Iva Gueorguieva: Reinvigorating Prints

After Melville and Whitman: Contemporary Responses to the Civil War

L: Matt Kish, #112: "The third mate was Flask...," 12/23/2009, acrylic paint, ink and marker on found paper, 10" x 8-1/2". Courtesy The Melville Society. R: Doug Paisley, Chapter XXXII: Showing that the age of magic and magicians is not yet over, 2012, oil and acrylic on plywood, 24" x 16". Courtesy of the artist.

Herman Melville and Walt Whitman both hold a place in the canon of American literature. Their works greatly inspired artists past and present. Their subjects were not always directly about the Civil War, but the upheaval within their writing style has been associated with the national unease that tore apart the nation and turned "brother against brother."

This concept was also explored in the exhibition The Civil War and American Art at the Smithsonian American Art Museum (SAAM), November 16, 2012 - April 28, 2013. Visual artists, such as Winslow Homer, Eastman Johnson, Frederic Church, and Sanford Gifford, depict scenes of soldiers at camp and snipers taking aim, but they also depict genre scenes of runaway and former slaves, dark storm clouds approaching, and ships stuck in ice. Altogether these images are a "portrait of war," just as Moby Dick and Whitman's poetry depicts this concept - an upheaval that grips an entire populace.

Matt Kish and Douglas Paisley have both created contemporary visual pieces based on Melville's works, Moby Dick and The Confidence-Man, respectively. We present their works alongside a number of photographs from the GW Permanent Collection. These images from the 19th century, depicting the Capitol Building, train stations for the B&O and Potomac Railways, and bridges both extant and long gone, are paired with excerpts from Whitman's journals and letters to display his experience. Whitman originally came to Washington, DC to look for his brother, a soldier in the Union army, but ended up staying until 1873.

A group of high school students from Anacostia High School, SEED Public Charter School, and School Without Walls, led by poet Holly Bass, toured the SAAM exhibition and from that visit, wrote poems that described their own portrait of war. Their poems are placed alongside the visual works to give a contemporary response to the Civil War.

Littoral: John Hubbard in Context

Turned and Burnt: Pre-Columbian Artifacts and Wood-turned Vessels

To honor the recent transfer of the Jane and Arthur Mason collection of wood-turned art from the Gelman Library to GW's Luther W. Brady Art Gallery we present this exhibit in the cases in the second floor lobby outside the Gallery. In addition to the pieces shown before, the Masons will lend two additional works to fit the theme, one to be gifted to GW's collection; and several works lent by regional artists in cooperation with area woodturning associations. The wood-turned works will be paired with Pre-Columbian ceramics from the GW Permanent Collection to examine the conceptual and aesthetic connections and unique craftsmanship of both.

Apocalypse or Awakening? The Maya were a religious society that largely looked to the cosmos for interpretation by its priestly class. A misconception has sprung up that the imminent cycle change in the Maya calendar is apocalyptic. In fact, a group of Maya leaders declared, "The mission is to return to our Mother Earth...to begin a new B'aqtun that was proclaimed by our ancestors, a new era in which the values of love, solidarity, brotherhood, loyalty, self-respect, and respect for others and all humanity can flourish."

The Mayan works show the mark of the reduction firing and hand-building as they did not use the potter's wheel. The use of the potter's wheel in the Americas did not appear until the arrival of the Spanish. A major motif in some ceramics is a "world tree" design from Mayan mythology that is modeled after the thorns on the trunk of young ceiba trees, a major motif. These connect to our current concerns for sustainability of natural resources and the natural beauty of wood. Phil F. Brown, one of the artists, cuts most of his wood from storm-fallen trees or ones displaced by construction. In describing his work, artist Binh Pho said, "I love to bring the beauty of nature and hand-creation techniques together to create character and soul in a piece." Joining with us to celebrate the beauty of nature, our exhibition is co-sponsored by The GW Office of Sustainability.

Clarice Smith: Captured Moments

George Washington University's Luther W. Brady Art Gallery opens its spring season with Clarice Smith: Captured Moments. Clarice Smith captures the essence of a place, individuality of a subject and mood of a moment in her approximately 30 paintings on view. The paintings express views that are near, far and envision dynamic movement.

"I paint the world I live in, the things I know, such as the dynamism of a horse in motion and the heavy atmosphere surrounding a particular road in the Scottish Highlands," said Ms. Smith.

She infuses conventional stylistic approaches to painting and composition with touches of her own invention. Patterning found in nature, people and objects is of paramount interest to Ms. Smith, and serves as the springboard for her compositions.

Clarice Smith is an internationally renowned artist who resides in the Washington, D.C., region. She has had solo exhibitions at prestigious galleries in D.C., New York City, London, Zurich and Jerusalem. She was a faculty member of the GW Department of Fine Arts and Art History from 1980 to 1987. She is a double alumna of George Washington having earned a B.A. in 1976 and an M.A. in 1979, and she received an honorary doctorate of fine arts degree from GW in 2012.

Jules Olitski On An Intimate Scale

This fall, three institutions are celebrating the art of Jules Olitski (1922-2007). Olitski, Kenneth Noland, Morris Louis and the British sculptor Anthony Caro were brought into public prominence by art critic Clement Greenberg, who coined the term "post-painterly abstraction." Olitski was a close friend and neighbor of Noland's, when Olitski taught at Bennington College, Bennington, Vermont, and Noland lived nearby. In the 1960s Olitski generally shared with Noland, and other members of the Washington Color School, an approach to painting in which the canvas is covered with pure areas of color, characterized, as well, by experimentation with color and pigments. Olitski applied the paint by staining, then spraying, and later used unconventional tools such as brooms, mops, and leaf blowers, among other things. His richly diverse surfaces diffused color and light, often with rich variations in texture.

Olitski's "bumper" years in Washington were 1966-67 when he won the gold medal at the Corcoran Biennial and had his first museum exhibition of abstract paintings at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in 1967. Writing about the Corcoran Gallery exhibition of 1967, Andrew Hudson, an art critic in Washington, D.C., wrote "...Olitski has been able to maintain the quality of his work while experimenting in things that one would expect to turn out "wrong"...the expansion of his vision and of the possibilities of painting that his recent work offers has effected an expansion in my way of looking."

The Luther W. Brady Art Gallery hosted Jules Olitski: Works on Paper, in 2006, one of the last exhibitions of Olitski's work prior to his death. A poignant testimony to the artist's creative longevity, a friendship grew with the Olitski family, which led to a second exhibition in 2009, Jules Olitski: An Inside View, A Survey of Prints 1954 - 2007 organized by the Brattleboro Museum.

This third exhibition of work by Jules Olitski at the Luther W. Brady Art Gallery is aptly timed to coincide with Revelation: Major Paintings by Jules Olitski, a traveling exhibition, on display at the Katzen Arts Center, American University, September 15 - December 16, 2012. Both are retrospective exhibitions, as they provide an overview by decade of Olitski's paintings.

In contrast to Olitski's large and immersive canvases in the Katzen Arts Center exhibition, the works in the Luther W. Brady Art Gallery demonstrate the artist's ability to work at intimate scale, without any lessening of powerful impact.

The GW Today article on the exhibition can be reached here

Jules Olitski On An Intimate Scale traveled to the Reading Public Museum, Reading, Pennsylvania, January - May 2013.