Part One: Department of Art and Art History Faculty Exhibition

This comprehensive exhibition showcases a large number of works over a diverse range of themes and media that offer a rich survey of recent and past activity by the Department’s faculty artists.

The Visual Arts Center has developed a new kind of exhibition to showcase the artwork of artists who teach in the Department of Art and Art History. The three-part show is occurring over the next three years, with each year featuring a different group of artists. This year, rather than adhering to an overarching theme, ten artists who teach in Studio Art were asked to provide viewers with a greater understanding of their practice by putting together small solo shows. Some have chosen to present a single work, while others are featured with a group of related pieces from the past and present.

The exhibition includes four artists who teach in Painting and Drawing, the largest of the Studio Art divisions. Sarah Canright explores subtle mark-making and texture through abstraction, and more recently images of animals. Michael Mogavero produces oil paintings that are densely layered with Baroque decoration, iconography, and sometimes words that allude to contemporary narratives. Susan Whyne makes works that involve a myriad of colors, objects, and people in surreal scenarios. Rob Verf takes a conceptual tact in paintings and installations that explore how forms, beings, and colors leave impressions in space.

Two artists featured in this show teach Photography. Lawrence McFarland has most recently produced panoramic, often people-less images of the American West and parts of Italy. Elizabeth Chiles exploits the medium’s ability to capture light, developing intimately-scale images that transform the everyday into the extraordinary. Printmaking is represented by Lee Chesney, whose exploration of intaglio began with abstraction and has more recently turned to landscape forms and color. Barna Kantor teaches Transmedia, and uses technology to produce films, videos, and sculptural elements that engage vision and perception. Margaret Meehan offers classes in Ceramics, though her multi-media installations play with notions of innocence and the dark impulses behind everything from boxing to circus acts. John Stoney, who teaches Sculpture, generates objects, videos, and even drawings that meditate on the elements that make up our universe—from the galaxies above, to the geological formations below, and to the architectural artifacts around us.

This exhibition not only offers viewers a glimpse into a wide-range of practices, but also a window into the strength and diversity of Studio Art at The University of Texas at Austin.

To complement this exhibition, Lee Chesney, Interim Chair of the Department of Art and Art History, will moderate an artist talk on December 1, 2011 in which participating faculty will discuss their work and process.

Part One: Department of Art and Art History Faculty Exhibition is funded in part by the Carole and Charles Sikes Fund of the Austin Community Foundation.

Organized by Jade Walker, VAC Director, and Kate Green, VAC Curatorial Fellow.