Program to feature nationally recognized artists in painting, illustration and mixed media
Western Connecticut State University will present nationally recognized artists to discuss their works in the fields of painting, illustration and mixed media during the spring semester Master of Fine Arts lecture series continuing from January through April.
Each of the six lectures, sponsored by the WCSU Department of Art, will be in Room 144 of the Visual and Performing Arts Center on the university’s Westside campus, 43 Lake Ave. Extension in Danbury. Admission will be free and the public is invited.
The series will lead off at 11 a.m. on Monday, Jan. 26, with a lecture by painter and educator Stanley Lewis. Lewis, a longtime member of the Bowery Gallery in New York and art professor emeritus at American University, is currently represented by the Betty Cunningham Gallery in New York and teaches at the New York Studio School. He has participated in exhibitions in New York, Massachusetts and Pennsylvania and a major retrospective of his work held at the Katzen Arts Center in Washington, D.C. A graduate of the Yale School of Art, he has received numerous awards including the Altman Prize, the Henry Ward Ranger Purchase Award, and a Guggenheim Fellowship.
Lewis’ recent works have featured a “cut and assemble” process of creation in which he cuts materials, adds pieces and piles up layers to produce bas-relief surfaces. It is not unusual for Lewis to work for years on a given painting or drawing: “You have to learn what abstraction is in order to understand what painting is,” he observed.
In his review for the online magazine Artcritical of Lewis’s exhibition in fall 2014 at the Betty Cunningham Gallery, David Carbone wrote that Lewis’s paintings and drawings “carry a real one-two punch. Here are deliberately banal subjects – backyards, suburban scenes, calendar views of Lake Chautauqua – transformed by a brilliant but tortured way of realizing a painterly image that can yield work of rare satisfaction and ambition. The fascination he arouses comes partially from an almost irreconcilable tension between working directly from observation, with exacting attention to small forms, and an almost sculptural process that builds a work with obsessively dense materiality.
“We are invited to move back and forth from the world depicted to the traces of his process,” Carbone added. “Ultimately, Lewis’s sucker punch is to shift our attention from quotidian views to the meditative adventure of what painting can be.”
Other lectures in the spring semester series will feature artists working in areas ranging from book illustration and drawing to mixed media collage. Presentations will include:
- Wednesday, Feb. 11, 11 a.m.: Illustrator Jerry Pinkney will discuss his celebrated career spanning nearly half a century in children’s literature. Pinkney’s illustrations for works by contemporary and classical children’s books have earned five Coretta Scott King Awards, four New York Times Best Illustrated Awards, Society of Illustrators gold and silver medals, the Boston Globe Horn Book Award, and selection as the 1998 nominee for the international Hans Christian Andersen Award. He won the 2010 Caldecott Medal for U.S. picture book illustration for “The Lion and the Mouse,” which he also wrote. Founder of the Jerry Pinkney Studio, his work celebrates multicultural diversity and the world of the imagination, and has been shown worldwide in more than 30 solo and 100 group exhibitions: “I have illustrated more than 100 children’s books, and my wish for each one is that all ages will find something that touches them in some way,” he said.
- Monday, Feb. 23, 11 a.m.: Artist Andrea Sulzer will provide an overview of her wide-ranging explorations in drawing, collage and mixed media. Sulzer, who lives and works in Maine, has staged 13 solo exhibitions and participated in 17 group shows since 2000 in the northeastern United States as well as Germany, the United Kingdom, Japan and China. Recipient of a Master of Fine Arts from the Glasgow School of Art, she has received grants from the Pollock Krasner and Ludwig Vogelstein foundations as well as the Good Idea Grant from the Maine Arts Commission. In her artist’s statement, Sulzer noted that she typically works “on and with paper: drawings where the medium sits on the surface; drawings using the thinnest of papers, so that the ink penetrates and alters the paper; woodblock prints, adding layer after layer of ink until the paper can’t take any more; and three-dimensional paper forms.” In a review for Maine magazine, Deborah Weisgall wrote that Sulzer’s mixed-media collage works “combine knowledge of the natural world with a passion for close observation."
- Monday, March 9, 10:30 a.m.: WCSU Adjunct Professor of Art Sabrina Marques will offer perspectives on her paintings, which have been exhibited at venues throughout Connecticut as well as New York City. Recipient of a Master of Fine Arts from the Yale School of Art, Marques’ 2007 solo exhibition, “Mi Patria Querida (My Beloved Homeland),” in Hartford featured paintings exploring her family heritage as the daughter of a Cuban exile. The Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art included her works in its Radius Program group exhibition. Her professional recognitions include the Emerging Artist Award from Real Art Ways in Hartford and the Vermont Studio Center Fellowship. Marques has taught drawing as a member of the Western faculty since 2011. She previously served as art director at the Neighborhood Music School in New Haven, and has extensive experience as an instructor and visiting artist at institutions including the University of Connecticut, Quinnipiac University, Mitchell College, Whittier College and Connecticut College.
- Wednesday, April 8, 11 a.m.: New York artist Judy Glantzman will discuss her works in painting, drawing and sculpture, which have earned acclaim in exhibitions across the United States and Europe during the past four decades. A graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design, Glantzman debuted on the New York arts scene with East Village shows in the 1980s, and was represented early in her career by Gracie Mansion Gallery, Blum Helman Gallery and Hirschl and Adler Modern. She was featured in 2008 in a 30-year retrospective exhibition organized by the Dactyl Foundation in New York, as well as a 2013 show of works inspired by Picasso’s “Guernica” at Betty Cunningham Gallery, which has represented her since 2006. “All of my work is like a flashlight on the dark underbelly that exists under the surface of polite society,” she wrote in her artist’s notes. “My work always had the macabre, and I wanted to marinate in my natural impulse, no holds barred.” Glantzman has been honored as the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and grants from Anonymous Was a Woman, the Pollock Krasner Foundation and the New York Foundation for the Arts. Her works are held in many public and private collections including the Whitney Museum of American Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Tampa Museum of Art, the Phoenix Art Museum and the Frye Art Museum. Glantzman also is a veteran art educator whose most recent faculty positions include the Maryland Institute College of Art and the New York Studio School.
- Monday, April 20, 11 a.m.: Art writer, historian and curator Dr. Jennifer Samet and gallerist Steven Harvey will offer their perspectives on artists and the contemporary art scene in the concluding presentation of the series. Harvey is the founder and Samet is co-director of Steven Harvey Fine Arts Projects, one of the pioneering galleries on the Lower East Side in Manhattan when it opened in 2007. The gallery has presented intimate exhibitions of works by contemporary artists, including a recent group show of “Nine Self-Portraits” by artists including Leland Bell, Lois Dodd, Gregory Gillespie and Paul Resika. Harvey has more than 25 years’ experience as an art dealer, curator, writer and adviser to collectors, and his paintings have been exhibited at the Schlesinger Gallery. Samet, who earned a Ph.D. in art history from the City University of New York (CUNY), has curated historical exhibitions on the Jane Street Gallery and the New York Studio School as well as thematic shows such as “Dark Matters,” “Rough Cut” and “Repetitive Motion.” She has written extensively about postwar and contemporary painting for publications including Master Drawings, ArtNet Magazine, Artcritical and The New York Sun, and has shared the creative insights of artists interviewed for her online column, “Beer with a Painter.” Samet also has taught art history at CUNY and is in an adjunct professor of art at the Borough of Manhattan Community College.
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