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Home › Archive by category '2001 / 2002 Season Archives'
August 31 – October 14, 2001
The Gallery of Fine Art, Edison Community College, is pleased to announce its next exhibit, Andrew Morgan: An Exhibition of Paintings from 1991 – 2001. This exhibit of paintings by Andrew Morgan spans the past decade and includes mesmerizing views of the Oregon coast, vibrant still lifes as well as impressions of Florida and New Mexico. Lush, vibrant and lyrical, these paintings, completed in the refined medium of oil bar, clearly show Andrew’s connection and commitment to still life and landscape. More to the point though, they show his command of the medium, the picture plane and color as an expressive vehicle.
Andrew’s highly successful professional career has been two-sided, including both academics and studio work. Andrew’s academic accomplishments include being the Chairman of the Art Department at the University of Mississippi, President of the Kansas City Art Institute, and Chairman of the Art Department at the University of Miami, among others. As a studio artist Andrew’s work has been included in numerous exhibitions and can be found in dozens of private collections as well as the collection of the University of Texas, The Art Museum at Florida International University, University of Mississippi and Weatherspoon Museum at the University of North Carolina, to name a few.
This exhibit, organized by the Gallery of Fine Art, will travel next to the Gulf Coast Museum of Art, Largo, Florida, then to the Lowe Art Museum, University of Miami, Coral Gables, Florida, and finally to Kennesaw State University Art Gallery, Kennesaw, Georgia.
The Gallery of Fine Art, Edison Community College, received a grant from the Richard Florsheim Art Fund for the publication of the catalog to accompany the traveling exhibit.
October 26 – December 9, 2001
The Gallery of Fine Art at Edison Community College is pleased to present the recent work of Hollis Jeffcoat. The 48 pieces in the exhibit were created between the years 1996 and 2001, and include drawings on paper and paintings on vellum, canvas and Plexiglas.
As a painter Jeffcoat’s lineage reaches back to the New York School that dominated the art world in the late 40’s and 50’s. That is not to say that the artists and ideas that influenced her thinking were of that singular band in time. But, it does speak to the concerns that painters focused on by the time the abstract expressionists had over-powered the art world. While that particular line of sight, from the New York School, can be drawn to a vast majority of artists in the late 20th century, it cannot be said of all that their work has the same integrity and focus. Jeffcoat’s work is as clear and direct as painting gets.
Line, color, form and light are dominant concerns that Jeffcoat has been working with for decades. In the most recent work, the use of materials has played a key role in achieving her goals, as they relate to the more formal aspects of art. In particular the use of Plexiglas has become an important element or vehicle that directly impacts the luminosity Jeffcoat covets. Line and color define and support the space but the luminous quality that brings full life to this work is controlled through the refined unification of materials and space. Hollis Jeffcoat is a painter’s painter. Her work is clear, concise, direct and more to the point, hers alone. The plastics of art are the formative elements that serve as the vehicle by which we enter the work. But we would miss the point entirely if we were to stop there. The paintings in this exhibit reflect the concerns of the artist and guide us to the inevitable conclusion that the spirit in art is our spirit, collectively.
Hollis Jeffcoat is a Fort Myers native and former Edison Community College student. In pursuit of her artistic goals she also studied at the Kansas City Art Institute and the New York Studio School. Hollis was an instructor and administrator at the New York Studio School, Paris, France, and has also taught at Big Arts, Sanibel, Florida, SoCo Studio School, Fort Myers, Florida, as well as Edison Community College, Fort Myers, Florida. Jeffcoat’s work is in the permanent collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY, NY, The Brooklyn Museum, NY, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Montreal, Canada, as well as the estate of Pierre Matisse.
The Gallery of Fine Art would like to express its sincere appreciation to the Docents of The Gallery of Fine Art and to Bluegreen Resort Services, www.bluegreenrentals.com, for their sponsorship of this exhibit.
http://www.hollisjeffcoat.com/
January 11 – February 17, 2002
The critically acclaimed “VOLTWERKS: The Fine Art of Electricity,” an art exhibition featuring works of art that illuminate the dexterity of electric light, will be hosted by the Edison College Gallery of Fine Art January 11 – February 17, 2002, Fort Myers, FL. More than 45 artists from southwest Florida and across the country have been invited by multimedia artist and curator Mary Sullivan Voytek to participate in this Edison Festival of Light sanctioned event. Voytek, who curated this and three previous critically acclaimed group shows in Fort Myers on “enlightened” art, assures creative artwork using electricity will abound.
