Texas Association of Schools of Art, Conference to be held at HSU
By Linda Fawcett, HSU Professor of Art
The Hardin-Simmons Art department will be co-hosting a state conference on campus this week, with events on the HSU campus Friday night and Saturday, March 27 & 28.
The Texas Association of Schools of Art is the conference organization and represents over 50 art departments of higher education throughout Texas. Artist-educators from member schools will be converging on Abilene to see what we have!
The conference theme this year is appropriately: Art and Soul, and various presentations, workshops and a Keynote Speaker will address the mixing of art and spiritual matters in a variety of ways.
The conference begins with a special reception at the Old Jail Art Center in Albany on Thursday evening, then spends Friday morning at McMurry, Friday afternoon at ACU and comes to HSU for the Keynote Speaker presentation Friday night (see below). The conference returns to HSU's FCVA Saturday morning for workshops and concludes with art receptions at various Abilene venues Saturday afternoon and an Awards Banquet at the Perini Ranch in Buffalo Gap Saturday night. FOR MORE DETAILS on the TASA Conference Schedule, contact Linda Fawcett or go to http://www.tasart.org/tasa_conferences.htm and click on the Conference banner.
TASA Conference Keynote Speaker: artist Mary McCleary
Thanks to the generosity of the HSU Academic Foundation, the Conference Keynote Speaker will be the nationally known artist Mary McCleary. Her slide lecture begins at 8pm in the Johnson Building, Multipurpose Room, Friday evening, March 27. Every one is invited and students can also gain chapel credit for their attendance.
The diversity of McCleary's work, her use of materials, the reasons why she makes art, the influences on her art, its evolvement over time and other such matters can easily connect with a variety of faculty, staff and students. By perusing her work at http://www.marymccleary.com, one can see how her talk could interest those in art, Theatre & Communication, Music (Music History & Literature courses), Honors, Philosophy, Bible & Theology, Sociology, Social Work & Psychology, English, Education (Early Childhood and Adolescent Development, Children's Literature), Botany/ Biology (McCleary's broad use of the natural phenomena as metaphor) and Leadership students (Christian Ethics for Leadership).
Mary McCleary has a highly respected reputation among artists and those who write about and curate art exhibitions. Her well-over 200 solo and group exhibitions represent museums and major art galleries in Texas, and nationwide from California to New York City with at least two international venues. Until recently, she was a respected Professor of Painting at Stephan F. Austin State University, but has since retired to pursue her artwork fulltime.
Her work has been reviewed in many notable publications such as The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, ArtNews, Artscene, Art in America and American Arts Quarterly. A published catalog of one of her exhibitions, After Paradise, with essays by art critics Clint Willour and Harold Fickett, is available through Amazon, and essays on her work figure prominently in two other widely available book compilations: Objects of Grace: Conversations on Creativity and Faith, and It Was Good. (Her full biography can be accessed by a link from her website: http://www.marymccleary.com).
McCleary's career represents an excellent example of how a contemporary artist of strong personal religious (Christian) belief can find ways to cross potential boundaries of difference, to transcend in order to engage and connect larger audiences. Also distinctive are her labor-intensive, rather unique combinations of materials, used not just as means but often just as symbolic as the images they make explicit. The results are exquisitely crafted, collaged paintings and prints that are visually compelling on multiple levels (visual and narrative), both intellectually and emotionally challenging, described by one critic as a "serious student of the Bible and of Philosophical thought all the while listening to show tunes, cabaret and big-band music of the forties and fifties and watching film noir..."
0 Comments
Share your thoughts
Comments are the sole responsibility of the person posting them. You agree not to post comments that are off topic, defamatory, obscene, abusive, threatening or an invasion of privacy. Click here for our full user agreement.