Exhibitions Archive 2000 – 2009

Artists: Phillip Adams, James Johnson, Kocot & Hatton, Lucy Pullen, Linda Yun

Guest Curator: Sheryl Conkelton, Director of Exhibitions and Public Programs, Tyler School of Art, Temple University

“A Closer Look 7” continues an ongoing series initiated in 1995 to present in greater depth the work of selected artists who have previously exhibited in Arcadia University Art Gallery’s juried “Works on Paper” shows. The exhibition features recent work by Phillip Adams, James Johnson, Kocot & Hatton, Lucy Pullen, and Linda Yun, all of whom (with the exception of Pullen) currently live and work in Philadelphia. Artists/Guest Curator biographies.

The Arcadia University Art Gallery is pleased to present “Stop Copying Me Stop Copying Me,” an exhibition of recent paintings and multiples by New York-based artist Cary Leibowitz. The exhibition includes a series of twelve text-based paintings on wood panels and a stack of over 200 trash cans/umbrella stands piled high in the center of the gallery.  

Since emerging in the late 1980s using the alias “Candyass,” (which he dropped in 1996) Leibowitz has developed a reputation for what he refers to as “late 20th-century gay Dada.” His paintings and multiples (such as pennants that read “Go Fags!” and “Misery Rules!”) use self-deprecating humor to critique our narcissistic fantasies of ambition and appearance. While the work in this exhibition makes self-conscious references to his identity as a gay, Jewish artist, Leibowitz’s most recent pieces comment wryly on more universal questions germane to the exhausted discourse around painting and contemporary practice that have also been his stock in trade. (A series of banners from 1989 included works with titles such as “I Love Sherrie Levine,” and “I Love Tom of Finland.”) More than a decade later, “Stop Copying Me Stop Copying Me” demonstrates how the persistence of Leibowitz’s dandified, sad-sack whining allows him to claim the nominal “failure” of his career as potent content for his work.  

For this exhibition Leibowitz employs a more minimal, monochromatic style compared to chattier, previous efforts.  Each of the new pictures is painted in his signature, candy-colored palette on thick, wood panels. Labeled in Leibowitz’s faux-naive scrawl and hung from their top edges on exaggerated nails, they resemble a cross between old fashioned shop signs and 3-D cartoons.  

The majority of the works are visual puns. Painting with Something Missing (2001) is a purple field with a square cut into its center. Painting with a Way Out (2001) offers a door knob. Painting with Hindsight (2002) has a rear-view mirror attached to it. Many of these multiple panel works use text to address each other as well as the viewer. In “Hi Fatty…HI,” (2001) a “slim” painting taunts a “fat” one. In another, a pink square with red lettering implores eleven others to “stop copying” it.  Confident in their awkward physicality and impudent formalism, Leibowitz’s deadpan one-liners take material literalism to a hyperbolic, bratty extreme.

In the center of the gallery Leibowitz has installed a mountain of garbage cans/umbrella stands, each printed with a snapshot of the artist on the occasion of his Bar Mitzvah, circa 1976. “The cans with the picture of Fatso,” he explains, “ also have the text GAIN! WAIT! NOW!, which is very much in keeping with my longstanding history of wanting/needing/hoping/praying for things to improve in my own impatient way.” The garbage cans are $50 and the umbrella stands are $52, the only difference being their price.  

Leibowitz’s penchant for producing inexpensive multiples in flagrantly large editions is extended in the 6 x 9” announcement card he conceived expressly for the exhibition at Arcadia University Art Gallery. Based on the aforementioned painting Stop Copying Me Stop Copying Me, this multiple was printed in an edition of 12,000 and was bulk-mailed not once but twice to every address on the gallery’s mailing list.

Leibowitz (38) received his MFA in painting from the University of Kansas in 1987 after studying interior design at the Fashion Institute of Technology (1983-84)  and  architecture at Pratt Institute, New York (1981-83).  Since his first one-person show in New York (at Stux Gallery in 1988), he has exhibited internationally, including important  group shows such as “Bad Girls,” at The New Museum of Contemporary Art (1994); “In a Different Light” at the University Art Museum, Berkeley, California; and “Two Jewish? Challenging Traditional Identities,” at the Jewish Museum, New York (1996). He is the recipient of an Award in the Visual Arts Fellowship (1991) and a grant from Art Matters (1994). A resident of Harlem (where he has lived since 1999), he is a print specialist at Christie’s New York auction house. In October of 2001, the interior of his town house (“decorated to within an inch of its life”) was featured in a cover story of the New York Times Magazine’s “Home Design”section. 

