Tuesday, January 22, 2008

Annual Scholastic Art Awards
Onondaga Community College

Price: Free
Whitney Applied Technology Center
Onondaga Community College, Syracuse

Scholastic Art is the largest juried art show for Junior and Senior high school students in Central New York. Covering a 13-county region, more than 5,000 pieces are submitted each year and over 1,200 winning pieces will be on display in the Whitney Applied Technology Center for six weeks following the awards ceremony. The work of Gold Key recipients is sent on to New York City for national consideration.

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.

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

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.

A Collection of Stories
Redhouse

Former Redhouse Theater
219 S. West St., Syracuse

A Collection of Stories is an exhibition of paintings by Oswego artist Cayetano G. Valenzuela. Valenzuela's work explores our understanding of experience, from how we simplify ideas and each other to the complexities of memory. Communication and poetic resonance are at the core of his paintings while personal narratives are used in generating images.

Cayetano G. Valenzuela graduated from SUNY College of Art and Design at Purchase with a BFA. He has been working and showing artwork in CNY for six years. His paintings and illustrations have been reviewed in TLC magazine, The Philadelphia Daily News online, Stars magazine and Leisure Time. He has published three small press books. Cayetano has had solo exhibitions as well as group shows with The Hat Factory Art Collective around the Central New York area.

Free parking is conveniently located directly behind the Redhouse building.

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!

The Lieutenant of Inishmore
Syracuse Stage
Robert Moss, director

Archbold Theater, Syracuse Stage
820 E. Genesee St., Syracuse

This gleeful and gruesome comedy about a fellow "too mad for the IRA" was a smash hit on Broadway and winner of Britains prestigious Olivier award. Blood and laughter flow liberally.

Read a Review!

Wednesday, January 23, 2008

Annual Scholastic Art Awards
Onondaga Community College

Price: Free
Whitney Applied Technology Center
Onondaga Community College, Syracuse

Scholastic Art is the largest juried art show for Junior and Senior high school students in Central New York. Covering a 13-county region, more than 5,000 pieces are submitted each year and over 1,200 winning pieces will be on display in the Whitney Applied Technology Center for six weeks following the awards ceremony. The work of Gold Key recipients is sent on to New York City for national consideration.

Gallery Exhibit: Mary Kester
Onondaga Community College

Price: Free
Ann Felton Multicultural Center and Gallery
Onondaga Community College, Syracuse

Exhibit of tapestries of human and landscape forms. Ms. Kester works in tapestry to exploit the tactile woven medium in forms which give the illusion of depth and monumentality. The woven grid expands into actual layers and drawn depth to suggest crevices and hollows - spaces which appear deeper than they really are. The tension between real textural substance and pictured illusion gives her work an interest that calls for a second, longer look.

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.

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.

A Collection of Stories
Redhouse

Former Redhouse Theater
219 S. West St., Syracuse

A Collection of Stories is an exhibition of paintings by Oswego artist Cayetano G. Valenzuela. Valenzuela's work explores our understanding of experience, from how we simplify ideas and each other to the complexities of memory. Communication and poetic resonance are at the core of his paintings while personal narratives are used in generating images.

Cayetano G. Valenzuela graduated from SUNY College of Art and Design at Purchase with a BFA. He has been working and showing artwork in CNY for six years. His paintings and illustrations have been reviewed in TLC magazine, The Philadelphia Daily News online, Stars magazine and Leisure Time. He has published three small press books. Cayetano has had solo exhibitions as well as group shows with The Hat Factory Art Collective around the Central New York area.

Free parking is conveniently located directly behind the Redhouse building.

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!

Civic Morning Musicals
Featuring Stephen Pikarsky, piano

Price: $15 regular, students free
Hosmer Auditorium, Everson Museum
401 Harrison St., Syracuse

Brahms-Paganini Variations, Verdi-Liszt Ernani, Beethoven Sonata, Op. 7.

The Lieutenant of Inishmore
Syracuse Stage
Robert Moss, director

Archbold Theater, Syracuse Stage
820 E. Genesee St., Syracuse

This gleeful and gruesome comedy about a fellow "too mad for the IRA" was a smash hit on Broadway and winner of Britains prestigious Olivier award. Blood and laughter flow liberally.

Read a Review!

The Lieutenant of Inishmore
Syracuse Stage
Robert Moss, director

Archbold Theater, Syracuse Stage
820 E. Genesee St., Syracuse

This gleeful and gruesome comedy about a fellow "too mad for the IRA" was a smash hit on Broadway and winner of Britains prestigious Olivier award. Blood and laughter flow liberally.

Read a Review!

Thursday, January 24, 2008

Annual Scholastic Art Awards
Onondaga Community College

Price: Free
Whitney Applied Technology Center
Onondaga Community College, Syracuse

Scholastic Art is the largest juried art show for Junior and Senior high school students in Central New York. Covering a 13-county region, more than 5,000 pieces are submitted each year and over 1,200 winning pieces will be on display in the Whitney Applied Technology Center for six weeks following the awards ceremony. The work of Gold Key recipients is sent on to New York City for national consideration.

