Hillstrom Museum of Art opening reception, with artist gallery talk by Tony MartinSeptember 17, 2018 at 7–9 p.m.
There will be an opening reception on Monday, September 17, 2018, 7 to 9 p.m. at the Hillstrom Museum of Art for its two new concurrent exhibitions 10 AM, Zero One, and Other Settings: Paintings by Tony Martin, and FOCUS IN/ON: Cameron Booth's Toilers (both on view September 10 through November 4, 2018).
Brooklyn artist Tony Martin will present a gallery talk about his paintings and drawings during the reception, starting at 7:30 p.m. Martin will also meet with art classes during his stay on campus, and his wife, poet Margot Farrington, will meet with English students studying creative writing.
As with all programs of the Hillstrom Museum of Art, the reception, gallery talk, and exhibits are free and open to the public.
Please see below for general information on the new exhibits.
The Hillstrom Museum of Art presents concurrent exhibitions: 10 AM, Zero One, and Other Settings: Paintings by Tony Martin, and FOCUS IN/ON: Cameron Booth's Toilers, both on view September 10 through November 4, 2018.
An opening reception will be held Monday, September 17, 7:00 to 9:00 p.m., featuring a gallery talk by artist Tony Martin (starting at 7:30); and there will be a Nobel Conference reception Tuesday, October 2, 2018, 3:30 to 5:30 p.m.
10 AM, Zero One, and Other Settings features and paintings and drawings by Brooklyn artist Tony Martin. Martin was born in Knoxville, Tennessee in 1937, and studied at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. His paintings present a commingling of invented abstract and figural forms in environments observed from his surroundings.
Martin's expressive painterly manner took hold and evolved through decades lived in New York City and Brooklyn. Paintings of the 1970s, possessed of somewhat linear and minimal spatial divisions, he called "emotional geometry." These were followed by light and dark "place oriented" interiors of the 1980s, and ultimately brought on, in the most recent decades, what Martin regards as his simplification of the essence of invented places.
Works in 10 AM, Zero One, and Other Settingspresent semblances of intimate or global stages, where the figures (or simply spheres, or heads, hats, or mirrors) confront their existences in an array of environs: some shadowed and tentative, tense with the sense of judgment, others blissful, ablaze with light like that of wisdom or of acknowledgement.
Martin was the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Individual Artist Fellowship and his works are in numerous public collections including the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden (Smithsonian Institution), Washington, DC, and the Butler Institute of American Art, Youngstown, OH. His works have been exhibited widely, abroad and across the United States, including in the 2015 exhibit Hippie Modernism: The Struggle for Utopia at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis.
10 AM, Zero One, and Other Settings: Paintings by Tony Martin is accompanied by a fully-illustrated brochure that includes an essay on the artist by art writer Regina Cherry. The brochure is available free of charge.
FOCUS IN/ON: Cameron Booth's Toilers is another of the Museum's FOCUS IN/ON projects, in which a single work from the Hillstrom Collection is analyzed in depth in collaboration with a colleague from across the Gustavus Adolphus College curriculum. Toilers (c. 1925), an oil painting by American artists Cameron Booth (1892-1980), is considered in an essay co-written by Laura Triplett, associate professor in geology and environmental studies and chair in geology, and Hillstrom Museum of Art director Donald Myers. The project explores the artist, his career, and how he portrayed people who live in close relationship with the land. It considers how new scientific breakthroughs are affirming what farmers have long known: that personal and societal well-being is tightly linked to the health of the soil.
This FOCUS IN/ON project is presented in conjunction with the Gustavus Adolphus College 2018 Nobel Conference, Living Soil: A Universe Underfoot (October 2-3, 2018); Triplett is co-chair for this year's Conference. In conjunction with this project, additional works by Booth from the Museum's collection will also be displayed.
FOCUS IN/ON: Cameron Booth's Toilers is accompanied by an illustrated brochure that includes the in-depth essay and is available free of charge to visitors.
As with all the programs of the Hillstrom Museum of Art, these exhibitions, their receptions, and the gallery talk by Tony Martin are open to the public and are free of charge.
Further information can be found at gustavus.edu/hillstrom.
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