Monday, January 7, 2008

Tango
Point of Contact Gallery

Price: Free
Point of Contact Gallery
350 W. Fayette St., Syracuse

Tango, a large format folio published by Iris Editions in New York (1991) with eight intaglio prints by Nancy Graves and 13 pages of text by Pedro Cuperman that gaze at the aesthetics of this Latin American dance.

Tango proposes an evening of music, dance, and food transposed into videoa sort of "performance" projected into the space of the gallery where audience and art become intertwined in the field of representation.

"Graves conceived of the prints in the folio as a continued exploration of pattern in nature and as a tonal study of black and white," writes Thomas Padon in his book, Nancy Graves, Excavations in Print A Catalogue Raisonné (1996). "More than once the artist has asserted, 'There is nothing more challenging and meaningful than to make prints in black and white.' For an admitted colorist, it is ironic that the nine prints Graves has made in black and white are among her most powerful." The cryptic titles of the prints in the folio were selected by Graves from Cuperman's text for Tango. The poet speaks of the dance as a gradually unfolding ritual, stating near the conclusion, "Tango helps you find your own levels of proximity."

16x16 Small Works Show
Limestone Art and Framing Gallery

Limestone Art and Framing Gallery
105 Brooklea Dr., Fayetteville

Juried exhibition of selected works by local, national and international artists.

Tuesday, January 8, 2008

Tango
Point of Contact Gallery

Price: Free
Point of Contact Gallery
350 W. Fayette St., Syracuse

Tango, a large format folio published by Iris Editions in New York (1991) with eight intaglio prints by Nancy Graves and 13 pages of text by Pedro Cuperman that gaze at the aesthetics of this Latin American dance.

Tango proposes an evening of music, dance, and food transposed into videoa sort of "performance" projected into the space of the gallery where audience and art become intertwined in the field of representation.

"Graves conceived of the prints in the folio as a continued exploration of pattern in nature and as a tonal study of black and white," writes Thomas Padon in his book, Nancy Graves, Excavations in Print A Catalogue Raisonné (1996). "More than once the artist has asserted, 'There is nothing more challenging and meaningful than to make prints in black and white.' For an admitted colorist, it is ironic that the nine prints Graves has made in black and white are among her most powerful." The cryptic titles of the prints in the folio were selected by Graves from Cuperman's text for Tango. The poet speaks of the dance as a gradually unfolding ritual, stating near the conclusion, "Tango helps you find your own levels of proximity."

Modernist Prints 1900-1955
Syracuse University Art Museum

Syracuse University Art Museum, Shaffer Art Building
Syracuse University, Syracuse

Since the turn of the century America and Europe have had a symbiotic relationship towards art. Movements that were born in Europe have been nurtured in the United States and those styles developed here have had a significant impact on artists abroad. In the years before World War I avant-garde movements in Europe seemed radical to many Americans but also extremely exciting to others. As the century progressed movements emerged that borrowed issues, techniques, devices, or other attributes from pre-existing styles. This led to a generic 'modernist' label for those art forms that did not seem to emerge from a traditional, academic manner.

The artwork in this exhibition was created by important artists of the era including Vasily Kandinsky, Joan Miro, and S. W. Hayter from Europe, and the Americans Stuart Davis, Boris Margo, and Morris Blackburn. The prints have been chosen to illustrate the multiplicity of graphic art styles that became popular during the period.

Impressions, a Jasper Johns Retrospective
Syracuse University Art Museum

Price: Free
Syracuse University Art Museum, Shaffer Art Building
Syracuse University, Syracuse

This retrospective exhibition of Jasper Johns' prints from the John and Maxine Belger Family Foundation starts with the artist's first published print in 1960, six years after Johns consciously destroyed all of his artwork. That act liberated him from "becoming" an artist to "being" an artist. Johns spent the next few years in the studio creating a body of imagery: flags, numerals, letters, and targets that flew in the face of the then popular Abstract Expressionism.

Trained briefly at the University of South Carolina, Johns moved to New York in the 1950s. In New York, he met and was influenced by a number of other artists including the composer John Cage, the choreographer Merce Cunningham, and the painter Robert Rauschenberg. After a visit to Philadelphia to see a Marcel Duchamp painting, Johns became very interested in the French artist's work. Duchamp had revolutionized the art world with his "readymades" - a series of found objects presented as finished works of art.

Jasper Johns' interest in process led him to printmaking. Often he would make counterpart prints
to his paintings. He explains, "My experience of life is that it's very fragmented; certain kinds of things happen, and in another place, a different kind of thing occurs. I would like my work to have some vivid indication of those differences." For Johns, printmaking was a medium that encouraged experimentation with an ease for repeat patterns. His work in screen printing, lithography, and etching have revolutionized the field.

Visual Arts Showcase #62, Brainstorms
CNY Arts

The Warehouse Link Gallery
350 W. Fayette St., Syracuse

Under One Roof Reprise
Everson Museum of Art

Price: Suggested donation, $5, adults
Everson Museum of Art
401 Harrison St., Syracuse

Juxtapose artwork created by artists whose common thread is a shared studio/classroom space and expect the unexpected. This happened in 2004, when a group of women who work and teach at Syracuse University's ComArt building joined together for an exhibition entitled Under One Roof at SOHO20 Gallery in Chelsea, NY. This was the first time the artists - three generations of students/teachers - had shown together, yet their work spoke of seamless connections and closer ties than one might assume.

Nine artists have reunited for the current exhibition Under One Roof Reprise. Their situations have changed slightly but their work once again has come together in surprising and interesting ways. Abby Goodman and Kim Carr Valdez earned their MFA degrees and moved to Brooklyn, while Laura Ledbetter now lives in Philadelphia. Anne Beffel, Ann Clarke, Mary Giehl, Gail Hoffman, and Jude Lewis continue to teach in the College of Visual and Performing Arts at Syracuse University, while Claire Harootunian, although officially retired, continues to teach, travel, and explore the art of found objects.

The artists' processes are diverse, including large-scale installations, found object collaboration, casting, kinetics, video, and hand-tooled objects. Emphasis is placed on the creative use of materials such as fibers, metals, wood, plastics, resin, and everyday products. Each artist translates and illuminates human experience through her unique visual language and conceptual sensibility. These artists address common themes such as play, gender, identity, time, place, and most of all, memories. Mary Giehl's Ivory combines happy childhood memories of bathing with her siblings - recalling the "toys, the fun, the soap floating and the smell of Ivory" - with "those of sad and heartbreaking stories" not uncommon in today's headlines.

Gail Hoffman, a sculptor immersed in the concept of time, presents "visual metaphorical narratives, freeze-framed in a state of suspended animation" through a variety of media including bronze, plastic toys, and other found objects. Plasco Ranch (Possible Outcomes) is a minature assemblage designed in the small scale to "invite the viewer to psychologically inhabit the space." A collection of disparate objects including a bronze sheep, Santa Claus, and military vehicles has been arranged to suggest a story that is left to the viewer's imagination. A journal placed nearby offers visitors the opportunity to record their stories and suggest possible outcomes for the scene as they see it unfold. Based on viewers' comments, Hoffman will return periodically to rearrange, add, or remove objects, providing photographic documentation of the ever changing Plasco Ranch as part of the exhibit.

This group exhibition is presented in conjunction with the Syracuse University College of Visual and Performing Arts.

Pollock Matters
Everson Museum of Art

Price: Suggested donation: $5 adults
Everson Museum of Art
401 Harrison St., Syracuse

Pollock Matters, curated by art historian Ellen G. Landau of Case-Western Reserve University, explores for the first time the personal and artistic relationship between famed American Abstract Expressionist painter Jackson Pollock and his close friend, noted Swiss-born photographer and graphic designer, Herbert Matter.