Gallery Exhibit: Mary Kester
Onondaga Community College

Price: Free
Ann Felton Multicultural Center and Gallery
Onondaga Community College, Syracuse

Exhibit of tapestries of human and landscape forms. Ms. Kester works in tapestry to exploit the tactile woven medium in forms which give the illusion of depth and monumentality. The woven grid expands into actual layers and drawn depth to suggest crevices and hollows - spaces which appear deeper than they really are. The tension between real textural substance and pictured illusion gives her work an interest that calls for a second, longer look.

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."

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.

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.

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

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.

A Collection of Stories
Redhouse

Former Redhouse Theater
219 S. West St., Syracuse

A Collection of Stories is an exhibition of paintings by Oswego artist Cayetano G. Valenzuela. Valenzuela's work explores our understanding of experience, from how we simplify ideas and each other to the complexities of memory. Communication and poetic resonance are at the core of his paintings while personal narratives are used in generating images.

Cayetano G. Valenzuela graduated from SUNY College of Art and Design at Purchase with a BFA. He has been working and showing artwork in CNY for six years. His paintings and illustrations have been reviewed in TLC magazine, The Philadelphia Daily News online, Stars magazine and Leisure Time. He has published three small press books. Cayetano has had solo exhibitions as well as group shows with The Hat Factory Art Collective around the Central New York area.

Free parking is conveniently located directly behind the Redhouse building.

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!

The Artistic Domain
Delavan Art Gallery

Delavan Art Gallery
501 W. Fayette St., Syracuse

Featuring paintings by Sharon Gordon, encaustic paintings by Lew Graham, etchings and oil paintings by James Skvarch and works by artists in Stone Canoe, a journal of arts and ideas from Upstate New York.

The Lieutenant of Inishmore
Syracuse Stage
Robert Moss, director

Archbold Theater, Syracuse Stage
820 E. Genesee St., Syracuse

This gleeful and gruesome comedy about a fellow "too mad for the IRA" was a smash hit on Broadway and winner of Britains prestigious Olivier award. Blood and laughter flow liberally.

Read a Review!

Friday, January 25, 2008

Annual Scholastic Art Awards
Onondaga Community College

Price: Free
Whitney Applied Technology Center
Onondaga Community College, Syracuse

Scholastic Art is the largest juried art show for Junior and Senior high school students in Central New York. Covering a 13-county region, more than 5,000 pieces are submitted each year and over 1,200 winning pieces will be on display in the Whitney Applied Technology Center for six weeks following the awards ceremony. The work of Gold Key recipients is sent on to New York City for national consideration.

Gallery Exhibit: Mary Kester
Onondaga Community College

Price: Free
Ann Felton Multicultural Center and Gallery
Onondaga Community College, Syracuse

Exhibit of tapestries of human and landscape forms. Ms. Kester works in tapestry to exploit the tactile woven medium in forms which give the illusion of depth and monumentality. The woven grid expands into actual layers and drawn depth to suggest crevices and hollows - spaces which appear deeper than they really are. The tension between real textural substance and pictured illusion gives her work an interest that calls for a second, longer look.

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.

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

The Artistic Domain
Delavan Art Gallery

Delavan Art Gallery
501 W. Fayette St., Syracuse

Featuring paintings by Sharon Gordon, encaustic paintings by Lew Graham, etchings and oil paintings by James Skvarch and works by artists in Stone Canoe, a journal of arts and ideas from Upstate New York.

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.

A Collection of Stories
Redhouse

Former Redhouse Theater
219 S. West St., Syracuse

A Collection of Stories is an exhibition of paintings by Oswego artist Cayetano G. Valenzuela. Valenzuela's work explores our understanding of experience, from how we simplify ideas and each other to the complexities of memory. Communication and poetic resonance are at the core of his paintings while personal narratives are used in generating images.

Cayetano G. Valenzuela graduated from SUNY College of Art and Design at Purchase with a BFA. He has been working and showing artwork in CNY for six years. His paintings and illustrations have been reviewed in TLC magazine, The Philadelphia Daily News online, Stars magazine and Leisure Time. He has published three small press books. Cayetano has had solo exhibitions as well as group shows with The Hat Factory Art Collective around the Central New York area.

Free parking is conveniently located directly behind the Redhouse building.

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!

SparkVideo: Kitties and Babies
Spark Contemporary Art Space

Price: $3
Spark Contemporary Art Space
1005 E. Fayette St., Syracuse

This month's video selection, Kitties and Babies, curated by Ann Hirsch, features a mix of international and local artists. This month's show will also debut the inclusion of sound works into the program. Artists include Yu Araki, Frank McCauley, Sacha Fink, Katie Micak, Catherine Forster and more!

