Director's Introduction

JANUARY 2021

I have been directing and curating the USC Fisher Museum of Art since 1981. It has been my practice to offer exhibitions to as large a number and range of artists as possible, knowing how many working artists there are and how relatively few opportunities exist for museum shows. Furthermore, I always seek to balance contemporary art with displays of our permanent collections of older art. With these as my guiding principles, I rarely offer more than one exhibition to any single artist. However, with Dan McCleary’s body of work celebrating twenty years of printmaking in Oaxaca, I am breaking that rule. I do this for several reasons: first having to do with the quality of the art itself, but second honoring his extraordinary contributions to the richness of the creative ecosystem of Los Angeles. Finally, I take pride and pleasure in celebrating the unique nature of the relationship Dan has built with Fisher for close to ten years.

With all that in mind, I want to write first about my directorial and curatorial vision of “Dan McCleary Oaxaca: 20 Years of Prints from the Taller Sangfer,” not so much as a stand-alone project, but rather as a second chapter of a two-part exhibition. Part One was the painting exhibition we held at Fisher in January of 2015. “Every Day Sacred” focused on Dan’s remarkable meditative figure paintings from 1993 to 2013. Dan represented his subjects as cut off from the frenzy, passions, and dramas that infused their worldly existences. The work is a reminder of the quiet buried in all of our daily existences-- a quietude that is indeed sacred but seldom memorialized. As Christopher Knight so aptly noted in his Los Angeles Times review, “McCleary endows small acts of everyday perception with hushed reverence.”

The art featured in Part Two is of a different nature. Here we move to another medium, to the printmaking that grew out of Dan’s profound relationship to Oaxaca. The works featured in this exhibition are an example of Dan McCleary