Events

Emily Caldwell is a pillar of the arts community in Monroe, Louisiana. Her service to Monroe’s Downtown Arts Alliance has contributed to providing area artists with a launching pad for careers in the arts. Caldwell’s artistic practice is as exemplary as her service to the Monroe arts community. She is a skilled draftswoman and a patient assembler of collages. Positing humans as unseen observers and stewards, her drawings and collages speak to the interconnectedness of various species and the roles they play in the delicate balancing act required to have a healthy ecosystem. Taking this into account, Caldwell focuses on the habitats within Northeast Louisiana, using them as specific examples to discuss broader conservation issues throughout the world. Caldwell’s finished works of art vacillate between stripped down drawings that feel slightly somber and scientific to lyrical pattern-driven collages full of contrasting, sometimes otherworldly colors. All told, her work is like the artist herself: an improbable mixture of joie de vivre and seriousness that coalesces into beautiful, thought provoking activism.

Makers’ Marks is an exhibition featuring work by Todd Cloe, Frank Hamrick, and Cliff Tresner. These artists’ studio practices revolve around making objects constructed largely by hand, as well as using visual forms to express parables. Their broad storytelling capacity touches on many themes ranging from formal or art historical issues to personal narratives with larger human implications. These artists work in representational and abstract modes in media as diverse as tintypes, books, drawings, and sculptures. The intended impact of this exhibition is an unexpected immediacy and connection by visitors to the artists’ work, because the personality of the artists and essence of their materials overlap where the traces of their touch can be detected. Tintypes individually rendered, with their distorted edges and glossy surfaces; hand hewn wood weathered by the very hands that shaped it; aggressively welded metal; and precisely bound, deckle-edged rag paper all speak to this. By and large, the work showcased in Makers’ Marks is an interesting counterpoint to living in front of a screen and expecting instant gratification. The exhibition is not a criticism of our milieu though, but a new way of appreciating it by reacquainting ourselves with skills and materials alien to most.

This exhibition will highlight recent acquisitions and favorites from the Masur Museum of Art’s permanent collection. While specifically outlining our collecting habits, it will also deal with broad artistic and historic trends, as well as those in the American South. Recent Acquisitions & Favorites will feature work by Ron Adams, Robin Bernat, John James Audubon, Richard Buswell, Mary Cassatt, Joshua Chambers, Clyde Connell, Samuel Corso, Salvador Dali, Bruce Davidson, Alexander Drysdale, Jenny Ellerbe, Michael Elliot-Smith, Frank Hamrick, Albino Hinojosa, Jim Isermann, Peter Jones, Ida Kohlmeyer, Eugene Martin, Robert Motherwell, Greely Myatt, Ed Pinkston, Alberto Rey, George Rodrigue, Vitus Shell, Ann Shields, Julian Stanczak, Bill Viola, Bob Ward, Douglas Weathersby, and others.