July 12 – September 2, 2000

Painter and sculptor Kathleen Holmes is one of the busiest artists in Florida.  In 2000 alone she will have exhibits in Atlanta, Chicago, Memphis, Miami, and Orlando. Those five locations represent one third of her schedule for the year; the other two thirds of her schedule include eight stops in Florida.

The popularity of Kathleen Holmes is not hard to understand.  Her work is dramatic and subtle, alluring and provocative, insightful and challenging, and it remains accessible.  Kathleen Holmes creates work that is abstract and realistic, contemporary and traditional.  She creates paintings and sculptures that act as metaphor for her heritage of Southern culture.  Artistically she crosses boundaries both in time and concept, incorporating her delicate Flemish like painted glazes with found objects and direct presentation in the tradition of Dove, Shapiro, and Rauschenberg.  With the premise or core idea of Southern culture Kathleen draws from personal experience creating intimate metaphors that lead the viewer to tradition, family, patterns of society, and the role of women in our culture.  For Holmes, it also leads to the expression of her feelings about the life patterns that we follow, including emotional, social, behavioral, and spiritual.

Holmes was born in Monroe, Louisiana in 1953 and spent most of her childhood in the South (Louisiana, Tennessee, and Texas), with the exception of some time in the Caribbean and the Middle East. She has no formal degrees and has been creating art in Florida for 15 years; she currently resides in Lake Worth, Florida.

http://www.kathleenholmes.com/

September 15 – October 29, 2000

The Gallery of Fine Art at Edison Community College will present an exhibition of the work of the late illustrator Alan E. Cober in Alan E. Cober: A Retrospective Afterlife September 15 through October 29, 2000.

In conjunction with the exhibit the Director of the Selby Gallery Director, Kevin Dean, will give two gallery talks about Cober’s work and his time at Ringling School of Art and Design.  Open to the public at no charge.  October 3, 7 p.m. and October 4, 2:30 p.m.

An admirer of German Expressionist Otto Dix, Cober developed his own distinct, expressive style that perfectly suited the sharp-edged subjects of modern life reflected in the stories he illustrated for publications such as Rolling Stone, Time, Newsweek, Life, Look and the New York Times. His emotional pictorial essays on Willowbrook, the New York State institution for the mentally handicapped; prisons, and the aged was published in 1975 as The Forgotten Society.

Cober’s long, successful career was punctuated when he was credited with expanding the possibilities of contemporary illustration by erasing the line between it and fine art.  David Schuster, Illustration Department Chair at The Art Institute of Boston, said of Cober, “By following his personal vision and instinct for social justice, Cober enlarged the parameters of visual graphics in the 20^th century and paved the way for a new genre – one that blurs the distinction between fine art and illustration.

Nancy Weekly, a ZAKS Illustrators Source Web site author said,  “….Cober creates gripping visual images that provide evidence of the harsh realities of contemporary events, cast in a format that will reach a universal community and instigate change.”

Innovators of American Illustration author Stephen Heller said, “Cober was a pioneer of expressionist illustration.  He influenced many in the seventies, due in part to his teaching and in part to the national accessibility of his work.”

Prior to serving as a visiting artist in Illustration at Ringling School from 1995 to 1997, he was for 10 years a professor of art and distinguished visiting artist at State University of New York at Buffalo.

Cober received many accolades for his work. He was one of the few artists to receive 10 medals from the Society of Illustrators inNew York City.

During the last three years of his life, Cober began creating three-dimensional versions of his bizarre hybrid figures in clay.  The exhibition in The Gallery of Fine Art at Edison Community College will present his clay sculpture along with a large retrospective of his work as an illustrator and artist, and a selection of his all-important sketchbooks.

The exhibit was organized by the Selby Gallery, Ringling School of Art and Design, as a national tour.

November 8 – December 3, 2000

The Gallery of Fine Art, Edison Community College, and Henderson, Franklin, Starnes and Holt, P.A. are pleased to announce the annual student scholarship exhibit.  This mixed media exhibit of work done by the art students at Edison Community College opens this Wednesday, November 8^th with a reception and awards ceremony in the Gallery between 6:30 p.m. and 8 p.m.   Henderson, Franklin, Starnes and Holt, P.A. sponsors the scholarship awards and organizes the local venues where the exhibit will be shown.  After the exhibit is shown at Edison Community College it will be shown at Big Arts, The Lee County Alliance of the Arts, Broadway Palm Dinner Theatre and the Cultural Park Theatre.

Following the opening reception, November 8^th, the Edison Community College Concert Band, under the direction of Dr. Dennis Hill, will perform in the Barbara B. Mann Performing Arts Hall at 8 p.m.

Both events, the opening reception and the concert, are open to the public at no charge.

February 16 – April 1, 2001

The Gallery of Fine Art, Edison Community College, Ft. Myers Florida is pleased to present, “Realism from the Martin Z. Margulies Collection.”  This exceptional exhibit of paintings, sculpture, and photography will be open to the public from February 16^th through April 1, 2001. The opening reception will be held in the gallery from 6 – 8 pm, Friday, February 16^th.  Refreshments will be offered by the Docents of the Gallery, and Kat Epple will provide music.  Mr. Martin Margulies will also give a collector’s talk the evening of the 16^th, from 7 to 8 pm.

