Collecting, 2012–2022 January–May 2023 Learning Guide
X A Decade of
A Decade of Collecting, 2012–2022
January–May 2023
X: A Decade of Collecting, 2012–2022 , a survey of artworks acquired by Sheldon Museum of Art in the past decade, offers a snapshot of how the museum’s collection has continued to evolve since its founding 60 years ago. The artworks on view are a modest representation of the approximately 1,875 works that have entered the collection since 2012— an increase of 17%. In the fall of this year, a second exhibition will focus specifically on works on paper acquired during this period.
Exhibition support is provided by Duncan Family Trust, Lincoln Industries, Roseann and Phil Perry, and Lisa and Tom Smith.
X
PAT ADAMS
born Stockton, CA 1928
It Comes To This Oil, isobutyl methacrylate, mica, eggshell, and pastel on linen, 1978 University of Nebraska–Lincoln Olga N. Sheldon Acquisition Trust U-6975.2022
PAT ADAMS It Comes To This
No doubt (aside from psychological preference) my ease in placing dissimilar and unlikely visual elements together on a canvas comes from seeing there in the interstices of nature’s forms man’s invented forms, man’s invented spheres, squares, pyramids stacked to the sky, fronting infinity.
—Pat Adams, 1986
An avid student of philosophy, science, and history, Pat Adams paints galactic works that allow the viewer’s gaze to drift across the pictorial field as well as to be grounded by the inclusion of geometric emblems. In 1978, Adams transitioned to making large paintings such as It Comes To This , which changed the viewer’s experience from a modest face-to-face encounter to a more full-body experience. Her inclusion of materials like shells, sand, and mica provides shimmer and movement across the surface, inviting slow looking and contemplation.
RICHARD AVEDON
New York, NY 1923–San Antonio, TX 2004
Danny Lane, Fourteen Year Old, Christine Coil, Seventeen Year Old, Calhan, Colorado 7/31/81 Gelatin silver print, 1981 University of Nebraska–Lincoln Olga N. Sheldon Acquisition Trust U-6766.2018
RICHARD AVEDON
This is a fictional West. I don’t think the West of these portraits is any more conclusive than the West of John Wayne.
—Richard Avedon, 1985
In 1979, the Amon Carter Museum of American Art in Fort Worth, Texas, commissioned Richard Avedon to travel throughout the American West and make portraits of people he found. The five-year project, titled In the American West , took Avedon and his team of assistants to rodeos, mining camps, cattle ranches, slaughterhouses, and other locations in 189 towns across 13 states. Only 124 photographs were ultimately selected for the series from 17,000 sheets of film exposed during 752 sittings. The chosen images not only departed from the romanticized depictions of the region previously found in art and film, but also were printed on a large scale that was extremely rare for the time.
Danny Lane, Fourteen Year Old, Christine Coil, Seventeen Year Old, Calhan, Colorado 7/31/81
MILTON AVERY
Altmar, NY 1885–New York, NY 1965 Sand Spit Oil on canvas, 1957
University of Nebraska-Lincoln
Bequest of Mary Riepma Ross through the University of Nebraska Foundation U-6327.2013
MILTON AVERY Sand Spit
The painter Milton Avery collapses foreground and background in his deceptively simple seascape Sand Spit . Considered America’s foremost colorist during his time, Avery moved to New York City in 1925 and ensconced himself in a vibrant community of painters including Robert Henri, John Sloan, and Edward Hopper. His distinct style places emphasis on the relationships between forms and colors rather than perspective or details. Comprising of roughly four colors, Sand Spit depicts a verdant field in the distance as a large swath of white spume claims a third of the canvas. This painting was done at a time when Avery focused more on landscapes and spare interiors that allowed him to adopt a minimalist approach. Due to his strong interest in color over detail, his later work teeters between the two movements of his time; European modernism and American Abstract Expressionism.