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

Kalakaar (Directed by Tejas Degskar, fiction (India), 12 min Best of Fest Nominee 2006)
A delightful tale about how the rubber eraser gets accidentally invented and saves a sketch artist from going to the gallows.

Cigar on the Beach (Directed by Stephen Keep Mills, fiction (USA), 15 min. Best of Fest Winner 2006)
A man withdraws to an empty beach to smoke a cigar and fantasize. An approaching storm out across the water mirrors the storm inside him as his fantasies propel him to the very edge of himself and to a surprise yearning greater than flesh or adventure.

Lucky (Directed by Avie Luthra, fiction (England), 20 min)
Lucky is a South African AIDS orphan who learns about life through an unlikely bond with a racist Indian woman.

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.

Words and Music Songwriter Showcase
Folkus Project
Featuring Jeffrey Pepper Rodgers

Jazz Central
441 E. Washington St., Syracuse

The series opener features Lisa Gentile, Timothy Daniel, Dusty Pas'cal, and Leo Crandall of Gonstermachers.

The Words and Music Songwriter Showcase is a celebration of original music from Central New York and beyond, featuring established and emerging artists of all genres in an up-close-and-personal acoustic setting.

The series is hosted by singer-songwriter, author, and NPR contributor Jeffrey Pepper Rodgers.

Each monthly show includes a featured artist performing a full set, four songwriters in the round, original music by Jeffrey Pepper Rodgers, The Song Schmooze, where musicians and music lovers mingle over a drink and a bite to eat. Plus special guests, surprise collaborations, and the Soundbite of the Night, where Rodgers shares a memorable moment from his extraordinary archive of interviews with artists such as Joni Mitchell, Paul Simon, Jerry Garcia, Ani DiFranco, and Dave Matthews.

Classics Series: Beethoven Festival: Fidelio
Syracuse Symphony Orchestra
Syracuse University Oratorio Society
Daniel Hege, conductor
Featuring Andrew Zaplatynsky, violin

Crouse Hinds Concert Theater, Mulroy Civic Center
411 Montgomery St., Syracuse

Beethoven Romance No. 2 in F major, op. 50
Beethoven Symphony No. 7 in A major, op. 92
Beethoven Fidelio Excerpts

There will be a free pre-concert talk in the theater at 7:00 pm and a free post-concert talk-back in the lobby immediately following the concert.

Read a review!

Poet Christopher Kennedy
Downtown Writer's Center

Price: Free
YMCA Downtown
340 Montgomery St., Syracuse

Christopher Kennedy is the Director of the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Syracuse University. He is the author of three full-length collections of poetry, Nietzsche's Horse (Mitki/Mitki Press), Trouble with the Machine (Low Fidelity Press), and his latest, Encouragement for a Man Falling to His Death (BOA Editions, Ltd., 2007), and three poetry chapbooks, Greatest Hits (Pudding House Press), King Cobra Does the Mambo (M2 Press, Fall 2005), and "B" Sides (M2 Press, Fall 2005). Kennedy has received grants from the New York Foundation for the Arts and the Constance Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts. His work has appeared in Grand Street, Ploughshares, The Threepenny Review, Mississippi Review, McSweeney's and many other journals and magazines.

The Left Hand Singing
Appleseed Productions
Linda Lance, director

Price: $15 regular; $12 students/seniors (price includes dessert and beverage at intermission)
Atonement Lutheran Church
116 W. Glen Ave., Syracuse

Amidst the idealism and violence of Freedom Summer in 1964 Mississippi, three college students vanish, seemingly without a trace. As the parents of Honey, Linda, and Wes cope with their loss, they become inescapably linked -- the heirs of their lost children's dreams. Throughout the next three decades, the connections among these people with very disparate backgrounds are tested against the fire of the country's social and political turbulence. The structure of the play mixes naturalism with a surprising time curve that evokes the whirl of events surrounding the parents' interwoven journeys.

Read a Review!

Friday Night Live
Redhouse

Price: $15 regular; $10 students/seniors
Former Redhouse Theater
219 S. West St., Syracuse

Redhouse brings back its hi-energy, interactive and very unique program, Friday Night Live from Redhouse! A troupe of 5 seasoned actors will perform a series of games and scenarios based on audience suggestion and participation. We guarantee 90 minutes of dangerous fun and no bodily injuries.

Featured performers are Laura Austin, Tim Mahar, Tim Davis, Brenda Owens, Jeff Kinsler.

The Lieutenant of Inishmore
Syracuse Stage
Robert Moss, director

Archbold Theater, Syracuse Stage
820 E. Genesee St., Syracuse

This gleeful and gruesome comedy about a fellow "too mad for the IRA" was a smash hit on Broadway and winner of Britains prestigious Olivier award. Blood and laughter flow liberally.

Read a Review!

I Love You, You're Perfect, Now Change
Salt City Center for the Performing Arts

Price: $22 regular; $20 students/seniors
Empire Theater
New York State Fairgrounds, Geddes

Read a review!

