Past Exhibitions, 2010

Lawrence Photo Alliance Exhibit

December 3 - 23
Gallery Talk, Monday December, 13th at 7pm

• Chuck Wehner
• Bruce Sturm
• Brenda Gadd
• James L Kramer
• Paul Herpich
• Henry Russell
• Leslie Carson Wolfe
• Rob Young
• Baiba Z. Sedriks
• Marciana Vequist
• Howard Freedman
• Wayne Rhodus
• Bill Dentler
• Michelle Wade
• Mary Tuven
• Angelia Perkins
• Dick Herpich
• Ken Ratzlaff
• Bill Bowerman
• Roger Spohn
• Susan Dunnaway
• Shakura Jackson
• Hobart Jackson
• Robin Loomas
• Bradford K Levy
• Alex Hawley
• Laura Dalrymple
• John Wysocki
• Sue Suhler

Holiday Show

December 3 - 23
Reception December 3, 7-9pm

Color Exploration With the Masters’
Student Show Exhibition, December 2010

December 3 - 23
Reception December 3, 7-9pm

This yearly class with Joan Parker emphasizes painting from life. Previous years have focused on composition, value scales, hard and soft edges, cast shadows and form shadows, brushwork, and color mixing (tint, tone and shade). With many students from previous years returning, we chose to add an extra dimension in 2010 by studying a current and a historically considered master artist with each subject/assignment.

Three June classes focused on both visual and tactile texture, representing different surfaces and creating textures with brush strokes and layers of paint. Our master artist was Richard Schmid –painter, and Joshua Been – our younger plein air painter, both currently living in Colorado. Schmid finds similarities in the relationship between values and edges, that they reciprocate and feed each other the same way that value and color interact.

The end of June and beginning of July focused on color, featuring Spanish master painter Joaquin Sorolla (1863 – 1923) and John Asaro –painter, a current resident of California. We looked at how Sorolla and Asaro used color to define light and shadow through tetrad color relationships (two sets of complements in a four-color combination. Example: blue and orange with red and green). We also explored the use of a key color (a predominant color in a painting’s color scheme).

July and August classes continued with Wayne Thiebaud 1923 – 2003 as our guide. We explored complementary color composition (two opposite colors on the wheel. An example being blue-violet and yellow-orange). Also split complementary (using any color with the two colors either side of the complement (Example: blue-violet with orange and yellow). Warm and cool, intensity of chrome, and color saturation theory and techniques were also explored.

“I am always impressed by how much the students know and how quickly their work evolves in a short amount of time. Their questions make me consider my own choices and help me articulate and refine my methodology.” Joan Parker Teacher/Painter

The show is the culmination of in classroom studio work and homework completed for the summer of 2010. We hope you enjoy what these artists have created.

Body Awareness

Curated by Ben Ahlvers
Reception October 15, 7-9pm

Participating artists

• Tom Bartel
• Stephanie Lanter
• Benjie Heu
• Lisa Marie Barber

Orton International ConeBox Show

October 15, 2010 - November 23, 2010

The International ConeBox Show reaches every part of the world. The 287 pieces submitted for the 2010 show came from 11 countries, including 40 USA states and 3 Canadian provinces.

The 147 pieces selected for the show were chosen for creativity, humor, imagination, craftsmanship and aesthetic excellence in combination with the artist’s knowledge of the clay medium. It is often heard that making ceramic art to fit the 3x3x6 inch dimension of the Orton Cone Box and still have work with a presence is a challenge.

Since 1994, Inge G. Balch, Professor of Art at Baker University in Baldwin City Kansas, has been the curator of the show and the show became international. The ConeBox Show is generously supported by The Edward Orton Jr. Ceramic Foundation.

The high quality of the show is maintained by inviting national and international jurors, who are recognized in the field of ceramics, to jury the show. Jurors for the 2010 ConeBox Show were Peter Callas, Malcolm Davis and Inge G. Balch. Past jurors have represented USA, Australia, England, Japan, Cuba and Denmark.

During the nine bi-annual shows from 1994-2010, artists from 36 countries, all fifty USA states, Puerto Rico, Washington DC, eight Canadian provinces and US army personnel stationed in Germany have been part of the exhibition. The artists have made 3680 entries resulting in 6050 pieces of art work.

The ConeBox Show was started by Bill Bracker in 1975, while teaching at Perdue University, as a way to encourage and promote creativity and excellence in the ceramics art. The standard Orton Cone Box, 3x3x6 inches, was chosen as the size limitation for the pieces in the show. The show continued in 1977 and 1979 but lay dormant from 1979 to 1994.