Writing about Leibowitz’s paintings on view in a recent exhibition at the Andrew Kreps Gallery–his first one-person exhibition in new York since 1996, New York Times critic Holland Cotter remarked: Mr. Leibowitz takes a passive aggressive jab at a whole range of art-world non-issues in work that is post-beauty, post-theory, post-cool, post mature, and possibly–this has been Leibowtiz’s consuming worry for over a decade–post success. But he needn’t fear failure. He never “arrived” on the scene in any conventional sense, so he has never left it either. Being perpetually out of step is a career move that makes him an artist for all seasons.  
After the exhibition opens on February 7, “Stop Copying Me Stop Copying Me” will remain on view until March 14. The show will be introduced by a lecture by Leibowitz starting at 6:30 PM on February 7 in Stiteler Auditorium, Murphy Hall. The opening reception will follow immediately afterwards in the art gallery. Both are free and open to the public.

The Beaver College Art Gallery is pleased to present a traveling exhibition (organized by the Contemporary Museum, Baltimore), which features over 1000 snapshots solicited from internationally recognized artists as well as amateur and untrained photographers at every level of experience. Submissions came from 24 countries around the globe, the only requirement for inclusion being that the entries be no larger than 4” x 6” and a suggestion they hold some personal significance for those responding. The show features 800 snapshots originally submitted to the Contemporary Museum (where the exhibition was on view from November 2, 2000 through February 4, 2001) as well as approximately 200 images solicited from area artists, fine art photographers, and residents of the immediate communities within and surrounding Beaver College.    

Hung floor-to-ceiling in alphabetical order, each snapshot is labeled with the name, birthyear, and city of residence of the person who submitted it, as well as a title ascribed by this individual to the image. While vastly outnumbered by unknown photographers, some of the more internationally recognized contemporary artists participating in the project include: Luis Cruz Azaceta, Polly Apfelbaum, Ken Aptekar, John Baldessari, Jennifer Bornestein, Emily Cheng, Petah Coyne, James Elaine, Louise Fishman, Rainer Ganahl,  Douglas Gordon, Harmony Hammond, Holly Hughs, Connie Imboden, Koo Jeong-a, Isaac Julien, Sejla Kameric,  Jerry Kearns, Mary Kelly, William Kentridge, Elke Krystufek, Justine Kurland, Pepon Osorio, Fabian Marcaccio, Jonathan Monk Sam Samore, Andres Serrano, Mira Schor, Kiki Smith, Buzz Spector, Jessica Stockholder, John Waters, Randy Wray, Rob Wynne, and Allan Wexler.   

“We’re trying to explore the relationship between fine art and non-art imagery and the relationship between things of personal value and images that would be aesthetically valuable in a public context,” said Adam Lerner, associate curator at the Contemporary Museum and exhibition co-curator. As such, the show explores contemporary techniques of popular folk imagery and family documentation as well issues regarding the impact of photographers on their subjects and indeterminate meanings that have always tempered the presentation of snapshots. Other issues raised include the relationship between accidents and deliberate intention, naturalness and theater, and the effects of captions and titles on photographic images.

“The Big G Stands for Goodness: Corita Kent’s 1960s Pop” features 50 works surveying the disarmingly engaging, formally inventive silkscreen prints from the 1960s by Sister Mary Corita Kent (1918-1986). Juxtaposed with these works will be pieces by 17 contemporary Los Angeles artists who use a similar approach to popular culture and formal experimentation with the visual display of texts. As well as pointing to the extraordinary sophistication of Corita’s 1960s work, the contemporary portion of the exhibition serves as a mini-survey of contemporary Los Angeles art that has utilized text in visually inventive ways.  

A teacher at Immaculate Heart College in Los Angeles, and a civil rights-, feminist-, and anti-war- activist, Corita (she resigned her religious order in 1968) was one of the most popular American graphic artists of the 1960s and 1970s, making hundreds of prints espousing her humanist causes. Creating her own liberal Catholic version of Pop in the early 1960s, Sr. Corita mixed swatches of bright, saturated color with fragments of graphics and type appropriated from supermarket items. With a deadpan literalism and an ear for language rivaling that of her contemporary Angelino, Ed Ruscha, Corita’s prints confirm her upbeat theology by sampling and morphing the well-known advertising phrases of her time, such as The big G stands for Goodness (General Mills) and Put a tiger in your tank (Esso gasoline). Logos and slogans promoting “Wonder” bread, “Humble” oil, “Sunkist” lemons, “Safeway” supermarkets, and even “Lark” cigarettes become visual and verbal puns endorsing her all-embracing humanitarianism. Interrupting our subliminal responses to familiar slogans, her graphic transformations borrow promises that the marketplace cannot deliver. A true subversive, Corita de-objectifies advertising, usurping its appeals for her own moral concerns.

Installation view, “The Big G Stands for Goodness: Corita Kent’s 1960s Pop,” Beaver College Art Gallery

Works by several contemporary Los Angeles Artists in the exhibition share auspicious affinities with Corita’s prints. Her playful application of block letters, word fragments, mirrored writing, and warped texts diversely parallel those of Larry Johnson, Karen Carson, and Lari Pittman. Passages from texts by Gertrude Stein, Samuel Beckett, Camus, e.e. Cummings, John Lennon, and Ugo Betti are often scrawled across Corita’s works in a style that prefigures that of Raymond Pettibon. Moreover, Mike Kelley’s felt banners from the late 1980s  (one of which is included in the show), were directly spun off her work, offering their own twisted celebration of the abject. 