As in the past, VOLTWERKS will feature internationally known artists from as far away as New York City (Rocky Pinciotti and Ingo Maurer), Washington DC (Craig Craft) and Montreal (Andrey Berezowsky) to as close to home as Captiva (Robert Rauschenberg and Darryl Pottorf) and Naples (Christopher Poehlmann). In addition to works of art created specifically for the exhibition by the artists themselves, artwork on loan from institutions like Graphicstudio in Tampa as well as prestigious private collections like the Martin Margulies Collection in Miami will also be on display.
A multimedia exhibition, the contemporary art will ignite viewers’ imaginations. Whether photography, video, holography, laser, neon, plasma, wood, metal or painting, the “enlightened” works of art comment on or involve light or electricity, celebrating the Edisonian heritage of innovation and invention. Morgan T. Paine, art professor at Florida Gulf Coast University, will contribute a conceptual work while sculptor Lawrence Voytek will exhibit his monumental, neon-illuminated 1957 Porsche.
The event is sponsored by Northern Trust Bank, The Bireley Family Foundation, Dr. John and Fran Fenning and the Edison Community College Foundation, Inc.
http://www.i2art.com/edisongallery/voltwerks/voltwerks_splash.htm
February 22 – March 24, 2002
The Gallery of Fine Art, Edison College is pleased to announce the first in a series of three exhibits featuring the most influential trio in the history of American Art, John Cage, Robert Rauschenberg and Merce Cunningham.
The first exhibit: The Visual Art of John Cage, February 22 – March 24, 2002. This extraordinary exhibit of Cage’s visual art includes 36 pieces completed between 1969 and 1992, the year of Cage’s death, and includes drawings, etchings, lithographs, aquatints, watercolors and three-dimensional plexigrams.
John Cage was born in Los Angles, California in 1912. Cage graduated from Los Angles High School as class valedictorian in 1928 and attended Pomona College for the next two years. In 1930 Cage traveled to Europe where he studied architecture and piano, and began to compose music. In 1934-35 Cage studied privately with Arnold Schonberg, and at the University of Southern California, and UCLA. Promises Schonberg to devote his life to music. In 1938 Cage moved to Seattle as composer-accompanist for Bonnie Bird’s modern dance classes at the Cornish School, also meets Merce Cunningham, a student of Bonnie Bird’s, as well as Mark Tobey and Morris Graves.
Laszlo Moholy-Nagy invites Cage, in 1941, to teach a class in experimental music at the Chicago School of Design. Cage moves to New York in 1942 and writes his first work to accompany a dance by Merce Cunningham, the beginning of a lifelong collaboration. Through his acquaintance with Max Ernst and Peggy Guggenheim, Cage also meets Marcel Duchamp in1942. During this same time frame Cage’s reputation as a key figure of the avant-garde is solidified. He directs a concert of percussion music at the Museum of Modern Art in 1944 and his first joint recital with Merce Cunningham occurs. In 1945 Cage begins to study philosophy and the music of India, and for two years he attends lectures on the philosophy of Zen Buddhism at Columbia University. In 1947 The Ballet Society of New York commissions his score for the Seasons, with choreography by Merce Cunningham and décor by Isamu Noguchi.
In 1948 Cage teaches at Black Mountain College in North Carolina and meets R. Buckminster Fuller whose thought would have a long lasting impact. In 1949 Cage receives a Guggenheim Fellowship from the American Academy and National Institute of Arts and Letters and continues to give concerts and dance recitals with Cunningham, now in Paris. In 1950 Cage meets David Tudor and collaborates on numerous projects and performances in the coming years. During this time he meets and becomes friends with many of the Abstract Expressionists. 1951 becomes a pivotal year for Cage as he is introduced to the I Ching, the Chinese Book of Changes, which becomes an essential tool for his musical compositions, and later, his texts and visual art. He shortly thereafter writes his first composition, Music of Changes for piano, based entirely on chance operations.