RADCLIFFE BAILEY
born Bridgeton, NJ 1968 Untitled Mixed media and collage on paper, 2000 Sheldon Art Association Gift of Kathryn and Marc LeBaron S-906.2013
Atlanta-based artist Radcliffe Bailey’s unique vision bridges African art, African American communities, and the larger world to revisit an often-misrepresented past. Creating art from personal memory and a keen sense of historical consciousness, Bailey focuses on an expressive use of rhythmic abstract patterning, collaged photography, and found material. For this piece, he incorporated a photograph of a Black boxer—perhaps the Belize-born athlete called “the Jamaican Kid”—with scraps of paper giving dates, numbers, and place names that refer to the transatlantic slave trade.
Untitled
RADCLIFFE BAILEY
ROBERT BORDO
born Montreal, Canada 1949 crackup #14 Oil on canvas, 2019 Sheldon Art Association Gift of Avo Samuelian and Hector Manuel Gonzalez S-1294.2022
In the painting crackup #14 , Robert Bordo depicts a sheet of broken glass in which cracks radiate from a jagged opening at its center. What caused the piece’s destruction and what lies beyond it are not revealed. One can imagine crackup #14 to be a continuation of Bordo’s series of “windshield paintings,” such as mother (2013–2014), also in the museum’s collection. mother suggests a degree of protection from threatening weather conditions, while the sharp, broken glass of c rackup #14 creates exposure to unknown elements. Bordo’s windshield paintings emerged from his growing concern over climate change and recent historical shifts in political rhetoric. In his subsequent crackup paintings, his concern has turned to panic. ROBERT
BORDO crackup #14
Robert Bordo, mother ; oil on canvas, 2013–2014; University of Nebraska–Lincoln, Olga N. Sheldon Acquisition Trust, U-6533.2016
born Lafayette, LA 1967
You Only Live Once , from the Forever Free portfolio
Color screen print, 1995
University of Nebraska–Lincoln
Robert E. Schweser and Fern Beardsley Schweser Acquisition Fund, through the University of Nebraska Foundation U-6751.1.2017
Join The Band , from the Forever Free portfolio
Color screen print, 1995
University of Nebraska–Lincoln
Robert E. Schweser and Fern Beardsley Schweser Acquisition Fund, through the University of Nebraska Foundation U-6751.4.2017
Bang Bang , from the Forever Free portfolio
Color screen print, 1995
University of Nebraska–Lincoln
Robert E. Schweser and Fern Beardsley Schweser Acquisition Fund, through the University of Nebraska Foundation U-6751.2.2017
Twenty-Four-Seven , from the Forever Free portfolio
Color screen print, 1995
University of Nebraska–Lincoln
Robert E. Schweser and Fern Beardsley Schweser Acquisition Fund, through the University of Nebraska Foundation U-6751.5.2017
MICHAEL RAY CHARLESA lot of people accuse me of perpetuating a stereotype. I think there’s a fine line between perpetuating something and questioning something. And I like to get as close to it as possible.
—Michael Ray Charles, 2001
Using archival imagery from American advertising, memorabilia, commercial packaging, and minstrel entertainment, Michael Ray Charles exposes the long history of African American stereotypes that have shaped the American unconscious. For this series of prints, Charles presents clownish figures resembling blackface minstrels—a form of entertainment that was popular well into the twentieth century—surrounded by the bright, attention-getting visual language of circus banners.
You Only Live Once , from the Forever Free portfolio
Bang Bang , from the Forever Free portfolio
Join The Band , from the Forever Free portfolio
Twenty-Four-Seven , from the Forever Free portfolio
MICHAEL RAY CHARLES
ROBERT COLESCOTT
Oakland, CA 1925–Tucson, AZ 2009
Knowledge of the Past is the Key to the Future: The Other Washingtons Acrylic on canvas, 1987
University of Nebraska–Lincoln Olga N. Sheldon Acquisition Trust U-6463.2015
I am not a writer. I present an image that can leave it to you to write the story.