Featuring compelling visual and documentary evidence, the exhibition demonstrates the impact of the artists' interaction on their respective work. Comprising paintings, drawings, works on paper and other documentation -- including previously unseen photographs and letters -- it compares Matter's experimental abstract photos with known works by Pollock, and highlights their significant stylistic, technical and thematic connections.

Pollock Matters also showcases 24 small-scale works discovered by Herbert Matter's son, Alex Matter, in a storage facility in 2002. The paintings, although identified as "Jackson experimental works" by an inscription in Herbert Matter's hand and dated 1958 (2 years after the artist's death), have been the subject of much controversy, scientific study, scholarly analysis, and significant media attention. In the exhibition and accompanying catalog, Curator Ellen Landau thoroughly investigates questions raised by this unprecedented discovery of previously unknown works: "If Pollock did not paint a portion of the cache, who did? How many artists were involved? And, no less importantly, what was the purpose of these paintings?" The debate will, without doubt, continue beyond the exhibition and for decades to come.

Genetic Self-Portrait: Works by Gary Schneider
The Warehouse Gallery

Price: Free
The Warehouse Gallery
350 W. Fayette St., Syracuse

The show includes 55 photo-based works that South African-born, NYC-based artist Gary Schneider produced when he was offered a chance to create a new body of work inspired by the Human Genome Project (HGP). The HGP, a scientific race to uncover the mysteries of DNA, began formally in the 1990s and was completed in 2003. During that period, Schneider was able to collaborate with a number of scientists and was given access to advanced imaging systems from electron microscopes to x-ray machines.

The work in the exhibition ranges from images of his individual chromosomes made by a light microscope to panoramic dental x-rays. Schneider is known as a master photographic printer, and by combining his skill as a craftsman and selecting specimens for their aesthetic qualities, he moved beyond scientific descriptions to produce a personal portrait that asks us to consider how we are unique and where we stand on common ground.

Schneider had always been interested in alternative imaging techniques, and previous to this project he had been making images by imprinting his hands onto film emulsions. When he decided to include these prints along with the images he had been making with scientists, he realized that what he had been creating was a new kind of portrait. Ann Thomas, curator of photographs at the National Gallery of Canada, described it as a new approach that "challenges the traditional definition of the portrait, and revises our understanding of what it means to be revealed before the camera's lens."

By merging scientific accuracy with poetic resonance, Schneider has created a very personal illumination of how our individual identity is so closely linked to our broader understanding and use of the information contained in the human building blocks of our DNA. Through the personal exploration that went into creating genetic self-portrait, Schneider reveals that while we may always want to think of ourselves as more than the sum of our parts, our real promise might be found in looking at the 99 percent of ourselves we have in common with everyone else.

Read a review!

Wednesday, January 9, 2008

Tango
Point of Contact Gallery

Price: Free
Point of Contact Gallery
350 W. Fayette St., Syracuse

Tango, a large format folio published by Iris Editions in New York (1991) with eight intaglio prints by Nancy Graves and 13 pages of text by Pedro Cuperman that gaze at the aesthetics of this Latin American dance.

Tango proposes an evening of music, dance, and food transposed into videoa sort of "performance" projected into the space of the gallery where audience and art become intertwined in the field of representation.

"Graves conceived of the prints in the folio as a continued exploration of pattern in nature and as a tonal study of black and white," writes Thomas Padon in his book, Nancy Graves, Excavations in Print A Catalogue Raisonné (1996). "More than once the artist has asserted, 'There is nothing more challenging and meaningful than to make prints in black and white.' For an admitted colorist, it is ironic that the nine prints Graves has made in black and white are among her most powerful." The cryptic titles of the prints in the folio were selected by Graves from Cuperman's text for Tango. The poet speaks of the dance as a gradually unfolding ritual, stating near the conclusion, "Tango helps you find your own levels of proximity."

Exploring History with Art -- Onondaga County on the Move: 200 Years of Transportation
Onondaga Historical Association

Onondaga Historical Association
321 Montgomery St., Syracuse

The exhibition will feature artwork from the OHA collection that depicts various modes of local transportation and how artists interpreted it over the last two centuries. Local teachers and students will find subjects meeting their document-based questions social studies standards within the exhibit.

Impressions, a Jasper Johns Retrospective
Syracuse University Art Museum

Price: Free
Syracuse University Art Museum, Shaffer Art Building
Syracuse University, Syracuse

This retrospective exhibition of Jasper Johns' prints from the John and Maxine Belger Family Foundation starts with the artist's first published print in 1960, six years after Johns consciously destroyed all of his artwork. That act liberated him from "becoming" an artist to "being" an artist. Johns spent the next few years in the studio creating a body of imagery: flags, numerals, letters, and targets that flew in the face of the then popular Abstract Expressionism.

Trained briefly at the University of South Carolina, Johns moved to New York in the 1950s. In New York, he met and was influenced by a number of other artists including the composer John Cage, the choreographer Merce Cunningham, and the painter Robert Rauschenberg. After a visit to Philadelphia to see a Marcel Duchamp painting, Johns became very interested in the French artist's work. Duchamp had revolutionized the art world with his "readymades" - a series of found objects presented as finished works of art.

Jasper Johns' interest in process led him to printmaking. Often he would make counterpart prints
to his paintings. He explains, "My experience of life is that it's very fragmented; certain kinds of things happen, and in another place, a different kind of thing occurs. I would like my work to have some vivid indication of those differences." For Johns, printmaking was a medium that encouraged experimentation with an ease for repeat patterns. His work in screen printing, lithography, and etching have revolutionized the field.

Modernist Prints 1900-1955
Syracuse University Art Museum

Syracuse University Art Museum, Shaffer Art Building
Syracuse University, Syracuse

Since the turn of the century America and Europe have had a symbiotic relationship towards art. Movements that were born in Europe have been nurtured in the United States and those styles developed here have had a significant impact on artists abroad. In the years before World War I avant-garde movements in Europe seemed radical to many Americans but also extremely exciting to others. As the century progressed movements emerged that borrowed issues, techniques, devices, or other attributes from pre-existing styles. This led to a generic 'modernist' label for those art forms that did not seem to emerge from a traditional, academic manner.

The artwork in this exhibition was created by important artists of the era including Vasily Kandinsky, Joan Miro, and S. W. Hayter from Europe, and the Americans Stuart Davis, Boris Margo, and Morris Blackburn. The prints have been chosen to illustrate the multiplicity of graphic art styles that became popular during the period.

Visual Arts Showcase #62, Brainstorms
CNY Arts

The Warehouse Link Gallery
350 W. Fayette St., Syracuse

Pollock Matters
Everson Museum of Art

Price: Suggested donation: $5 adults
Everson Museum of Art
401 Harrison St., Syracuse

Pollock Matters, curated by art historian Ellen G. Landau of Case-Western Reserve University, explores for the first time the personal and artistic relationship between famed American Abstract Expressionist painter Jackson Pollock and his close friend, noted Swiss-born photographer and graphic designer, Herbert Matter.

Featuring compelling visual and documentary evidence, the exhibition demonstrates the impact of the artists' interaction on their respective work. Comprising paintings, drawings, works on paper and other documentation -- including previously unseen photographs and letters -- it compares Matter's experimental abstract photos with known works by Pollock, and highlights their significant stylistic, technical and thematic connections.

Pollock Matters also showcases 24 small-scale works discovered by Herbert Matter's son, Alex Matter, in a storage facility in 2002. The paintings, although identified as "Jackson experimental works" by an inscription in Herbert Matter's hand and dated 1958 (2 years after the artist's death), have been the subject of much controversy, scientific study, scholarly analysis, and significant media attention. In the exhibition and accompanying catalog, Curator Ellen Landau thoroughly investigates questions raised by this unprecedented discovery of previously unknown works: "If Pollock did not paint a portion of the cache, who did? How many artists were involved? And, no less importantly, what was the purpose of these paintings?" The debate will, without doubt, continue beyond the exhibition and for decades to come.