Saturday, January 26, 2008

Annual Scholastic Art Awards
Onondaga Community College

Price: Free
Whitney Applied Technology Center
Onondaga Community College, Syracuse

Scholastic Art is the largest juried art show for Junior and Senior high school students in Central New York. Covering a 13-county region, more than 5,000 pieces are submitted each year and over 1,200 winning pieces will be on display in the Whitney Applied Technology Center for six weeks following the awards ceremony. The work of Gold Key recipients is sent on to New York City for national consideration.

The Artistic Domain
Delavan Art Gallery

Delavan Art Gallery
501 W. Fayette St., Syracuse

Featuring paintings by Sharon Gordon, encaustic paintings by Lew Graham, etchings and oil paintings by James Skvarch and works by artists in Stone Canoe, a journal of arts and ideas from Upstate New York.

Images of Vice and Virtue from the Syracuse University Art Collection
Everson Museum of Art

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

Images of Vice and Virtue investigates how artists from different cultures and time periods visualized fundamental themes of good and evil. Early civilizations enacted codes of conduct believing that individual behavior benefited from these guidelines. The ancient Greeks developed a set of inspirational values that included prudence, justice, courage and temperance. Later, Christianity refined and enlarged these to the seven holy virtues against which were set seven deadly sins. Additionally, bible stories illustrated what would happen to individuals who either followed or violated church doctrine.

Western society's growing secularization from the late 18th century onward gave artists greater freedom in interpreting biblical subjects and themes. Artists like Picasso strongly criticized the Spanish government in a pair of prints that depicted the ruler Francisco Franco as a biological polyp. Andy Warhol showed his support for the civil rights movement in a 1964 print of the Birmingham race riot. These examples further indicated the artist's growing role as an individual commenting on good and evil.

Also included in the exhibition are several pieces by non-western cultures. Like their western counterparts, these pieces were inspired and informed by their culture's historical beliefs about good and evil and were often drawn from stories used to explain those beliefs. All of the objects in the exhibition have been drawn from Syracuse Universitys encyclopedic collection of over 45,000 objects.

Images of Vice and Virtue is curated by David Prince, Associate Director of Syracuse University Art Collection.

Read a review!

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.

Paper Arts in the Low Countries: 1600 - 1800
Everson Museum of Art

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

The Low Countries, a region comprising present-day Holland and Belgium, was a site of truly spectacular art production during the so-called early modern period, ca. 1600 to ca. 1800. Indeed, some of the foremost artists in the history of European art practiced within this region, including Rembrandt van Rijn and Peter Paul Rubens. Although the art-loving public is quite familiar with paintings by Dutch (Holland) and Flemish (Belgium) masters their drawings and prints are less known, despite the many outstanding examples of such work that survive. Some of the most memorable and impressive art during this period was made with ink and paper, as opposed to oil paint and canvases and panels. Paper Arts in the Low Countries, 1600-1800 consists of 35 noteworthy examples of drawings and prints by prominent masters of the Low Countries (including Rembrandt and Rubens), drawn from a number of private collections and from the holdings of the Syracuse University Art Collection and the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University.

Paper Arts in the Low Countries is curated by Dr. Wayne Franits, Professor and Department Chair, Department of Fine Arts, Syracuse University with the assistance of graduate students currently enrolled in the Fine Arts program.

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!

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!

Reading of Scores by Young Composers
Society for New Music
Da Capo Chamber Players

May Memorial Unitarian Society
3800 E. Genesee St., Syracuse

Composers whose work will be performed include Diego Davidenko, Ian Hartsough, Tom Healy, Diane Jones, and Elizabeth Luttinger.

America Sings
Society for New Music
Da Capo Chamber Players

Price: $10 regular; $5 students/seniors
May Memorial Unitarian Society
3800 E. Genesee St., Syracuse

John Harbison Songs America Loves to Sing
Daniel Godfrey Luna Rugosa
Elliott Carter Canon for 4
Igor Golubev Sparkling Thirds
Igor Stravinsky Suite from L'histoire du soldat
Joan Tower Petroushskates

Classics Series: Beethoven Festival: Fidelio
Syracuse Symphony Orchestra
Syracuse University Oratorio Society
Daniel Hege, conductor
Featuring Andrew Zaplatynsky, violin

Crouse Hinds Concert Theater, Mulroy Civic Center
411 Montgomery St., Syracuse

Beethoven Romance No. 2 in F major, op. 50
Beethoven Symphony No. 7 in A major, op. 92
Beethoven Fidelio Excerpts

There will be a free pre-concert talk in the theater at 7:00 pm and a free post-concert talk-back in the lobby immediately following the concert.

Read a review!

The Princess and the Pea
Magic Circle Children's Theatre

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

Interactive comedy.

The Lieutenant of Inishmore
Syracuse Stage
Robert Moss, director

Archbold Theater, Syracuse Stage
820 E. Genesee St., Syracuse

This gleeful and gruesome comedy about a fellow "too mad for the IRA" was a smash hit on Broadway and winner of Britains prestigious Olivier award. Blood and laughter flow liberally.

