Past Exhibitions: Spring 2006

Forget Me Not/No Me Olvides: Photographs by Norma I. Quintana

Nearly 70 black-and-white photographs by Quintana, a California artist, pay homage to memento portraits from her Puerto Rican childhood: subjects pose in front of a painted seascape with individual wooden posts that spell out poignant messages in Spanish or English. A mosaic of people who live and work in the Napa Valley are depicted, including a rockabilly couple (pictured left), army recruit, midget ballet dancer, mother-daughter violinist team, several wheelchair-bound veterans, and bookworm film director Francis Ford Coppola. Also on display are the backdrop and post recreated by Quintana for the 2004 series.

Estuardo Maldonado: Dimensionalismo

This exhibition, installed in the museum's skylit stairwell gallery, features a selection of modular structures of colored stainless steel by Maldonado (b. 1930), an Ecuadorian artist whose radical mode of abstraction, which he calls "Dimensionalismo," invokes painting, sculpture, architecture, and engineering all at once, recasting Constructivism for the 21st century. Influenced early on by pre-Colombian as well as European art, Maldonado's works have been exhibited internationally for decades at biennials in Venice, Florence, and Havana, as well as numerous European and Latin American museums, but have been shown only sporadically in the United States. This exhibition is organized in cooperation with the Embassy of Ecuador.

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Annual Student Exhibitions

This series charts the progress of emerging artists at varying levels of study at American University's Art Department as follows:

• Undergraduate Painting, Printmaking, Sculpture, and Design

• First-Year MFA Students

• MFA Theses Exhibitions

Visual Politics: The Art of Engagement

On tour from the San Jose Museum of Art (SJMA) in California, this exhibition examines the interconnected history of art and politics since the Cold War with a focus on art from the West Coast, where protest politics and countercultural activities have been particularly pronounced. Free speech, Vietnam, black power, gay rights, Chicano liberation, the environmental movement, poverty, immigration, and nuclear war are among the issues explored and reflected in paintings, sculptures, works on paper, mixed-media pieces, interactive videos, and an outdoor installation of knotted fabric on the museum’s façade by Helene Aylon. The exhibition comes with a 300-page book by Berkeley art historian Peter Selz, who lectures on the exhibition May 25. It is organized by Susan Landauer, SJMA's chief curator, who gives a Gallery Talk on June 4. Drawn almost entirely from the socially-based contemporary art collection of SJMA, the exhibition premiered in San Jose in November 2005 and appears at the AU Museum for its only East Coast showing.

The exhibition features four parts:

Part 1: Against War and Violence—Ariel, Robert Arneson, Helène Aylon, David Best, Enrique Chagoya, Binh Danh, Conner Everts, Al Farrow, Rupert Garcia, Wally Hedrick, Frank Lobdell, Erle Loran, Long Nguyen, Irving Norman, Manuel Ocampo, Dinh Q. Le, the team of Tamiko Thiel and Zara Houshmand.

As part of "Against War and Violence," the museum exterior features Helène Aylon's ongoing Bridge of Knots II, derived from Bridge of Knots I (now a permanent installation at the Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Art, Peekskill, NY), in which Ms. Aylon and other women filled pillowcases with earth gathered from Strategic Air Command military sites and traveled them across country in an “Earth Ambulance” for the United Nations Disarmament Rally of 1982. Aylon’s project was generated by fear of nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet Union, which was particularly keen in the Reagan era.

Six months later, Aylon delved deeper into this theme by traveling to the Soviet Union where she asked women in four cities to write personal dreams and nightmares regarding nuclear war on their own pillowcases. In 1983, the artist launched a similar project among women protesting escalation of defense systems at the Seneca Army Depot in New York State. In 1985, Aylon went to the twin symbols of nuclear horror, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, where a dying-out generation of survivors, in Japanese, also wrote dreams and nightmares on their own pillowcases.Bridge of Knots II presents these three projects as one piece. This showing at the Katzen marks its first façade installation since 1995 and its first ever in the mid-Atlantic region. The artist likens its effect to escaping from a burning building.

Part 2: On Racism, Discrimination and Identity Politics—the team of Anthony Aziz and Sammy Cucher, Judith Baca, Hung Liu, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Lari Pittman, Tino Rodriguez, Travis Somerville, M. Louise Stanley, Salvador Roberto Torres.

Part 3: Toward a Sustainable Earth—Chester Arnold, John Buck, Edward Burtynsky, Rene de Guzman, Helen and Newton Harrison, Masami Teraoka.

Part 4: Contemporary Politics—Sandow Birk, Hans Burkhardt, Robbie Conal, Clinton Fein, Llyn Foulkes, Bruce Hasson, Evri Kwong, William Wiley.

Book: Art of Engagement:
Visual Politics in California and Beyond
The exhibition's four themes are probed in depth, encompassing ephemera such as mural art and posters, parallel national developments and other art and artists, in the 200-illustration, 312-page book by art historian Peter Selz that accompanies the exhibition. Co-published by SJMA and the University of California Press, the book also features an informative introduction by Susan Landauer, who conceived and organized the exhibition. It is available at the AU Museum's front desk for $60 hardcover and $30 softbound.

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