—Robert Colescott
ROBERT COLESCOTT
Knowledge
of the Past is the Key to the Future: The Other Washingtons
Robert Colescott is best known for his improvisational, large-scale canvases that comment on class, gender, sexuality, and race in a satirical manner. The key elements of Colescott’s mature work—vivid color, complex narrative, and monumental scale—are the product of his travel and studying abroad. In the 1970s, Colescott began to reinterpret famous American and European paintings through an African American lens by inserting both well-known and anonymous Black figures into the compositions.
This work depicts famous, infamous, and unsung individuals who share a wellestablished surname. The irony that “Washington” was the surname most frequently chosen by formerly enslaved people of the United States when separating themselves from their former owners is underscored by Colescott’s inclusion of the profile of George Washington, himself an enslaver, in this painting.
LOIS DODD
born Montclair, NJ 1927
Open Door, Pink and Green Oil on linen, 1982
University of Nebraska–Lincoln
Robert E. Schweser and Fern Beardsley Schweser Acquisition Fund through the University of Nebraska Foundation U-6951.2021
LOIS DODD
Open Door, Pink and Green
I’m not looking for details or surface description that’s for sure. But I am looking for the light, how it hits volumes. I am looking for the light and the color…. Sometimes I see things like that, then go back, but because the light has changed it’s literally gone. It depends on the light and a lot of wandering around.
—Lois Dodd, 2015
In the process of composing her paintings, Lois Dodd looks for strange, distinctive shapes. Guided by the fluctuations of natural light, Dodd works in thin layers of paint to let the luminous quality of the canvas come through. In Open Door, Pink and Green , the viewer looks out from within a house at long shadows and vibrant greenery in a suburban yard. This work demonstrates Dodd’s characteristic close attention to detail within a landscape and the inherent beauty of daily scenes.
SAM DURANT
born Seattle, WA 1961
Am I Next?
Electric sign with vinyl text, 2017 University of Nebraska–Lincoln Olga N. Sheldon Acquisition Trust U-6816.2018
SAM DURANT
born Seattle, WA 1961
Protest in wake of police shooting of Michael Brown. Ferguson, Missouri, August 2014 (index) (Am I Next?) Graphite on paper, 2018 University of Nebraska–Lincoln Olga N. Sheldon Acquisition Trust U-6817.2018
Am I Next?
SAM DURANT
Protest in wake of police shooting of Michael Brown. Ferguson, Missouri, August 2014 (index) (Am I Next?)
Sam Durant scours archival photographs of civil rights demonstrations and appropriates isolated texts from protest signage for his large, illuminated installations. Many times, his chosen phrases transcend temporality and evoke universal anxieties or convictions. In this exhibition, Durant’s lightbox is paired with his detailed drawing of an original photograph, taken during a protest following the 2014 killing by police of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri.
SAM DURANT
MELVIN EDWARDS
born Houston, TX 1937 Makatini (Lynch Fragment) Welded steel, 1992 University of Nebraska–Lincoln Olga N. Sheldon Acquisition Trust U-7002.2022
MELVIN EDWARDS
Makatini (Lynch Fragment)Melvin Edwards began welding as an undergraduate at the University of Southern California in 1960. Three years later he began Lynch Fragments, a series that focuses on political awareness and social justice by probing Black history. The works fuse together common metal objects such as nails, chains, spikes, crow bars, scissors, and knives, resulting in haunting recollections of a dark past. In each piece, the dimensions and placement of the objects relative to each other are crucial to the overall effect, evoking the human head and the subsequent complexities and nuances of identity—both personal and, with their suggestion of African masks, political. At over 200 works, the Lynch Fragments series has developed during three periods: 1963 to 1967, in response to racial violence in America; 1973 to 1974, in protest of the Vietnam War; and 1978 to the present, when Edwards began honoring individuals, exploring notions of nostalgia, and investigating his personal interest in African culture. This work’s title, Makatini , refers to Mfanafuthi Makatini (1932–1988), a spirited freedom-fighter who devoted his life and work to establishing a non-racial, non-sexist, just, and democratic society.