Read a Review!

The Left Hand Singing
Appleseed Productions
Linda Lance, director

Price: $15 regular; $12 students/seniors (price includes dessert and beverage at intermission)
Atonement Lutheran Church
116 W. Glen Ave., Syracuse

Amidst the idealism and violence of Freedom Summer in 1964 Mississippi, three college students vanish, seemingly without a trace. As the parents of Honey, Linda, and Wes cope with their loss, they become inescapably linked -- the heirs of their lost children's dreams. Throughout the next three decades, the connections among these people with very disparate backgrounds are tested against the fire of the country's social and political turbulence. The structure of the play mixes naturalism with a surprising time curve that evokes the whirl of events surrounding the parents' interwoven journeys.

Read a Review!

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!

The Lieutenant of Inishmore
Syracuse Stage
Robert Moss, director

Archbold Theater, Syracuse Stage
820 E. Genesee St., Syracuse

This gleeful and gruesome comedy about a fellow "too mad for the IRA" was a smash hit on Broadway and winner of Britains prestigious Olivier award. Blood and laughter flow liberally.

Read a Review!

I Love You, You're Perfect, Now Change
Salt City Center for the Performing Arts

Price: $22 regular; $20 students/seniors
Empire Theater
New York State Fairgrounds, Geddes

Read a review!

Sunday, January 27, 2008

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.

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.

Images of Vice and Virtue from the Syracuse University Art Collection
Everson Museum of Art

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

Images of Vice and Virtue investigates how artists from different cultures and time periods visualized fundamental themes of good and evil. Early civilizations enacted codes of conduct believing that individual behavior benefited from these guidelines. The ancient Greeks developed a set of inspirational values that included prudence, justice, courage and temperance. Later, Christianity refined and enlarged these to the seven holy virtues against which were set seven deadly sins. Additionally, bible stories illustrated what would happen to individuals who either followed or violated church doctrine.

Western society's growing secularization from the late 18th century onward gave artists greater freedom in interpreting biblical subjects and themes. Artists like Picasso strongly criticized the Spanish government in a pair of prints that depicted the ruler Francisco Franco as a biological polyp. Andy Warhol showed his support for the civil rights movement in a 1964 print of the Birmingham race riot. These examples further indicated the artist's growing role as an individual commenting on good and evil.

Also included in the exhibition are several pieces by non-western cultures. Like their western counterparts, these pieces were inspired and informed by their culture's historical beliefs about good and evil and were often drawn from stories used to explain those beliefs. All of the objects in the exhibition have been drawn from Syracuse Universitys encyclopedic collection of over 45,000 objects.

Images of Vice and Virtue is curated by David Prince, Associate Director of Syracuse University Art Collection.

Read a review!

Paper Arts in the Low Countries: 1600 - 1800
Everson Museum of Art

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

The Low Countries, a region comprising present-day Holland and Belgium, was a site of truly spectacular art production during the so-called early modern period, ca. 1600 to ca. 1800. Indeed, some of the foremost artists in the history of European art practiced within this region, including Rembrandt van Rijn and Peter Paul Rubens. Although the art-loving public is quite familiar with paintings by Dutch (Holland) and Flemish (Belgium) masters their drawings and prints are less known, despite the many outstanding examples of such work that survive. Some of the most memorable and impressive art during this period was made with ink and paper, as opposed to oil paint and canvases and panels. Paper Arts in the Low Countries, 1600-1800 consists of 35 noteworthy examples of drawings and prints by prominent masters of the Low Countries (including Rembrandt and Rubens), drawn from a number of private collections and from the holdings of the Syracuse University Art Collection and the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University.

Paper Arts in the Low Countries is curated by Dr. Wayne Franits, Professor and Department Chair, Department of Fine Arts, Syracuse University with the assistance of graduate students currently enrolled in the Fine Arts program.

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.

Annual Scholastic Art Awards
Onondaga Community College

Price: Free
Whitney Applied Technology Center
Onondaga Community College, Syracuse

Scholastic Art is the largest juried art show for Junior and Senior high school students in Central New York. Covering a 13-county region, more than 5,000 pieces are submitted each year and over 1,200 winning pieces will be on display in the Whitney Applied Technology Center for six weeks following the awards ceremony. The work of Gold Key recipients is sent on to New York City for national consideration.

A Cinema Showcase: “A Cantor’'s Tale”
Syracuse International Film Festival

Price: $10 film only; $25 film and reception
Palace Theater
2384 James St., Syracuse

This documentary by Erik Greenberg Anjou profiles Cantor Jacob Mendelson who is jovial, rotund and prone to impromptu bursts of song. The Cantor explores the American roots of Jewish liturgical music while taking us on a musical voyage that spans the Atlantic, originating in his birthplace of Boro Park, Brooklyn and reaching all the way to Jerusalem.