Inge G. Balch

Cups: A National Invitational Ceramics Exhibition

October 15 – November 23
Curated by Ben Ahlvers

Participants

• Linda Christianson
• Mark Burns
• Julia Galloway
• Matt Long
• Kristin Kieffer
• Sarah Gross
• Ted Adler
• Pete Pinnell
• Robert Brisco
• Russ Wrankle
• Ben Bates
• Rick Dunn
• Julia Galloway
• Brad Schwieger
• Ted Neal
• Jason Bige Burnett
• Mikey Walsh
• Deborah Schwartzkopf
• Brenda Lichman
• Martha Grover
• Victoria Christen
• Chris Gustin
• Steven Roberts
• Kip O’Krongly
• Joe Davis
• Kristin Pavelka

Jennifer Jarnot

Reconstructing the Paint-By-Number
August 27 - October 1, 2010
Reception August 27. 5-8pm FINAL FRIDAYS.

Encouraging Kindheartedness

Bio

Jennifer Jarnot is a professional artist living and working In Lawrence, Kansas. She received her undergraduate degree from SUNY at Fredonia (Magna Cum Laude) and her MFA in painting and drawing from the University of Colorado at Boulder.

Since moving to Lawrence, Kansas a little over three years ago, she has been teaching (since 2008) painting, drawing, visual language, and digital media at nearby Baker University. Last year, she also directed Baker’s Holt-Russell Gallery, and beginning this fall, she has been appointed to a full-time faculty position.

In 2010. Ms. Jarnot produced IN TRANSITION, a splendid photo book that features some of her current paintings as well as an explication of her painting process and her photographic, image source material. The book is available by special order at jennjarnot.com.

JENNIFER JARNOT
PAINT-BY-NUMBER PAINTINGS 2010

My recent paintings take their cue from my fascination for the nostalgia of popular culture, particularly those items that were influential, i.e., the stuff of one’s childhood, toys, books, and games. Fascinating to me is the fact that these items were largely stand-ins for the “real world”; houses, automobiles, people, animals, etc, thereby allowing me to create a narrative that is culturally relevant using images that appear, at least on the surface, to be more comforting, accessible, and less threatening.

With this memorabilia as my guide, I offer the viewer a chance to visually enter a space that is quite similar to the typical second hand store, overloaded with objects, novelties, and curiosities. Through my paintings, the viewer can relive and return to a time when learning was largely experiential and not imposed, rekindle a variety of bits and pieces of memories, and perhaps create a engaged narrative through the re-introduction of objects from a collective and familiar past. My overall intention is to simply ask the viewer to be self-reflective, to reconsider feelings or conversations they may have forgotten, places they may have been or would like to go, and material collections that are now lost or allegedly devoid of symbolism.

Stylistically, the work borrows heavily from paint-by-number paintings. The paint-by-number style reduces and abstracts the image down to essential shapes and colors, ridding the work of the excessive virtuosity of traditional rendering while still conveying an overall pictorial sense of what is depicted. I am fascinated by the utter simplicity of form and color as well as the economy of means of this particular style. The crisply delineated shapes also facilitate the transition of stacked, overlapping, or even incomplete images as an overall surface further enhancing the patterned, almost quilt-like nature of the work.

Leisure time was a new concept during the 1950’s and paint-by-number was a wildly popular hobby craze that made the successful creation of a painting available to everyone. With the purchase of an inexpensive painting kit, one did not have to worry about composition, subject matter, or the analysis of form, and success was based solely on mechanical performance or one’s ability to “stay-within-the lines.” The majority of the subject matter consisted of pets, flowers, portraits, and landscapes, and the kits contained the muted colors so popular at the time.

Needless to say, paint-by-number masterpieces were never revered, valued or collected, and have now become an ever-prominent feature of second hand stores. While walking through a flea market one afternoon, and stumbling upon a paint-by-number painting of a boy and a rabbit, it occurred to me that the best manner in which to present the imagery that fascinated me most was to borrow a style from the same era as the images I collect.

Rita Blitt Exhibit Opens September 10, 2010

Artist Explores Themes of Joy, Pain in Variety of Media

The Lawrence Arts Center is pleased to announce its latest Gallery exhibition, Courage to Hope...While Dancing: Drawings, Paintings and Sculptures by Rita Blitt. In this exhibit, Blitt expresses her deep passions of both pain and joy through a variety of media. Many pieces in this exhibit are in response to human suffering due to war and injustices; contrasting these works is a series of pieces that celebrate life through music, dance and nature.

