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Herndon Gallery

Dayton’s 2018 Top Ten Visual Arts

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Dayton’s visual arts scene is abundant with compelling exhibitions and activities; selecting ten was a challenge.  Enjoy this review of my top ten favorite visual art exhibitions in 2018!

Connie Campbell, Archetypes
Rosewood Gallery
November 26 – December 28, 2018

Connie Campbell’s sculptures are created through mathematical references to the golden ratio, with intricate formulas to create each shape, curve, and line. Made with aluminum, copper, and wood, the sculptures echo animal skeletons and snares. Learn more about the exhibition and the artist here.

Kei Ito and Migiwa Orimo, Nuclear Fallout: The Bomb in Three Archives
Herndon Gallery, Antioch College
September 20, 2018 – December 7, 2018

Detail from Migiwa Orimo’s Souvenirs installation

This incredibly moving exhibition featured the work of Migiwa Orimo and Kei Ito, both reflecting on the 1945 atomic bombings of Japan. Orimo’s body of work, Proofs of Burden, is a reflection of the elements of destruction, censorship, constructed narratives, and reflections on popular culture through her research. Artist Kei Ito explores the 1945 bombings through personal narrative. Kei’s grandfather survived the destruction of Hiroshima, witnessing the horrors of radiation effects on his loved ones.  Learn more about the exhibitions here.

Drawing from Perception
Robert and Elaine Stein Galleries, Wright State University
January 16 – February 25, 2018

Abel Dolby, “L & G,” Graphite on paper

Drawing from Perception featured sixty artists with a focus on the tradition of observational renderings. Sometimes there is nothing better than admiring a beautifully rendered drawing! Stand outs included Bradley Mulligan’s still life; Abel Dolby’s studies of quiet domestic moments; Mark Lewis’ collaged cut paper scenes of Americana; and Amy MacLennan’s richly textured streetscape.  See more about the exhibition here.

Kim Rae Taylor, Rendered Complete Equals
Virginia Kistler, Fungal Impressions
Rosewood Gallery
April 16 – May 18, 2018

Rosewood Gallery was host to two excellent solo exhibitions featuring work by Kim Rae Taylor (Cincinnati) and Virginia Kistler (Gahanna, Ohio). Kim Rae Taylor’s exhibition Rendered Complete Equals explored materiality, process, relationships in mixed media paintings. Virginia Kistler’s Fungal Impressions documented the natural world through photographic processes. Learn more about these exhibitions here.

Muse: Mickalene Thomas Photographs and tête-à-tête
Dayton Art Institute
October 20 2018 – January 13 2019
Mickalene Thomas: I Can’t See You Without Me
Wexner Center for the Arts
September 14, 2018 – December 30, 2018

Mickalene Thomas, la leçon d’amour, 2008, c-print

Ohio lucked out with two important Mickalene Thomas exhibitions this fall – large scale painting and collage works at the Wexner Center for the Art’s, and photographs at the Dayton Art Institute. Thomas’ work is monumental in scale and examines representations of the female body in contemporary subject matter to art history. Both exhibitions reflect on the dual influence of photographs with her paintings and collage that initially brought her acclaim in the contemporary art world. Learn more about the Dayton Art Institute exhibition here.

Edmund Merricle, Recent Paintings
Dutoit Gallery
May 2018

Martyr, 2018, oil on linen

It was great to see the quirky color palettes, focused nautical content and joyful painting of Edmund Merricle at Dutoit Gallery. Learn more about the exhibition here.

Julia Oldham, Dogs of Future Earth
Blue House Gallery
October 13 – 31, 2018

Oldham is a prolific artist, with fascinating artwork and travels on her resume. Oldham’s recent series was part of an artist residency in Chernobyl, where she documented the feral dogs that roam the seemingly empty town, descendants of those that survived the nuclear disaster.  Blue House featured her large-scale fantastical collages, as well as videos, allowing a glimpse into a reality blended with science fiction.  Learn more from the Blue House website.

Akram Zaatari, The Fold – Space, time and the image
October 05, 2018 – February 10, 2019
Cincinnati Contemporary Art Center

The photo-based work of Akram Zaatari represents sometimes haunting narratives, but his work extends beyond his own studio – Zaatari is also the co-founder of the Arab Image Foundation, which preserves a history of photographic images from the Middle East. This exhibition impressively balances his artistic vision and preservation work. Learn more here.

