Events

Sponsored by The Northeast Louisiana Arts Council

Exhibition on view Feb 20 – May 3, 2025
Public Reception: February 20, 2025 5:30 – 7:30 PM

About the Juror
Annemarie Sawkins, PhD, is a Milwaukee-based independent curator, who has curated several exhibitions for the Masur Museum of Art including Kogyo: Japanese Woodblock Prints (2022), Treasures of Art Nouveau (2019) and Afghan War Rugs: The Modern Art of Central Asia (2018). Her more recent projects include Profound Prints: Art by Exceptional Women at the Hilliard Art Museum and A Creative Place at the Trout Museum of Art. From 1999 to 2012, she was a curator at the Haggerty Museum of Art at Marquette University. A frequent juror and portfolio reviewer, Annemarie Sawkins has a MA and PhD in Art/Architectural History from McGill University in Montreal, Canada.

About the Exhibition
The Masur Museum of Art’s Annual Juried Competition showcases contemporary artists throughout the United States of America working in any medium. First started in 1964, the Annual Juried Competition is the Masur Museum’s longest-running tradition and one of its best-reviewed exhibitions each year.

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On View: November 21, 2024 – February 1, 2025

Public Reception: November 21, 2024  5:30 – 7:30PM

Artist Statement:

“I work in oil on panel or canvas, preferably from life, as the nuances of light captured by the human eye exceed the capability of a single photographic exposure. I find this facilitates a more painterly approach. I believe that still life narratives can be contemporary and not just a reflection of nostalgia for a vanished past. A lemon may have symbolized transience in a Dutch still life, but in my work, it can play a variety of formal and domestic roles in addition to being a code for the 17th century. The same objects recur in in different roles, and the table becomes a stage, or, in postmodern terms, a field of signs and signifiers. Still lifes provide endless opportunities within a studio, while plein aire landscape painting requires travel. Landscape is my most abstract work, with a direct response to an environment. For forty years, I painted largely plein aire landscapes in trips to Italy and Vermont; however, since 2019 my continuing interest in photography and my use of a new limited palette has led to my current series of photo-based downtown landscapes, undertaken during the COVID shutdown. My work is usually small in scale, as I like the intimacy of a small painting as well as the enhanced visual weight of the individual objects. The brushstrokes are also more apparent in a small picture, counting for even more, as does the frame that completes the piece—a lesson I learned from Robert Kulicke, whose small still life paintings had a strong impression on me. He also taught me frame design, construction, and finishing techniques, as well as his concept of “eclectic framing”—the use of historical designs in conjunction with contemporary work.”

About the Artist:

Peter Jones is a figurative painter with a deep respect for the abstract accomplishments of the 20th Century. He grew up in the artists’ community of Woodstock, New York, where his mother painted portraits and his father painted mural commissions for the Federal Government projects during the Depression. He received his MFA from the University of Iowa in 1969, and focused on still life painting in the early 70s during his first teaching experience at Sullins College. Following seven years as art director of Vermont Life Magazine he came to Louisiana Tech in 1980, and taught there for 31 years. During that period he had two one-man shows at A.M Adler Fine Arts in New York City, and one-man shows at Amherst College and in Woodstock, New York, Charleston, West Virginia, Charleston, South Carolina, and Charlottesville, Virginia. He had a 25 year retrospective in Ruston in 2005 and an exhibition of still lifes at the Alexandria Museum in 2006. Since his retirement he has continued to exhibit still lifes and landscapes in group shows in Louisiana and national juried shows. In 2023 he had a retrospective exhibition at ULM’s Bry Gallery.

Image:

Gardenias with Peach in Hand
(Ovid’s Judgement of Paris)
Kulicke cast Louis XIII reproduction frame
2005

Julie Crews is an oil painter. She grew up in Asheville, North Carolina, but has called many other places home. A few include northern California, which taught her how to ease into her 20’s; Louisiana, which enriched her southern vision for ten years; and Huntsville, Alabama, where she now lives with her husband and five children. She operates an open studio and gallery in a 122-year-old cotton mill, repurposed as Lowe Mill Arts and Entertainment.

Julie paints what takes her out of the studio: the life it takes to nurture a family. When she is in the studio she escapes certain domestic tethers, but on the canvas before her remain the scenes of her life. Fires burn in the backyard. Cars wait at a red light. Children swim and leaves settle on the forest floor. Weather, traffic, landscapes encountered while running errands around town, and her interactions with the people closest to her influence her work, naturally. But recreating these scenes gives permanence to the emotional undercurrents of her life.

I’ll Be Right With You is an ongoing narrative of the pursuit of living a well-curated life, and even though curating her emotions is one of her most challenging charges, Julie Crews does not hold back. With works entitled I Can Do Hard Things and Wake Me Please When This is Over, she is hopeful that every soul viewing the exhibition I’ll Be Right With You will find work that resonates with them in a deep and meaningful way.