattening, abstracting, obscuring) both to better match form and content and to push the boundaries of figurative art. The exhibition features work by artists Odilon Redon, Jan Toorop, Paul Gauguin, Maurice Denis, Édouard Vuillard, Félix Vallotton, Henri Ibels, Pierre Bonnard, Félix Buhot, Pierre Roche, Henri Martin, Armand Point, Maurice Dumont, Jeanne Jacquemin, Georges de Feure,François-Marius Valère Bernard, Carlos Schwabe and others. Print techniques represented in this survey range from lithography and etching to gypsography. The exhibition catalogue features essays by the curator and La Salle faculty from the disciplines of art history and philosophy.
The seven essays included in this volume move beyond the famed Ashcan School to recover the lesser known work of Robert Henri's women students. The contributors, who include well-known scholars of art history, American studies, and cultural studies demonstrate how these women participated in the "modernizing" of women's roles during this era.
Jack Shadbot was inspired in his formative years by hi contact with Emily Carr and with her brooding works portraying the remnants of Indian villages against the overwhelming wilderness. He made sketches of Indian artifacts and the Cowichan Reserve in the 1930s, but it was only after World War II that elements of Indian art began tooshow up in his style. Marjoria Halpin finds in the changes in the way Indian forms occur in Shadbolt’s paintings an appropriate expression of the changing attitudes of British Columbians to native society and the political will the native people now manifest. As she demonstrates, the place of Indian motifs in Shadbolt’s painting can be broadly correlated with the cultural quickening of Indian society in recent years. From the late 1940s until his 1969 retrospective, Shadbolt chiefly used details form Indian sculptures as elements in highly designed watercolours. Subsequently, they became part of more generalized primitives, combining with elements of tribal art of the Southwestern United States and Melanesia. But in the 1980s, the coastal artifacts have become wholly integrated yet autonomous forms in the paintings. Though Jack Shadbolt has never been an ideological artist, he recognizes that his recent works make direct political statements. But he believes his expression of his feelings must continue to be in poetic rather than literal terms. Shadbolt’s paintings reveal his emotional sympathy with Kwagiutl, Haida, and Tlingig forms and his deep response to the Indians’ spiritual and historic preseence in the British Columbia environment. Marjorie Halpin adds an informative and intriguing commentary to the growing body of critical literature on Jack Shadbolt and the varous movements of which he has been a part. Significantly too, she stresse sthe commonality between Canadian native and non-native artists in addressing universal artistic concerns.
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