UB ANDERSON GALLERY

Upcoming:

Opening Reception
Thursday, April 25, 2008
7 – 9 pm

CONTINUUM: The MacKrell Collage Archive Project by Gerald Mead

For over 50 years, the late WNY artist Marie MacKrell assembled and categorized over 4,000 items of print ephemera. This exhibition consists of a highly structured presentation, authentication, classification and documentation of her idiosyncratic collage archive and a site-specific installation intended to illustrate the depth and range of the voluminous material it contains.

A COLLAGE SURVEY: COLLECTED WORKS
Curated by Gerald Mead

This exhibition of collage works drawn from public and private collections in Western New York was organized as a companion exhibition for CONTINUUM: The MacKrell Collage Archive Project by Gerald Mead. It briefly surveys various techniques and approaches that artists working in this media have used from the 1960's to the present, the period over which the MacKrell Collage Archive was assembled. These works, many of which combine paper and printed imagery with other media such as paint, range from the highly detailed compositions of longtime UB art professor, the late Seymour Drumlevitch, to the vibrant gestural forms of Charles Clough, an UB alumnus and one of the founders of Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center. Considering scale, John Hultberg's Giant Collage, spanning over eight feet, and Lois Lane's Untitled #184, at nearly six feet wide, belie the common perception that collage is essentially a diminutive art form. Also included in the exhibition are collage works by Romare Bearden, Nancy Belfer, Larry Bell and Andrew Topolski.

Gerald Mead is a collage/assemblage artist who teaches at Buffalo State College, the University at Buffalo and Chautauqua Institution. His work is in the collections of the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, George Eastman House/International Museum of Film and Photography, Castellani Art Museum, and Rochester Institute of Technology among others, and has been included in exhibitions throughout the U.S. and in Australia, Great Britain and Poland. Gerald's artwork is also published in two photography textbooks and he has received grants from the New York Foundation of the Arts and the New York State Council on the Arts. He is currently a surveyor for the American Association of Museums, an appointed member of the Buffalo Arts Commission, and serves on the boards of several arts organizations in the region.

Now on view at UB Anderson Gallery through April 6, 2008:

Sam Francis: Black and White
Sam Francis (1923-1994) is known for his colorful paintings and prints exploding with splashes, drips, and organic forms.  The current exhibition at the UB Anderson Gallery focuses on his overshadowed black-and-white lithographs that are the basis for and sometimes the end product of many of his colorful prints. Lithography was the first print technique that Francis embraced in his prolific artistic career. In 1970, Francis opened the Litho Shop in Santa Monica, California. The Litho Shop was a monumental endeavor, one that showed Francis’s commitment to printmaking that few painters had at that time. A student of Zen Buddhism, Francis continuously presented his audiences with opposites like the Yin and Yang, or the black and white. Francis believed that proofing first in black would reveal the graphic impact of the image, therefore all of his color lithographs evolved from a black-inked proof.  In 1973, Francis began to create black versions of his color prints, a process that would bring his prints full circle.  In these prints, the blacks appear warm and cool through the mixing of various colors like green, brown, and purple, adding depth and separation. Francis’s lithographs transcend the media in such a way as to fool the viewer.  While they might seem spontaneous and immediate, they are actually the product of a labor-intensive process that Francis makes seem effortless. 

Joseph Norman:  Der Tiergarten Suite, 1999
UB Anderson Gallery, First Floor

For over two decades, Joseph Norman has worked to articulate through the mediums of painting and printmaking his own aesthetic response as an African American artist living in the twenty-first century. Der Tiergarten Suite consists of twenty-one lithographs created from the artist’s memory of Tiergarten Park in Berlin, Germany where he spent much of his time in the 1990s.  The lithographs focus on twisted and tangled tree trunks that mimic human form and emotion.  Norman emphasizes the varieties and differences among the trees in color, pattern and texture through black-and-white lithography. 

Der Tiergarten Suite was a generous gift of UB alumnus Joseph A. Chazan, M.D. ’60 & B.S. ’56, and his wife Helene S. Chazan in 2000.

