I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t making drawings. Some of my earliest memories are from family summer vacations at my parent’s friends’ lake cabin, watching my father sketch the dock or the boat house or the potbellied stove. To me, it seemed like magic; I wanted to be able to do it myself. For most of my more than 35-year-career as a professional artist, I’ve created works almost exclusively in graphite pencil. The medium has always had a fundamental appeal for me. It’s direct and uncomplicated. As such, it is well suited to my sensibility and to my imagery, style, and working methods, all of which are equally straightforward.My work is representational, which to me means more than achieving a pictorial illusion. It is an investigation of our perceptions of the seeable world, an effort to determine what makes things visually “tick”, and to understand what exactly it is that allows us to make sense of what we see. It is an attempt to comprehend and reveal the nature of the interactions of light, space, and form. The process consists of mentally deconstructing, analyzing and distilling a visual essence of the subject which is then “re-presented” to the viewer.Still-lifes have been my primary subject matter. The objects in these arrangements are generally commonplace but are also chosen because of a timeless, almost generic quality I feel they possess. I’ve purposely composed them to be neither time nor place-specific, including only slight, often incongruous, hints of their contemporaneity or significance to me as the artist. Similarly, my landscapes offer no reference to a particular time or place, although their precision and detail suggest an actual location.Despite their simplicity and lack of context (or perhaps because of it) they create intriguing and evocative images. If anything, they are perhaps simply suggestive of the quietude and contemplative environment in which they were created.

Skip Steinworth “White Flowers in Bright Light” 22.5″ x 29.5″

Skip Steinworth “Two Pears” 14″ x 10″

Skip Steinworth “Apple”
14″ x 11″

Skip Steinworth “Nest #5″
13.5″ x 16.5”

Skip Steinworth “Paper Bag and Onions” 25.5″ x 19.5″

Skip Steinworth “Shoreline, Still Water”
20″ x 30″

About the Artist
Skip Steinworth lives and works in Stillwater, Minnesota, an historic river town on the outskirts of the Twin Cities along the St. Croix River. His interest in art began at a very early age; by his teens he was selling work in local galleries. After earning their college degrees in the early 1970s, he and his wife taught art in Melbourne, Australia. They returned to Minnesota and both began careers as full-time studio artists. Steinworth works exclusively in pencil and his drawings are included in the permanent collections of the Minneapolis Art Institute, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Plains Museum in Moorhead, Minnesota, the University of North Dakota, and Arkansas Arts Center in Little Rock as well as in numerous private collections. He is represented by the Jenkin Johnson Galleries in San Francisco and New York and the MA Doran Gallery in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

STILLNESS: DRAWINGS BY SKIP STEINWORTH
February 27 –  May 14, 2017
Evansville Museum  Evansville, Indiana

FRAMING SPECIFICATIONS AND ADVICE

METRO GALLERY FRAME

Profile: 102
Type: Thin Gallery Frame
Wood and Finish: maple frame with charcoal finish
Purchasing Option: joined wood frame
Custom Wood Strainer: 1/2″ wood frame strainer
Framing Advice: fitting gallery frames

The College of the Arts will honor the SPARK Lifetime Achievement Award winner, Herman Mhire, with an exhibition of 80 of his framed photographs.  The exhibit opens March 5 and continues through March 24, 2017 at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. 

Herman Mhire “Green Leaves Falling” – 7 x 5

Herman Mhire “Demon 5” – 7 x 5

Herman Mhire “Archachatina mask” – 7 x 5

Herman Mhire “Rembrandt triptych 2” – 5 x 7

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Herman Mhire was named Distinguished Professor in the College of the Arts at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, where he taught from 1977 until his retirement in 2005. He also served as Director/Chief Curator of the University Art Museum for 17 years, where he envisioned and established the Paul and Lulu Hilliard University Art Museum. Additionally, he is the founding president of Festival International de Louisiane. Trained as a painter and printmaker. His work has been widely exhibited and critically acclaimed. Since 1977, Mhire has devoted his life and work to cultivating the Arts at ULL, the greater Lafayette community, and beyond. Through his many roles as a curator, artist, and professor he continues to serve as an ambassador of the Arts for Louisiana locally and internationally.

