CURRENT EXHIBITIONS

Fall 2009

Topspin

A Series of solo exhibitions for regional artists

Tom Hughes: We Know All the Words

September 27, 2009 - January 17, 2010

Opening Reception:

Sunday, September 27, 2009 2:00 - 4:00 p.m.

Tom Hughes describes himself as an “artist who works concept-first. A medium is, for me, quite simply whatever I find to be appropriate…you will see various manifestations of my ideas in the works, ranging from custom shirts, sculptural firecrackers, video installations, and motorized mechanical assemblages.” His installation for the Castellani Art Museum’s TopSpin Series will include sculptural light-boxes based on text and language. When illuminated, they will generate “something between an aura and a personality,” according to Hughes. “I work with words. I build simple objects, sometimes in complicated relationships, which are centered around the ideas of language as a human construction and an anthropomorphic tool. There is a curious degree of communication and sympathy with these non-human forms and their relation to viewers. These things try to stand on their own; they somewhat rely on each other; they fumble towards something meaningful. They are illuminated. They can be wired together, they are plugged in, when properly connected, they shine.”

Tom Hughes is the recipient of a 2009 Special opportunity Stipend grant from the Buffalo and Erie Council on the Arts.

PERMANENT COLLECTION EXHIBITION

Andy Warhol: A Photographic Legacy

August 16, 2009 - February 14, 2010

Andy Warhol, Carly Simon, 1980, Polacolor Type 108

The Castellani Art Museum is proud to announce a significant acquisition to its permanent collection. The museum has received 158 original Andy Warhol Polaroid photographs and gelatin silver prints, a gift of the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. In honor of its 20th anniversary, the Foundation is distributing 28,000 original Warhol photographs valued in excess of $28 million through the Andy Warhol Photographic Legacy Program. The Castellani Art Museum of Niagara University is one of only two institutions in Western New York to be awarded this gift. The photographs are valued at $185,000.

“The Warhol Foundation’s gift to the Castellani Art Museum augments its permanent collection, which includes portions of the legacies of a growing number of artists in an archival repository that serves as an educational resource,” said Curator of Collections and Exhibitions Michael Beam. The Castellani Art Museum will be featuring works from this donationin a fall exhibition, along with several Warhol artworks from its permanent collection.

According to Warhol Foundation President, Joel Wachs, the aim of the Photographic Legacy Program is to “provide greater access to Warhol’s artwork and process, and to enable a wide range of people from communities across the country to view and study this important yet relatively unknown body of his work. The program offers institutions the opportunity to bring a significant number of photographs into their permanent collections, allowing those institutions that currently have works by Warhol to enrich the scope and breadth of their holdings.”

“A wealth of information about Warhol’s process and his interactions with his sitters is revealed in these images,” notes Jenny Moore, curator of the Photographic Legacy Program. The foundation says, "While the Polaroid portraits reveal Warhol's profound and frank engagement with the personality in front of his lens, the gelatin silver prints point to his extraordinary compositional skill, his eye for detail, and his compulsive desire to document the world around him.”

PERMANENT COLLECTION EXHIBITION

Sightseeing:

Pop Art from the Permanent Collection

October 4, 2009 - February 28, 2010

IN OUR EDUCATION GALLERY

A Menagerie: Animal Imagery from the Collection

Through December 23, 2009

FOLK ARTS EXHIBITION

Reflecting on Folk Arts

August 2 - December 23, 2000

Our current exhibition Reflecting on Folk Arts examines to process of creating a folk arts exhibition. It was inspired by conversations between Interim Folk Arts Curator Claire Aubrey with photographer Lauren Tent as they photographed occupational apron wearers across Western New York. Claire Aubrey commented, “Of the many things that folklorists reflect upon, perhaps the most heart wrenching is the loss of folk artists. While attending the 52nd Annual Attica Rodeo in Attica, New York, a project I have been working on since 2005, I was saddened to learn of the passing of several of my informants. We are blessed with the opportunity to meet talented men and women whom are often unrecognized outside of their small communities. These truly gifted people open their homes to us and often become treasured friends. Our lives are enriched by knowing them and incomplete without them.”

Summer 2009

TopSpin

A Series of solo exhibitions for regional artists

Tom Holt: Test for Echo

May 31 - September 13, 2009
Opening Reception:
Sunday, May 31, 2009 2:00 - 4:00 p.m.

Berzerk, 2009 , mixed media, 12 x 12 inches

The Castellani Art Museum’s TopSpin Series continues with Tom Holt: Test for Echo. An opening reception with artist’s talk will be held Sunday, May 31, 2009 from 2:00 – 4:00 p.m. at the museum on the Niagara university campus.

A highlight of Test for Echo will be a multi-media graffiti mural that Holt is creating especially for the TopSpin exhibition. The spray painted work that will cover one wall of the gallery is also going to also incorporate projected video images.

A former preparator and assistant curator at the Burchfield Penney Art Center, Holt has been active in the Buffalo art scene for several years, arriving in Buffalo in 2002 to start the successful, but short lived, Kamikaze Art Gallery in Allentown. His work has been exhibited at Hallwalls Contemporary Art Center, The Burchfield Penney Art Center and the Buffalo Arts Studio. Holt has engineered large-scale work for Squeaky Wheel and Roger Waters of Pink Floyd. His work incorporates the styles of graffiti, anime and video games, ranging from small pencil illustrations and mixed media paintings to large-scale spray painted murals and digital video projects. He currently resides in Buffalo where he maintains an active studio.