Under One Roof Reprise
Everson Museum of Art

Price: Suggested donation, $5, adults
Everson Museum of Art
401 Harrison St., Syracuse

Juxtapose artwork created by artists whose common thread is a shared studio/classroom space and expect the unexpected. This happened in 2004, when a group of women who work and teach at Syracuse University's ComArt building joined together for an exhibition entitled Under One Roof at SOHO20 Gallery in Chelsea, NY. This was the first time the artists - three generations of students/teachers - had shown together, yet their work spoke of seamless connections and closer ties than one might assume.

Nine artists have reunited for the current exhibition Under One Roof Reprise. Their situations have changed slightly but their work once again has come together in surprising and interesting ways. Abby Goodman and Kim Carr Valdez earned their MFA degrees and moved to Brooklyn, while Laura Ledbetter now lives in Philadelphia. Anne Beffel, Ann Clarke, Mary Giehl, Gail Hoffman, and Jude Lewis continue to teach in the College of Visual and Performing Arts at Syracuse University, while Claire Harootunian, although officially retired, continues to teach, travel, and explore the art of found objects.

The artists' processes are diverse, including large-scale installations, found object collaboration, casting, kinetics, video, and hand-tooled objects. Emphasis is placed on the creative use of materials such as fibers, metals, wood, plastics, resin, and everyday products. Each artist translates and illuminates human experience through her unique visual language and conceptual sensibility. These artists address common themes such as play, gender, identity, time, place, and most of all, memories. Mary Giehl's Ivory combines happy childhood memories of bathing with her siblings - recalling the "toys, the fun, the soap floating and the smell of Ivory" - with "those of sad and heartbreaking stories" not uncommon in today's headlines.

Gail Hoffman, a sculptor immersed in the concept of time, presents "visual metaphorical narratives, freeze-framed in a state of suspended animation" through a variety of media including bronze, plastic toys, and other found objects. Plasco Ranch (Possible Outcomes) is a minature assemblage designed in the small scale to "invite the viewer to psychologically inhabit the space." A collection of disparate objects including a bronze sheep, Santa Claus, and military vehicles has been arranged to suggest a story that is left to the viewer's imagination. A journal placed nearby offers visitors the opportunity to record their stories and suggest possible outcomes for the scene as they see it unfold. Based on viewers' comments, Hoffman will return periodically to rearrange, add, or remove objects, providing photographic documentation of the ever changing Plasco Ranch as part of the exhibit.

This group exhibition is presented in conjunction with the Syracuse University College of Visual and Performing Arts.

Genetic Self-Portrait: Works by Gary Schneider
The Warehouse Gallery

Price: Free
The Warehouse Gallery
350 W. Fayette St., Syracuse

The show includes 55 photo-based works that South African-born, NYC-based artist Gary Schneider produced when he was offered a chance to create a new body of work inspired by the Human Genome Project (HGP). The HGP, a scientific race to uncover the mysteries of DNA, began formally in the 1990s and was completed in 2003. During that period, Schneider was able to collaborate with a number of scientists and was given access to advanced imaging systems from electron microscopes to x-ray machines.

The work in the exhibition ranges from images of his individual chromosomes made by a light microscope to panoramic dental x-rays. Schneider is known as a master photographic printer, and by combining his skill as a craftsman and selecting specimens for their aesthetic qualities, he moved beyond scientific descriptions to produce a personal portrait that asks us to consider how we are unique and where we stand on common ground.

Schneider had always been interested in alternative imaging techniques, and previous to this project he had been making images by imprinting his hands onto film emulsions. When he decided to include these prints along with the images he had been making with scientists, he realized that what he had been creating was a new kind of portrait. Ann Thomas, curator of photographs at the National Gallery of Canada, described it as a new approach that "challenges the traditional definition of the portrait, and revises our understanding of what it means to be revealed before the camera's lens."

By merging scientific accuracy with poetic resonance, Schneider has created a very personal illumination of how our individual identity is so closely linked to our broader understanding and use of the information contained in the human building blocks of our DNA. Through the personal exploration that went into creating genetic self-portrait, Schneider reveals that while we may always want to think of ourselves as more than the sum of our parts, our real promise might be found in looking at the 99 percent of ourselves we have in common with everyone else.

Read a review!

Thursday, January 10, 2008

Tango
Point of Contact Gallery

Price: Free
Point of Contact Gallery
350 W. Fayette St., Syracuse

Tango, a large format folio published by Iris Editions in New York (1991) with eight intaglio prints by Nancy Graves and 13 pages of text by Pedro Cuperman that gaze at the aesthetics of this Latin American dance.

Tango proposes an evening of music, dance, and food transposed into videoa sort of "performance" projected into the space of the gallery where audience and art become intertwined in the field of representation.

"Graves conceived of the prints in the folio as a continued exploration of pattern in nature and as a tonal study of black and white," writes Thomas Padon in his book, Nancy Graves, Excavations in Print A Catalogue Raisonné (1996). "More than once the artist has asserted, 'There is nothing more challenging and meaningful than to make prints in black and white.' For an admitted colorist, it is ironic that the nine prints Graves has made in black and white are among her most powerful." The cryptic titles of the prints in the folio were selected by Graves from Cuperman's text for Tango. The poet speaks of the dance as a gradually unfolding ritual, stating near the conclusion, "Tango helps you find your own levels of proximity."

Exploring History with Art -- Onondaga County on the Move: 200 Years of Transportation
Onondaga Historical Association

Onondaga Historical Association
321 Montgomery St., Syracuse

The exhibition will feature artwork from the OHA collection that depicts various modes of local transportation and how artists interpreted it over the last two centuries. Local teachers and students will find subjects meeting their document-based questions social studies standards within the exhibit.

Modernist Prints 1900-1955
Syracuse University Art Museum

Syracuse University Art Museum, Shaffer Art Building
Syracuse University, Syracuse

Since the turn of the century America and Europe have had a symbiotic relationship towards art. Movements that were born in Europe have been nurtured in the United States and those styles developed here have had a significant impact on artists abroad. In the years before World War I avant-garde movements in Europe seemed radical to many Americans but also extremely exciting to others. As the century progressed movements emerged that borrowed issues, techniques, devices, or other attributes from pre-existing styles. This led to a generic 'modernist' label for those art forms that did not seem to emerge from a traditional, academic manner.

The artwork in this exhibition was created by important artists of the era including Vasily Kandinsky, Joan Miro, and S. W. Hayter from Europe, and the Americans Stuart Davis, Boris Margo, and Morris Blackburn. The prints have been chosen to illustrate the multiplicity of graphic art styles that became popular during the period.

Impressions, a Jasper Johns Retrospective
Syracuse University Art Museum

Price: Free
Syracuse University Art Museum, Shaffer Art Building
Syracuse University, Syracuse

This retrospective exhibition of Jasper Johns' prints from the John and Maxine Belger Family Foundation starts with the artist's first published print in 1960, six years after Johns consciously destroyed all of his artwork. That act liberated him from "becoming" an artist to "being" an artist. Johns spent the next few years in the studio creating a body of imagery: flags, numerals, letters, and targets that flew in the face of the then popular Abstract Expressionism.

Trained briefly at the University of South Carolina, Johns moved to New York in the 1950s. In New York, he met and was influenced by a number of other artists including the composer John Cage, the choreographer Merce Cunningham, and the painter Robert Rauschenberg. After a visit to Philadelphia to see a Marcel Duchamp painting, Johns became very interested in the French artist's work. Duchamp had revolutionized the art world with his "readymades" - a series of found objects presented as finished works of art.

