Sunday, December 30, 2007

Gingerbread Gallery
Erie Canal Museum

Price: $5 regular; $4 seniors; $2 children 12 and under
Erie Canal Museum
318 Erie Blvd. E., Syracuse

Display of more than 40 gingerbread creations.

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.

Water and Light: The Etchings and Drypoints of James MacNeill Whistler
Syracuse University Art Museum

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

Water and Light is a focused examination of two of James MacNeill Whistler's favorite subjects. The American expatriate was fascinated with water and the effects of light. A highlight of his career as a printmaker were his famous Venetian "nocturnes" that so effectively captured the mood and atmosphere of Italy's famous floating city.

The strength of these images is Whistler's unique talent at blending the reflections of the water in the canals with the natural light that suffused the city. Later in his career he journeyed to Amsterdam where he again combined water and light into images that captured that city's particular flavor.

Weekend and evening Galleries visitors can park in the Q4 (VIP) lot on College Place. Notify the attendant that you are visiting the Galleries and you will be directed where to park. Parking is on a space available basis and may be restricted during events held at the Carrier Dome. If spaces aren't available the attendant will direct you to the nearest lot.

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.

Pollock Matters
Everson Museum of Art

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

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

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

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

Under One Roof Reprise
Everson Museum of Art

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

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

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

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

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

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

Off the Wall Show and Sale
Associated Artists of Central New York

Price: Free
Manlius Village Library
Manlius Village Center, 1 Arkie Albanese Dr., Manlius

Unlike most gallery shows, this Associated Artists sale allows everyone the opportunity to purchase fine original artwork that can be taken home immediately, and so it's "Off The Wall". A portion of each sale helps support the Manlius Library general fund and the remainder subsidizes various community activities and educational programs of Associated Artists. Please join us and enjoy the creations of the many talented and well-known members of this group. This is a wonderful chance to find one-of-a-kind gifts!

A Christmas Carol
Syracuse Civic Theatre
Salt City Center for the Performing Arts
Bob Brown, director

Price: $33 regular; $29 students/seniors; $25 ages 12 and under
Carrier Theater, Mulroy Civic Center
411 Montgomery St., Syracuse

A musical adaptation of A Christmas Carol by Pat Lotito and Ken Prescott that has been delighting local audiences for years under the name A Dickens of a Christmas. For the first time, it has been renamed to assume the title of the Dickens work on which it's based.

Read a Review!

Fiddler on the Roof
Syracuse Stage
Syracuse University Drama Department
Anthony Salatino, director

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

Brimming with wonderfully memorable songs (Tradition; Matchmaker, Matchmaker; If I Were a Rich Man;
Sunrise, Sunset; To Life) and folk-inspired choreography, Fiddler on the Roof is the touching tale of Tevye, his family and the tiny Russian town of Anatevka. Tradition is the fabric that holds body and soul, family and community together. But can tradition, however strong, withstand the strain of pressure from within and without. Fiddler is a classic of American musical theatre.

Read a Review!

Fiddler on the Roof
Syracuse Stage
Syracuse University Drama Department
Anthony Salatino, director

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

Brimming with wonderfully memorable songs (Tradition; Matchmaker, Matchmaker; If I Were a Rich Man;
Sunrise, Sunset; To Life) and folk-inspired choreography, Fiddler on the Roof is the touching tale of Tevye, his family and the tiny Russian town of Anatevka. Tradition is the fabric that holds body and soul, family and community together. But can tradition, however strong, withstand the strain of pressure from within and without. Fiddler is a classic of American musical theatre.

Read a Review!

Monday, December 31, 2007

The Never-Ending Wrong: The Execution of Sacco and Vanzetti
Syracuse University Library Special Collections Research Center

Price: Free
Bird Library, 6th Floor
Syracuse University, Syracuse

In commemoration of the 80th anniversary of the execution for murder of two Italian anarchist laborers, Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, a selection of period ephemera issued by the Sacco-Vanzetti Defense Committee together with a plethora of books associated with the trial that have been published in the intervening years by Paul Avrich, Felix Frankfurter, and Eugene Lyons, among others. The exhibit features artistic expressions (cartoons, illustrations, novels, plays, poems, songs and music) inspired by the trial, including the work of Maxwell Anderson, John Dos Passos, Fred Ellis, Howard Fast, Woodie Guthrie, William Gropper, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Rockwell Kent, Katherine Anne Porter, Pete Seeger, and Upton Sinclair. The story of the Sacco and Vanzetti mural by Ben Shahn on the east wall of H. B. Crouse will also be explored.

