The Ogden Museum of Southern Art will unveil six exhibitions on Sat. Oct. 6 for CAC’s Art for Arts’ Sake: Michael J. Deas; From Terra to Verde: The Work of Sharon Kopriva; Shelby Lee Adams: Salt & Truth; Louviere + Vanessa: Something Whispered, Something Sung; Tav Falco – 50 Photographs: An Iconography of Chance; Health, Wealth and Progeny, a multimedia installation by Dave Greber and Matthew Holdren.
“The Ogden Museum of Southern Art continues to explore the landscape of art in the American South through a variety of exhibitions which focus on different narratives and different media which help us tell our story,” says Director William P. Andrews. “We are particularly proud to participate in the citywide celebration of CAC’s Art for Arts’ Sake and look forward to celebrating the visual culture of the South once again.”
Ogden Museum Chief Curator Bradley Sumrall says of the Michael J. Deas and Sharon Kopriva exhibitions, “They will offer insight into the careers and creative process of two important artists working in the American South.”
Three of the exhibitions focus on photography: “Shelby Lee Adams: Salt & Truth; Louviere + Vanessa: Something Whispered, Something Sung; and Tav Falco – 50 Photographs: An Iconography of Chance—showcase the diversity of subject matter in the American South, as well as the medium of photography,” says Photography Curator Richard McCabe.
In addition to the exhibition openings, there will be live musical entertainment, a cash bar, and the Museum Store will be open, showcasing original art and craft for sale.
Admission is free and the Museum is open 6 p.m.-9 p.m. for Art for Arts’ Sake.
Michael J. Deas
Michael J. Deas is a master realist painter and one of the nation’s premier illustrators. His reinterpretation of the Columbia Pictures logo, commissioned in 1993, is easily one of the most widely seen images in the world. Working from his studio in New Orleans’ historic Vieux Carré, he creates paintings and drawings with an elegant eye and a mastery of the oil medium unusual in a contemporary context.
The Ogden Museum’s exhibition, Michael J. Deas, will feature paintings and drawings spanning his career as an illustrator, combined with never-before-seen works of a deeply personal and often highly allegorical nature, offering new insight into the work of a true master painter working in the South.
From Terra to Verde: The work of Sharon Kopriva
From Terra to Verde is a thirty-year survey of works created between 1982 and 2012 by Houston artist, Sharon Kopriva. Born into a Catholic family in the Houston Heights in 1948, she received a Master of Fine Art in Painting from the University of Houston in 1981.
Kopriva’s work explores issues of faith and doubt, life and death, primitive culture, historic events and contemporary society conveyed through sculptures, drawings, paintings and installations. Moving from the earth-tones of her early expressionistic landscapes and mummies to more recent magical realist depictions of forests-as-cathedrals, this exhibition reveals the breadth and unity of her career.
A book cataloguing this exhibition will be available for sale.
Shelby Lee Adams: Salt & Truth
For more than thirty-five years, Shelby Lee Adams has been making powerful and honest photographs of the hollow dwellers of eastern Kentucky. These images described by Adams as “collaborations” come from mutual trust and respect between the photographer and his subjects.
Adams was born and raised in Hazard, Kentucky. His insider knowledge and connection to the people and culture of that region is reflected in his compassionate photographs that expose the depth and character of a disappearing way of life.
Louviere + Vanessa
Something Whispered, Something Sung
Jeff Louviere and Vanessa Brown incorporate elements of painting, film, and printmaking into their work, creating elaborate images that blur the traditional notion of a photograph. Exploring themes of duality and paradox, creation and destruction, horror as beauty—they construct a surrealistic world that can be as dark and disturbing as it is beautiful and inviting. This exhibition represents a decade of collaborative work from New Orleans’ premier photography couple: Louviere + Vanessa.
Tav Falco – 50 photographs: An Iconography of Chance
Musician, filmmaker, performance artist, photographer and Southern provocateur Tav Falco presents 50 photographs: An Iconography of Chance. These black and white photographs—taken in the 1970s and early 1980s—provide a gothic travelogue through the Deep South. From the farmlands of rural Arkansas to downtown Memphis, the Mississippi Delta and all parts in between, Falco’s haunted images capture the fleeting vestiges of a bygone era found along the lost highways of the American South.
Health, Wealth and Progeny
Health, Wealth and Progeny are fishing the surface of human consciousness when their vessel is compromised by a force that threatens their survival. This will be the most ambitious multimedia installation video-artist, Dave Greber, and woodworker, Matthew Holdren, have worked on to date.
The Art for Arts’ sake exhibitions will be on view through Jan 7, 2013.