Juan-Sí González, Displacement: Collective Practice to Recover Memory
Rosewood Gallery
October 15 – November 16

In Displacement, Juan-Sí González digs deep into his own personal archive, from his youth in Cuba, to his political asylum which eventually led him to Dayton, Ohio.  This exhibition was a dense, emotional, and significant telling of an artist’s story, as well as his connections to his present-day community. Learn about González exhibition’s here.

Ashley Jude Jonas, it’s likely in front of you
Dutoit Gallery
November 2018

Jonas’ thoughtful artwork can be highly conceptual, but always is deeply intentional and sensitive to various aspects of material, dimensionality and balance. Her work is most successful when viewers the time to understand the relationships each piece puts forward, both formally and theoretical.  A truly beautiful exhibition.  Learn more here.

BONUS PICKS

Joel Whitaker, When Things Go Missing
Dayton Visual Arts Center
September 7, 2018 – November 3, 2018
Whitaker’s beautiful, quiet photographs documented of sites of trauma, including locations of tornado touch-downs in the American South and “photographs that explore the idea of losing things—the transitory nature of all things.” An incredibly poetic exhibition. Learn more here.

Ann Kim, Time Cycles, but Never Back to Now
Dutoit Gallery
July 2018
Featuring work made from the artist’s experience living in two locations at opposite points on the globe, Kim’s intimate mixed media paintings echo the movement of the tides and a feeling of standing simultaneously between night and day.  The exhibition includes photographs documenting the locations, and sand samples carefully labeled with the latitude, longitude and date of each collected unit. Learn more here.

Stratum: New Work by Amy Kollar Anderson & Kate Huser Santucci
February 22 – March 24, 2018
Dayton Visual Arts Center
In this unexpected and fun exhibition, the artists documented their collaborative process of creating new works, with the result a richly layered, textured, and sometimes colorful play on each other’s aesthetic tendencies and techniques.  The creative process was documented with notes and photos displayed alongside the finished work. Learn more here.

The Woods in Color: Works by Jean Koeller
Springfield Museum of Art
July 28, 2018 -January 6, 2019
Koeller’s incredible use of color and her perception of what some would call the mundane – like piles of wood – transcend to masterful compositions of abstraction, tonality, surface tension and quiet moments of reprieve.  A must see exhibition; learn more here.

“Danny Lyon: Memories of the Southern Civil Rights Movement” to Open at Antioch College’s Herndon Gallery

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5719425_origThe Herndon Gallery opens an historic exhibition of iconic documentary photography, “Danny Lyon: Memories of the Southern Civil Rights Movement” on Friday, June 5 from 7:00 pm to 9:00 pm. The evening’s public reception includes live performances by local artists and activists involved in the #BlackLivesMatter and Justice for John Crawford movements. The Gallery will also present an artist talk with Danny Lyon via Skype on Thursday, July 16 from 7:00 pm to 8:00 pm.

The reception on Friday, June 5 will feature slam and performance poets, John Booth, Furaha Henry-Jones and G. Scott Jones, performing powerful spoken word pieces, while visual artist and citizen activist, Migiwa Orima, makes screen prints in the gallery. Migiwa’s protest banners visually connect the local protest movements to the national movement. Between marches, these banners will reside in the Herndon Gallery.

The exhibition also features the archival slide montage known as The Gegner Incident, created by Brian Springer. It includes archival newspaper clippings and photographs of a local civil rights citizen protest around racism in a local barbershop in Yellow Springs in the 1950s.

Antioch College and the Herndon Gallery will also host a special reception and conversation on Friday, June 19 from 1:00 pm to 3:00 pm with David Goodman ’69 and Steve Schwerner ’60 (Brothers of Andrew Goodman and Michael “Mickey” Schwerner, who along with James Earl Chaney were murdered by the Ku Klux Klan in Neshoba County, Miss. during the Freedom8916880_orig Summer campaign in 1964). Artist Danny Lyon will also be present for a book signing in the Gallery following Goodman and Schwerner’s reflections. The second publishing of Lyon’s out of print memoir was made possible through the generosity of Antioch College Trustee David Goodman and The Andrew Goodman Foundation. As part of Antioch’s Reunion 2015 events, David Goodman and Steve Schwerner will also tell “The Chaney, Goodman & Schwerner Story” on Saturday, June 20 at 4:00 p.m. in the College’s Foundry Theater. The event will be moderated by Mila Cooper, Director of the Coretta Scott King Center. All events are free and open to the public.

