Aaron Collier: Revival

Newcomb Art Department Professor Aaron Collier opened a two-person exhibition entitled "Revival" on October 24 at Octavia Art Gallery in Houston, TX. The exhibition runs through November 30.

“The “Everything You Need to Know” website that intends to prepare visitors to Palatine Hill in Rome offers the following caution: “Without a guide or guidebook, it can be difficult to make sense of the ruins of the Palatine… you don’t want to be one of those tourists who wanders aimlessly around the hill, with no idea of what they’re looking at.”

In September of 2017, Collier found himself to be just exactly that, a tourist without the benefit of a guide. It was the challenge of making sense of Palatine’s excavations and ruins, with their innumerable fragments, pieces, and remains, the profound inability to explain away or see through every layer, the overwhelming sense of bewilderment and mystery, that inspired the series Of Rocks and Ruins.

With these works, Collier implements several modes of image making towards squaring with the central questions that drive his research: “What to do with a small and incomplete knowledge of a vast, complex, and multivalent world? How are images, which are inherently shards or snippets of information, able to convey this inability to know in full?”.

Artwork: Fact and Spirit, 2018, Flashe on canvas, 38 x 38.”

Remembering Kendall Shaw (1924-2019)

In honor of Veterans Day, the Ogden Museum of Southern Art highlighted the work of World War II veteran and Tulane alumnus, Kendall Shaw.

Shaw was born in New Orleans in 1924. He served in the U. S. Navy as a radioman on an SPB Dauntless dive-bomber searching for German submarines off the mid-Atlantic coast during the second world war. The experience he gained during his service to country at a time of war informed his work for the rest of his life.

Shaw studied painting in New Orleans with George Rickey, Ida Kohlmeyer and Mark Rothko. In New York he studied with Ralston Crawford, Stuart Davis and O. Louis Guglielmi. He held faculty teaching positions at Columbia University Architecture School, Hunter College, Lehman College, The Brooklyn Museum School and Parsons School of Design. Shaw was one of the founding members of a group of artists that came to be called the Pattern and Decoration Movement in the 1970s for their use of repeating geometric patterns inspired by craft traditions from both Western and non-Western cultures.

Born in the final years of the Greatest Generation, Shaw devoted his life to art after his formative experience of military service during WWII. Kendall Shaw died peacefully in his home in Brooklyn, New York on October 18, 2019. He leaves a legacy of innovation and excellence in American Art, and remains one of the most important artists to the mission, history and trajectory of the Ogden Museum of Southern Art.

WWII Veteran Kendall Shaw, Sunship, for John Coltrane, 1982, Acrylic and mirrors on canvas, Gift of the artist, Ogden Musuem of Southern Art

Aaron Collier: "Knowing in Part"

Aaron Collier, Assistant Professor in the Newcomb Art Department, is closing a month-long solo exhibition entitled Knowing in Part on March 28 at Furman University in Greenville, SC.  As part of the closing reception from 6:00-7:30, he will be giving a Gallery Talk for the Furman and Greenville community. 

Collier teaches drawing and painting at Tulane. Solo exhibitions of his work have appeared at Octavia Gallery, Cole Pratt Gallery, and Staple Goods, an artist cooperative in the St. Claude Avenue Arts District. He has participated in recent group exhibitions at the Contemporary Arts Center and the Ogden Museum of Southern Art and has been featured in “New American Paintings.”

Collier’s paintings are represented in such collections as the New Orleans Museum of Art, Iberia Bank, and the Boston Medical Center. He has enjoyed artist residencies at the Ragdale Foundation, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Joan Mitchell Center in New Orleans, ISCP in Brooklyn and OAZO in Amsterdam.
 
[Aaron Collier, Without a Flower, 2019, graphite on paper, 6.5 x 4.75."]

Faculty News: Aaron Collier at UMass

"Datum Drawing" gallery talk with Prof. Aaron Collier

Datum Drawing (February 4-March 8) is an exhibition that explores the use of datum in drawing as an architectural or spatial point of reference. A Datum Line is a line to which dimensions are referred on engineering drawings, and from which measurements are calculated. The term datum refers to a piece of information or fixed point of scale that serves as a reference in defining the geometry of a composition and in measuring aspects of that geometry to assess its relation to another value in space. Artists, architects, designers, engineers, cartographers and many others use datums to construct and define visual representation of space and place.  This show brings together two artists and   two architects who employ the use of datum lines in their work.