In 1952 Cage is again teaching at Black Mountain College and organizes an untitled event with Cunningham, Robert Rauschenberg, David Tudor, and the poets Charles Olson and M.C. Richards. In the 45-minute event each participant simultaneously performs unrelated actions, and is later seen as the prototype for the “Happenings” and “Fluxus” movements of the 1960’s. During this time Cage also collaborates with Rauschenberg on Automobile Tire Print and writes the famous 4’33”, a silent piece in three movements.
In 1953 the Merce Cunningham Dance Foundation is formed with Cage as the Musical Director. He also meets Jasper Johns this year. In 1956 he writes Music for Piano by noticing imperfections in the paper he is using.
In May of 1958 a retrospective concert of 25 years of Cage’s music is organized by Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg and Emile de Antonio and presented at Town Hall in New York. A group of Cage’s original scores is shown at the Stable Gallery in New York. Meets Nam June Paik this year. Commissioned by the Montreal Festival Society in 1960 to write a major orchestral work, Atlas Eclipticalis, composed with astronomical charts and I Ching chance operations. The New York Philharmonic Orchestra at the initiation of Leonard Bernstein also performs Atlas Eclipticalis, in 1964. In 1965 Cage becomes President of the Cunningham Dance Foundation and a Director of the Foundation for Contemporary Performance Arts.
In 1967 Cage is composer in residence at the University of Cincinnati, and in 1968 is elected to the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. In 1968 Cage also creates Reunion, continuously activated sound systems gated by moves on an electrically enhanced chessboard, which included Marcel and Teeny Duchamp among the performers. Cage is artist in residence at the University of California, Davis in 1969, also the year he completes his first major graphics work, Not Wanting to Say Anything About Marcel, with Calvin Sumsion.
Cage is appointed Fellow for Advanced Studies at Wesleyan University in 1970 and continues to make use of Thoreau’s writings to derive both music and prose. Creates 62 Mesostics re Merce Cunningham in 1971, subjecting over 700 typefaces and sizes to chance operations. Exhibits at Galeria Schwarz, Milan. Produces Mushroom Book in 1972, which includes 10 handwritten lithographs. In 1973 he exhibits scores and plexigrams at Carl Solway Gallery, Cincinnati. M is published by Wesleyan University. In 1975 Cage is commissioned by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation for a work related to the Bicentennial of the USA, and in 1976 is commissioned by Seiji Ozawa and the Boston Symphony Orchestra for a major Bicentennial work.
In 1977 Cage is invited by Kathan Brown, Crown Point Press, to come to Oakland to make etchings. Cage had started to work on visual art in 1969 but it was at this time he sustained the pursuit.
Between 1983 and 1992, the year of his death, Cage produced some 150 drawings and he made 114 watercolors in two sessions at the Mountain Lake Workshop in Virginia. At the same time he continued to refine his printmaking approach while working at Crown Point Press. He also designed complex room-sized installations including one for the Carnegie International Art Exhibition in Pittsburgh. Rolywholyover was initiated by the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angles and planned by Cage, but realized after his death. Rolywholyover was a traveling exhibition of his own art, along with works by other artists and a sampling of things from local museums.
Cage developed his visual art in the same way he developed musical compositions. Technical assistants and printmakers were his new musicians. He composed scores for them to execute. On chance operations Cage said “you’re basically shifting from the responsibility to choose to the responsibility to ask. People frequently ask me if I’m faithful to the answer, or if I change them because I want to. I don’t change them because I want to. When I find myself in the position of someone who would change something—-at that point I don’t change it. I change myself. It is for that reason I have said that I am not involved in self expression, I’m involved in self-alteration.”
All of the work in the exhibit is on loan from the John Cage Trust and the Margarete Roeder Gallery , both New York City.
Laura Kuhn, Executive Director of the John Cage Trust, New York, NY will give a talk in the gallery on March 1, 2 p.m. Ms. Kuhn will discuss the work in the exhibit as well as other aspects of Cage’s career.