JUDITH GODWIN
born Suffolk, VA 1930 Male Study Oil on Masonite, 1954 Sheldon Art Association Gift in memory of Wilma B. Fulk S-1083.2017
JUDITH GODWIN Male Study
Judith Godwin was one of several abstract expressionists whose early career was influenced by cubism, an early-twentiethcentury artistic style that explored the fragmentation of form. The stark contrast between light and dark tones in Male Study creates the illusion of fractured space, indicative of the concept of “push and pull” championed by painter Hans Hofmann, with whom Godwin studied in the early 1950s. Here, the dynamism of the depicted forms is further accentuated through Godwin’s application of paint in long drips, some of which appear to defy gravity as they run in multiple directions.
After moving from Virginia to New York in 1953, Godwin began a lifelong friendship with Martha Graham, one of the leading modern dancers and choreographers of the twentieth century. Graham’s innovative poses and the distinctive interaction of her costumes with her body deeply inspired Godwin, who stated, “I can see her gestures in everything I do.”
Martha Graham in Lamentation , 1930s. Photo by Herta Moselsio. Courtesy of Library of Congress.
NORMAN LEWIS
New York, NY 1909–New York, NY 1979 Untitled Oil on canvas, circa 1958 University of Nebraska–Lincoln
Olga N. Sheldon Acquisition Trust and gift from Billy E. Hodges U-5742.2012
NORMAN LEWIS Untitled
Throughout his career, Norman Lewis straddled two artistic communities in New York: the Black figurative artists in Harlem and the avant-garde nonobjective painters living downtown. By the 1950s, Lewis had become a leading figure in both abstract expressionism and twentieth-century African American art. Known for the atmospheric compositions that he began in the late 1940s, Lewis was an abstract artist inspired by his observations of people and places. This untitled painting of a bullfight from the late 1950s was most likely completed after a trip to Spain. Among the daubs of color on the mostly cream-colored canvas, Lewis paints a bull leaping toward a human-like figure as a crowd of spectators surrounds the scene. The crowd, subtly depicted here, is a common motif in Lewis’s work; by the 1960s, he began depicting civil rights marches using an abstract visual language.
CURTIS MAN
born Dayton, OH 1979
Split
Synthetic polymer varnish on bleached chromogenic prints, 2011 Sheldon Art Association Gift of Katie and Amnon Rodan S-1296.2022
CURTIS MAN Split
Split from Curtis Mann’s series Modifications showcases the artist’s signature style of photo manipulation. In the series, Mann’s deconstruction and rebuilding of anonymous snapshots taken of international conflicts spark new conversations about large-scale violence and photography itself. Mann conceals identifying markers of places and events in found images through use of bleach and other chemicals. In so doing, he calls attention to the malleability and artifice of documentary photography.
ELIZABETH MURRAY
Chicago, IL 1940–Granville, NY 2007
Wishing for the Farm Oil and canvas on wood, 1991 University of Nebraska–Lincoln Gift of the Hormel Harris Foundation, Rhonda Seacrest, Donna Woods, and funds from the Olga N. Sheldon Acquisition Trust, and the Charles W. Rain and Charlotte Rain Koch Gallery Fund U-6778.2018
ELIZABETH MURRAY
Chicago, IL 1940–Granville, NY 2007
Wishing for the Farm
If I got the shapes right, if I got the forms right, I could go back into illusion. I could use perspective and architecture to create the perspectival space. Even though it was physically coming out, visually it could go back in another direction. It took a long time to start to grasp those possibilities, but that was what was fun about it—beginning to find this other world that you didn’t even know you made. I think inventing situations like that is the best part—it’s where spontaneity and intuition and the unconscious come in. I don’t know what I’ve made when I start in on it; I don’t know how it’s going to come together. If I knew, it wouldn’t be any fun.
—Elizabeth Murray, 2005
In this work, Elizabeth Murray paints a white, wormlike form rising in the corner of a room with multicolored walls. The figure, which might be interpreted as wailing, occupies a claustrophobic space that appears to have no escape and may represent the artist’s feelings, specifically around her roles as both an artist and a mother raising three children. The undulating shape of the canvas mimics the rolling hills of upstate New York, where the artist owned a farm. A shift in palette— from cool green to warm yellow—is traced by a winding road arriving at the sought-after destination.