ARTISTS:

Aaron Collier, Assistant Professor of Art, Tulane University 

Perry Kulper, Professor of Architecture, University of Michigan 

Derek Lerner, NYC based artist

Tiffany Lin, Associate Professor of Architecture, Tulane University      

Curated  by Sandy Litchfield, Assistant Professor Department of Architecture

DESIGN BUILDING GALLERY
University of Massachusetts 

John W Olver Design Building #180
551 North Pleasant Street

Amherst MA

Aaron Collier: Of Rocks and Ruins

Aaron Collier: Of Rocks and Ruins October 6 – October 27, 2018

Octavia Art Gallery, 454 Julia Street, New Orleans

Opening reception: October 6, 6 – 8 pm *In conjunction with Art for Art's Sake

Abstraction, marked as it is by the ability to be both suggestive and silent, proves to be a fitting vehicle for exploring the possibility of paint to simultaneously reveal and conceal. This dichotomy parallels a shifting, evolving world where what we know consistently shares an edge with what we do not. Paintings in Of Rocks and Ruins layer observed positive shapes and negative spaces from historical works such as Leonardo’s Virgin of the Rocks and Hendrick Goltzius’ Pieta to the degree that the individual and original referent becomes difficult to delineate. Piecing together a knowledge or experience of something through remaining or available fragments mimics our daily interactions with the world. Rather than suggest that these interactions foreground a certain lack or shortcoming, I wonder if incomprehensibility can ever be a source of joy? 
 
– Aaron Collier 

Aaron Collier is a visual artist living in New Orleans. He teaches drawing and painting at Tulane University as an Assistant Professor. This is Aaron’s first solo exhibition at Octavia Art Gallery. Previous solo exhibitions of his work have occurred at Cole Pratt Gallery and Staple Goods, an artist-run gallery in the St. Claude Avenue Arts District of New Orleans. He has participated in recent group exhibitions at The Clemente in New York and the Ogden Museum of Southern Art in New Orleans. Additionally, his work has been featured in New American Paintings and is represented in such collections as the New Orleans Museum of Art, Iberia Bank, and the Boston Medical Center. Collier has been awarded artist residencies by the Ragdale Foundation, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Joan Mitchell Center (New Orleans), ISCP (Brooklyn), and Open Ateliers Zuidoost (Amsterdam). 

Faculty Spotlight - Aaron Collier

Fragments of Reality

Faculty Spotlight - Aaron Collier
Written by Emily Wilkerson

Wednesday, September 26, 2018

Assistant Professor of Art Aaron Collier is inspired by questions and possibilities. His new paintings and works on paper, which will be on view in his upcoming exhibition, Of Rocks and Ruins at New Orleans’ Octavia Gallery, respond to the illusiveness of our inability to see or understand something fully.

“I find there to be an extreme amount of verisimilitude in abstract painting. Abstraction can feel more like an experience with the world than viewing something chronicled in its totality,” Collier explains. While his paintings are mostly composed of varying expanses of color and little recognizable imagery, Collier doesn’t claim to be a purely abstract artist; in other words, he doesn’t wish for there to be a complete divorce between his imagery and the world.

Of Rocks and Ruins will be comprised of Collier’s newest body of work that is inspired by traditional paintings, such as Leonardo da Vinci’s “Virgin of the Rocks,” 1483-1486, as well as his experience visiting Palatine Hill in Rome. In a recent conversation, he explained that while some architectural elements are more intact at Palatine Hill’s ancient site, visitors essentially examine shards and fragments in order to create a vision of what once was.

“The questions that drive my practice are several: how can we enjoy, how can we take pleasure in, how can we exist within finite knowledge? How can we savor and appreciate these beautiful, astounding fragments?”

Collier began teaching in Tulane’s School of Liberal Arts in 2006 as a professor of practice in painting and drawing, focusing on fundamentals in foundations courses such as line, shape, and color. During those first few years, he began reconsidering these same fundamentals in his own work.

“The daily opportunity to observe and participate in the creative processes of Tulane's driven students is incredibly inspiring, challenging, and humbling. Students have no idea how thankful I am for such a gift.”

Anne C. Nelson: Invasive Species at Staple Goods

Anne C. Nelson, Professor of Practice in Painting and Drawing, is the recipient of a 2018-19 Lavin Bernick Research Support Grant. 

During the summer of 2018 she traveled extensively, visiting locations in Minnesota, the East Coast, and Northern Europe where she has ancestral roots. 

Nelson's resulting art work reflects a desire to examine the negative consequences of European immigration in the 19th century and to consider the bearing that history has on present narratives. 

An exhibition of new paintings is on view at Staple Goods Gallery in New Orleans from September 8 - October 7, 2018.

TACTILE FOCUS: The Reciprocality of Painting & Architecture

The Lavin-Bernick Grant for faculty research has sponsored a collaboration between the Tulane School of Architecture and the Newcomb Art department, supporting an interdisciplinary course that examines the spatial behavior of color. Associate Professor Tiffany Lin (architect) and Assistant Professor Aaron Collier (painter) have co-authored a paper to describe this curriculum entitled, Tactile Focus: The Reciprocality of Painting and Architecture.  