A Gala Holiday Art Exhibit
Westcott Community Center

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

Mary Stebbins Taitt: digital paintings
John "Jaw's" McGrath: pen and ink landscapes
Karen Tashkovski: paper collage
Amber Blanding: glass work
Mary Fragapane: pastel paintings and prints
Mick Mather: photographs
Kirsten Moore: acrylic and oil paintings
John Swank: photography

Gingerbread Gallery
Erie Canal Museum

Price: $5 regular; $4 seniors; $2 children 12 and under
Erie Canal Museum
318 Erie Blvd. E., Syracuse

Display of more than 40 gingerbread creations.

16x16 Small Works Show
Limestone Art and Framing Gallery

Limestone Art and Framing Gallery
105 Brooklea Dr., Fayetteville

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

Wednesday, January 2, 2008

Tango
Point of Contact Gallery

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

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

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

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

Off the Wall Show and Sale
Associated Artists of Central New York

Price: Free
Manlius Village Library
Manlius Village Center, 1 Arkie Albanese Dr., Manlius

Unlike most gallery shows, this Associated Artists sale allows everyone the opportunity to purchase fine original artwork that can be taken home immediately, and so it's "Off The Wall". A portion of each sale helps support the Manlius Library general fund and the remainder subsidizes various community activities and educational programs of Associated Artists. Please join us and enjoy the creations of the many talented and well-known members of this group. This is a wonderful chance to find one-of-a-kind gifts!

16x16 Small Works Show
Limestone Art and Framing Gallery

Limestone Art and Framing Gallery
105 Brooklea Dr., Fayetteville

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

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.

Under One Roof Reprise
Everson Museum of Art

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pollock Matters
Everson Museum of Art

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read a review!

Thursday, January 3, 2008

Tango
Point of Contact Gallery

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

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

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

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

Off the Wall Show and Sale
Associated Artists of Central New York

Price: Free
Manlius Village Library
Manlius Village Center, 1 Arkie Albanese Dr., Manlius

Unlike most gallery shows, this Associated Artists sale allows everyone the opportunity to purchase fine original artwork that can be taken home immediately, and so it's "Off The Wall". A portion of each sale helps support the Manlius Library general fund and the remainder subsidizes various community activities and educational programs of Associated Artists. Please join us and enjoy the creations of the many talented and well-known members of this group. This is a wonderful chance to find one-of-a-kind gifts!

16x16 Small Works Show
Limestone Art and Framing Gallery

Limestone Art and Framing Gallery
105 Brooklea Dr., Fayetteville

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

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.

Visual Arts Showcase #62, Brainstorms
CNY Arts

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

Pollock Matters
Everson Museum of Art

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

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

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

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

Under One Roof Reprise
Everson Museum of Art

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read a review!

Pirates of the Yuletide
Acme Mystery Company

Price: $25.95 plus tax and gratuities (includes meal and show)
Spaghetti Warehouse
689 N. Clinton St., Syracuse

London 1757: The world's hardiest pirates are planning to raid the North Pole and kidnap Santa. Interactive mystery/comedy dinner theater.

Friday, January 4, 2008

Tango
Point of Contact Gallery

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

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

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

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

Off the Wall Show and Sale
Associated Artists of Central New York

Price: Free
Manlius Village Library
Manlius Village Center, 1 Arkie Albanese Dr., Manlius

Unlike most gallery shows, this Associated Artists sale allows everyone the opportunity to purchase fine original artwork that can be taken home immediately, and so it's "Off The Wall". A portion of each sale helps support the Manlius Library general fund and the remainder subsidizes various community activities and educational programs of Associated Artists. Please join us and enjoy the creations of the many talented and well-known members of this group. This is a wonderful chance to find one-of-a-kind gifts!

16x16 Small Works Show
Limestone Art and Framing Gallery

Limestone Art and Framing Gallery
105 Brooklea Dr., Fayetteville

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

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.

Visual Arts Showcase #62, Brainstorms
CNY Arts

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

Under One Roof Reprise
Everson Museum of Art

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pollock Matters
Everson Museum of Art

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read a review!

Annual Holiday Extravaganza
Trans-Siberian Orchestra

Price: $50.50; $45.50; $26
War Memorial at Oncenter
800 S. State St., Syracuse

Tickets are available at the OnCenter box office, at Ticketmaster locations, and by phone at 315-472-0700.

Saturday, January 5, 2008

Off the Wall Show and Sale
Associated Artists of Central New York

Price: Free
Manlius Village Library
Manlius Village Center, 1 Arkie Albanese Dr., Manlius

Unlike most gallery shows, this Associated Artists sale allows everyone the opportunity to purchase fine original artwork that can be taken home immediately, and so it's "Off The Wall". A portion of each sale helps support the Manlius Library general fund and the remainder subsidizes various community activities and educational programs of Associated Artists. Please join us and enjoy the creations of the many talented and well-known members of this group. This is a wonderful chance to find one-of-a-kind gifts!