Painter, sculptor, and filmmaker Rita Blitt has created art all of her life. She won scholarships to the Kansas City Art Institute as a child and returned there for further studies after attending the University of Illinois and graduating from the University of Kansas City, now a part of the University of Missouri. Her first New York exhibition was in 1969.

Blitt’s sculptures, up to sixty feet in height, have been permanently installed and exhibited (along with her drawings and paintings) in museums, galleries and public places in Australia, Germany, Italy, Israel, Japan, Singapore, Taiwan, Uganda and the United States. Her sculpture Sensuously Stacked Steel was a prize winner in the 2005 Florence Biennale. Her six-minute documentary collaboration with David Parsons and the Parsons Dance Company, Caught in Paint, has won many awards and has been invited to over 130 film festivals, including Cannes in 2008. Blitt has studios in Emeryville, California, Aspen, Colorado and Leawood, Kansas.

Courage to Hope...While Dancing: Drawings, Paintings and Sculptures by Rita Blitt opens Friday, September 10 with a reception Friday, September 24 from 5-8pm in conjunction with the Downtown Lawrence Arts District’s Final Fridays events. Blitt will give an artist’s talk during the reception beginning at 7pm. The exhibit runs through Saturday, October 9.

Stan Herd & Simon Cordova

August 27 - September 26, 2010 Reception: August 27, 5-8pm

Stan Herd

On the set of the film earthwork

Stan Herd will exhibit photos, original paintings, and sketches of his Countryside piece, which is featured in the film earthwork. Simon Cordova will be showing photographs taken on the set of the film earthwork.

“Chuck Norris”. By Alison Filley

“POP”.
A group exhibition.

Opening July 23 through August 20, 2010
(extended to August 29)
Reception: July 23, 7-9pm

Taking inspiration from popular culture, artists use a variety of mediums to express their personal visions. This exhibit explores a range of approaches to art making, especially ideas of popular culture and its influences. The use of found objects or recycled imagery which in their original context fit into the everyday are often used by artists to create a new conversation about current and past influences on culture. The participating artists in this exhibition represent several generations, and, therefore, varying perspectives on popular culture interact in the gallery.

Artists:

• Ann Dean
• Kendra Marable
• Archie Gobber
• Dan Anderson
• Kristin Moreland
• Jamie Warren
• Alison Filley
• Jeff Eaton
• Jeremy Rockwell
• Joelle Ford

“Futilitarian”

A fibers installation
by Danielle Yakle

Opening July 23 – through August 20, 2010
Reception: July 23, 7-9pm

Danielle is a recent graduate from the University of Kansas, receiving a Master of Fine Arts in Textiles/Fibers

Herbert Friedson Exhibit Opens August 13, 2010
Retrospective Show Examines 60 Years of Enameling

Friedson's work has been shown in more than 120 regional, national and international exhibitions including those at the Museum of Contemporary Crafts and the Aaron Faber Gallery in New York; the Cleveland Museum of Art; the Long Beach Museum of Art, Nelson Gallery/Atkins Museum and the Biennale Internationale de Limoges in France.

60 Years of Enameling: a Retrospective is Friedson’s first solo show at the Lawrence Arts Center, where he has taught enameling for three years. The exhibition opens Friday, August 13 with a reception from 7-9pm and runs through Saturday, September 4. Friedson will give a public talk about his art on Monday, August 30 at 7pm at the Arts Center.

Website

“Art Clips”

Works by Joelle Ford

July 23 through August 7, 2010

This show will include 50 collages comprised of vintage clippings and original drawings by Joelle Ford.

“Animalia”
group exhibition

Still from “Treebeasties 1” by Barry Anderson

• June 18 – July 17
• Reception: June 18. 7-9PM
• Lawrence Arts Center Galleries

Artists:

• Angie Pickman
• Barry Anderson
• Ilena Finnochi
• Marty Olson
• Eric Abraham
• Connie Ehrlich
• Tyler Coey
• Davin Watne

Sarah Gross
“The Street Where You Live”

2009-10 Lawrence Arts Center Artist-in-Residence.
June 18 – July 17
Reception: June 18. 7-9PM
Gallery talk: June 24. 7PM
Lawrence Arts Center Gallery

Sarah was recently featured in Ceramics Monthly as a 2010 Emerging Artist.