The next exhibits in the series are:
Robert Rauschenberg: March 28 – April 28, 2002
Merce Cunningham: May 31 – July 7, 2002
http://johncage.org/
March 28 – April 28, 2002
The Gallery of Fine Art, Edison College, is pleased to welcome back world-renowned artist Robert Rauschenberg. This exhibit, titled “Robert Rauschenberg: Recent Work” is taken from Mr. Rauschenberg’s most recent series of paintings, titled “Short Stories,” which was executed between 2000 and 2002. The exhibit will open March 28 and run through April 28, 2002. The exhibit opens to the public on March 28with a reception in the Gallery from 6 – 9 p.m. Kat Epple will perform and the Docents of the Gallery will provide refreshments.
Robert Rauschenberg, often cited as the most important artist of his generation, did more than any other artist to reach beyond contemporary thinking by challenging limits, perceptions, and every other boundary in sight. After all, this is the artist who erased a deKooning drawing, created a tire impression on paper with John Cage, worked extensively with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, ushered in “Happenings” and “Pop Art,” and influenced virtually all artistic thinking since Abstract Expressionism.
A career retrospective was organized by and displayed at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York and the Guggenheim Museum, Soho, in late 1997. The exhibit of more than 400 pieces showed Rauschenberg from 1948 to the present. In the fifty years of relentless pursuit of imagery, Rauschenberg’s mark of free association and experimentation is seen on painting, performance, collage, sculpture, printmaking, and photography. It was Rauschenberg’s first retrospective since 1976 and one of the largest exhibitions ever held of work by a living artist. Following the New York opening the exhibit began touring with stops in Houston, Texas, as well as venues in Germany and Spain.
The exhibit at The Gallery of Fine Art, Edison College, is comprised of 15 large format pieces, measuring 85 ½” x 61”, that were completed between 2000 and 2002. The mixed media work, all on polylaminate, was executed using a pigment transfer process or vegetable dye transfer process, and also incorporates acrylic and/or graphite. The highly technical process Mr. Rauschenberg uses to create his work was developed at his Captiva studio. The process includes creating, on a film, computer-driven soluble (transferable) laser images of Mr. Rauschenberg’s own photographs. Those laser images are then used by Mr. Rauschenberg in creating his paintings.
To make this exhibit more accessible to the students and faculty at Edison Community College and to the greater Fort Myers area, the normal days of operation are being extended to include Mondays.
This exhibit is the second in the series:
Cage: February 22 – March 24, 2002
Rauschenberg: March 28 – April 28, 2002
Cunningham: May 31 – July 7, 2002
May 2 – 19, 2002
This is the final exhibit of the school year and features work created by Edison art students. 1st, 2nd and 3rd place awards will be presented in the categories of Photography, Drawing, Ceramics Painting, Design, Ceramics Wheel and Ceramics Hand. In addition, a “Rising Star” award will be awarded to a full time, first year student who shows exceptional promise. This exhibit is sponsored by the South West Florida Craft Guild and the Docents of the Gallery of Fine Art.
May 30 – July 3, 2002
The Gallery of Fine Art, Edison College, is pleased to present the work of Merce Cunningham, considered to be the most influential choreographer in the world today. The work in this exhibit is on loan to the Gallery from the Cunningham Dance Foundation and the Margarete Roeder Gallery, both of New York City.
The exhibit opens to the public Thursday May 30 at 4 p.m. with a talk in the gallery by Merce Cunningham, Trevor Carlson Director of Communications for the Cunningham Dance Foundation and Laura Kuhn, Director of the John Cage Trust. Following the talk the Gallery will be open until 8pm to view the exhibit. The exhibit runs through July 3, 2002. The Gallery will be observing the “summer hours” of the college and be open Monday – Thursday from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.
Featured work in the exhibit includes a series of prints created to benefit the Cunningham Dance Foundation (which includes artists Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Andy Warhol, Morris Lewis, Bruce Nauman, John Cage and Morris Graves,) performance costumes designed by Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg and Merce, archived performance photographs from the Cunningham Dance Company, rarely seen manuscript dance notations as well as the delightfully whimsical drawings from nature by Merce. Additionally, throughout the exhibition there will be 3 videos of interviews and performances running in the Gallery.
