Artists Return For Exhibitions
As it continues celebrating Queens College’s 75th anniversary, the Queens College Art Center will itself hit the quarter-century mark, and will honor both milestones with the group show, 25/75: The Silver & Diamond Jubilees/Then + Now, opening on Thursday, Feb. 7.
The exhibition assembles recent work by 25 artists, one from each season since the Art Center’s 1988 inauguration in the Benjamin S. Rosenthal Library.
Reviewing the 476 participants who have been presented here over the years, curators Tara Mathison, Suzanna Simor and Alexandra de Luise focused on those they identified as the most accomplished, original, and revealing-and the most relevant to contemporary issues and the Art Center’s current concerns.
Chronologically, the show begins with a sculptural collage by Joan Giordano, who originally exhibited in 1989. Magical Thinking, Giordano says, evokes “both the fabric of a person’s life-remnants of experience that are always slipping from our grasp-and the fabrication of reality continually spun by the media.”
At the other end of the timeline, Howard Lerner, a returnee from last season, contributes Psalm 139, verse 15, mixing mystical, spiritual, and temporal elements in a space where they “take on an iconic presence,” Lerner stated.
His drawing finds an interesting counterpart in Lisa DeLoria Weinblatt’s pastel and graphite sketch, Her Body/Her Text, while the personal, diary-like drawings by Slovenian artist Metka Krascaron;ovec relate to both pieces in associating images with verses.
Comprising diverse media, 25/75 ranges from perennial subjects to topical issues. Eye of an Artist, a novel by British painter Yolanda Christian, is inspired by her experience of diaspora and career as a professional artist; excerpts from the cycle Universes, The Non Exploded Ones, by Genoese artist-scientist Luisella Carretta, offer mixed-media visions of the endless expanse of the universe and dream travels beyond time and space.
In painting, the exhibition features work by Janet Lage, whose disciplined, formal process combines with chance and intuition to emphasize the energetic physicality of the medium; Sue Collier, who looks at individuality within the multiplicity of groups; and Seongmin Ahn, who draws on her Korean heritage.
Queens College Professor Emeritus (Art, 1965-1996) Harold Bruder describes his contemplative still life as analytical in a sense he traces to his teaching, but private, as his life is now. On the Plaza, by Robert (Bob) Kenny, a distinguished journalist and historian turned artist, eloquently relates to college experience. Alice Zinnes (MFA QC’82), an environmental activist, delves “into a mythic space of abstract dreamscapes where hellip; paint is transformed into the unknowable depths of our shared humanity.”
The exhibition also includes a painting installation by Anne Sherwood Pundyk, and stained glass or rather, painting in light, by Ellen Mandelbaum.
Among the sculptures are pieces by John Crawford, whose Queens College Marker, possibly the tallest steel sculpture in the city, is installed on campus; wood carvings by multimedia artist Dennis Cady that abstractly represent human conditions; and a small nonfigurative marble, at once playful and provocative in its references to violence, by Claire Lieberman. Photography is represented by Eva Fuka’s surreal, painterly images, and Tommy Mintz’s automated digital photo collages of New York City street scenes, through which Mintz (MFA QC ’04; Adjunct Lecturer, Art Department) examines virtual and visual hoarding.
Betty Vera explained that her woven textiles express “the underlying solitude and fleeting nature of human existence by exploring aspects of reality that often are ignored or forgotten.” Combined-media artist and conservationist Barbara Roux has contributed the installation Tulip Tree Seeds, which, like all her work, focuses on natural history and habitat change. Three Women, Naomi Grossman’s mixed-media collage of wire, words, and paper, addresses issues of identity and aging, “revealing both their strength and vulnerability in an increasingly complex world,” Grossman noted.
Kathy Goodell, who is interested “in surprising phenomena-evidence of something magical, and the ‘state of becoming’ where everything is possible and nothing is in stasis,” reaches her goal in Mesmer Eyes, a work that “exudes energy past its material self, a kind of reverberation.”
In an installation specific to this site, Tara Mathison based The Fairfield Porter Reading Room on a syllabus
Porter, an American painter, used when he taught at Queens College.
The Art Center’s Spanish and Latin American Art program (1985- 2002) is recalled in several works from its 52 exhibitions and in neverseen before photographs by its founder, the late Jerald R. Green, a QC professor of Spanish language and literature and an authority on Hispanic art.
The exhibition is sponsored by Queens College’s Kupferberg Center for the Arts, QC Alumni Relations Office, ARIA – Italian American Faculty and Staff, Art Department, Center for Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies, the Godwin-Ternbach Museum, Hispanic Languages and Literatures, Latin American and Latino Studies Program, the Libraries, and Provost James R. Stellar.
It is free and open to the public. Images, as well as biographical and sales information, are available upon request.
For additional information, visit https://www.queenscollegeartcenter.or g/exhibitions.html.
Queens College Art Center (part of the Selma and Max Kupferberg Center for the Arts) is located on the sixth floor of the Benjamin S. Rosenthal Library at 65-30 Kissena Blvd. in Flushing.
An opening reception and curators’ and artists’ talk will take place on Thursday, Feb. 7 from 5 to 8 p.m.
The gallery will be open Mondays through Thursdays from 9 a.m. to 8 p.m. and on Fridays 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. It will be closed on Feb. 12 and Feb. 18 as well as weekends and holidays.
For more information, call 1-718- 997-3770 or visit https://www.queenscollegeartcenter.org or https://kupferbergcenterarts.org.