The film has received rave reviews including from The New York Times, Variety, and TV Guide.

Both Cantor Mendelson and Director Erik Greenberg Anjou will be in attendence. They will do a question and answer session after the film and then attend a reception. Also, cantors from area synagogues will sing some songs with Cantor Mendelson at the event.

This event is open to the general public, not just the Jewish community. Audiences that love great singers along with anybody that participates in their church and synagogue choirs would appreciate seeing this film.

For more information, phone 315-443-8826.

Central New York Jazz Composer's Cooperative
Kevin Dorsey, bass; Mark Nanni, piano and vocals; John Magnante, guitar

Price: $10 regular; $7 donors
Jazz Central
441 E. Washington St., Syracuse

Sunday Musicale: Little Jazz Trio
Fayetteville Free Library

Price: Free
Fayetteville Free Library
300 Orchard St., Fayetteville

Lionheart Vocal Chamber Music
Malmgren Concert Series
Society for New Music

Price: Free (contributions for the Society for New Music accepted)
Hendricks Chapel
Syracuse University, Syracuse

Phil Kline John the Revelator
Marc Mellits String Quartet No. 2

One of America’'s leading chamber ensembles, Lionheart interprets medieval and Renaissance a cappella music with Gregorian chant, the keystone of its repertoire. Kline, hailed for the originality, beauty, subversive subtext and wry humor of his compositions, was the only classical composer nominated for the 2004 ShortList Music Prize, honoring the most creative records of the year.

Phil Kline wrote John the Revelator as a kind of spiritual portal through which one can become part of a universal body. This is not a blues Mass any more than it is a medieval one, although the title was inspired by a song by gospel-blues legend Blind Willie Johnson, and it does set the traditional Latin Ordinary along with Klines own set of Propers.

The texts Kline ultimately chose suggest a narrative of redemption in a blighted world. Several are from the Old Testament, including two from the Lamentations of Jeremiah, plus one by American poet David Shapiro, whose image of indifferently falling snow recalls the ashes falling from the skies of lower Manhattan. Offered as a prayer, Samuel Becketts monologue "The Unnamable" portrays the struggle of the mind in present tense. And while "Dark was the Night" has no text that can be heard, it is a fantasy on Willie Johnsons 1927 recording of an old hymn depicting Jesus doubt at the Passion, paraphrased in wordless moaning.

Bookending the Mass are treatments of two early American shape-note hymns from The Sacred Harp: "Northport" and "Wondrous Love." Klines favorite part of religion has always been the mystery. What wondrous love is this? 

SSYO Winter Concert
Syracuse Youth Orchestras
Featuring winner of the SSYO Concerto Competition, violist Emily Lane

Price: $12 adults, $8 students
Crouse Hinds Concert Theater, Mulroy Civic Center
411 Montgomery St., Syracuse

Syracuse Symphony Youth Orchestra; Kenneth Andrews, conductor
Beethoven Overture to Fidelio, Op. 72c
Hoffmeister Viola Concerto
Humperdinck Excerpts from "Hansel and Gretel"
Williams March from "Superman"

Syracuse Symphony Youth String Orchestra; Muriel Bodley, conductor
Mozart Overture to "The Marriage of Figaro"
Handel Concerto Grosso, Op. 6, No. 7
Faure Pavane

Seven Short Monologues
Armory Square Playwrights

Price: $5 regular, $4 students/seniors
Former Redhouse Theater
219 S. West St., Syracuse

Armory Square playhouse will present script-in-hand readings of seven new short monologues by Armory Square Playhouse members Amy Doherty, David Feldman, Len Fonte, Richard Harris, Charles Lupia, Peter Moller, and Joel Potash. The short pieces were inspired by genuine oddball incidents reported in the news.

In Amy Doherty's This Little Pig a woman reconnects with her marriage while relating to a local reporter the details of her pet pig, Boots' escape from his pen...again. Read by the author.

David Feldman's Greyhound focuses on a new employee in the Greyhound bus company who escapes clutches of a lecherous boss and finds a new life for herself in the process. It features Donna Stuccio as the young employee.

A man confronts family history while telling as ghost story in Len Fonte's Where is My Brother?

In a verse monologue titled Lateisha and written by Charles Lupia, a woman recalls her
troubled marriage and subsequent custody battle. It will be read by Eleanor Russell.

In Peter Moller's The Mystery at the MCCL, one overly-officious person confronts an even more-overly-officious person at the Madison Country Carnegie Library. And because no one is more officious than the author, he will play the part of Mr. Collins.

Connie wants a quiet day at home, but Alejandro won't let her alone. On Christmas Eve she finally finds a way to get rid of him forever in Joel Potash's piece, Santa Baby.

Mozart and What's His Name is the story of a love sick Manhattanite, whose love life is ruined by a feud between his dog and her cat. Narrated by the author, Richard Harris.

About the Playwrights:
Amy Doherty, a graduate of the Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theater, holds a BFA in Theater Arts from Drake University, and an MLS from Syracuse University.