Jasper Johns' interest in process led him to printmaking. Often he would make counterpart prints
to his paintings. He explains, "My experience of life is that it's very fragmented; certain kinds of things happen, and in another place, a different kind of thing occurs. I would like my work to have some vivid indication of those differences." For Johns, printmaking was a medium that encouraged experimentation with an ease for repeat patterns. His work in screen printing, lithography, and etching have revolutionized the field.

Visual Arts Showcase #62, Brainstorms
CNY Arts

The Warehouse Link Gallery
350 W. Fayette St., Syracuse

Under One Roof Reprise
Everson Museum of Art

Price: Suggested donation, $5, adults
Everson Museum of Art
401 Harrison St., Syracuse

Juxtapose artwork created by artists whose common thread is a shared studio/classroom space and expect the unexpected. This happened in 2004, when a group of women who work and teach at Syracuse University's ComArt building joined together for an exhibition entitled Under One Roof at SOHO20 Gallery in Chelsea, NY. This was the first time the artists - three generations of students/teachers - had shown together, yet their work spoke of seamless connections and closer ties than one might assume.

Nine artists have reunited for the current exhibition Under One Roof Reprise. Their situations have changed slightly but their work once again has come together in surprising and interesting ways. Abby Goodman and Kim Carr Valdez earned their MFA degrees and moved to Brooklyn, while Laura Ledbetter now lives in Philadelphia. Anne Beffel, Ann Clarke, Mary Giehl, Gail Hoffman, and Jude Lewis continue to teach in the College of Visual and Performing Arts at Syracuse University, while Claire Harootunian, although officially retired, continues to teach, travel, and explore the art of found objects.

The artists' processes are diverse, including large-scale installations, found object collaboration, casting, kinetics, video, and hand-tooled objects. Emphasis is placed on the creative use of materials such as fibers, metals, wood, plastics, resin, and everyday products. Each artist translates and illuminates human experience through her unique visual language and conceptual sensibility. These artists address common themes such as play, gender, identity, time, place, and most of all, memories. Mary Giehl's Ivory combines happy childhood memories of bathing with her siblings - recalling the "toys, the fun, the soap floating and the smell of Ivory" - with "those of sad and heartbreaking stories" not uncommon in today's headlines.

Gail Hoffman, a sculptor immersed in the concept of time, presents "visual metaphorical narratives, freeze-framed in a state of suspended animation" through a variety of media including bronze, plastic toys, and other found objects. Plasco Ranch (Possible Outcomes) is a minature assemblage designed in the small scale to "invite the viewer to psychologically inhabit the space." A collection of disparate objects including a bronze sheep, Santa Claus, and military vehicles has been arranged to suggest a story that is left to the viewer's imagination. A journal placed nearby offers visitors the opportunity to record their stories and suggest possible outcomes for the scene as they see it unfold. Based on viewers' comments, Hoffman will return periodically to rearrange, add, or remove objects, providing photographic documentation of the ever changing Plasco Ranch as part of the exhibit.

This group exhibition is presented in conjunction with the Syracuse University College of Visual and Performing Arts.

Pollock Matters
Everson Museum of Art

Price: Suggested donation: $5 adults
Everson Museum of Art
401 Harrison St., Syracuse

Pollock Matters, curated by art historian Ellen G. Landau of Case-Western Reserve University, explores for the first time the personal and artistic relationship between famed American Abstract Expressionist painter Jackson Pollock and his close friend, noted Swiss-born photographer and graphic designer, Herbert Matter.

Featuring compelling visual and documentary evidence, the exhibition demonstrates the impact of the artists' interaction on their respective work. Comprising paintings, drawings, works on paper and other documentation -- including previously unseen photographs and letters -- it compares Matter's experimental abstract photos with known works by Pollock, and highlights their significant stylistic, technical and thematic connections.

Pollock Matters also showcases 24 small-scale works discovered by Herbert Matter's son, Alex Matter, in a storage facility in 2002. The paintings, although identified as "Jackson experimental works" by an inscription in Herbert Matter's hand and dated 1958 (2 years after the artist's death), have been the subject of much controversy, scientific study, scholarly analysis, and significant media attention. In the exhibition and accompanying catalog, Curator Ellen Landau thoroughly investigates questions raised by this unprecedented discovery of previously unknown works: "If Pollock did not paint a portion of the cache, who did? How many artists were involved? And, no less importantly, what was the purpose of these paintings?" The debate will, without doubt, continue beyond the exhibition and for decades to come.

Genetic Self-Portrait: Works by Gary Schneider
The Warehouse Gallery

Price: Free
The Warehouse Gallery
350 W. Fayette St., Syracuse

The show includes 55 photo-based works that South African-born, NYC-based artist Gary Schneider produced when he was offered a chance to create a new body of work inspired by the Human Genome Project (HGP). The HGP, a scientific race to uncover the mysteries of DNA, began formally in the 1990s and was completed in 2003. During that period, Schneider was able to collaborate with a number of scientists and was given access to advanced imaging systems from electron microscopes to x-ray machines.

The work in the exhibition ranges from images of his individual chromosomes made by a light microscope to panoramic dental x-rays. Schneider is known as a master photographic printer, and by combining his skill as a craftsman and selecting specimens for their aesthetic qualities, he moved beyond scientific descriptions to produce a personal portrait that asks us to consider how we are unique and where we stand on common ground.

Schneider had always been interested in alternative imaging techniques, and previous to this project he had been making images by imprinting his hands onto film emulsions. When he decided to include these prints along with the images he had been making with scientists, he realized that what he had been creating was a new kind of portrait. Ann Thomas, curator of photographs at the National Gallery of Canada, described it as a new approach that "challenges the traditional definition of the portrait, and revises our understanding of what it means to be revealed before the camera's lens."

By merging scientific accuracy with poetic resonance, Schneider has created a very personal illumination of how our individual identity is so closely linked to our broader understanding and use of the information contained in the human building blocks of our DNA. Through the personal exploration that went into creating genetic self-portrait, Schneider reveals that while we may always want to think of ourselves as more than the sum of our parts, our real promise might be found in looking at the 99 percent of ourselves we have in common with everyone else.

Read a review!

Beethoven Festival Preview
Syracuse Symphony Orchestra
Daniel Hege, conductor

Barnes & Noble
3454 Erie Blvd. E., Dewitt

SSO Music Director Daniel Hege will be on hand to speak about Beethoven and the many activities planned as a tribute to this remarkable composer. Enjoy a performance by Nicholas Hrynyk, an 11th grade student at Auburn High School who will perform the Allegro movement from Beethoven’'s Piano Sonata No. 15 in D Major, Op. 28, "Pastorale". Purchase anything at Barnes and Noble on January 10 and 11, with a Beethoven Festival coupon, and the SSO will receive 20%.

Friday, January 11, 2008

Tango
Point of Contact Gallery

Price: Free
Point of Contact Gallery
350 W. Fayette St., Syracuse

Tango, a large format folio published by Iris Editions in New York (1991) with eight intaglio prints by Nancy Graves and 13 pages of text by Pedro Cuperman that gaze at the aesthetics of this Latin American dance.

Tango proposes an evening of music, dance, and food transposed into videoa sort of "performance" projected into the space of the gallery where audience and art become intertwined in the field of representation.

"Graves conceived of the prints in the folio as a continued exploration of pattern in nature and as a tonal study of black and white," writes Thomas Padon in his book, Nancy Graves, Excavations in Print A Catalogue Raisonné (1996). "More than once the artist has asserted, 'There is nothing more challenging and meaningful than to make prints in black and white.' For an admitted colorist, it is ironic that the nine prints Graves has made in black and white are among her most powerful." The cryptic titles of the prints in the folio were selected by Graves from Cuperman's text for Tango. The poet speaks of the dance as a gradually unfolding ritual, stating near the conclusion, "Tango helps you find your own levels of proximity."

