Contact: Maralee Csellar, AU Media Relations, 202-885-5952

Washington, D.C. (Nov. 20, 2007)—The American University Museum at the Katzen Arts Center announces its line-up of exhibitions for winter 2008:

Carlos Luna: El Gran Mambo (Tuesday, Jan. 29 – Sunday, March 16, 2008)
Cuban-American artist Carlos Luna is a storyteller and social chronicler, merging themes of fables and mysticism, eroticism and prejudice, religiosity and anthropology, all of which are organized, disbanded, interwoven and reorganized in the iconographic discourse he creates.

Ben L. Summerford (Tuesday, Jan. 29 – Sunday, March 16, 2008)
Born in Alabama in 1924, Professor Emeritus Ben Summerford has been a major influence on Washington art for over fifty years as an artist, teacher and co-founder of the Jefferson Place Gallery. Summerford remains well known for his still-lifes, landscapes and interiors of exquisite color and sensitivity.

Roger Brown: Southern Exposure (Tuesday, Feb. 5 – Saturday, March 22, 2008)
Although identified with Chicago Imagism, Roger Brown (1941-1997) never forgot his Alabama roots, infusing dark, cartoon-like paintings with fire-and-brimstone religion, folk craft, storytelling, no-nonsense politics and big-city awe. A selection of nearly forty examples, together with childhood artifacts, works by artist-friends, and self-taught art tell the story. This exhibition was curated by Sidney Lawrence and organized by the Jule Collins Smith Museum of Fine Arts at Auburn University, Auburn, Ala.

Elena Sisto: New Work (Tuesday, Feb. 5 – Saturday, March 22, 2008)
Elena Sisto, a painter and an avid teacher of art, will display her new work at the museum. Hearne Pardee of Artzine writes of Sisto's work: "Over her career, she has consistently explored her own emotions projected into surrogate figures—first into cartoon characters and then into more naturalistically rendered figures.... There is a social confrontation, not merely with the character portrayed, who engages our immediate attention, but with the artist at work.... We continually examine the protagonists, but also develop an awareness of the layers of meaning involved in that silent interaction."

William Christenberry: Site/Possession (Tuesday, Feb. 5 – Saturday, March 22, 2008)
Organized by the University of Virginia Art Museum, this show features William Christenberry's rarely exhibited drawings in relation to his Ku Klux Klan room (the Tableau), last seen in this country more than ten years ago. Consisting of more than 200 works rendered in the entire range of media used by the artist, the Klan Room describes the artist's visceral reaction to this abhorrent American phenomenon, which, although officially excised from the public, still exists and arouses intense feelings in all areas of the country. In this age of homeland security and border control, one senses the relevance of Christenberry's vision.