Archive for June, 2009
Legacy’s Hagan, Moore Go Solo
During the month of July, Jackson Hole’s Legacy Gallery will offer up one-person shows for artists Carol Hagan and Jay Moore. Hagan’s exhibit opens Thursday, July 2; Moore’s debuts Thursday, July 16.
Carol Hagan is noted for her painterly, half-impressionistic half-Fauvist color palette, ecstatically applied to whimsically rendered animal portraits. Embedded with Native American symbols and totems, Hagan’s mystical images fast-freeze species’ souls. Blood reds and rubbed, earthy yellows suggest a womb, a path towards the light. Legacy Gallery notes that Hagen is well-known to such prominent Western Art venues as the C. M. Russell Auction, the Buffalo Bill Art Show and Sale, and Desert Caballeros Western Museum’s show – “Cowgirl Up!” Says the gallery, Hagan’s paintings are paintings “from the heart.”
Landscape artist Jay Moore’s skies are big; making the clouds in the sky seem to 
move across the prairie and a river’s glassy water slide down a valley are reasons why Moore is a respected landscape painter. The Legacy Gallery notes that Moore develops color studies and sketches from plein-air. He then combines a certain technology with a traditional plein aire style by assigning GPS (latitude/longitude) coordinates to his pieces. 
From a historical perspective, this will be of interest and assist collectors and historians. Moore is a devoted and respected artist, says Legacy, whose landscape paintings allow the viewer to feel the beauty of the scene he is recreating.
Legacy Gallery invites the public to both July openings. Welcome to summer! Find Legacy Gallery on the corner of Jackson’s Town Square, at 75 North Cache. Contact the gallery by phone at 307.733.2353.
Jackson Hole artist Suzanne Morlock will join the U.S. non-profit Cross Cultural Collaboration (www.culturalcollaborative.org) , an educational organization working with students from around the world, to work on a variety of paper-making projects in Ghana, Africa. Morlock will spend three weeks this August in Ghana, fulfilling a mission to promote cultural exchange and understanding through art.
Although Ghana provides six years of free, compulsory education, school curriculums are limited, says Morlock. “There is a focus on reading, writing and math, but no exploration of technology or the arts,” she says.
Morlock, Teton County Library’s Public Service Manager, will work with over 40 students daily at Aba House, CCC’s cultural center. She will supervise current projects and create new ones using papers from locally grown sugar cane fibers.
While teaching artistic techniques, these craft projects have another
purpose: creating saleable items to help students earn money for school supplies not provided by state sponsored schools. Morlock lists books, pencils and writing paper as some of the basics students still need. She adds that the summer should see the addition of a new library and webpage design project at Aba House.
Morlock says that though weekends are weekends, children come to the program seven days a week. The kids are learning values, rather than simply relying on bartering or begging. Children will work with other mediums and create art using materials other than paper.
“Here in Jackson we are experiencing some economic slowdowns, and I believe 
this kind of service is even more important as we realize how connected we are globally. Culturally diverse experiences strengthen and influence our communications as humans living on one planet. I’m sure I will learn more than I will teach,” says Morlock, who also needs help now with projects such as gathering and shipping books, computers and art accessories to Africa.
Want to know more? Contact Suzanne Morlock by emailing nungua.ghana@gmail.com.
The Jackson Hole Art Association addresses global warming with its summer exhibition GAIA and Global Warming: Women Artists Champion Nature, kicking off with a free “art talk” at the Center for the Arts Theater on June 24, beginning at 7:30 pm. The show opens June 26 with a 5:30 pm artists’ reception at Artspace; the work remains on display through September 27, 2009.
Curated by Lowery Stokes Sims, GAIA looks at climate change through the eye of the arts. In other words, this is not an exhibit about climate change; it is a show examining–considering–the myriad ways the arts have explored themes of global warming, sustainability (which, in its true sense, refers to any activity or practice that, no matter how often executed, never leaves a corrosive environmental trace) and responsibility.
Hope Sandrow, Peggy Diggs, Margaret and Christine Wertheim (of the Institute for Figuring), Nancy Macko and Judy Cotton are participating artists.
