Arts & Entertainment · The Star Democrat
Academy Art Museum Announces Fall Exhibits
Friday, September 29, 2017
Transcription note: The text below was transcribed from the original newspaper page. Capitalization, titles, and wording have been preserved where possible.
EASTON — Three new exhibits have opened at the Academy Art Museum.
“Bennett Bean: Be Careful What You Fall in Love With,” which will be open through Nov. 5, will have a curator-led tour at 11 a.m. Wednesday, Nov. 1.
Bennett Bean is an American ceramic artist best known as a ceramicist for his treatment of vessels post firing. He works in a range of media, including stone, precious metals, wool and silk weaving, and painting.
For Bean, as a Buddhist practitioner, the distinctions between media are less than the interplay between them. The Easton exhibit, his first solo show, will highlight that interplay — the cross-pollination between ceramic sculpture, painting, rugs and furniture he has been working with in recent years.
Bean’s work is in the permanent collections of the Whitney, the Smithsonian Institution and the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. He lives and works in Blairstown, N.J., with his wife, Cathy Bao. He was selected as the honorary chairman and Visionary Artist of this year’s Academy Art Museum Craft Show.
“David Driskell: Renewal and Form, Recent Prints,” which will be open through Dec. 31 (with interruption from Oct. 18 to 22 for the Craft Show), comes to Easton from the Center for Maine Contemporary Art, in Rockland, Maine, and was curated by Greenhut Galleries in Portland, Maine.
David Driskell is an artist, curator, educator and scholar of African-American art. He began making prints in 1952 while attending Howard University in Washington, D.C., where he was introduced to lithography and woodcuts. Printmaking has remained a favorite medium throughout his career. As he often did not have access to a printing press, he came to rely on the traditional manual method of producing relief prints, by rubbing the back of the paper with a wooden spoon. Like the painter’s brush, a simple tool such as the spoon links the artist’s mind, eye and hand directly to the work.
Driskell is professor emeritus of art at the University of Maryland, College Park, where the David C. Driskell Center for the Study of the Visual Arts and Culture of African Americans and the African Diaspora honors his contributions to the field.
Helen Siegl: Fantasy Creatures from the Museum’s Collection
“Helen Siegl: Fantasy Creatures from the Museum’s Collection,” which will be open through Nov. 26, features the unusual printmaking technique of Helen Siegl (1924–2009), who often combined various kinds of blocks and plates to create an image, including handmade plaster blocks.
The museum has 49 original prints by Siegl in its Permanent Collection. She designed these when wood was scarce in Vienna during World War II. Siegl gained a reputation for both her individual signed and numbered prints, and for her book illustrations. Her illustration “The Dancing Palm Tree” was selected one of the Year’s Best Illustrated Children’s Books by The New York Times (1990). She was a regular contributor to the Philadelphia Print Club, and her work is included in various collections nationwide, among them the National Gallery of Art and the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
For more information, visit www.academyartmuseum.org or call 410-822-2787.
The page pictures Helen Siegl’s Apple Thief, identified in the original caption as a linoleum block print on tissue paper.