INHERITED SUCCESSION: Instill and InspireWork and Reflections by Elan Cadiz

Let Them Eat Cake, I, (2023), acrylic and gouache paint on poster paper, 18”x24”  

October 29 – November 23

Opening reception: Tuesday, October 29, 5:00 – 6:30 p.m.
Artist’s Gallery Talk: 5:30 p.m.

Élan Cadiz is an interdisciplinary, multi-ethnic, multi-racial, North American, native New Yorker, and visual artist who deconstructs and balances her intersectionality through her creative projects. Élan’s art and practice are grounded in the documentation of her personal narrative through the use of portraiture, domestic and historical imagery.

Cadiz’s artworks explore the ways societal and personal histories overlap and affect individual relationships, power dynamics and identity. The materials she works with are influenced by the subjects she discuss which is why she moves skillfully through mediums, combining and collaging the best materials to convey her visual language.

Cadiz’s intention is to speak to the boundless potential in humanity and ways our pasts can inform our future for the better, despite impediments that arise. Her goal is to have viewers question their condition(s) in ways that bring about helpful inner inquiry and thoughtful discussion.

About the Artist

Élan Cadiz’s formal training began in the High School of Art & Design, New York City. After graduation she was accepted to the Fashion Institute of Technology where she studied Advertisement and Design and Photography for two years. Cadiz graduated from City College of New York City with a BA in Studio Art and Education in 2008. Cadiz received her Master’s in Fine Art (MFA) from the School of Visual Arts May 2018 and received the Martha Trevor Award/ Worldstudio AIGA Scholarship, Paula Rhodes Memorial Award and the School of Visual Arts Merit Scholarship.

Since 2014 Cadiz has participated in numerous solo and group exhibitions and she has been engaged in numerous artist residencies.

Cadiz has instructed young people in the arts for 24 years and taught for or was in collaboration with programs/institutions such as the Harlem School of the Arts, Thurgood Marshall Upper and Lower Academies, Harlem Children Zone, No Longer Empty, Cool Culture, Bank Street College, Weeksville Heritage Center, the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York Historical Society, Center for Arts Education, Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn Children’s Museum, the Boys Club of New York City, Foster Pride, the Children’s Museum of Manhattan and the Sugar Hill Children’s Museum of Art and Storytelling, Bridgehampton Museum and more.

Progression: Work by Robert Stuart

Robert Stuart

Ashes, 2023, oil and collage on canvas, 63″ x 112″

September 10 – October 19, 2024

Opening reception: Tuesday, September 10, 5:00 – 6:30 p.m.
Artist’s Gallery Talk: 5:30 p.m.

Working with materials, thinking with materials, sensing their potential as you interact with them—constructing and deconstructing—to make an object with a physical presence that can provide a locus for emotional, intuitive responses that can engage the viewer in a deep, interior way.  This is the process and the potential of painting.   The physical becoming meta-physical.  Intimations of infinity.

I love this quote from President Kennedy engraved in the wall at the Kennedy Center, Washington, DC:  “The life of the arts . . . .  is close to the center of a nation’s purpose—and is a test of the quality of a nation’s civilization.”  It gives me hope and support as an artist in our contemporary world, a world in need of authenticity and beauty which art can provide.

About the Artist

About half of Robert Stuart’s time growing up was spent overseas in Africa, Asia, and the Pacific while his father worked for USAID and UNESCO.  Stuart was encouraged in art by his mother who attended The Art Students League, and taught art, and also by a longtime family friend, Catalan artist Pierre Daura, who had been a member of “Cercle et Carré,” (Circle and Square), the avant-garde group in Paris that included artists such as Mondrian, Arp, and Kandinsky.  Four years at Boston University’s School for the Arts was a rigorous, traditional program with much figure drawing,  and where Philip Guston was a major influence.

Following an MFA at James Madison University Stuart launched a career as a painter of landscapes and still-lifes, confident painting “before the motif,” and found success in galleries.  An art historian friend once said that he was “an abstract painter who went outside.”  Being selected for two exhibits at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts were important early boosts for Stuart’s career.

After ten years exhibiting in prominent galleries with his unique representational style, but with episodes of experimenting with abstraction, his responses to abstract paintings became so strong and his need for it so compelling that he could no longer deny it.  Discovering the painter Agnes Martin’s paintings and writings was crucial. Finally, immediately after visiting Zen gardens in Japan, a vivid dream of a large, red, abstract painting was so potent that Stuart had to make the painting, and set out newly committed to pure abstraction.  Almost immediately, there were two major validations for the artist:  he was selected for the New Orleans Museum of Art Triennial, and not long after, Stuart received an “Academy Award in Art” from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Stuart’s home and studio are in Staunton, Virginia.  He is represented by Reynolds Gallery in Richmond, Virginia.