Exploring History with Art -- Onondaga County on the Move: 200 Years of Transportation
Onondaga Historical Association

Onondaga Historical Association
321 Montgomery St., Syracuse

The exhibition will feature artwork from the OHA collection that depicts various modes of local transportation and how artists interpreted it over the last two centuries. Local teachers and students will find subjects meeting their document-based questions social studies standards within the exhibit.

Impressions, a Jasper Johns Retrospective
Syracuse University Art Museum

Price: Free
Syracuse University Art Museum, Shaffer Art Building
Syracuse University, Syracuse

This retrospective exhibition of Jasper Johns' prints from the John and Maxine Belger Family Foundation starts with the artist's first published print in 1960, six years after Johns consciously destroyed all of his artwork. That act liberated him from "becoming" an artist to "being" an artist. Johns spent the next few years in the studio creating a body of imagery: flags, numerals, letters, and targets that flew in the face of the then popular Abstract Expressionism.

Trained briefly at the University of South Carolina, Johns moved to New York in the 1950s. In New York, he met and was influenced by a number of other artists including the composer John Cage, the choreographer Merce Cunningham, and the painter Robert Rauschenberg. After a visit to Philadelphia to see a Marcel Duchamp painting, Johns became very interested in the French artist's work. Duchamp had revolutionized the art world with his "readymades" - a series of found objects presented as finished works of art.

Jasper Johns' interest in process led him to printmaking. Often he would make counterpart prints
to his paintings. He explains, "My experience of life is that it's very fragmented; certain kinds of things happen, and in another place, a different kind of thing occurs. I would like my work to have some vivid indication of those differences." For Johns, printmaking was a medium that encouraged experimentation with an ease for repeat patterns. His work in screen printing, lithography, and etching have revolutionized the field.

Modernist Prints 1900-1955
Syracuse University Art Museum

Syracuse University Art Museum, Shaffer Art Building
Syracuse University, Syracuse

Since the turn of the century America and Europe have had a symbiotic relationship towards art. Movements that were born in Europe have been nurtured in the United States and those styles developed here have had a significant impact on artists abroad. In the years before World War I avant-garde movements in Europe seemed radical to many Americans but also extremely exciting to others. As the century progressed movements emerged that borrowed issues, techniques, devices, or other attributes from pre-existing styles. This led to a generic 'modernist' label for those art forms that did not seem to emerge from a traditional, academic manner.

The artwork in this exhibition was created by important artists of the era including Vasily Kandinsky, Joan Miro, and S. W. Hayter from Europe, and the Americans Stuart Davis, Boris Margo, and Morris Blackburn. The prints have been chosen to illustrate the multiplicity of graphic art styles that became popular during the period.

Visual Arts Showcase #62, Brainstorms
CNY Arts

The Warehouse Link Gallery
350 W. Fayette St., Syracuse

Pollock Matters
Everson Museum of Art

Price: Suggested donation: $5 adults
Everson Museum of Art
401 Harrison St., Syracuse

Pollock Matters, curated by art historian Ellen G. Landau of Case-Western Reserve University, explores for the first time the personal and artistic relationship between famed American Abstract Expressionist painter Jackson Pollock and his close friend, noted Swiss-born photographer and graphic designer, Herbert Matter.

Featuring compelling visual and documentary evidence, the exhibition demonstrates the impact of the artists' interaction on their respective work. Comprising paintings, drawings, works on paper and other documentation -- including previously unseen photographs and letters -- it compares Matter's experimental abstract photos with known works by Pollock, and highlights their significant stylistic, technical and thematic connections.

Pollock Matters also showcases 24 small-scale works discovered by Herbert Matter's son, Alex Matter, in a storage facility in 2002. The paintings, although identified as "Jackson experimental works" by an inscription in Herbert Matter's hand and dated 1958 (2 years after the artist's death), have been the subject of much controversy, scientific study, scholarly analysis, and significant media attention. In the exhibition and accompanying catalog, Curator Ellen Landau thoroughly investigates questions raised by this unprecedented discovery of previously unknown works: "If Pollock did not paint a portion of the cache, who did? How many artists were involved? And, no less importantly, what was the purpose of these paintings?" The debate will, without doubt, continue beyond the exhibition and for decades to come.

Under One Roof Reprise
Everson Museum of Art

Price: Suggested donation, $5, adults
Everson Museum of Art
401 Harrison St., Syracuse

Juxtapose artwork created by artists whose common thread is a shared studio/classroom space and expect the unexpected. This happened in 2004, when a group of women who work and teach at Syracuse University's ComArt building joined together for an exhibition entitled Under One Roof at SOHO20 Gallery in Chelsea, NY. This was the first time the artists - three generations of students/teachers - had shown together, yet their work spoke of seamless connections and closer ties than one might assume.

Nine artists have reunited for the current exhibition Under One Roof Reprise. Their situations have changed slightly but their work once again has come together in surprising and interesting ways. Abby Goodman and Kim Carr Valdez earned their MFA degrees and moved to Brooklyn, while Laura Ledbetter now lives in Philadelphia. Anne Beffel, Ann Clarke, Mary Giehl, Gail Hoffman, and Jude Lewis continue to teach in the College of Visual and Performing Arts at Syracuse University, while Claire Harootunian, although officially retired, continues to teach, travel, and explore the art of found objects.

The artists' processes are diverse, including large-scale installations, found object collaboration, casting, kinetics, video, and hand-tooled objects. Emphasis is placed on the creative use of materials such as fibers, metals, wood, plastics, resin, and everyday products. Each artist translates and illuminates human experience through her unique visual language and conceptual sensibility. These artists address common themes such as play, gender, identity, time, place, and most of all, memories. Mary Giehl's Ivory combines happy childhood memories of bathing with her siblings - recalling the "toys, the fun, the soap floating and the smell of Ivory" - with "those of sad and heartbreaking stories" not uncommon in today's headlines.

Gail Hoffman, a sculptor immersed in the concept of time, presents "visual metaphorical narratives, freeze-framed in a state of suspended animation" through a variety of media including bronze, plastic toys, and other found objects. Plasco Ranch (Possible Outcomes) is a minature assemblage designed in the small scale to "invite the viewer to psychologically inhabit the space." A collection of disparate objects including a bronze sheep, Santa Claus, and military vehicles has been arranged to suggest a story that is left to the viewer's imagination. A journal placed nearby offers visitors the opportunity to record their stories and suggest possible outcomes for the scene as they see it unfold. Based on viewers' comments, Hoffman will return periodically to rearrange, add, or remove objects, providing photographic documentation of the ever changing Plasco Ranch as part of the exhibit.

This group exhibition is presented in conjunction with the Syracuse University College of Visual and Performing Arts.

Genetic Self-Portrait: Works by Gary Schneider
The Warehouse Gallery

Price: Free
The Warehouse Gallery
350 W. Fayette St., Syracuse

The show includes 55 photo-based works that South African-born, NYC-based artist Gary Schneider produced when he was offered a chance to create a new body of work inspired by the Human Genome Project (HGP). The HGP, a scientific race to uncover the mysteries of DNA, began formally in the 1990s and was completed in 2003. During that period, Schneider was able to collaborate with a number of scientists and was given access to advanced imaging systems from electron microscopes to x-ray machines.

The work in the exhibition ranges from images of his individual chromosomes made by a light microscope to panoramic dental x-rays. Schneider is known as a master photographic printer, and by combining his skill as a craftsman and selecting specimens for their aesthetic qualities, he moved beyond scientific descriptions to produce a personal portrait that asks us to consider how we are unique and where we stand on common ground.