The Beaver College Art Gallery is pleased to present “A Closer Look: 4,” the fourth in a biennial series of exhibitions that presents in greater depth works by area artists previously included in the gallery’s juried “Works on Paper” exhibitions. Curated by Alex Baker, former associate curator of the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, the exhibition features recent projects by Susan Arthur, Aaron Igler, Nancy Lewis, and Matthew Wine. On view from September 20 through October 31, 2000, the show opens with a public conversation between Baker and the participating artists in Stiteler Auditorium at 6:30 PM on Wednesday, September 20, followed immediately by the opening reception in the art gallery. All of the artists selected for “A Closer Look: 4” share an affinity for both oblique narrative and a deceptively capricious formalism. Whether personal, fictional, whimsical, or disturbing – the storytelling employed is frequently deferred and indirect. Lightness in attitude, composition, and even subject matter provide points of entry into often more complicated ways of representing the world and the self. 

Susan Arthur’s recent color photographs depict marshmallow “peeps” (candy chicks, ghosts, jack-o-lanterns, and snowmen that she places in natural, outdoor settings to create fanciful, diorama-like compositions that are also reminiscent of still-lifes. Although “peeps” may be perceived as cute, harmless, inanimate confections, a poignant anthropomorphism and loneliness haunts these vibrant pictures. Arthur received her M.A. in art history from the University of Texas, Austin before becoming director of the Houk Friedman and Edwynn Houk Galleries in New York. “A Closer Look: 4” is her first major exhibition since she returned to Philadelphia last year when her work was included in “Works on Paper” (1999), selected by James Elaine, then curator of The Drawing Center, New York.

Nancy Lewis’s paintings, drawings, and prints employ a vocabulary that includes fireworks, flames, diamonds and other archetypal symbols that she revisits to convey her emotional state at the time each work was created. For “A Closer Look: 4,” she will present her first site-specific work, a 16-ft. image of a roller coaster. Rendered in pencil on the gallery wall, Lewis uses this undulating motif both as an emotional trope and as a reflexive exercise to explore the process of drawing itself. She will also be represented by a selection of computer prints and a large-scale canvas depicting a vast sea of fire. Lewis received her B.A. from San Francisco State University and her M.F.A. from the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts and is currently a member of Vox Populi. She was selected for “Works on Paper” (1996) by Bill Arning–then director of White Columns, New York.

Matthew Wine will present a series of new works made from foam carpet-backing, a speckled, multicolored material that he manipulates into a surprising variety of eccentric, three-dimensional volumes. Resembling otherworldly creatures familiar from science fiction narratives, these biomorphic abstractions also reference the sick or expelling body. Wine cites Eva Hesse and Lynda Benglis – and their attention to the materiality of form – as influences on this work. A recipient of a B.F.A. from Virginia Commonwealth University, Wine graduated with an M.F.A. from Tyler School of Art last spring. He was included in the “Works on Paper” (1999) juried by James Elaine. 

Aaron Igler is a photographer, video artist, and musician who is interested in the chance intersection of images and sounds. For his video projection, Models for the Floatable Delay of Light (2000), a pair of video loops depicting light reflected from rotating, prism-like surfaces joins a third image of an illuminated object darting across a South Philadelphia sky. The three loops are accompanied by a dense audio-track of synthesized sound accessed via headphones plugged into a custom seating unit. The repetition of visual and aural stimuli creates a hypnotic environment that offers viewers the opportunity to create an individualized interior space while constructing their own associative narratives. Igler attended Munson Williams Proctor Institute (Utica, New York) before receiving his B.F.A. in photography from the University of the Arts, Philadelphia. He was included in “Works on Paper” (1996), selected by Bill Arning. Until June of this year, guest curator Alex Baker was associate curator of the ICA, Philadelphia, a position he’d held since 1996. During his tenure there he developed numerous exhibitions featuring the work of international as well as area artists – including “Biographies: Philadelphia Narratives,” which he co-curated with Judith Tannenbaum. Baker also conceived and organized the wildly popular “Sticker Shock” (1998) and this spring’s “Indelible Market” (part of the exhibition “Wall Power”). Now an independent curator, Baker is currently completing his doctorate in Cultural Anthropology at Temple University. He will return to the ICA in May, 2000, as a guest curator of “East Meets West: ‘Folk’ and Fantasy from the Coasts,” an exhibition featuring three Philadelphia artists and three San Franciscans.

“A Closer Look” was initiated in 1995 as a biennial series to present more comprehensively the work of artists who have been included in the gallery’s juried “Works on Paper” shows. The series provides an opportunity to consider an expanding roster of Philadelphia-based artists in the context of small group shows underscoring relationships among the exhibited works. Funded by a grant from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts and the Friends and Advisory Board of the Beaver College Art Gallery.