The Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art presents The Making of David McCosh, Early, Paintings, Drawings and Prints on view July 23 – September 4, 2011. Free Opening Reception, Friday July 22, 6:00 – 8:00 p.m.
David McCosh, The Reservoir, 1934, Water color, ink, charcoal, David McCosh memorial Collection
David McCosh (1903-1981) is recognized as one of the region’s most important artists of the twentieth century due to his remarkable works that documented personal experiments in observation, his three and a half decades as faculty at the University of Oregon, and his continued influence on many of Oregon’s most talented contemporary painters. However, before he reached this level of success, the Iowa-born McCosh was a struggling artist trying to make a living during the Great Depression in Chicago and New York and at Grant Wood’s Stone City artist colony. His training at the prestigious School of the Art Institute of Chicago was a valuable asset in an artistic environment that raised questions of academicism, modernism, and regionalism among Midwestern artists. McCosh’s paintings, prints, sketchbooks, and letters from this period illustrate his transition from student to teacher as well as his dual development as a painter and a lithographer.
This exhibition, curated by Danielle Knapp, the JSMA’s McCosh Fellow Curator, offers a never-before-seen glimpse at the beginning career of one of Oregon’s most distinctive and influential artists. Made possible by the David and Anne Kutka McCosh Memorial Endowment.
http://jsma.uoregon.edu