Focused on the period since the pop movement of the 60’s, this exhibit features artists who have made significant contributions to the resurgence of realism and who have added insight into a broad range of concerns and approaches. Some of the artists included in this exhibit are Ralph Goings, John Salt, Deborah Butterfield, Christy Rupp, Max Ferguson, William Beckman, David Mach, Davis Cone, Julian Opie, Zadik Zadikian, Jerry Ott and Steven Warre.  Diverse in visual and conceptual identity, this exhibit, as a survey of ideas with realism at its core, offers glimpses of a range of concerns that have impacted artists in the latter part of the 20^th Century.  From photo realism onward, the work in this exhibit is rich in visual texture (as in the Davis Cone paintings), grand in scale and sublime (as in the Deborah Butterfield sculpture), sometimes small and captured (as in the Steven Fox’s painting), or classical and juxtaposed (as the sculpture of Zadak Zadikian). Whether found and assembled, photographed and painted, exaggerated in scale or constructed, they all point to a tradition that is deeply rooted, richly varied, and powerful in imagination.  They represent the strength, vitality, responsiveness, perseverance and independence of realism.

The Gallery of Fine Art is pleased to have the opportunity to exhibit this selection from the private collection of Mr. Martin Z. Margulies.  It is through his generosity and commitment to education that the Gallery has the pleasure of exhibiting this work.  

http://www.margulieswarehouse.com/

April 12 – 29, 2001

The Gallery of Fine Art, Edison Community College, and Henderson, Franklin, Starnes and Holt, P.A., are pleased to announce the 10^th Annual Student Art Scholarship Competition, “Celebration of the Arts 2001.”  This mixed media exhibit of work done by the art students at Edison Community College opens Thursday, April 12^th with a reception and awards ceremony in the Gallery between 5:00 and 7:00 p.m.  Henderson, Franklin, Starnes and Holt, P.A. sponsors the scholarship awards and organizes the local venues where the exhibit will be shown.

This event is open to the public at no charge.

Tropisms and Small Fires
May 11 – July 8, 2001

This exhibit features the work of New York artist Stephanie Brody Lederman.  The exhibit includes more than 40 paintings completed in the 90’s.  Lederman’s work, in a sense, is a cronicle of our time and the universal story of our lives.  As in Gertrude Stein’s concept of “everybody’s autobiography,” Lederman offers, through the generalities of our daily sojourn, insights into our lives, our social interactions, and our intimate personal contact with our own individual realities.

Lederman’s work does not fit into an ‘ism, it does not rely on a movement or a category for it’s validation.  It is neither mainstream nor fashionable art. Her work is raw and fresh, yet sly in presentation and technical accomplishment. But most of all it originates at the core of her being.  Therein lies the power and the authenticity of her work.

Asked to comment on her work Stephanie responded in a recent statement, “because my art involves words and discernable images, I am working with concrete meaning in search of a metaphor that is richer than the simplicity of the images. I want to touch the viewer in a way that enables him or her to access sincere feeling and emotional truths ….. I feel more comfortable with the tender telling of taking a dog to the vet, than philosophical treatises on power and love.  I want to show the complexity and beauty of life, the poetry inherent in the ordinary.”  To that end words and images play off each other in the viewer’s mind and are filtered by the personal record each individual carries.  Stephanie touches on the ordinary to show us the sublime. 

In his remarks for the exhibition catalog, B. H. Friedman, noted author whose work includes Jackson Pollock: Energy Made Visible,” points to a connection between Lederman’s work and what Jean Dubuffet identified as l’art brut (Dubuffet organized the first major public exhibition of this art in 1949.)  Friedman effortlessly takes us through Dubuffet’s definition of l’art brut and states in the catalog essay (referring to Dubuffet’s Collection de l’Art Brut,) “I assume that if Dubuffet had owned post-Cubist Picassos or dripped Pollocks, work he admired, they, too, would have been included.  And so would Stephanie Brody Lederman if Dubuffet had known her work. It fits well into that special category of cultural art inspired by raw art.”

Lederman’s work is whimsical, serious and unpretentious. It is so pure that the viewer need not try to enter her work. It is remarkably accessible once the viewer dismisses attempts at literal translation.  The imagery and text work together metaphorically to invite each participant on a journey. The experience is initiated by Lederman’s selections and completed by each individual, culminating in a completely unique experience for every viewer.

Lederman’s work can be found in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, NYC, Brooklyn Museum of Art, NY, The Jewish Museum, NY, National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, DC, Newark Museum, NJ, Cooper Hewitt Museum NY, Victoria and Albert Museum, London, and Yale University Library, New Haven, to name a few.

http://stephaniebrodylederman.com/

July 19 – August 23, 2001

This annual favorite features the artwork of local and national artists that have been donated for auction to benefit ACT, INC. 

http://www.actabuse.com/