Schneider had always been interested in alternative imaging techniques, and previous to this project he had been making images by imprinting his hands onto film emulsions. When he decided to include these prints along with the images he had been making with scientists, he realized that what he had been creating was a new kind of portrait. Ann Thomas, curator of photographs at the National Gallery of Canada, described it as a new approach that "challenges the traditional definition of the portrait, and revises our understanding of what it means to be revealed before the camera's lens."

By merging scientific accuracy with poetic resonance, Schneider has created a very personal illumination of how our individual identity is so closely linked to our broader understanding and use of the information contained in the human building blocks of our DNA. Through the personal exploration that went into creating genetic self-portrait, Schneider reveals that while we may always want to think of ourselves as more than the sum of our parts, our real promise might be found in looking at the 99 percent of ourselves we have in common with everyone else.

Read a review!

BakeHouse Films
Syracuse International Film Festival

Price: Free. Food and beverages available for purchase
Pascale's Bakehouse and Cafe
Hotel Syracuse, 500 S. Warren St., Syracuse

Rocketboy (13 minutes, fiction, USA) Screened in the 2007 festival, Robert Picardo (Star Trek – Voyager, Stargate Atlantis) is a disenchanted accountant that comes face-to-face with a strange visitor from outer space.

The Wishing Well (13 minutes, animation, USA) From the 2006 festival, this is an experimental one-man production, created and starring one person as 26 characters.

The Life (10 minutes, animation, Korea) Featured in the 2004 festival, this is about a fantastic climb up, what seems an indefinitely high totem, revealing the drama of the life cycle.

The “BakeHouse Films” series features Best of Fest shorts and animation from the Syracuse International Film Festival archive. The programs last from 40 minutes to an hour. For more information, phone 315-443-8826.

Syracuse Symphony Orchestra
Duke Ellington Orchestra

Price: $20 to $70
Crouse Hinds Concert Theater, Mulroy Civic Center
411 Montgomery St., Syracuse

Called "the supreme jazz talent of the past 50 years" by critic Alistair Cooke, Duke Ellington wrote more than 2,000 pieces of music, including such great American standards as "Take The A-Train" and "It Don't Mean A Thing (If It Ain't Got That Swing)." The legend continues as The Duke Ellington Orchestra joins the SSO for one night only!

Read a review!

Hamlet
Syracuse Shakespeare-in-the-Park
Tony Brown, director

Price: $10 regular; $5 with S.U. student ID
The Warehouse, Main Auditorium
350 W. Fayette St., Syracuse

Shakespeare reached his pinnacle when he wrote the dark and introspective masterpiece, Hamlet. You will see and hear it all as we reveal the layers of a tortured mind bent on avenging his father's death. This intimate portrait will leave you stunned by its power and beauty.

Read a Review!

Saturday, January 12, 2008

Under One Roof Reprise
Everson Museum of Art

Price: Suggested donation, $5, adults
Everson Museum of Art
401 Harrison St., Syracuse

Juxtapose artwork created by artists whose common thread is a shared studio/classroom space and expect the unexpected. This happened in 2004, when a group of women who work and teach at Syracuse University's ComArt building joined together for an exhibition entitled Under One Roof at SOHO20 Gallery in Chelsea, NY. This was the first time the artists - three generations of students/teachers - had shown together, yet their work spoke of seamless connections and closer ties than one might assume.

Nine artists have reunited for the current exhibition Under One Roof Reprise. Their situations have changed slightly but their work once again has come together in surprising and interesting ways. Abby Goodman and Kim Carr Valdez earned their MFA degrees and moved to Brooklyn, while Laura Ledbetter now lives in Philadelphia. Anne Beffel, Ann Clarke, Mary Giehl, Gail Hoffman, and Jude Lewis continue to teach in the College of Visual and Performing Arts at Syracuse University, while Claire Harootunian, although officially retired, continues to teach, travel, and explore the art of found objects.

The artists' processes are diverse, including large-scale installations, found object collaboration, casting, kinetics, video, and hand-tooled objects. Emphasis is placed on the creative use of materials such as fibers, metals, wood, plastics, resin, and everyday products. Each artist translates and illuminates human experience through her unique visual language and conceptual sensibility. These artists address common themes such as play, gender, identity, time, place, and most of all, memories. Mary Giehl's Ivory combines happy childhood memories of bathing with her siblings - recalling the "toys, the fun, the soap floating and the smell of Ivory" - with "those of sad and heartbreaking stories" not uncommon in today's headlines.

Gail Hoffman, a sculptor immersed in the concept of time, presents "visual metaphorical narratives, freeze-framed in a state of suspended animation" through a variety of media including bronze, plastic toys, and other found objects. Plasco Ranch (Possible Outcomes) is a minature assemblage designed in the small scale to "invite the viewer to psychologically inhabit the space." A collection of disparate objects including a bronze sheep, Santa Claus, and military vehicles has been arranged to suggest a story that is left to the viewer's imagination. A journal placed nearby offers visitors the opportunity to record their stories and suggest possible outcomes for the scene as they see it unfold. Based on viewers' comments, Hoffman will return periodically to rearrange, add, or remove objects, providing photographic documentation of the ever changing Plasco Ranch as part of the exhibit.

This group exhibition is presented in conjunction with the Syracuse University College of Visual and Performing Arts.

Pollock Matters
Everson Museum of Art

Price: Suggested donation: $5 adults
Everson Museum of Art
401 Harrison St., Syracuse

Pollock Matters, curated by art historian Ellen G. Landau of Case-Western Reserve University, explores for the first time the personal and artistic relationship between famed American Abstract Expressionist painter Jackson Pollock and his close friend, noted Swiss-born photographer and graphic designer, Herbert Matter.

Featuring compelling visual and documentary evidence, the exhibition demonstrates the impact of the artists' interaction on their respective work. Comprising paintings, drawings, works on paper and other documentation -- including previously unseen photographs and letters -- it compares Matter's experimental abstract photos with known works by Pollock, and highlights their significant stylistic, technical and thematic connections.

Pollock Matters also showcases 24 small-scale works discovered by Herbert Matter's son, Alex Matter, in a storage facility in 2002. The paintings, although identified as "Jackson experimental works" by an inscription in Herbert Matter's hand and dated 1958 (2 years after the artist's death), have been the subject of much controversy, scientific study, scholarly analysis, and significant media attention. In the exhibition and accompanying catalog, Curator Ellen Landau thoroughly investigates questions raised by this unprecedented discovery of previously unknown works: "If Pollock did not paint a portion of the cache, who did? How many artists were involved? And, no less importantly, what was the purpose of these paintings?" The debate will, without doubt, continue beyond the exhibition and for decades to come.

Exploring History with Art -- Onondaga County on the Move: 200 Years of Transportation
Onondaga Historical Association

Onondaga Historical Association
321 Montgomery St., Syracuse

The exhibition will feature artwork from the OHA collection that depicts various modes of local transportation and how artists interpreted it over the last two centuries. Local teachers and students will find subjects meeting their document-based questions social studies standards within the exhibit.

Modernist Prints 1900-1955
Syracuse University Art Museum

Syracuse University Art Museum, Shaffer Art Building
Syracuse University, Syracuse

Since the turn of the century America and Europe have had a symbiotic relationship towards art. Movements that were born in Europe have been nurtured in the United States and those styles developed here have had a significant impact on artists abroad. In the years before World War I avant-garde movements in Europe seemed radical to many Americans but also extremely exciting to others. As the century progressed movements emerged that borrowed issues, techniques, devices, or other attributes from pre-existing styles. This led to a generic 'modernist' label for those art forms that did not seem to emerge from a traditional, academic manner.

The artwork in this exhibition was created by important artists of the era including Vasily Kandinsky, Joan Miro, and S. W. Hayter from Europe, and the Americans Stuart Davis, Boris Margo, and Morris Blackburn. The prints have been chosen to illustrate the multiplicity of graphic art styles that became popular during the period.

