EASTON, MD – The Academy Art Museum in Easton, MD, is opening three new exhibitions with a public reception for artists on Friday, August 2, 2019 from 5:30 to 7 p.m. The exhibitions will be open through September 30. Free Art Tours will be offered on Wednesdays at 11 a.m.
“We are thrilled to have three fascinating artists on view this summer: Philadelphia printmaker Amze Emmons explores printmaking in contemporary culture, not only as on exhibit but also as our Artist-in-Residence. To show his work with powerhouse James Turrell’s large light-inspired prints is a curator’s dream. At the same time, we offer regional artist Heather Harvey’s visual experiments of her ‘urban beachcombing’,” says Anke Van Wagenberg, Chief Curator at the Academy Art Museum.
Amze Emmons: Pattern Drift features Amze Emmons, a Philadelphia-based, multi-disciplinary artist with a background in drawing and printmaking. His images evoke a sense of magical/minimal realism inspired by architectural illustration, comic books, cartoon language, information graphics, news footage, consumer packaging, and instruction manuals. An exhibition publication will accompany the show and serve as a catalogue raisonné of his oeuvre to date. The exhibition was conceived and curated by the Academy Art Museum and will travel to the Ross Art Museum, at Ohio Wesleyan University. Amze Emmons will serve as the Museum’s second Artist-in-Residence at the time of his exhibition. Emmons will offer a three-day workshop on Tuesday, August 6 through Thursday, August 8 from 10 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. The cost is $125 for Museum members and $150 for non-members. The workshop will be free for up to four college art students or recent art graduates.
For over half a century, the American artist James Turrell has worked directly with light and space to create artworks that engage viewers with the limits and wonder of human perception. Turrell’s group of prints, Mapping Spaces, was created in 1987 as Chambers and Cross Sections of the Roden Crater. Located in the Painted Desert region of Northern Arizona, Roden Crater is an unprecedented large-scale artwork created within a volcanic cinder cone by light and space and the culmination of the artist’s lifelong research in the field of human visual and psychological perception. Roden Crater is a controlled environment for the experience and contemplation of light. The Academy Art Museum acquired the portfolio of five color etchings with aquatint, photo-etching, soft-ground and dry point, in 2018.
The final exhibition, Heather Harvey: The Thin Place, features the work of visual artist Heather Harvey, Associate Professor and Chair of Art + Art History at Washington College in Chestertown, MD. Harvey works at the overlap between objective and subjective experience. Her studio practice includes night walks to collect trash inadvertently left by others; what she calls “urban beachcombing.” These materials, regarded by most as worthless and unsightly, are incorporated in order to draw out their inherent significance, beauty, and strangeness. This will be the first exhibition of her work within the community where most of her materials were gathered.
The Academy Art Museum exhibitions are sponsored by the Talbot County Arts Council, the Maryland State Arts Council, and the Star Democrat and open daily, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. For additional information, visit academyartmuseum.org or call the Museum at 410-822-2787.
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~ Academy Art Museum