Fall 2008 Visiting Artist Lecture Series

Timothy Berry, Mineko Grimmer , Jason Middlebrook, Norma Quintana , and Anne Wilson

Copia Auditorium, 500 First Street Napa, CA, 7 – 8:30 PM,

Free Admission
For information call 707-255-6000
Presented in partnership with Copia: The American Center for Food, Wine and the Arts.

Generously supported by a grant from:

The Phyllis C. Wattis Foundation

In tandem with a talented and experienced faculty, visiting artists comprise and create one of the most compelling facets of the Oxbow program. Each semester, Oxbow hosts two artists who join the faculty for ten-day residencies, working with students to bring their own perspective, experiences and approaches to thinking about and making art. In addition, artists visit to give lectures and Oxbow students travel to significant collections and arts institutions and meet informally with artists in their studios. Oxbow is proud to present many of these artists in its Fall and Spring Lecture Series, free to the public, as part of its commitment to building a stronger Napa community.

Mineko Grimmer- Monday, September 22

(Image: Spiral Towers, University of Washington, Seattle, WA 1988)

Mineko Grimmer (1949 - ) was born in Hanamaki, Iwate Prefecture, Japan. After receiving a B.A. from Iwate University and working as a commercial artist, she moved to Los Angeles, where she earned a B.F.A. and M.F.A. from the Otis Art Institute of Parsons School of Design. Her work has been exhibited in solo and group shows, including an installation, "Symposium," at the Whitney Museum of American Art, which Douglas C. McGill of the New York Times described as "crowd-stopping sculpture" and "mesmerizing." Her gallery work unites natural materials, such as stone and water, with natural forces, such as gravity, temperature, and time. This sculpture, which is both visual and audio, creates a harmonious relationship between opposites, by combining a Japanese tradition of using and arranging natural materials with a contemporary attitude of process, randomness, and change.

Norma Quintana - Monday, October 6

(Image: Circus Toddler, 2008, watercolor on paper, 34 x 42 in.)

Norma I. Quintana is a photographer and educator working in the tradition of social documentary. Quintana has two extensive and ongoing pictorial bodies of work: the first, CIRCUS, chronicles the life of a traveling one-ring circus; and the second, FORGET ME NOT, is a series of portraits that artfully displays the layered complexities of her California community. Currently, Norma is working on a photo project entitled TRANSPLANTS.

Born and raised in the Midwest, Quintana grew up in a bicultural home and frequently returned to her parents’ native Puerto Rico for visits. She earned a Master’s degree in Social Sciences, which she credits, in part, to her acute curiosity with her work’s sociological underpinnings. Essentially self-taught, Quintana has studied with some of the world’s most important and influential photographers, such as Mary Ellen Mark, Shelby Lee Adams, and Graciela Iturbide from Mexico.

www.normaquintana.com

Timothy Berry- Monday, October 13

(Image: Negro–Eden, 2008, oil, tar, encaustic on paper on canvas 30 x 36 in.)

Timothy Berry is creating the most moving work of his thirty year career. It is a body of evocative, process-oriented drawings and paintings with gold leaf and tar that symbolically grapple with the origins of fear in our society. Fear has surfaced as a dominant, emotional component driving many Americans’ decision-making process since the aftermath of 9/11. The “culture of fear” seems to have supplanted “the age of anxiety.” Berry’s visual inquiry began with the question of how children are taught to mediate this primal emotion through masks during the ritual celebration of All Saints’ Eve (Halloween). Berry’s expressive interpretations echo a long lineage in art history, ranging from those of James Ensor to the work of indigenous cultures. The issues behind Berry’s work raise awareness of cultural scripts that are manipulated by those in power to coerce emotional reactions on the part of the public in perceiving the other or in responding to threats of security. Timothy Berry teaches at the San Francisco Art Institute and University of California at Davis,

http://www.timothyberryart.com/

Anne Wilson - Monday, October 20

(Image: Anne Wilson and collaborators, Performance and sculpture, Wind-Up: Walking the Warp, Rhona Hoffman Gallery, January 2008 Stainless steel frame, thread, 30" x 17' x 7')

Chicago based artist Anne Wilson creates her work in that changing conceptual space where the processes of handwork are used to address social and political concepts. Employing familiar, domestic materials, including table linen, bed sheets, human hair, thread, and lace, Wilson explores the larger themes of time, loss, private and social rituals. On January 18th she discusses her work in a presentation entitled “ Liminal Networks.” “Using pixilation and projection,” Wilson explains, “I de-materialize and re-animate work that began on the border between drawing and object making, and remains liminal in whatever new medium it enters.”

Wilson’s sculpture, drawings, internet projects and animation have been shown nationally and internationally. In 2005-6 her work was part of the “Alternative Paradise” exhibition at the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art in Kanazawa, Japan; the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston hosted a major solo exhibition of her work in 2004; and she was included in the “2002 Biennial” at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. Upcoming 2007 exhibitions include the Museum of Arts & Design in New York and the Victoria & Albert Museum in London.

Wilson has received numerous awards including a Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation grant and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts. She is a professor and chair of the Department of Fiber and Material Studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Jason Middlebrook- Monday, October 27

(Image: Its All Here for the Taking, 2006 Acrylic, ink and colored pencil on paper 60 1/2 x 66 inches)

With a continued emphasis on the tense relationship between man and nature, Jason Middlebrook’s new work finds inspiration in recent historical events and current news. While the title of the exhibition suggests an inflexible understanding of “truth,” the tone of the show acknowledges a shift in understanding and an increased awareness of such sobering topics as war, waste and natural disaster.

Middlebrook draws from the rich and endless supply of media imagery. Specifically, The New York Times provides his works on paper with images from such front-page stories as Hurricane Katrina, the war in Iraq, the tsunami in Indonesia and the crisis in the Middle East. This is a world in which man is disoriented and surrounded by the disarray of disastrous circumstances. In keeping with his continued interest in the environment, landfills play a primary role, exposing nature as overgrown and out of control. Weeds are the opportunists, exerting a regenerative power where the landscape has been scarred. The site of a bomb explosion or a natural calamity becomes a place where humans flock to witness the destruction and to engage with the debris that bears memory or serves as evidence of lives lost. From these horrific scenes the media spectacle is born.