A Selection of Graphic Works from the Collection
Selected Prints from the Permanent Collection showcases American artists Sam Francis, Mark Tobey, James Brooks, Claire Falkenstein, Shiro Ikegawa, Joan Mitchell, John Hultberg, Elaine Breiger, and Bruce Lowney; Mexican artist Francisco Toledo; Spanish artist Antoni Tapies; and Dutch artist Karel Appel.  The thirty prints featured in this exhibition span the 1960s and 70s and represent the UB Anderson Gallery’s commitment to contemporary art. 

UB ART GALLERY

Upcoming:

Opening reception
Thursday, April 17, 2008
Second-Floor Gallery
5 to 7 pm

(In)visible Cities, a exhibition of architectural projects by five students from UB’s School of Architecture and Urban Planning in Second Floor Gallery: 4/17/08-5/1708

Italo Calvino’s novel, The Invisible Cities, was a vehicle to generate diverse readings of contemporary cities and ideas about the multifaceted aspects of future cities. The students began examining present-day urban conditions that result in new forms of interconnected public spaces and systems, generated by people in their everyday use of networked media and other activities, as well as in the realms of public art, architecture, and urban form. Each project develops strategies and unique ways in which structures and infrastructures of the urban fabric may interweave.

Shadi Nazarian and Douglas Repetto
February 28 through May 17, 2008

Introversions, a Lightwell Project by Shadi Nazarian: 2/28/08 – 5/17/08.
Nazarian frames and choreographs an architectural experience as audiences are drawn toward a responsive minimalist structure, seemingly hovering in midair. Working in the fertile intersections of art, architecture, and emergent technology, she employs switchable Liquid crystal layered privacy glass to explore cognition and think about the ways in which we navigate the environment we live in. In the commercial sector, privacy glass has been used primarily for partitions, display cases, bank screens, and as enclosures for conference rooms, and provocatively, in dressing rooms and bathrooms. Presented in an academic and artistic context, Introversions seeks to discover how new materials such as privacy glass fundamentally alter spatial relationships and human perception. Nazarian isolates and enhances disorienting moments inherent to urban conditions that are triggered by reflections and other strange sights seen out of the corner of the eye by combining minimalist sculpture and architecture to generate uncanny optical effects.

Nazarian moved to New York City in 1989 to join I.M. Pei & Partners as an architectural designer, and then to Ithaca, NY to teach at Cornell University (1991-92, and 1999-2002). She has been teaching at the State University of New York at Buffalo in the School of Architecture and Urban Planning since 1994.

The production of Introversions is sponsored in part, by a generous grant from the New York State Council on the Arts Individual Artists Program (Film, Media and New Technology Production Category), New York Foundation for the Arts Special Opportunity Stipends, as well as the support of CBO Glass, KNEMA LLC, Polytronix Inc. and SMG HARSON. Fabrication by factoryny.

Douglas Repetto: 2/28/08 – 5/17/08.
Douglas Repetto’s two installations in the first floor gallery revel in madcap interactivity and DIY technologies. action at a distance is a bewitching tangle of motors and pulleys, zigzags of rope, an otter theater, jangling bells, fireflies, switches, breath activators, and rough steel. Small gestures made by visitors are amplified and transmitted via motors and rope, repurposed as the drivers of small dramas tucked into corners and nooks. everything, all at once is a sudden condensation of sound and reflections: a dense net of hundreds of bells, mirrors, motors, lights, and vibrations envelop the viewer. These immersive performance and listening experiences attest to how the visual arts are being revolutionized by new technologies such as sensors and interactive performance systems.

Repetto is an artist and teacher whose varied interests exemplify the interdisciplinary nature of contemporary art production today. His work, which includes sculpture, installation, performance, recordings, and software, is presented internationally. He is the founder of a number of art/community-oriented groups including dorkbot: people doing strange things with electricity, ArtBots: The Robot Talent Show, organism: making art with living systems, and the music-dsp mailing list and website. Repetto is Director of Research at the Columbia University Computer Music Center and lives in New York City.