Impressions, a Jasper Johns Retrospective
Syracuse University Art Museum

Price: Free
Syracuse University Art Museum, Shaffer Art Building
Syracuse University, Syracuse

This retrospective exhibition of Jasper Johns' prints from the John and Maxine Belger Family Foundation starts with the artist's first published print in 1960, six years after Johns consciously destroyed all of his artwork. That act liberated him from "becoming" an artist to "being" an artist. Johns spent the next few years in the studio creating a body of imagery: flags, numerals, letters, and targets that flew in the face of the then popular Abstract Expressionism.

Trained briefly at the University of South Carolina, Johns moved to New York in the 1950s. In New York, he met and was influenced by a number of other artists including the composer John Cage, the choreographer Merce Cunningham, and the painter Robert Rauschenberg. After a visit to Philadelphia to see a Marcel Duchamp painting, Johns became very interested in the French artist's work. Duchamp had revolutionized the art world with his "readymades" - a series of found objects presented as finished works of art.

Jasper Johns' interest in process led him to printmaking. Often he would make counterpart prints
to his paintings. He explains, "My experience of life is that it's very fragmented; certain kinds of things happen, and in another place, a different kind of thing occurs. I would like my work to have some vivid indication of those differences." For Johns, printmaking was a medium that encouraged experimentation with an ease for repeat patterns. His work in screen printing, lithography, and etching have revolutionized the field.

Visual Arts Showcase #62, Brainstorms
CNY Arts

The Warehouse Link Gallery
350 W. Fayette St., Syracuse

Genetic Self-Portrait: Works by Gary Schneider
The Warehouse Gallery

Price: Free
The Warehouse Gallery
350 W. Fayette St., Syracuse

The show includes 55 photo-based works that South African-born, NYC-based artist Gary Schneider produced when he was offered a chance to create a new body of work inspired by the Human Genome Project (HGP). The HGP, a scientific race to uncover the mysteries of DNA, began formally in the 1990s and was completed in 2003. During that period, Schneider was able to collaborate with a number of scientists and was given access to advanced imaging systems from electron microscopes to x-ray machines.

The work in the exhibition ranges from images of his individual chromosomes made by a light microscope to panoramic dental x-rays. Schneider is known as a master photographic printer, and by combining his skill as a craftsman and selecting specimens for their aesthetic qualities, he moved beyond scientific descriptions to produce a personal portrait that asks us to consider how we are unique and where we stand on common ground.

Schneider had always been interested in alternative imaging techniques, and previous to this project he had been making images by imprinting his hands onto film emulsions. When he decided to include these prints along with the images he had been making with scientists, he realized that what he had been creating was a new kind of portrait. Ann Thomas, curator of photographs at the National Gallery of Canada, described it as a new approach that "challenges the traditional definition of the portrait, and revises our understanding of what it means to be revealed before the camera's lens."

By merging scientific accuracy with poetic resonance, Schneider has created a very personal illumination of how our individual identity is so closely linked to our broader understanding and use of the information contained in the human building blocks of our DNA. Through the personal exploration that went into creating genetic self-portrait, Schneider reveals that while we may always want to think of ourselves as more than the sum of our parts, our real promise might be found in looking at the 99 percent of ourselves we have in common with everyone else.

Read a review!

Second Saturday Series: Loren Barrigar
Westcott Community Center

Westcott Community Center
Corner of Euclid Ave. and Westcott St., Syracuse

One could almost say that Loren Barrigar was born with a guitar in his hands. At just four years old he stunned his parents by picking up his father's guitar and announcing he wanted to play "In the Mood" with his dad. They humored him until Loren explained that his dad could take either the rhythm part or the lead, whichever he preferred. Guitar lessons were quickly arranged and two short years later Loren played the Chet Atkins hit, "Yakety Axe" in front of thousands of country fans at the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville, the youngest guitarist to appear on that famous stage. During his childhood in Nashville, Loren studied with Jimmy Atkins, (Chet's brother), a long-time member of the Les Paul Trio. A touring career followed, with Loren, his brother, and his father playing clubs and showrooms from Nashville to Las Vegas, and traveling with George Morgan and other established country stars.

The Stonecutter
Open Hand Theater

Price: $8 adults; $6 children
International Mask and Puppet Museum
518 Prospect Ave., Syracuse

This favorite adaptation of both a classic Japanese folktale and a contemporary story is portrayed with Bunraque puppetry in the beautifully quiet style of Japanese theater.

The Princess and the Pea
Magic Circle Children's Theatre

Price: $5
Spaghetti Warehouse
689 N. Clinton St., Syracuse

Interactive comedy.

Hamlet
Syracuse Shakespeare-in-the-Park
Tony Brown, director

Price: $10 regular; $5 with S.U. student ID
The Warehouse, Main Auditorium
350 W. Fayette St., Syracuse

Shakespeare reached his pinnacle when he wrote the dark and introspective masterpiece, Hamlet. You will see and hear it all as we reveal the layers of a tortured mind bent on avenging his father's death. This intimate portrait will leave you stunned by its power and beauty.

Read a Review!

Well Aged Words: Home-Fried African-American Gifts
Open Hand Theater
Featuring Lyn Ford

Price: $18 advance sale, $20 at the door; artist's reception $5
International Mask and Puppet Museum
518 Prospect Ave., Syracuse

Fourth-generation storyteller Lynette Ford shares "Home-Fried Tales" rooted in her family's multicultural African American storytelling traditions. "Home-Fried Tales" honors her father, who was a terrible cook (the only things he consistently made well were home-fried potatoes and barbecued ribs doused with Lyn's mother's special sauce), and the best storyteller she ever heard. Lyn learned to "stir up, season, and simmer" her folktale adaptations and original stories while sitting knee-to-knee with elders who passed on their own special gifts from the oral tradition.

Lyn's programs vibrate with rhythm and rhyme, history and mystery, humor and heart. Lyn Ford is the latest recipient of the Oracle Award from the National Storytelling Conference.

Spirits of Suspicion
Opening Night Productions

Glen Loch Restaurant
4626 North St., Jamesville

An interactive spoof of the Thin Man movies of the 1930s and '40s.

Read a review!

Sunday, January 13, 2008

Exploring History with Art -- Onondaga County on the Move: 200 Years of Transportation
Onondaga Historical Association

Onondaga Historical Association
321 Montgomery St., Syracuse

The exhibition will feature artwork from the OHA collection that depicts various modes of local transportation and how artists interpreted it over the last two centuries. Local teachers and students will find subjects meeting their document-based questions social studies standards within the exhibit.

Impressions, a Jasper Johns Retrospective
Syracuse University Art Museum

Price: Free
Syracuse University Art Museum, Shaffer Art Building
Syracuse University, Syracuse

This retrospective exhibition of Jasper Johns' prints from the John and Maxine Belger Family Foundation starts with the artist's first published print in 1960, six years after Johns consciously destroyed all of his artwork. That act liberated him from "becoming" an artist to "being" an artist. Johns spent the next few years in the studio creating a body of imagery: flags, numerals, letters, and targets that flew in the face of the then popular Abstract Expressionism.

Trained briefly at the University of South Carolina, Johns moved to New York in the 1950s. In New York, he met and was influenced by a number of other artists including the composer John Cage, the choreographer Merce Cunningham, and the painter Robert Rauschenberg. After a visit to Philadelphia to see a Marcel Duchamp painting, Johns became very interested in the French artist's work. Duchamp had revolutionized the art world with his "readymades" - a series of found objects presented as finished works of art.

Jasper Johns' interest in process led him to printmaking. Often he would make counterpart prints
to his paintings. He explains, "My experience of life is that it's very fragmented; certain kinds of things happen, and in another place, a different kind of thing occurs. I would like my work to have some vivid indication of those differences." For Johns, printmaking was a medium that encouraged experimentation with an ease for repeat patterns. His work in screen printing, lithography, and etching have revolutionized the field.