Pollock Matters
Everson Museum of Art

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

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

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

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

Under One Roof Reprise
Everson Museum of Art

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

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

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

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

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

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

16x16 Small Works Show
Limestone Art and Framing Gallery

Limestone Art and Framing Gallery
105 Brooklea Dr., Fayetteville

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

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.

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!

A Night of Poetic Hilarity and Experimental Music
Redhouse

Price: $12
Former Redhouse Theater
219 S. West St., Syracuse

R)Evolution Studios,in collaboration with Free Cake and Poetry and The Redhouse present a night of poetic hilarity and experimental music unlike anything you will ever experience anywhere else. Jane Cassady hosts 2 nationally known performance poets and the area's most brillant musical confection.

Robbie Q has featured in over 20 major US cities and is published in the 2003, 2004, and 2005 National Poetry Slam anthologies, March/April 2006 American Book Review, and in several online journals. He frequently performs with the Speak'Easy Ensemble under the direction of Marc Smith, the founder of the National Poetry Slam. Robbie Q is not afraid to jump into someone else's skin and dig at you with some humor. As he says in his bio, "Robbie Q. Telfer is your grandma. He misses you and wishes you'd call more. He makes a vicious pistachio jello with marshmallows. . . . His feet are cold, but he doesn't want you to fuss over it."

From Mike McGee's bio: "He is the first two-time poetry slam title-ist, having won the National Poetry Slam Individual Grand Slam Championship in 2003, and the Individual World Poetry Slam Championship in 2006. Mike has toured for the last three years, taking his poetry to the Sorbonne in Paris, Germany, Holland and the UK. He has appeared on Russell Simmons Presents Def Poetry Jam, and is co-founder of the talk-rock trio, Tons of Fun University. McGee is, and always shall be, a permanent purveyor of peace, poetry and pudding."

The Magnetic Pull is music without borders,an experimental/ambient band which uses keyboards, acoustic guitar, digital manipulation (sounds a little dirty...) video and other magic to provide listeners with weird feelings and epiphanies.On this night they will be collaborating with Jeff Bujak, who also produces a novel look at live music production. He combines jazz and classical piano influences and fuses them with modern electronic and intricate percussion rhythms. Classically trained pianist and composer, Bujak looks at his pieces as digital slices of life, each piece being inspired by an existing period of time.

The Day it Snowed Tortillas
Open Hand Theater
Crabgrass Theatre

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

Fantastic puppets, hysterically funny action, marvelous Mexican music, and one very funny chicken! A delightful folktale from Mexico about creative problem-solving.

Spirits of Suspicion
Opening Night Productions

Glen Loch Restaurant
4626 North St., Jamesville

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

Read a review!

Sunday, January 6, 2008

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

Onondaga Historical Association
321 Montgomery St., Syracuse

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

Impressions, a Jasper Johns Retrospective
Syracuse University Art Museum

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

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

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

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

Under One Roof Reprise
Everson Museum of Art

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pollock Matters
Everson Museum of Art

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

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

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

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

George Sand ... and Chopin?
Arts Alive in Liverpool
Society for New Music

Price: Free
Liverpool Public Library
310 Tulip St., Liverpool

A chamber opera.

A Romantic Christmas Pie
Syracuse Vocal Ensemble
Robert Cowles, conductor

Price: $15 regular, $12 students/seniors
Cicero United Methodist Church
8416 North Main St., Cicero

SVE's celebrated Christmas Pie concert tradition continues this year with a program of music for the season dating from the 19th and early 20th centuries. The program, chosen from romantic-era original works from Germany, France, England, and Italy, will feature works by Berlioz, Bruckner, Rossini, and many more. Ottorino Respighi's beautiful Laud to the Nativity, scored for chorus, woodwinds, and piano, will conclude the program. Then join us for the famous pie reception!

(Concert was rescheduled from Dec. 16.)

Jazz Vespers: Blow, Spirit, Blow
CNY Jazz Arts Foundation
Featuring Jackie Riveria

Price: Free (donation requested)
Pebble Hill Presbyterian Church
5299 Jamesville Rd., Dewitt

The jazz vesper service, open to everyone of all faiths, is a combination of inspirational and meditative readings, homily, and jazz played by members of the CNY Jazz Orchestra and various guest vocalists. The jazz selections are drawn from secular and sacred sources, representing a wide range of composers as varied as Duke Ellington, Chick Corea, Cole Porter, and Stephen Foster, and well-known hymns in jazz settings for all to enjoy, singing if they wish.