JOYCE PENSATO
New York, NY 1941–New York, NY 2019
Mr. MotoMickey
Enamel on linen on board, 2006 University of Nebraska–Lincoln Olga N. Sheldon Acquisition Trust U-6550.2016
JOYCE PENSATO Mr. MotoMickey
The painting was based on a rubber Mickey Mouse head someone gave me—such an unhappy-looking guy found in a garbage dump. It looked like something out of [an] Edvard Munch, really deep and brooding. —Joyce Pensato, 2017
Joyce Pensato used glossy enamel paint and the visual language of abstract expressionism to create quirky, chilling interpretations of familiar cartoon characters. Pensato’s gestural approach to depicting popular icons— including Mickey Mouse, Lisa and Homer Simpson, and Donald Duck— combined with the works’ outsized scale yields an uncompromising interpretation of over-spending and unchecked commercialism, a dark side lurking within consumer desire.
NATHANIEL MARY QUINN
born Chicago, IL 1977
Big Bertha Black charcoal, soft pastel, oil pastel, oil paint, paint stick, acrylic silver leaf, and gouache on Coventry Vellum paper, 2015 University of Nebraska–Lincoln
Olga N. Sheldon Acquisition Trust U-6501.2015
NATHANIEL MARY QUINN Big Bertha
I had a vision of a face—and my need to recreate it on paper was almost visceral. I understood that I had to reduce it to its key elements: eyes, nose, and mouth. Trusting my intuition, I pulled fragments from different visual sources—a fashion magazine, Google images, my own photo albums—copying each piece by hand. When I stepped back from the canvas, I was stunned. It was a Frankensteinlike portrait of my brother Charles. —Nathaniel Mary Quinn, 2018
Nathaniel Mary Quinn deploys the visual language of collage and cubism for his portraits of estranged family members, friends, and community members in Chicago’s South Side neighborhood. Drawing from various sources including photo albums, fashion magazines, and Google images, Quinn uses a variety of materials including charcoal, pastel, paint stick, and gouache to assemble disparate facial features for his subjects. Quinn’s portraits are attempts to reconstruct his memory of people no longer with him.
ROBERT RAUSCHENBERG
Port Arthur, TX 1925–Captiva, FL 2008
Soviet / American Array VI Photogravure, 1989–1990
University of Nebraska–Lincoln Olga N. Sheldon Acquisition Trust U-6779.2018
ROBERT RAUSCHENBERG
Soviet / American Array VI
Robert Rauschenberg formed the Rauschenberg Overseas Culture Interchange in 1984 as a means to encourage social and cultural exchange through art, particularly in countries where freedom of creative expression had been suppressed. Over a seven-year period, Rauschenberg visited ten countries, met with government officials and members of local communities, and created artwork inspired by his experiences. In 1988, he traveled to the Soviet Union and subsequently produced his Soviet / American Array series featuring photographs he took in both Moscow and New York City. While many of the images clearly depict either a Soviet or an American landscape, in some instances it is difficult to distinguish between the two, a fact that speaks to Rauschenberg’s attempt at bridging the gap between cultures by drawing our attention to the commonalities of urban landscapes.
PETER SAUL
born San Francisco, CA 1934
Abstract Expressionist Still Life Acrylic on canvas, 2016 University of Nebraska–Lincoln Olga N. Sheldon Acquisition Trust U-6563.2016
PETER SAUL Abstract Expressionist Still LifeI have a feeling that abstract expressionism was caused by a certain nervousness that came about because of World War II. I think everybody was drinking coffee and smoking, and it made everyone so jittery they couldn’t paint buttons and noses and things, you know; they just couldn’t do it. Their patience was shot by the war.