Modernist Prints 1900-1955
Syracuse University Art Museum

Syracuse University Art Museum, Shaffer Art Building
Syracuse University, Syracuse

Since the turn of the century America and Europe have had a symbiotic relationship towards art. Movements that were born in Europe have been nurtured in the United States and those styles developed here have had a significant impact on artists abroad. In the years before World War I avant-garde movements in Europe seemed radical to many Americans but also extremely exciting to others. As the century progressed movements emerged that borrowed issues, techniques, devices, or other attributes from pre-existing styles. This led to a generic 'modernist' label for those art forms that did not seem to emerge from a traditional, academic manner.

The artwork in this exhibition was created by important artists of the era including Vasily Kandinsky, Joan Miro, and S. W. Hayter from Europe, and the Americans Stuart Davis, Boris Margo, and Morris Blackburn. The prints have been chosen to illustrate the multiplicity of graphic art styles that became popular during the period.

Pollock Matters
Everson Museum of Art

Price: Suggested donation: $5 adults
Everson Museum of Art
401 Harrison St., Syracuse

Pollock Matters, curated by art historian Ellen G. Landau of Case-Western Reserve University, explores for the first time the personal and artistic relationship between famed American Abstract Expressionist painter Jackson Pollock and his close friend, noted Swiss-born photographer and graphic designer, Herbert Matter.

Featuring compelling visual and documentary evidence, the exhibition demonstrates the impact of the artists' interaction on their respective work. Comprising paintings, drawings, works on paper and other documentation -- including previously unseen photographs and letters -- it compares Matter's experimental abstract photos with known works by Pollock, and highlights their significant stylistic, technical and thematic connections.

Pollock Matters also showcases 24 small-scale works discovered by Herbert Matter's son, Alex Matter, in a storage facility in 2002. The paintings, although identified as "Jackson experimental works" by an inscription in Herbert Matter's hand and dated 1958 (2 years after the artist's death), have been the subject of much controversy, scientific study, scholarly analysis, and significant media attention. In the exhibition and accompanying catalog, Curator Ellen Landau thoroughly investigates questions raised by this unprecedented discovery of previously unknown works: "If Pollock did not paint a portion of the cache, who did? How many artists were involved? And, no less importantly, what was the purpose of these paintings?" The debate will, without doubt, continue beyond the exhibition and for decades to come.

Under One Roof Reprise
Everson Museum of Art

Price: Suggested donation, $5, adults
Everson Museum of Art
401 Harrison St., Syracuse

Juxtapose artwork created by artists whose common thread is a shared studio/classroom space and expect the unexpected. This happened in 2004, when a group of women who work and teach at Syracuse University's ComArt building joined together for an exhibition entitled Under One Roof at SOHO20 Gallery in Chelsea, NY. This was the first time the artists - three generations of students/teachers - had shown together, yet their work spoke of seamless connections and closer ties than one might assume.

Nine artists have reunited for the current exhibition Under One Roof Reprise. Their situations have changed slightly but their work once again has come together in surprising and interesting ways. Abby Goodman and Kim Carr Valdez earned their MFA degrees and moved to Brooklyn, while Laura Ledbetter now lives in Philadelphia. Anne Beffel, Ann Clarke, Mary Giehl, Gail Hoffman, and Jude Lewis continue to teach in the College of Visual and Performing Arts at Syracuse University, while Claire Harootunian, although officially retired, continues to teach, travel, and explore the art of found objects.

The artists' processes are diverse, including large-scale installations, found object collaboration, casting, kinetics, video, and hand-tooled objects. Emphasis is placed on the creative use of materials such as fibers, metals, wood, plastics, resin, and everyday products. Each artist translates and illuminates human experience through her unique visual language and conceptual sensibility. These artists address common themes such as play, gender, identity, time, place, and most of all, memories. Mary Giehl's Ivory combines happy childhood memories of bathing with her siblings - recalling the "toys, the fun, the soap floating and the smell of Ivory" - with "those of sad and heartbreaking stories" not uncommon in today's headlines.

Gail Hoffman, a sculptor immersed in the concept of time, presents "visual metaphorical narratives, freeze-framed in a state of suspended animation" through a variety of media including bronze, plastic toys, and other found objects. Plasco Ranch (Possible Outcomes) is a minature assemblage designed in the small scale to "invite the viewer to psychologically inhabit the space." A collection of disparate objects including a bronze sheep, Santa Claus, and military vehicles has been arranged to suggest a story that is left to the viewer's imagination. A journal placed nearby offers visitors the opportunity to record their stories and suggest possible outcomes for the scene as they see it unfold. Based on viewers' comments, Hoffman will return periodically to rearrange, add, or remove objects, providing photographic documentation of the ever changing Plasco Ranch as part of the exhibit.

This group exhibition is presented in conjunction with the Syracuse University College of Visual and Performing Arts.

Stained Glass Series: Beethoven and Mozart
Syracuse Symphony Orchestra
Daniel Hege, conductor
Featuring Julia Pliant, horn

Most Holy Rosary Church
111 Roberts Ave., Syracuse

Beethoven Septet in E-flat major, op. 20
Beethoven Ritterballet Music
Mozart Horn Concerto No. 4 in E-flat major, K. 495

TK99/TK105 Sound Check
Redhouse
Featuring Leif Olsen and The Mike Estep Band

Price: $5
Former Redhouse Theater
219 S. West St., Syracuse

Hamlet
Syracuse Shakespeare-in-the-Park
Tony Brown, director

Price: $10 regular; $5 with S.U. student ID
The Warehouse, Main Auditorium
350 W. Fayette St., Syracuse

Shakespeare reached his pinnacle when he wrote the dark and introspective masterpiece, Hamlet. You will see and hear it all as we reveal the layers of a tortured mind bent on avenging his father's death. This intimate portrait will leave you stunned by its power and beauty.

Read a Review!

Monday, January 14, 2008

Tango
Point of Contact Gallery

Price: Free
Point of Contact Gallery
350 W. Fayette St., Syracuse

Tango, a large format folio published by Iris Editions in New York (1991) with eight intaglio prints by Nancy Graves and 13 pages of text by Pedro Cuperman that gaze at the aesthetics of this Latin American dance.

Tango proposes an evening of music, dance, and food transposed into videoa sort of "performance" projected into the space of the gallery where audience and art become intertwined in the field of representation.

"Graves conceived of the prints in the folio as a continued exploration of pattern in nature and as a tonal study of black and white," writes Thomas Padon in his book, Nancy Graves, Excavations in Print A Catalogue Raisonné (1996). "More than once the artist has asserted, 'There is nothing more challenging and meaningful than to make prints in black and white.' For an admitted colorist, it is ironic that the nine prints Graves has made in black and white are among her most powerful." The cryptic titles of the prints in the folio were selected by Graves from Cuperman's text for Tango. The poet speaks of the dance as a gradually unfolding ritual, stating near the conclusion, "Tango helps you find your own levels of proximity."

Ollin Mecatl: The Measure of Movement
Light Work Gallery

Price: Free
Robert B. Menschel Media Center
316 Waverly Ave., Syracuse University, Syracuse

Photographer Don Gregorio Antón creates mystical retablos that look like sacred objects in themselves. They are intimately small and sit on little stands to be viewed individually. Each retablo is one of a kind. Retabols, or ex votos as they are sometimes called, have been part of Mexico's tradition since the 17th century. They were originally hung behind the altars of Catholic churches, and remain a tradition to this day.

Transmedia Photography Annual
Light Work Gallery

Price: Free
Robert B. Menschel Media Center
316 Waverly Ave., Syracuse University, Syracuse

Exhibit features work by Transmedia students at Syracuse University.