Alice Leora Briggs -ASYLUM by Evoke Contemporary

ALICE LEORA BRIGGS A S Y L U M voted 60 Fall Gallery Shows You Can’t Miss artnet News, Wednesday, September 3, 2014

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ALICE LEORA BRIGGS | ASYLUM Disquiet has marked art since its beginnings: the success and failures of Paleolithic hunts, the tides of slaves who filled Egyptian tombs, the memento moris of Dutch stilled lives, the spears of Shakespearean wit. Likewise, occupation with human frailty and worldly conceits is integral to Alice Leora Briggs’ work. When she was seven years old, her brother fell to his death at Grand Teton National Park. And, perhaps as a result, Briggs probes with curiosity and intensity those facets of human life that we often seek to closet.  The artist finds her subject in the narco-violence that plagues Ciudad Juárez and in an asylum built by a visionary on the outskirts of this Mexican border city. Briggs’ explores the daily adaptations made by the citizens of the narco-battered borderlands. She renders them in her native amalgam of classic and contemporary imagery and oblique narratives coaxed from European art history. In tandem a recent series of woodcuts explores a twelve-line universe, The Room, a poem by American poet laureate, Mark Strand. Each of her images conjures one line from the poem. The world she creates is brittle, tenuous, and furtive. The images glimpse into concealed longings and secrets, like looking into someone’s emotional closet. In her persistent way, all of Briggs’ work finds a way to link our contemporary anxieties, desires, and expectations with those of the art historical past. Her visual quotations from Albrecht Durer, Hans Holbein, Hendrik Goltzius, and others meld seemingly incongruent worlds into the singular time and place of her drawings.

SELECTED PUBLIC COLLECTIONS 1

Arkansas Art Center Border Art Residency, El Paso, TX Carlton College Gould Library Special Collections, Sherwin Beach Press Collection Cornell University, Main Library Special Collections Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art Denver Art Museum El Paso Museum of Art Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, De Young Firestone Graham Foundation, Albuquerque, NM Flatbed Press, Austin, TX Fort Hays State University, Fort Hays, KS Larry E. Elsner Art Foundation, Logan, UT Library of Congress, Rare Books/Special Collections Limerick School of Art and Design, Limerick, Ireland McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, TX Međunarodna galerija portreta, Tuzla, Bosnai Hercegovina Museum of Texas Tech University, Lubbock, TX

Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art, Utah State University Phoenix Art Museum Richard M. Ross Art Museum, Ohio Wesleyan University Rochester Institute of Technology Libraries, Cary Collection Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, Scottsdale AZ Tucson Museum of Art, Tucson, AZ University of Arkansas at Little Rock, UALR Gallery University of Arizona, Special Collections, Art of the Book Collection University of Chicago Library Special Collections, Rare Books University of Iowa Museum of Art University of Nebraska, Lincoln, Blue Heron Press Collection, Artists’ Books University of New Mexico Art Museum University of Oxford, Bodleian Library Sherwin Beach Press, Chicago, IL Wichita Falls Museum of Art

Cover: La Ventana woodcut on BFK with Kitakata chine collé (edition of ten) printed by Tracy Mayrello, Flatbed Press Austin, Texas, 60 x 40 La Ventana is a lifesize portrait of Santiago, a resident of an asylum on the outskirts of Juárez.

Butcher (portait of Charles Bowden), sgraffito with acrylic ink on panel, 24 x 18