David Feldman is Artistic Director of Armory Square Playhouse and is Professor Emeritus of English and Journalism at Onondaga Community College. He has also taught drama at Syracuse University.

Len Fonte, who retired from the Syracuse City School district after 33 years and 45 productions, recently, directed the Armory Square Playhouse production of Jeff Kramer's Lowdown Lies.

A retired advertising executive, Richard Harris has tried acting wings in Los Angeles and teaching Readers Theatre in London.

Charles Lupia's plays have been featured at SABEL, Theatre Three, NY Artists Unlimited and The Barnstormers. His radio plays have received broadcasts in San Francisco and Oswego. He is a graduate of Syracuse University.

Peter Moller has been a member of the Armory Square Playhouse since its beginning. Moller teaches courses in screenwriting, producing and directing at Syracuse University's Newhouse School of Public Communications.

Joel Potash is a retiring family doctor who sees the absurdity of putting our sometimes violent thoughts into action.

The Left Hand Singing
Appleseed Productions
Linda Lance, director

Price: $15 regular; $12 students/seniors (price includes dessert and beverage at intermission)
Atonement Lutheran Church
116 W. Glen Ave., Syracuse

Amidst the idealism and violence of Freedom Summer in 1964 Mississippi, three college students vanish, seemingly without a trace. As the parents of Honey, Linda, and Wes cope with their loss, they become inescapably linked -- the heirs of their lost children's dreams. Throughout the next three decades, the connections among these people with very disparate backgrounds are tested against the fire of the country's social and political turbulence. The structure of the play mixes naturalism with a surprising time curve that evokes the whirl of events surrounding the parents' interwoven journeys.

Read a Review!

The Lieutenant of Inishmore
Syracuse Stage
Robert Moss, director

Archbold Theater, Syracuse Stage
820 E. Genesee St., Syracuse

This gleeful and gruesome comedy about a fellow "too mad for the IRA" was a smash hit on Broadway and winner of Britains prestigious Olivier award. Blood and laughter flow liberally.

Read a Review!

Monday, January 28, 2008

Annual Scholastic Art Awards
Onondaga Community College

Price: Free
Whitney Applied Technology Center
Onondaga Community College, Syracuse

Scholastic Art is the largest juried art show for Junior and Senior high school students in Central New York. Covering a 13-county region, more than 5,000 pieces are submitted each year and over 1,200 winning pieces will be on display in the Whitney Applied Technology Center for six weeks following the awards ceremony. The work of Gold Key recipients is sent on to New York City for national consideration.

Gallery Exhibit: Mary Kester
Onondaga Community College

Price: Free
Ann Felton Multicultural Center and Gallery
Onondaga Community College, Syracuse

Exhibit of tapestries of human and landscape forms. Ms. Kester works in tapestry to exploit the tactile woven medium in forms which give the illusion of depth and monumentality. The woven grid expands into actual layers and drawn depth to suggest crevices and hollows - spaces which appear deeper than they really are. The tension between real textural substance and pictured illusion gives her work an interest that calls for a second, longer look.

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."

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.

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.

A Collection of Stories
Redhouse

Former Redhouse Theater
219 S. West St., Syracuse

A Collection of Stories is an exhibition of paintings by Oswego artist Cayetano G. Valenzuela. Valenzuela's work explores our understanding of experience, from how we simplify ideas and each other to the complexities of memory. Communication and poetic resonance are at the core of his paintings while personal narratives are used in generating images.

Cayetano G. Valenzuela graduated from SUNY College of Art and Design at Purchase with a BFA. He has been working and showing artwork in CNY for six years. His paintings and illustrations have been reviewed in TLC magazine, The Philadelphia Daily News online, Stars magazine and Leisure Time. He has published three small press books. Cayetano has had solo exhibitions as well as group shows with The Hat Factory Art Collective around the Central New York area.

Free parking is conveniently located directly behind the Redhouse building.

Tuesday, January 29, 2008

Annual Scholastic Art Awards
Onondaga Community College

Price: Free
Whitney Applied Technology Center
Onondaga Community College, Syracuse

Scholastic Art is the largest juried art show for Junior and Senior high school students in Central New York. Covering a 13-county region, more than 5,000 pieces are submitted each year and over 1,200 winning pieces will be on display in the Whitney Applied Technology Center for six weeks following the awards ceremony. The work of Gold Key recipients is sent on to New York City for national consideration.

Gallery Exhibit: Mary Kester
Onondaga Community College

Price: Free
Ann Felton Multicultural Center and Gallery
Onondaga Community College, Syracuse

Exhibit of tapestries of human and landscape forms. Ms. Kester works in tapestry to exploit the tactile woven medium in forms which give the illusion of depth and monumentality. The woven grid expands into actual layers and drawn depth to suggest crevices and hollows - spaces which appear deeper than they really are. The tension between real textural substance and pictured illusion gives her work an interest that calls for a second, longer look.