This manuscript was presented at the 2018 National Conference for the Beginning Design Student (NCBDS) in Cincinnati and will be published in forthcoming conference proceedings. Lin and Collier have also been invited to show their work at the University of Massachusetts Amherst in February 2019. The Lavin-Bernick grant will support the creation and transportation of paintings to this exhibition, as well as fund travel and accommodation costs related to the opening.

Tulane/Newcomb artists featured in New American Paintings

The most recent edition of New American Paintings features the work of Ronna S. Harris, Associate Professor of Painting and Drawing. Harris works in oils and soft pastels, playing with light and its affect on color. Her paintings communicate a state of controlled chaos as she combines two divergent forces and approaches: realism and abstract expression. By a proficient handling of light, a mastery of images, and a skillful mark making method, the paintings confer an illusion of reality to something that's not real. The end result is a spatial between magic and illusion rooted in the American Realist tradition.

Issue 130 of New American Paintings also features the work of two Tulane/Newcomb alumnae, Maysey Craddock (BA 1993) and Anastasia Pelias (BFA 1981).

Faculty News: Aaron Collier

Two Blocks from Elysian Fields exhibition at the Clemente in New York City.

Following a successful third year review, Assistant Professor Aaron Collier will be spending three weeks in September at an artist residency in Amsterdam.

During the residency, Aaron will delve into the engravings and etchings of Goltzius and Rembrandt at the Rijksmuseum in order to generate line-based works on paper in the studio.

Following Amsterdam, Aaron will lead a day-long drawing workshop in Rome with the Tulane School of Architecture Rome Study Abroad Program.

Staple Goods show in New York features Tulane/Newcomb artists

Members of Staple Goods artist collective, based in New Orleans, are showing new work at The Clemente Center, 107 Suffolk Street in the Lower East Side, New York City.  

Two Blocks From Elysian Fields: Recent Work From New Orleans features Aaron Collier, Abdi Farah, Abe Geasland, Anne C. Nelson, Bill DePauw, Jack Niven, Katrina Andry, Norah Lovell and Thomasine Bartlett. The show is on view from June 1-30, 2017. 

The top photo shows current MFA student Abdi Farah's work on the left (Twice Conquered, 2017, tackle twill, fringe, fabric, and Latex paint, 87 x 104") and Assistant Professor Aaron Collier's two pieces on the right (Deep Calls to Deep, 2015, Flashe on canvas, 72 x 72" and Walkin' After Midnight, 2015, Flashe on canvas, 72 x 72").  Pictured in the orange shirt is Norah Lovell, a member at Staple Goods and Program Manager of the Honors Program at Tulane University.

The bottom photos shows Senior Professor of Practice William DePauw's piece in the foreground (Tip of the Tongue, 2016, fired clay and painted panel) and Professor of Practice Anne C. Nelson's piece to the far left (Anxiety of ancestry, 2017, Latex on wall, oil on canvas, oil on panel, 120 x 80").

Kaori Maeyama at Staple Goods

In the Neighborhood, oil on panel, 18″x24″

The Passenger, a solo show of urban landscape paintings by alumna Kaori Maeyama (MFA 2017) will be on view at Staple Goods, 1340 St. Roch Avenue, from June 10 – July 2, 2017. The opening reception will be held on Saturday, June 10, from 6-9pm.

Maeyama's work is also on view at TEN Gallery, 4432 Magazine Street, June 3- June 25. This group exhibition, titled Rassemblés, features current and recent Tulane and LSU graduate students: Andrea Berg, Justin Bryant, Eli Casino, Carolina Casusol, Christopher Gray, Masy Hebert, and Kaori Maeyama.

Inside Looking Out / Outside Looking In: Paintings by Ronna S. Harris

Inside Looking Out / Outside Looking In: Paintings by Ronna S. Harris is on view at the Blowing Rock Art & History Museum in Blowing Rock, North Carolina from March 25 - July 23, 2017.

Ronna S. Harris was trained in the philosophy of impressionism and its warm and cool palette, yet her current practice involves a back-and-forth and intertwined relationship between American realism and abstract expression. Formally, her paintings depict still lifes, portraiture, and details pulled from the landscape. Conceptually, Harris discloses connections between all three. Inside Looking Out / Outside Looking In celebrates this and many other diverging and converging relationships in her work through an exhibition of twenty oil paintings.

Through a proficient understanding of light and skillful mark-making, Harris’ paintings serve as windows into the intimate, connective details of nature, objects, and humanity. A window rendered within the painting may serve as a backdrop for other subjects, or the physical frame of the painting itself may serve as a window into nature. One painting may place the viewer inside, allowing for one to look outward, while another places the viewer outside, allowing for one to reflect inward.