So, GAIA is not land art–art that disappears or transforms–nor is it work designed for a specific public installation. The show is at once a retrospective and commentary. Tracing the “explosion” of enviro-art back to 2006, GAIA embraces the concept that artists are at the vanguard of environmentalism. Creativity and its derivative tactile arts reflect our experience of the world around us.
The Art Association notes that collaborations with “….scientists, statisticians, public policy wonks, municipal officials and arts organizations (has) set the protocol for this genre of art making. Artists thus have been at the vanguard of concretizing (sic) scientific, social, political and economic theory around the environment into specific projects which they have situated in venues for maximum exposure to the public.”
June 24th’s free panel discussion features moderator Lowery Stokes Sims, forest ecologist Nalini Nadkarni, and artists Nancy Macko, Susan Thulin and Lyndsay McCandless.
For more information, phone the Art Association at 307.733.6379.
“An important aspect of both of these designs is that they don’t recall any familiar balls that I know of.” – John Gibson
June 18 – July 20, you can see artist John Gibson’s latest works in a new show, “Inter-play,” at the J.H. Muse Gallery. If you know the Muse, you are very familiar with his paintings of patterned balls. I first thought of these as portraits of cue balls, though the patterns and colors clearly say they are not. But Gibson is obsessed with pattern. He’s so obsessed, he’s written an essay about it. And if you, like me, find his prodigious and in-plain-sight paintings enigmatic–the Muse Gallery has a soft spot for the enigmatic–here are some excerpts from Gibson’s website, specifically from his essay “Patterns,” that discuss his passion for repetition. Twenty years. That’s how long Gibson has been finding continued renewal in his subject. It’s a lot about math, movement, Maori and…scavenger hunting.
“The balls are wrapped with patterns I’ve found in mathematical textbooks, art museums, toy stores and tag sales. Choosing the right pattern is really important. It’s crucial to the question of how the balls turn in space and to how you get from one ball to another. The patterns are the way the paintings move.”
“What attracted me to [a] design was its forward and backward rhythm, which seemed to reflect the swelling and contracting of the ball itself….If I paint them correctly, the stripes wrap around the form of the ball enhancing its volume, its roundness. Those same stripes can also be read as flat–like an exotic wallpaper….”
“For me, the wooden ball lacked the tensions between opposites that the paintings possessed. I missed being confused. I was also reminded of a painter’s fundamental impulse towards opposing forces of all kinds….The best patterns have been the ones that make those issues explicit…and become, like the ball itself, familiar and mysterious at the same time.”
An opening reception takes place Thursday, June 25, 5-8 pm. JH Muse Gallery is located at 62 South Glenwood, in Jackson. www.jhmusegallery.com.
The Buffalo Bill Historical Center’s Whitney Gallery of Western Art is set to re-open June 21. It has been closed for remodeling since October 2008.
Curator Mindy Besaw has been neck deep in the project.
“It’s been “all Whitney, all the time” says Besaw. “I hope to provide visitors with a rich new perspective on the role of art in understanding the American West.” Besaw feels the gallery’s 50th anniversary catch phrase, “Seeing the West in a whole new way,” captures its essence. She notes that the “… reinterpreted gallery goes beyond a traditional chronological display of artwork to create a mixture of historic and contemporary art, grouped together based on such themes as, “Horses in the West,” “Wonders of Wildlife,” “Heroes and Legends,” and “Inspirational Landscapes.” Put another way, it “celebrates the past and envisions the future.” ”
The gallery’s history began when the Buffalo Bill Memorial Association commissioned a New York artist, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, to create a monument to Cody. She donated Buffalo Bill – The Scout, which was dedicated on July 4, 1924, and forty acres of adjacent land.
Besaw tells us that,”For 30 years, the Scout remained a solitary horse-and-rider at the outskirts of town. In 1954, Cornelius Vanderbilt Whitney, the sculptor’s son, donated funds in his mother’s honor to create a western art gallery in Cody, Wyoming. Then, in 1957, the Honorable Robert Coe, acting for the Coe Foundation, purchased the Frederic Remington studio collection of paintings, sketches, and artifacts and gave it to the Buffalo Bill Memorial Association for a new art museum.”
And, as they say, the rest is history. For information, contact Mindy Besaw at mindyb@bbhc.org , or phone 307.578.4053