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.

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

Images of Vice and Virtue from the Syracuse University Art Collection
Everson Museum of Art

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

Images of Vice and Virtue investigates how artists from different cultures and time periods visualized fundamental themes of good and evil. Early civilizations enacted codes of conduct believing that individual behavior benefited from these guidelines. The ancient Greeks developed a set of inspirational values that included prudence, justice, courage and temperance. Later, Christianity refined and enlarged these to the seven holy virtues against which were set seven deadly sins. Additionally, bible stories illustrated what would happen to individuals who either followed or violated church doctrine.

Western society's growing secularization from the late 18th century onward gave artists greater freedom in interpreting biblical subjects and themes. Artists like Picasso strongly criticized the Spanish government in a pair of prints that depicted the ruler Francisco Franco as a biological polyp. Andy Warhol showed his support for the civil rights movement in a 1964 print of the Birmingham race riot. These examples further indicated the artist's growing role as an individual commenting on good and evil.

Also included in the exhibition are several pieces by non-western cultures. Like their western counterparts, these pieces were inspired and informed by their culture's historical beliefs about good and evil and were often drawn from stories used to explain those beliefs. All of the objects in the exhibition have been drawn from Syracuse Universitys encyclopedic collection of over 45,000 objects.

Images of Vice and Virtue is curated by David Prince, Associate Director of Syracuse University Art Collection.

Read a review!

Paper Arts in the Low Countries: 1600 - 1800
Everson Museum of Art

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

The Low Countries, a region comprising present-day Holland and Belgium, was a site of truly spectacular art production during the so-called early modern period, ca. 1600 to ca. 1800. Indeed, some of the foremost artists in the history of European art practiced within this region, including Rembrandt van Rijn and Peter Paul Rubens. Although the art-loving public is quite familiar with paintings by Dutch (Holland) and Flemish (Belgium) masters their drawings and prints are less known, despite the many outstanding examples of such work that survive. Some of the most memorable and impressive art during this period was made with ink and paper, as opposed to oil paint and canvases and panels. Paper Arts in the Low Countries, 1600-1800 consists of 35 noteworthy examples of drawings and prints by prominent masters of the Low Countries (including Rembrandt and Rubens), drawn from a number of private collections and from the holdings of the Syracuse University Art Collection and the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University.

Paper Arts in the Low Countries is curated by Dr. Wayne Franits, Professor and Department Chair, Department of Fine Arts, Syracuse University with the assistance of graduate students currently enrolled in the Fine Arts program.

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.

A Collection of Stories
Redhouse

Former Redhouse Theater
219 S. West St., Syracuse

A Collection of Stories is an exhibition of paintings by Oswego artist Cayetano G. Valenzuela. Valenzuela's work explores our understanding of experience, from how we simplify ideas and each other to the complexities of memory. Communication and poetic resonance are at the core of his paintings while personal narratives are used in generating images.

Cayetano G. Valenzuela graduated from SUNY College of Art and Design at Purchase with a BFA. He has been working and showing artwork in CNY for six years. His paintings and illustrations have been reviewed in TLC magazine, The Philadelphia Daily News online, Stars magazine and Leisure Time. He has published three small press books. Cayetano has had solo exhibitions as well as group shows with The Hat Factory Art Collective around the Central New York area.

Free parking is conveniently located directly behind the Redhouse building.

A Sonata Soirée
Syracuse Friends of Chamber Music

Price: $10 adult, $5 student, $20 family
Pebble Hill Presbyterian Church
5299 Jamesville Rd., Dewitt

Mendelssohn Concert Piece for two clarinets
Brahms Sonata in F Major for cello and piano, Op. 99
Grieg Sonata No. 3 in G Major for violin and piano, Op. 44
Poulenc Sonata for clarinet and piano

For the past three years SFCM has presented a mid-winter concert featuring some of the excellent musicians resident in Central New York. Many great composers have expressed their most eloquent and heart-felt music in the form of a sonata for piano joined by another solo instrument. This concert will feature some of the "stars" of the Central New York music scene: David LeDoux, who recently joined the Syracuse Symphony as Principal Cello, will be heard with SSO pianist Sar-Shalom Strong, violinist Laura Klugherz of Colgate University will perform together with pianist Steven Heyman, and Sar-Shalom Strong will return to the stage to join Gerald Zampino, former SSO Principal Clarinet. Also, continuing the SFCM tradition of including a talented young musician in our mid-winter concert, high school senior Nina Elhassan will join Gerald Zampino and Sar-Shalom Strong in a sonata for two clarinets and piano.

The Lieutenant of Inishmore
Syracuse Stage
Robert Moss, director

Archbold Theater, Syracuse Stage
820 E. Genesee St., Syracuse

This gleeful and gruesome comedy about a fellow "too mad for the IRA" was a smash hit on Broadway and winner of Britains prestigious Olivier award. Blood and laughter flow liberally.

Read a Review!