—Peter Saul, 2007
For the past six decades, Peter Saul has critiqued and satirized contemporary society, politics, and the art world using his exaggerated, cartoonish, and often acerbic imagery. He has never strayed from figuration; even in the late 1950s, when he began painting, he found abstract expressionism too cerebral. Despite having always considered himself an outsider, his pictures have influenced generations of younger artists, beginning in the 1980s during the resurgence of figurative painting in the art world.
DAVID BENJAMIN SHERRY
born Stony Brook, NY 1981
View from Muley Point I, Bears Ears National Monument, Utah Chromogenic print, 2018 University of Nebraska–Lincoln Olga N. Sheldon Acquisition Trust U-6991.2022
DAVID BENJAMIN SHERRY
View from Muley Point I, Bears Ears National Monument, Utah
American Monuments is a photographic series examining our relationship to landscape, climate change, color, queer identity, and historical photography, using monochrome depictions of the American national monuments being targeted by the Trump administration for immediate development in the interest of oil, coal, and uranium exploration…. Aside from referencing the monuments themselves, the title also refers to the many bodies of historical photographic work that proudly documented the “free and open” American West at a time before human-induced climate change was recognized as an existential threat to our species and all life on Earth.
—David Benjamin Sherry, 2019
ALEC SOTH
born Minneapolis, MN 1969
Near Kaaterskill Fall, New York Pigment print, 2012, printed 2014 University of Nebraska–Lincoln Robert E. Schweser and Fern Beardsley Schweser Acquisition Fund, through the University of Nebraska Foundation U-7019.2022
ALEC SOTH
There are people living all sorts of different lives out in the world and I think we sit behind computers and behind screens and sort of imagine that the world doesn’t really exist anymore. We’re so filled with irony and distance, but in fact, it does still exist and that was one of the revelations in making the work.
—Alec Soth, 2015
From 2012 to 2014, photographer Alec Soth and writer Brian Zeller traveled across the United States documenting the lives of everyday Americans in the tradition of the small-town newspaper reporter. Working on assignments for publications such as The New York Times and their own selfpublished newspaper, The LBM Dispatch , Soth photographed local gatherings, celebrations, and other human interactions that would otherwise be lost to time. After their trip, he began to exhibit his large-format photographs stripped of context, leaving only locations and dates.
Near Kaaterskill Fall, New YorkHANK WILLIS THOMAS
born Plainfield, NJ 1976 Priceless #1 Lambda photograph, 2004 University of Nebraska–Lincoln Anna R. and Frank M. Hall Charitable Trust H-3120.2015
HANK WILLIS THOMAS
Emphasizing the intersections of race, consumerism, and advertising, Hank Willis Thomas highlights how Black bodies have been treated as commodities throughout history, especially when they were freely bought and sold during the transatlantic slave trade.
Priceless #1 draws upon personal crisis. The artist’s cousin, Songha Willis Thomas, was murdered in 2000 outside a Philadelphia nightclub over a gold chain worn by a friend. In this work, Thomas presents a photograph of his devastated family at his cousin’s funeral overlaid with the MasterCard logo and a text outlining the costs associated with this death—both mimicking ad campaigns by the credit card company.
Priceless #1
ANDY WARHOL
Pittsburg, PA 1928–New York, NY 1987
Electric Chair Screen print, 1971 University of Nebraska–Lincoln Olga N. Sheldon Acquisition Trust U-6947.2021
ANDY WARHOL Electric Chair
When you see a gruesome picture over and over again, it doesn’t really have an effect —Andy Warhol, 1963
Electric Chair is from a print portfolio that depicts the same image of an electric chair in different color combinations. The original 1953 photograph shows the electric chair at Sing Sing Prison in New York that was used to execute Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who were convicted for passing information about the atomic bomb to Russia during World War II. Warhol first used the image in 1962 for his Death and Disasters series, which reproduced newspaper photos of suicides, car crashes, and riots. By isolating and removing these pictures from their original contexts, Warhol draws attention to the deluge of graphic, violent images shown by news media that viewers are exposed to every day.