Statement

I am fascinated with the duality of the screen; it simultaneously conceals and reveals, protects and tantalizes. It divides space and unites it. My exploration is rooted in the institution of veiling in Islamic society. I draw connections to the relationship of the sexes in the West as well as the East. I hope to reveal the intersection of eroticism, the sacred, containment, and desire.

The title “The Street Where You Live” alludes in part to a song from “My Fair Lady” that to me is remarkable for its romanticism and underlying darkness. We each view the world through the veil of our fantasies, which are shaped by our culture, background, and personal experience. The street acting simultaneously as divider and connector, the two-way street, are ideas that are embodied by the screen. The screen in this installation is a physical manifestation of the divide between us.

A screen blurs the boundary between public and private, transforming the space, person, or object on the other side. Tension is heightened through separation and visibility. Objects and space become eroticized. By highlighting the fragility and permeability of dividers I question our often self-imposed restrictions of openness, protection and vulnerability. I invite you to reexamine ideas of what is familiar and what is foreign, beginning perhaps, on the street where you live.

www.sarahgrossceramics.com

“Superficial”

A solo exhibition by Alison Filley
2009-10 Artist-in-Residence, Printmaking.

Artist Statement:

Popular culture has become an integral part of our contemporary society as images of celebrities flood all aspects of mass media. Their photos and their lives find their way into headline news, magazines, tabloids, websites, blogs, and everyday conversations. This ubiquity of celebrity culture fascinates me. I am particularly interested in the concept of a celebrity’s facade. The facade of the celebrity is a person’s celebrity image created through marketing, PR, television and film that we as an active participant in a consumer culture are bombarded with on a daily basis. The facade is an artificial glamorized identity that is unavoidably intertwined with an individual celebrity’s personal identity. I am questioning how this facade and image of a celebrity functions. What does the glorification of their façade do and what happens when it is deconstructed and manipulated. What part of a person’s appearance makes them a celebrity and identifies them as a particular celebrity? It is the formation and dissemination of this facade through numerous reproductions of an individual’s image that ultimately leads to their status in celebrity culture.

Currently I am exploring the manipulation of celebrity images chosen after extensive research. Through various processes of digital editing, chemical deletion, painting and digital printing I am creating larger than life altered images of the celebrity. With the addition of craft materials such as glitter, flocking, embossing powder, and foil stamping I am referencing celebrity merchandising and also giving the work a more physical and tactile dimension.

Alison will talk about her exhibition at the Lawrence Arts Center May 25, 7pm. (free)

www.alisonfilley.com

“Character Building, Building Character”

This collection of artists are exploring the idea of identity and elements that may inform it. These explorations range from personal narratives to broader concerns of the human condition. The exhibit will have pieces in a wide range of mediums and approaches to art making.

Participating artists:

• Dave Van Hee
• Amy Lenharth
• Paul Hotvedt
• Misty Gamble
• Michael Krueger
• Paul Flinders
• Deb Stavin
• Christa Dalien

"Kansas City" by John Ferry

This group exhibition is designed to explore many medium & approaches to art making, all under the umbrella of a theme, place. Such a broad theme provides for engaging, enriching and challenging responses by these artists.

Place - an area set aside for a particular purpose.
Place - an abstract mental location.
Place - home, landscape, standing, situation, mapping, reservation, location, inhabit, territory, space, room, zone, position.

View the show online

"Listening for a Murmer" by Norman Akers

Past, present or future sense on the idea of place as it relates to you personally or our local/global community might feed into your conceptualization of place. Various styles, doctrines, ideas, in both process and concept will culminate for a powerful experience for viewers.

Participating Artists:

• Norman Akers
• Dylan Beck
• Daniel Coburn
• Rick Dunn
• John Ferry
• Heather Smith Jones
• Ke-Sook Lee
• Chris Mateer
• Armin Mühsam
• Matt Needham
• Laura Nugent
• Mike Sinclair
• Celia Smith
• David Vertacnik
• Yuri Zupancic

Unwrapping the Past
A solo exhibition by Lynda Andrus

Artist Statement:

"My pieces are created from vintage fabrics and thrift store finds. The materials express subtle tactile qualities of past experiences and make everyday objects take on a sense of the sacred. Nostalgic sentiments emanate from textures of worn cloth, discarded candy wrappers, dishes, toys, and other found objects from the home. These materials become precious links with those who have handled them."

Artists website: lyndaandrus.com

LJWorld Story

To and From
A solo exhibition by Shawn Bitters