David Richard Gallery | News

June 12, 2019
Rebecca Allan and Dean Fleming: Landscape Medicine
GalleriesNow.net
June 12, 2019

News

Rebecca Allan and Dean Fleming: Landscape Medicine
David Richard Gallery
New York

Wed 12 Jun 2019 to Sat 13 Jul 2019
Wed-Sat 10am-6pm

The exhibition title refers to the artists’ shared dedication to revealing the majesty of landscape and the power of the natural world to open us to deeper levels of perception and attentiveness to the healing power of landscape. For Allan and Fleming, soil is also a unifying, metaphorical material that is regarded by each artist as a life-sustaining substance.

The exhibition includes Allan’s paintings that emerge from her experiences as a collections assistant at Kykuit/The Rockefeller Estate, and previously, as a plant records manager at a private garden north of New York City where she witnessed the labor and artistry of gardeners who cultivate, tend, harvest, and prune rare collections of Japanese maples, conifers, vegetable and perennial gardens. Piles of cut branches, pruning tools, and debris became a visual leitmotif for the seasons of the year, and a metaphor for the effort that is required to maintain and to steward a landscape garden.

Fleming’s paintings in this presentation reference the Medicine Wheel of the Lakota people, Native Americans and one of three Sioux tribes living in the Plains of the US. The Medicine Wheel, comprised of a circle that represents the earth’s boundary and referred to as the Sun Dance Circle, is a sacred symbol of the Plains people for the never-ending cycle of life and death.

Allan (b. 1962), is a New York-based painter, writer, and horticulturist who is known for her gestural and chromatically nuanced abstract paintings. Her work has been influenced by her travels throughout the Northeast, Pacific Northwest, New Mexico, Kentucky, Florida’s Gulf Coast, Lebanon, France, and Norway and is inspired by her interest in botany, geology, and landscape conservation. The artist’s studio overlooks the Spuyten Duyvil, at the confluence of the Harlem and Hudson Rivers in The Bronx.

While traveling across the United States in 1966, Fleming witnessed an Ute Indian Sun Dance in Ignacio, Colorado that had a profound effect on the artist. Seeing this moving ritual inspired Fleming to return to nature, to find an alternative model of peace, harmony and simplicity, and to devote his art to a spirit of thanksgiving. From this initial experience came the impetus for Libre—meaning “free” in Spanish—the intentional artist community where, according to Fleming, “We built our own houses, grew our own food, delivered our children and followed our bliss.”

About Rebecca Allan:
Exhibiting in the United States and abroad for over 25 years, Allan has been represented in 40 solo, and 23 group exhibitions. Her work was recently acquired for the permanent collection of the United States Embassy in Olso, Norway. She is also a contributing writer for publications including Fine Art Connoisseur, and artcritical.com. In addition, she has had a professional career as arts administrator and programs curator, museum educator, garden records manager, and teaching artist.

In 2012, Allan became a principle collaborator of The Crossroads Project: Rising Tide—working with physicist Dr. Robert Davies and The Fry Street Quartet (at Utah State University), Laura Kaminsky, and Canadian environmental photographer Garth Lenz. This trans-disciplinary work of “performance science” addresses climate change through the perspectives of environmental science, chamber music, and visual art.

About Dean Fleming:
Fleming (b. 1933) is a painter and a founder member of the Park Place Gallery, an important artist collective and exhibition space in lower Manhattan in the early 1960s. Fleming is also a founder member of Libre, an intentional community of artists in southern Colorado where he currently lives. His vibrant paintings use geometry as a means to symbolize his deep engagement with nature, his experiences of indigenous cultures in the United States, as well as a metaphorical record of his extensive travels through Asia, Africa, Central and South America, and Europe.

Fleming studied at the California School of Fine Arts with Elmer Bischoff and Frank Lobdell. There, he developed life-long friendships with Peter Forakis, Leo Valledor and Mark di Suvero. He shared a studio with Manuel Neri, Joan Brown, Bill Brown and Forakis and regularly exhibited at the Six Gallery and Batman Gallery in San Francisco.

In 1966, Fleming was included in the important exhibition at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, “Systemic Painting”, organized by Lawrence Alloway. Fleming’s artworks are included in the collections of the Oakland Museum, California; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, California; Allentown Art Museum, Pennsylvania; Denver Museum of Art, Larry Aldrich Museum, Ridgefield, Connecticut; San Francisco Art Institute, California; Corcoran Gallery, Washington D.C.; and Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center, among others.

Courtesy of the artists and David Richard Gallery

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January 17, 2017
Globalocation: Celebrating 20 Years of Artnauts
J. Willard Marriott Library
The University of Utah, 01/17/2017

The University of Utah’s J. Willard Marriott Library will host the art exhibition Globalocation: Celebrating 20 Years of Artnauts, Jan. 20-March 3.

Artnauts, an art collective formed 20 years ago by George Rivera, professor of art and art history at the University of Colorado, Boulder, consists of 300 global artists who serve as goodwill ambassadors, acknowledging and supporting victims of oppression worldwide. Their creativity has generated over 230 exhibitions across five continents. Five faculty members from the U’s Department of Art and Art History are members of the collective, Sandy Brunvand, Beth Krensky, V. Kim Martinez, Brian Snapp and Xi Zhang.

Globalocation derives from “Globalocational Art” — a concept used by the Artnauts to refer to their exhibitions in international venues. It is the mission of the Artnauts to take art to places of contention, and this anniversary exhibition is a sample of places where they have been and themes they have addressed.

“The Artnauts could not exist without the commitment of the artists in the collective to a common vision of the transformative power of art,” said Rivera. “The Artnauts make their contribution with art that hopefully generates a dialogue with an international community on subjects that are sometimes difficult to raise.”

Krensky, associate department chair of the Art and Art History Department, had the opportunity to travel with Rivera in Chile as part of an Artnauts project, working with mothers who were searching for their children who had mysteriously disappeared during a time of political unrest.

“When I travelled to Chile in 1998, George and I spent an afternoon with the Mothers of the Disappeared, and the meeting changed my life,” said Krensky. “It was from that moment on that I placed a picture of them on my desk to look at every day. I was so moved by what they each had lost — a son, a brother, a father — and yet what remained for them was a deep, deep well of love. They were fierce warriors and stood up to the government to demand the whereabouts and information of the people who had disappeared, but they lived within profound love.”

The 20th anniversary exhibition at the Marriott Library is a retrospective of the traveling works the Artnauts have toured around the globe. The exhibition will be located on level three of the library. The opening reception is open to the public and will be held on Friday, Jan 20, 4-6 p.m. Rivera will speak at 4 p.m.

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