About Danny Lyon:

Photographer and filmmaker Danny Lyon captured some of the civil rights movement’s most compelling moments, from the March on Washington,  from the March on Washington, to the aftermath of the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing in Birmingham, Alabama.  A self-taught photographer and graduate of the University of Chicago, Lyon began his photographic career in the early 1960s as the first staff photographer for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), a national group of college students who joined together after the first sit-in by four African American college students at a North Carolina lunch counter.

Said Lyon of his work, “I wanted to change history and preserve humanity, but in the process I changed myself and preserved my own.”

Lyon became a leader of post-War documentary photography and film and helped create a mode of photojournalism in which the picture-maker is deeply and personally embedded in his subject matter. From 1962-1964, Lyon traveled the South and Mid-Atlantic regions documenting the Civil Rights Movement.  His photographs were published in The Movement, a documentary book about the Southern Civil Rights Movement, and later in Memories of the Southern Civil Rights Movement, Lyon’s own memoir of his years working for the SNCC.

Lyon has won two Guggenheim Fellowships, a Rockefeller Fellowship, and ten National Endowment for the Arts awards.  He is affiliated with Magnum Photos, and his work has appeared at MoMA, the Art Institute of Chicago and the Center for Creative Photography. Two of his photos are attached at the end of this release.

Herndon Gallery Information:

Herndon Gallery hours are Tuesdays through Saturdays, 1:00 p.m.-4:00 p.m.  The gallery is closed June 30 through July 6 during the Antioch College quarter break. For more information, contact Jennifer Wenker, creative director of the Herndon Gallery at jwenker@antiochcollege.org or 937-319-0114.  Additional information may be found at www.antiochcollege.org/campus-life/herdon-gallery

Antioch College’s Herndon Gallery Hosts Night Of Performance To Close Currencies Exhibition

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Gabrielle Civil performs at Antioch College's Herndon Gallery

Gabrielle Civil performs at Antioch College’s Herndon Gallery

The Herndon Gallery on Antioch College’s campus will host an evening of performances on Friday, February 14, beginning at 7:00 p.m.  This event will close the current exhibition, Currencies, which presents the work of current Antioch arts faculty and resident scholars.

The evening will include dance performances by Jill Becker, associate professor of dance at the former College, and a National Endowment for the Arts Choreographer’s Fellowship recipient, and Melissa Heston, a collaborative dance and theatre artist who performs regionally and internationally. Becker and Heston will begin by performing solos and duets improvised with a  “love” theme—sappy, romantic, dreamy, love-sick, love-lost, melancholy, first love, etc.  In addition, Heston will perform an excerpt from Bon Voyage, a piece choreographed in 2003 with music by Yann Tierson. Becker will be performing a solo piece, “What I want to say is…,” that moves between the private and public self.

Louise Smith, an actor, writer, and educator, and currently Antioch’s dean of community life, will be performing One Don’t Operate Without the Other, a performance poem about darkness. This piece premiered in Cincinnati last year at the Time Arts Series, and is inspired by Jungian ideas about the unconscious mind and how it expresses itself through language, the body and the world around us. Smith is a 2003 Obie Award winner for her work in A Painted Snake in a Painted Chair.

Gabrielle Civil, a poet, conceptual and performance artist, and associate professor of performance at Antioch College, will be performing “and then . . .” This piece features Nicolas Daily, resident life manager, with video by Cristian Perez Lopez ’17. Civil writes of this new piece, “Break out the Happy Meal, it’s Valentine’s Day. What to do with the space before, during and after love? With loud sound, movement, video, naughty texts and more, this work offers upside down roses, black kisses and trying to cry. There is a parental advisory due to its explicit content. Not for the faint of heart.”

The evening of performances is free and open to the public.  For more information, please contact Dennie Eagleson, creative director of the Herndon Gallery, at 937 768 6462 or e-mail her at deagleson@antiochcollege.org.