Test for Echo melds together all of Holt’s artistic interests from painting and illustration to digital video and graffiti. Particular influences are attributed to graffiti artists who “tag” urban locations and derelict spaces. Returning a few weeks later to see who was inspired to “respond.” Often, numerous artists add their “tags” in a spontaneous arrangement that Holt describes as, “…free-form painting akin to the musical format of jazz arrangements. The purest satisfaction in art is taking something small and recreating it on a grand-scale altering the experience and contributing to a greater visual impact.”

Holt is motivated by a wide array of today’s visual media including advertising, animation, the Juxtaposed movement and fantasy animation. His work is influenced by mass media, commercial advertising; infomercials, art museums, urban graffiti and early video games. His appreciation for both video art and mural paintings has led him to explore how they can be combined successfully.

Holt’s vision is often expressed through cartoons. He believes “cartoons carry a stronger sense of originality than other artistic expressions due to the digital age of photographic reproduction. Illustrators and cartoonists define their style by the way they interpret the world around them.”

The artist will host a Blackbook event at his home Friday, July 10, 6:00-8:00 p.m. Graffiti artists regularly carry black sketch books and bring them to each other’s homes to pass them around and draw in. For more information, directions, and to RSVP, please contact Curator Michael Beam at 716-286-8286 or mjbeam@niagara.edu.

The latest in the museum’s series of solo exhibitions profiling emerging artists of Western New York, Test for Echo runs through September 13, 2009. The TopSpin series is sponsored by Tops Friendly Markets. The Castellani Art Museum of Niagara University is open Tuesday – Saturday, 11 a.m. – 5:00 p.m. and Sundays 1:00 – 5:00 p.m. Admission is free. For more information on the exhibition and its related programming, 716-286-8286.

The TopSpin series is sponsored by Tops Friendly Markets.

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CONTEMPORARY ART EXHIBITIONS

JED': 30 Years of Painting by Jed Jackson

Sex life of Flowers -or Goethe, Byron and Madame de Stael in Elysium,1986

Oil on wood, 33 x40 inches

JED’: 30 Years of Paintings by Jed Jackson opens with a reception from 2:00 – 4:00 p.m. on Sunday, March 15, 2009. The artist is will be on hand to give a talk and to answer questions about his work. The exhibition runs through September 20, 2009. Arkansas Sunset is featured, as well as works from collections in Buffalo, New York; the artist’s studio in Memphis, Tennessee, and a private collection in Lonoke, Arkansas.

During his tenure in Buffalo, Jackson was active in the local art scene with exhibitions at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery and Nina Freudenheim Gallery, and served as a member of the Board of Directors at Hallwalls.

Jackson’s paintings are modern mythological allegories, rich with subtle innuendos, political dissent, and emotional ambiguity. His subject matter is culled from his photographs, sketches, writings, and a myriad of commercial media. Inspiration is also derived from literary, musical, and big screen interests including: Mark Twain, Stanley Kubrick, Jack Kerouac, Gloria Swanson, W.C. Fields, Buster Keaton, Leni Riefenstahl, and Tom Waits. Jackson regards his editing process as, “a manner of image sorting—a kind of improvisation.”

Jackson’s visual narratives reflect his cosmopolitan interest, opportunistic Bon-Vivant esthetic, and curiosity about social culture throughout the western world. His thirty-years of work echo a non-linear novel where past, present, and future crisscross. A gifted visual conservationist, Jackson is also influenced by the “gritty realism” of artists such as Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Jacques Louis David, and early Edgar Degas. Jackson also looks to the work of his contemporaries including John Currin and David Salle.

Jackson, born in Fayette, Arkansas, attended Rhodes College in Memphis and Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine. He received his Master of Fine Arts from Cornell University and Bachelor of Fine Arts from Memphis College of Art. He is the recipient of numerous honors, awards, and fellowships from organizations including; ArtsMidwest, National Endowment for the Arts, Mid America Arts Alliance, Arkansas Arts Council, Cornell University, Tennessee Arts Commission, and recently concluded the Rocheforte-en-Terre residency sponsored by the Maryland College of Art in Morbihan, France. His work has been exhibited in over a hundred solo and group exhibitions in museums and galleries from New York, Miami, and Chicago to London and Amsterdam. Jackson’s work can be found in numerous public and private collections. He is currently Professor of Painting at The University of Memphis.

JED’: 30 Years of Paintings by Jed Jackson was developed in conjunction with the 2009 Music is Art Festival hosted by Niagara University’s Live music Committee. This exhibition was made possible with public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts, a State Agency. Additional support provided by Duane Reed Gallery St. Louis/New York www.rduanereedgallery.com, Beau Fleuve, Buffalo, New York www.beaufleuve.com and by Niagara University’s Live Music Committee www.niagara.edu/rtr.

FOLK ARTS PROGRAM

Artistic and Functional: Aprons from the Karen Anderson Collection

January 18 - July 19, 2009

Artistic and Functional: Aprons from the Karen Anderson Collection features a diverse selection of 47 aprons collected by Mrs. Karen Anderson of Lynn Center, Illinois. These beautiful pieces of domestic art demonstrate the ingenuity of a century of American women who fashioned aprons from recycled feedsacks, dresses, curtains, handkerchiefs and blue jeans. Visitors will be captivated by the array of styles and awed by the sewing skills of appliqué, embroidery, smocking and tatting.

This exhibition also features Aprons from a Local Kitchen Drawer, a collection of aprons created by Catherine Weinheimer Hackenheimer, the grandmother of Castellani Art Museum docent Jean Hackenheimer, and Aprons at Work, a series eight of occupational apron portraits photographed by Lauren Tent of CEPA Gallery.

This spring the Folk Art Program of the Castellani Art Museum of Niagara University will team up with Florence Rhodes of Quiltmaker’s and Friends for an apron making workshop.