“Beauty and the Beast: Herman Mhire”

March 5, 2017 – March 24, 2017
Fletcher Hall Gallery of the College of the Arts
University of Louisiana  Lafayette, Louisiana

FRAMING SPECIFICATIONS AND ADVICE

METRO GALLERY FRAME

Profile:106
Type: Standard Gallery Frame
Wood & Finish: maple frame with rising white finish
Purchasing Option: joined frame with matching splines
Custom Frame Mat: 8 ply white museum mat
Custom Frame Acrylic: regular acrylic cut to size
Custom Frame Backing Board: archival coroplast cut to size
Framing Advice: fitting gallery frames

For the first time in history, the Museum of Wisconsin Art (MOWA) will dedicate all four of its changing exhibition spaces to the work of a single artist – Tom Bamberger. Hyperphotographic is Bamberger’s first major retrospective which will feature more than 100 photographs – some up to 35’ in scale. MOWA will open the exhibition on March 25, 2017, and celebrate his recent gift of nearly 400 photographs to the museum’s permanent collection.

In his earliest work, Bamberger favored photographing tarred, painted and crumbled pavement. For nearly two years, he worked to give new meaning to the definition of street photography. Pavement soon gave way to flesh in a large and cohesive group of photographs of women’s faces and bodies. Shot with a laser-recording film and high-powered strobes at close range, these heads and torsos are neutral and asexual with oiled skins, gaping pores and fields of body hair that take shape into to more corroded pavement.

Tom Bamberger, Untitled (Shannon), Gelatin silver print, 1982, Museum of Wisconsin Art

Gradually, Bamberger distanced his lens to from heads and torsos to include full shots of people as well as their surroundings. He established a reputation for black-and-white psychological portraits shot in controlled interior environments.

Tom Bamberger, Fred L. Brengel, Gelatin silver print, 1984, Museum of Wisconsin Art

Throughout the 1980s, in seemingly two-year increments, he moved through series after series of increasingly complex groupings of figures and relationships, starting with family and friends (Jane and Sophie, 1986), the country club set, and diners in cafés and ice cream shops.

Tom Bamberger, Jane and Sophie, Gelatin silver print, 1986, Museum of Wisconsin Art

Over the years, as he increasingly distanced his lens and figures grew smaller until the tortured narrative of suburban life disappeared altogether, leaving only empty fields and horizon lines. By the 1990s, he had tapped into the zeitgeist of Donald Judd and Agnes Martin. Pure landscapes had evolved into minimalist experiments with accentuated horizon lines surrounded by broad expanses of white paper. No longer photographs of places per se, Bamberger’s works now straddled the line between traditional photography and contemporary art, and therein lays their compelling visual power.

Tom Bamberger, Brown Grass, Inkjet pigment print face mounted on plexi, 2003, Museum of Wisconsin Art

Tom Bamberger, Windmills, Inkjet pigment print face mounted on plexi, 2006, Museum of Wisconsin Art

Most recently, Bamberger used a robotic GigaPan camera to produce works that hover alluringly between specificity and universality with subjects that register immediately as both somewhere and nowhere. Civil Twilight, a behemoth at 35 feet, took more than forty-five minutes of camera time to record the setting sun. The result is a physical and temporal composite that defies definitions of photography as a captured moment and further evolves the idea of a landscape of “no place in particular.”

