Past Exhibitions: Fall 2005: Grand Openings

William Allan, Rainbow (soda creek), 2004.
20 x 28 in. Watercolors on paper. Courtesy the artist.

William Allan:
Stories and Watercolors

This William Allan exhibition combines the widely-respected California artist’s written vignettes about life, art, and fishing with nine examples of his virtuoso paintings of fish. The exhibition features 13 stories with such evocative titles as “What Fishing Is For” and “Where the Sea Birds Go at Night” appear on text panels next to vivid, life-size watercolors of salmon, trout and other fish on white paper. The juxtapositions are “neither random nor deliberate,” says Museum Director Jack Rasmussen, who organized the exhibition, “but somewhere in between.” Allan, 69, is a fisherman of long standing.

Frost Work, March 15, 2004, 2004.
19 x 21 7/8 in. Blue ink on paper.
Courtesy Alan Koppel Gallery.

After Bruce Conner: Anonymous, Anonymouse, and Emily Feather

The first extensive showing of inkblot drawings by the internationally-known, San Francisco-based artist Bruce Conner (b. 1933), together with three of the anonymous artists he has trained to carry on his work in recent years. The exhibition features twenty-nine examples of intimately scaled, accident-rich inkblots by the artist and his colleagues, dating from 1981 to the present. Bearing occasional resemblances to epitaphs, cosmograms, and Asian scrolls, they reveal how the "simplest, most elemental forms born of accident and surprise can become a subtle vehicle for the imagination and intellect," says Museum Director and Curator Jack Rasmussen

Conner, who officially retired as an artist at age 65 in 1999, is the "conductor," as Rasmussen puts it, for the inkblots created before and since. Acknowledging the individual temperaments of the unnamed artists who now make the inkblots, he directs compositions to be organized mostly along vertical lines parallel to one another. "It’s like a cinematic device," he says in a catalog interview, "When you see one image followed by another it adjusts your vision, memory and awareness."

Prominent in San Francisco’s "Beat" scene of the 1950s, Conner first became known for his assemblages and short films using "found" footage–genres recognized as revolutionary even today. In the 1960s, Conner turned to mandala-like drawings, collages made from 19th century engravings, and rock-concert light shows echoing the sensory-based spirituality of the Bay City’s counterculture movement.

Producing his first inkblots in grade school penmanship class, he later incorporated them in his drawings in the 1970s. In the 1980s, when illness restricted his physical activity, Conner devoted himself to this small-scale medium until his retirement. Acknowledged as one of America’s most influential artists, Conner was born in Kansas and earned his BFA degree at the University of Nebraska. He attended art school at the Brooklyn Museum and the University of Colorado before moving to San Francisco in 1957. Critical acclaim marked his career from the start, and his profile as an exhibiting artist became national.


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Emilie Brzezinski, Titans, 2003.
16'. Oak. Courtesy the artist.

Emilie Brzezinski:
Dialog with Wood

The Brzezinski show, marking the artist’s most comprehensive exhibition of wood sculpture to date, fills the museum’s 6,000 square foot sculpture garden, third-floor rotunda and a stairwell entry.

Brzezinski’s twisting, torquing, gouged out compositions in groups and single displays, which she identifies with such evocative titles as "Titans” and “Nike,” often resemble gargantuan human torsos. The artist makes them from trees that are slated to be cut, dying trees, or trees felled by hurricanes, storms or foresters. She scavenges these materials from various sites to haul to her studio where she re-works them into “vertical wedges,” following natural twists, turns and growth patterns, with axes, chainsaws, chisels, chains and ropes. Brzezinski’s “tree-forms,” as she calls the completed sculptures, are “metaphors of humanity and its struggle for survival.” The current selection dates from the past six years.

Brzezinski, born Emilie Benes to Czech parents in Switzerland, has lived since childhood in America but has evolved an approach that parallels the monumental wood sculpture of her Central European counterparts Magdalena Abakanowicz of Poland and Magdalena Jetelova of the Czech Republic, as well as Ursula Von Rydingsvard, an American who was born in a border region of Germany and Poland.

Brzezinski began her activity as an abstract sculptor in the 1970s by exploring the transparency of plastic but eventually turned to wood, her focus since the late 1980s. Her fascination with the material began in childhood when, growing up in Berkeley, California, her professor father took her on long excursions through the coastal forests and beaches of Northern California and Oregon. Later, Constantin Brancusi’s direct carving techniques and the wood sculpture of Japan were also influences. An even stronger influence, in 1993-95, was Brzezinski’s participation in a roving international symposium known as “Construction in Process” in Lodz, Poland; Cardiff, Wales and Israel’s Negev Desert. “We made art not to be sold, not to be placed under critical scrutiny, not to adapt to someone’s taste, but for artistic purity, truthfulness, and the rewards of hard work,” the artist says. “The process was liberating.”

Brzezinski earned a fine arts degree at Wellesley College in Massachusetts and shortly after married Zbigniew Brzezinski, a political scientist of Polish parentage. Quietly pursuing sculpture over 25 years while raising a family, Brzezinski had her first solo show in 1981 in Washington.