[Ronna Harris, The Actress, What Kind of Fool am I? Oil on canvas. Courtesy the artist]

Anthony Baab: Cover the Earth IV

Cover the Earth IV, an exhibit by Anthony Baab, Professor of Practice in Painting and Drawing, opens on Friday, February 10th at Antenna, 3718 St Claude Avenue, with a reception from 6-10pm. The exhibit will be on view through March 5th.

Anthony Baab experiments with objects and materials associated with consumerism – packaging, advertisements, and logos. Baab views an explicit sense of command and function conveyed through these containers, perhaps more so than the commodities they hold or represent. Attempting to regenerate these objects into something otherwise and redirect their pre-fixed purposes towards aesthetic ends, Baab confronts the challenge of making these objects his own. The work is compelled by a sense of misbehavior, evoking the spirit and ethos of adolescence, inspired by doodling on a shoe, covering a room with posters, and building a fort.

What to Make of Silence

Aaron Collier, Assistant Professor in Studio Art (Painting and Drawing), has a solo exhibition of drawings entitled "What to Make of Silence" at Hyman Fine Arts Center, Francis Marion University, Florence, South Carolina from January 10-February 16, 2017.

Aaron has taught drawing and painting at Tulane since the fall of 2006. His classes are aimed at providing the drawing and painting student with an expansive vocabulary in communicating their personal concerns, posing formal elements as the gateway to conceptual considerations of the work. Aaron's personal work traffics more in glimpse, suggestion, or fragment than in chronicle, consonant with daily experience and our understanding of the world.

Friday Life Drawing Sessions

The Newcomb Art Department is pleased to offer Open Model Sessions on Friday afternoons from 1-4pm. The drawing sessions began September 9th, and last until December 2nd.  There are two exceptions - Tulane is on Fall Break on October 14, and on Thanksgiving Break on November 25. There will NOT be sessions on those Fridays. The Open Model Sessions take place in room 216 of the Woldenberg Art Center and are free and open to the public.

'Adventuring with the image’ defines Aaron Collier’s art

Artist, alumnus and assistant professor Aaron Collier works to develop images that engage viewers in his colorful paintings. The Tulane University community will have a chance to view Collier’s works when the Carroll Gallery opens a solo exhibit of his paintings on Jan. 12.

Entitled “Something There,” the exhibit runs through Feb. 5. To celebrate the opening, a reception is planned for Jan. 14 from 5:30 until 7:30 p.m., with a walk through with the artist at 6 p.m.

[read more >>> Tulane New Wave, January 7, 2016]

Adam Mysock: Artist Perspective at NOMA December 18

On Friday December 18th Adam Mysock, Senior Professor of Practice in Studio Art, will present a lecture titled "On Seeing and Being: Appropriation and Identity Narratives" at the New Orleans Museum of Art as part of the museum’s Artists Perspectives series and in conjunction with the Visions of US exhibition currently on display.

In November Mysock had paintings included in two group exhibitions- two works presented as part of the Travelers in Time exhibition at Site 109 in New York City and two works in the Annual Miniature Exhibition at the New Orleans Academy of Fine Arts.  In December, Mysock will also have several of his paintings on exhibition in Miami – at the ART MIAMI Contemporary Art Fair with the London-based Cynthia Corbett Gallery and at the Deauville Beach Resort presented by the MIAMI PROJECT Contemporary Art Fair and Jonathan Ferrara Gallery.  

New faculty: Anthony Baab, Professor of Practice, Painting

The Newcomb Art Department welcomes Anthony Baab to the faculty as Professor of Practice in Painting and Drawing.

Anthony Baab studied Painting and Printmaking at the Kansas City Art Institute (’04) before obtaining an MFA in Interdisciplinary Art from Cornell University (‘09). Representing a wide range of media, his recent work consists of drawings, sculptures, and large-scale models that explore notions of self-reflexivity. His work has been exhibited at Grand Arts (Kansas City), Dan Graham (Los Angeles), The Mattress Factory (Pittsburgh), and Three Walls (Chicago) and has been included in several permanent collections including: The Nelson Atkins Museum of Art, The Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, The Marianna Kistler Beach Museum and The Microsoft Collection. Recently Baab was a 2014-15 Fine Arts Work Center Provincetown Fellow and resident at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Drawing (’15). His work is represented by Haw Contemporary in Kansas City.

Visiting Artist Jim Gaylord meets with Abstraction class

On Tuesday September 29 visiting artist Jim Gaylord of Brooklyn met with Aaron Collier's Intermediate Painting (Abstraction) class which has 18 undergraduates. The students had recently completed a Geometric Abstraction assignment which they reviewed together.  It was a real hit: students were really thankful, and were sharpened by the experience.  Gaylord also offered a public lecture in Stone Auditorium Tuesday night.  His visit with us was generously supported by CELT, the Sandra Garrard Memorial Fund, and the Newcomb Art Department.