Tom Bamberger, OK, Digital mixed media, 2013, Museum of Wisconsin Art

Tom Bamberger, Pete’s World, Inkjet pigment print face mounted on plexi, 2014, Museum of Wisconsin Art

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Bamberger continues to live and work in Milwaukee. A graduate of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Bamberger is an artist and writer whose essays on architecture and urban design have garnered many awards.  As curator of photography at the Milwaukee Art Museum, a position he held for ten years, Bamberger produced the first Andreas Gursky museum show in America in 1998.  Tom also served as director of the Perihelion gallery, an alternative arts space, and initiated Art Futures, a grants program for local artists. His works have been collected by museums throughout the U.S. including the Museum of Modern Art in New York and San Francisco, Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, among many others. He has received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and was awarded the White Award for city and regional magazines five times. Bamberger is represented by Leslie Tonkonow Artworks and Projects, New York.

Tom Bamberger
“Hyperphotographic”
March 25–May 21, 2017
MOWA (Museum of Wisconsin Art)
West Bend, WI

FRAMING SPECIFICATIONS AND ADVICE

METRO GALLERY FRAME

Profile: 114
Type: Thin Gallery Frame
Wood & Finish: maple frame with black opaque finish
Purchasing Option: joined wood frame with matching splines
Framing Advice: fitting gallery frames

METRO GALLERY FRAME

Profile: 114
Type: Thin Gallery Frame
Wood & Finish: maple frame with white opaque finish
Purchasing Option: joined wood frame with matching splines
Framing Advice: fitting gallery frames

Landscapes are constructs. They are derived from the complex layering of a particular physical geography with the cultural, political, and other ideological concerns of those that inhabit them. Because they represent an accumulation of human activity over time, their meaning is contingent upon, and reflective of, both historical and contemporary values. A Narrative Atlas of the Great Basin seeks to reveal the multilayered conception of a vast region of the American landscape. Focusing primarily on the arid lands of the Great Basin, the Atlas functions as a framework for a series of smaller projects exploring the relationship between nature and culture.

Todd Stewart, Approaching Laughlin from the Colorado River, Arizona, 2011, archival inkjet print, 16×20 inches, Courtesy of the artist

Todd Stewart, Bicyclists, at Smithson’s Spiral Jetty, Utah, 2014, archival inkjet print, 16×20 inches, Courtesy of the artist

Todd Stewart, Jiaxin, Bombay Beach, Salton Sea, California, 2015, archival inkjet print, 40×50 inches, Courtesy of the artist

Todd Stewart, Approaching Laughlin from the Colorado River, Arizona, 2011, archival inkjet print, 16×20 inches, Courtesy of the artist

Todd Stewart, Cellular Tower Disguised as Palm Tree, 2010, archival inkjet print, 16×20 inches, Courtesy of the artist

Todd Stewart, Andrew Inspecting Cairn Along the Mojave Road, 2010, archival inkjet print, 16×20 inches, Courtesy of the artist

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Todd Stewart’s research and creative concerns center on the cultural landscape and focus particularly on intersections of history, myth, time, and perception. Stewart is the author of two books: Placing Memory: A Photographic Exploration of Japanese American Internment (2008) and Picher, Oklahoma, Catastrophe, Memory, and Trauma with co-author Dr. Alison Fields (2016). His photographs have been exhibited widely throughout the United States, recognized by museum curators at the The Whitney Museum of American Art, The Museum of Photographic Arts, Santa Diego; and publication editors including those from Aperture and the New York Times Magazine. Stewart lives in Norman, Oklahoma and teaches at the University of Oklahoma, where he is Associate Professor of Art, Technology, and Culture.

Todd Stewart

“Photographs from a Narrative Atlas of the Great Basin”

March 3, 2017 – March 26, 2017

JRB Art at The Elms   Oklahoma City, Oklahoma

FRAMING SPECIFICATIONS AND ADVICE

METRO GALLERY FRAME

PROFILE: 101
Type: Standard Gallery Frame
Wood & Finish: maple wood frame with pickled white finish
Purchasing Option: joined wood frame
Framing Advice: fitting gallery frames