Since then, Brzezinski has had increasing exhibitions of her work locally, nationally and internationally. A recent sampling includes the Florence International Biennale of 2003, where she won first prize in sculpture; the Kampa Museum, Prague, 2002, with an installation paying double homage to devastating floods in that city and the September 11 attacks; and various permutations of “Forest” at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington (1997), Delaware Center for the Contemporary Arts in Wilmington (2000) and major art spaces in Bratislava, Bucharest, Budapest and Warsaw (2002-04). “Forest III,” the newest, 23-piece version dated 2005, is in the A.U. Museum show.

The Bayly Museum in Charlottesville, VA, presented Brzezinski with a solo show in 2004. She is also included in this year’s Vancouver International Sculpture Biennale. In 1998, her work was featured at the Fujiwa Sculpture Park in Kyoto, Japan. Her 2002 version of “Titans” was donated to the city of Prague and now stands by the river’s edge.


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David Bates, Sisters, 1985.
72 1/4 x 90 1/4 in. Oil on canvas.
Collection of Dr. and Mrs. Cyrus Katzen.

A First Look:
David Bates, Nancy Graves, Gene Davis, and Master Drawings from the Katzen Collection

A First Look brings together nearly 30 works reflecting several strengths of a little-known private collection of modern and contemporary art, part of a generous philanthropic gift to American University on behalf of Washington area patrons Dr. Cyrus and Myrtle Katzen, after whom the Katzen Arts Center is named.

Dr. Katzen, now retired, enjoyed a successful career in real estate development, banking and dentistry in the Washington area. His wife enthusiastically pursued art through painting classes at AU. Their collecting has focused on “art that makes you smile and laugh,” proclaims Dr. Katzen.

Rasmussen elaborates, “The Katzen collection covers several genres—Pop Art, Washington art, glass sculpture and 20th century works on paper. For this initial exhibition, we highlight the Katzens’ enthusiasm for three diverse artists—Bates and Davis, who paint country people and color abstractions, respectively, and Graves, whose buoyant, colorful bronzes and mixed-media paintings merge abstract and natural forms. The exhibition’s bonus is a small but exquisite group of drawings by modern and contemporary masters.”

David Bates (b. 1952), a Texas native educated there and, briefly, New York City, has long focused on the people, ambiance and natural surroundings of the swampy regions of his home state and adjoining Arkansas. Three boldly colorful paintings in the Katzen show, dating from the mid-1980s, typically fuse Bates’s good-natured Pop Art sensibility, jagged, energetic paint handling in the tradition of German Expressionism, comfort level with ordinary people, and folk art’s directness. Images include a maniacal barbershop scene, a view from the stage of a strip club called the Busy Bee Lounge, and a fireside evening with two sisters quietly reading.

Gene Davis (1920-1985), a Washington artist who was revered locally and also won national acclaim from critics, curators and collectors, created a genre in 1958 known as “stripe” paintings. These multi-colored vertical compositions used the placement and patterns of stripes to create complex rhythms, sensations and associations—“an atmospheric reverie of controlled color,” he once said, comparing himself to a jazz musician “playing by eye.” In the Katzen collection, this central figure of the Washington Color School and friend of Cy Katzen is represented by eight diverse works, 1979-83, ranging from atmospheric, open compositions only partly filled with stripes to a bold broad-striped triptych.

Nancy Graves (1939-1995) jolted New York’s art world in 1969 with her lifesize camel sculptures at a Whitney Museum solo show—the first women so honored. How to infuse art with forms from nature remained her focus over the next decades. The Katzen collection includes two mixed-media linear abstractions from the 1980s—works that invoke, like the weather maps and moon maps that influenced Graves, unpredictable natural phenomena—and two major bronzes of the 1990s. Graves applied brilliantly colorful patinas to these tipsy, dynamic structures, which appear both abstract and inherently real. Found objects as well as casts of natural and man-made forms make them seem almost alive.

Master Drawings: This small but choice selection of modern and contemporary drawings by Europeans and Americans ranges chronologically from Amadeo Modigliani’s characteristically spare “Head of a Girl,” 1919, to Andy Warhol’s brushy, colorful “Christmas with a Pig,” 1979. In between are a late figure drawing by Pablo Picasso, a study of a woman by Willem de Kooning, a nude by George Bellows, two figure drawings by Milton Avery, Jim Dine’s ethereal image of yellow trucks on a green face, a rough-edged figure by Jean Dubuffet, and Larry Rivers’s imaginary depiction of Picasso in his studio.


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William Avery, Green Landscape, 1945.
35 1/2 x 45 3/4 in. Oil on canvas.
Gift of Duncan Phillips.
Watkins Collection, American University Museum.

Living Legacy:
60 Years of the Watkins Collection

Living Legacy exhibits 50 key paintings, sculptures, and works on paper from an underknown, 4500-work university collection that reflects the growth of Washington’s art culture since 1945. Pioneer modernists Arthur Dove, Rockwell Kent and John Marin, 1960s abstractionists Kenneth Noland, Jacob Kainen and Alma Thomas associated with the Washington Color School, and such national figures as Milton Avery, John Buck, David Burliuk and Grace Hartigan are among numerous artists, many of them still active locally, represented in the exhibition.