Merce Cunningham was born in 1919 in Centralia Washington and received his first formal dance and theater training at Cornish School (now Cornish College of the Arts) in Seattle. From 1939 to 1945 he was a soloist with Martha Graham. During that time, he began to choreograph independently, presenting his first New York solo concert with John Cage in April 1944. He continued to present annual concerts, by himself or with an ad hoc group of dancers, until the formation of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company at Black Mountain College in the summer of 1953. Since that time Cunningham has choreographed nearly 200 works for his dance company’s world-wide performances. Cunningham’s interest in contemporary technology has also led him to work with the computer program LifeForms, which he has used in making all his dances since 1991.
He has choreographed works for the New York City Ballet, American Ballet Theatre and the Ballet of the Paris Opera. His work has also been included in the repertories of numerous ballet and modern dance companies around the world, among them the Boston Ballet, Mikhail Baryshnikov’s White Oak Dance Project, Pacific Northwest Ballet, Pennsylvania Ballet, Cullberg Ballet (Stockholm), Rambert Dance Company (London), the Ohio Ballet, Charleroi/Danses, Repertory Dance Theater (Salt Lake City), Dayton Contemporary Dance Company, and Theatre du Silence (France).
In 1999 Cunningham was given the Premio Internazionale “Gino Tani” and he received a Handel Medallion from the Mayor of New York City. In 1995 he was awarded the Golden Lion of the Venice Biennale. Cunningham and John Cage (posthumously) were awarded the Wexner Prize of the Wexner Center for the Arts at Ohio State University in 1993. Cunningham was also a recipient of the National Medal of Arts in 1990 and the Kennedy Center Honors in 1985, in which year he also received the Laurence Olivier Award in London and a MacArthur Fellowship. In France, he was made a Chevalier of the Legion d’Honneur in 1989.
Cunningham has collaborated with many significant artists of our time including John Cage, Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, and Andy Warhol, among others. He also collaborated with filmmaker Charles Atlas on three original works for film, and three original works for video. In the fall of 2000, a new documentary was directed by Atlas and produced by French, American and British television.
Cunningham’s work has been the subject of major exhibitions at two contemporary art museums, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis and the Museo d’Arte Contemporaneo del Castello di Rivolli, Torino, Italy.
Cunningham has collaborated on two books about his work: Changes: Notes on Choreography, with Frances Starr, and The Dancer and the Dance, interview with Jacqueline Lesschaeve. The latter, originally published in French, has also been translated in German and Italian. Merce Cunningham/Dancing in Space and Time, a collection of critical essays edited by Richard Kostelanetz, was published in 1992. Merce Cunningham: Fifty Years, chronicle and commentary by David Vaughan, archivist of the Cunningham Dance Foundation, was published in September of 1997, with a French translation published the same year, and just released by Aperture is the book Other Animals which documents his drawings and journals.
In the year 2000 on the occasion of their bicentennial, the Library of Congress recognized Merce Cunningham as a Living Legend for the lasting contribution he has made in enriching our lives.
Web sites with information about Merce Cunningham:
www.merce.org Merce Cunningham Dance Foundation, links to all aspects of the Company
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/entertainment/july-dec99/merce_8-24.html Interview by Elizabeth
Farnsworth
http://www.salon.com/weekly/interview960722.html Interview by Cynthia Joyce
http://www.brunel.ac.uk/depts/pfa/bstjournal/1no1/DEEreynolds.htm Story by Dee Reynolds
http://www.nypl.org/press/merce.html New York Public Library acquires Cunningham Dance Foundation
Collection
Books:
Merce Cunningham 50 Years … David Vaughan author … available through Aperture Foundation
Other Animals … Available through Aperture Foundation (www.aperture.org)
Both books will be available in the gallery during the exhibit.
http://www.merce.org/about/
July 18 – August 22, 2002
From July 18 – August 22 the Gallery of Fine Art will host the preview exhibit for the annual charity gala Arts for ACT 2002. The donated work of more than 150 local, national and international artists will be shown at Edison prior to the August auction to benefit Abuse Counseling and Treatment, Inc.
http://www.actabuse.com/
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