STANLEY WHITNEY
born Philadelphia, PA 1946 Red Oil on linen, 2015 University of Nebraska–Lincoln Anna R. and Frank M. Hall Charitable Trust H-3121.2016
People sometimes find my paintings odd because of the rhythm. The idea of a painting being so still but so rhythmic at the same time. So getting the rhythm of the painting is really important to me; there’s no beginning to it and no end, and I can shift around in it from any one spot.
—Stanley Whitney, 2020
Having come of age during the era of the Vietnam War and the Civil Rights Movement, Stanley Whitney rejected the trend among African American artists to make politically engaged and figurative work that directly addressed the Black experience. However, his deeply saturated, square paintings were influenced by the improvisational structure of jazz. Working in a loose grid pattern, Whitney’s choice of color for each square is based on whatever color square he has just painted. The artist never plans his compositions in advance, stating, “I just start painting. I don’t plan it out. Since I know what the form is, I can start anywhere, get there immediately, and just keep working.”
STANLEY WHITNEY Red
SUE WILLIAMS
born Chicago Heights, IL 1954
Cutie Pie Oil and acrylic on canvas, 2001 University of Nebraska–Lincoln Olga N. Sheldon Acquisition Trust U-6945.2021
SUE WILLIAMS Cutie Pie
By the late 1990s, Sue Williams had begun creating purely abstract paintings that allowed her to both explore the materiality of oil paint and interrogate the male-dominated world of abstraction. The artist once stated, “I want to draw attention to issues; I want people to be informed.” Her process is laborious. She carefully mixes each color with turpentine to achieve the right hue and viscosity. Next she applies long, continuous brushstrokes, then pauses, wipes away the pigment using paper towels, and repeats the process until she believes the composition is complete. She describes the act of painting as a “semiconscious attack, with constant editing.”
TERRY WINTERS
born New York, NY 1949 Event Horizon Oil on linen, 1991 University of Nebraska–Lincoln Olga N. Sheldon Acquisition Trust U-6946.2021
TERRY WINTERS Event Horizon
I was intrigued by forms that looked “real,” but were difficult to identify or whose identity was linked directly to their structure: crystals, shells, honeycombs. There was an architecture to the “morula” forms, in terms of the cell development.
—Terry Winters, 2015
In his biomorphic abstractions, Terry Winters draws attention to the microscopic and blurs the line between scientific illustration and artistic expression. His magnifications of the patterns, layers, and shapes found at the cellular level of organisms reveal parallels within the fields of biology, technology, and aesthetics. He states: “Whether it is a computer screen or within a cellular structure inside a human body, it seems that we are all made of the same stuff. And that singularity— there is a kind of quest to imagine and visualize that, or have it manifest itself through this activity of painting.” Winters titled this work, which seems to be a dissection of the cellular membrane, with an astrophysical term used to describe the boundary marking the limits of a black hole—a point of no return.
URSULA VON RYDINGSVARD
born Deensen, Germany 1942 3 boxes Cedar with graphite pigment, 1985 Sheldon Art Association Gift of Norma and Sheldon Minkowitz S-1185.A-C.2021
URSULA VON RYDINGSVARD
I come from a long line of Polish peasant farmers, and they were surrounded with wood—wooden homes, wooden fences, wooden tools to farm the land. There is a familiarity, a feeling of comfort and grace. And because of the familiarity, I can really push it around.
—Ursula von Rydingsvard, 2011
Wood—specifically cedar—has been at the core of Ursula von Rydingsvard’s work since the 1970s. Forced to live in Nazi labor camps and, later, refugee camps after World War II, von Rydingsvard’s family immigrated to the United States in 1950. She recalls the camp barracks being made entirely of wood: “The floors were wooden. The stairs going up the barracks were wooden . . .. There was something about sleeping against the wood, having that familiarity with wooden planks.”
In her work, von Rydingsvard melds personal history with abstraction. She stacks and attaches hand-carved cedar beams on top of each other and rubs them with graphite powder to weather their look. The results are organic, undulating forms, often with deep crevasses and geological-looking voids.
3 boxes