Available Providence: Work by Constance Lowe

February 27 – March 30, 2024

Opening reception: Tuesday, February 27, 5:00 – 6:30 p.m.
Artist’s Gallery Talk: Tuesday, February 27, 5:30 p.m.

My process has employed a variety of images, forms, surfaces, methods, and materials to explore an imaginative space in which contrasts and contradictions coexist to encourage a multitude of associations.  Available Providence brings together two generations of my work — pairing earlier sculptures with new mixed media works on drafting film — that emphasize intersections of the human-constructed environment and our conceptions of the natural world.

Drift Threshold (study 1), 2023, Acrylic paint, acrylic ink, colored pencil, leather on drafting film, 11.25″ x 9″

Pearl, 1998, Styrofoam, fiberglass, resin, acrylic interference paint, 52″ x 21″

In the mid-1990’s, with the support of my university and a residency in the ArtPace International Artist in Residence program, I was able to enlist fabricators to translate my drawn images into physical objects, designed to resemble manufactured or naturally occurring fodrms that suggest notions of containment and hidden or absent actions. Subsequently, I re-engaged with my original painting/drawing practice, arriving at its current incarnation in the Drift Threshold series. Here, painting, drawing, and collage are combined to exploit the translucent, two-sided substrate on which images related to transitory phenomena (such as aerial landscapes, clouds, and patterns in ocean foam and butterfly wings) are layered and “carved” into each other.  These contingent and shifting perspectives inevitably become explicit and metaphorical references to our larger, shared concerns of partitioning, erosion, instability, water, and weather.

Pictured above: Drift Threshold (study 1), 2023, Acrylic paint, acrylic ink, colored pencil, leather on drafting film, 11.25″ x 9″

Passages: Paintings by Nancy Newman Rice

October 31 – December 8, 2023

Windows 1, 2022, oil on canvas on panel, 30″ x 30″ (above)

Nancy Newman Rice was born in New York City and was educated at Cornell University (BFA with honors) and at Washington University (MFA). She has received awards that include a National Endowment for the Arts/MMA Fellowship for painting, Artist’s Residency Award at the Cité Internationale des Arts, Paris, France, and nominations for a Tiffany Award and an AVA Award in the Visual Arts. Newman Rice has exhibited her work internationally and has had solo exhibitions in both galleries and museums. Her work is included in public and private collections in the U.S. and abroad. Newman Rice has also written articles and reviews for national arts magazines including The New Art ExaminerAmerican Craft, and The St. Louis Post Dispatch, as well as catalog essays for artists’ exhibitions. She took early retirement from Maryville University, St. Louis MO, where she taught painting for 34 years and was the director of Studio Art.

Website: www.nancynewmanrice.com

Seeing Green: New Work by Dan Kistler

September 12 – October 21, 2023

Opening reception: Tuesday, September 12, 5:00 – 6:30 p.m.
Special Homecoming reception: Friday, October 13, 5:00 – 6:30 p.m.

Dan Kistler is a visual media artist living and working in southern Illinois.  His pathway in art includes an undergraduate degree in studio art from Principia College, two-years of classes at The Center for Creative Studies, a decade of work as an illustrator in the Detroit market, an MA in drawing from Webster University, and 27 years of teaching art at Principia College.  Kistler’s current work is taking a number of directions. In photography he has stepped back into the darkroom and has fallen in love all over again with film photography—the grain, the anticipation, the unexpected results, and the touch it takes to get an image worth working with.

Seeing Green: New Work by Dan Kistler

Lecture by internationally acclaimed artist Alfredo Jaar

Title: It is difficult

Photo credit: Jee Eun Esther Jang

TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 28, 2023, 7:30 P.M.
WANAMAKER HALL, PRINCIPIA COLLEGE, ELSAH, IL 62028

Internationally acclaimed artist, architect, and filmmaker Alfredo Jaar will present the inaugural lecture of a dynamic new lecture series at Principia College, the Schmidt Family Lecture Series in Contemporary Art.  During the lecture, titled “It is difficult,” Jaar will discuss his art, ideas, and studio practice.  The lecture will be on Tuesday, February 28, 2023, at 7:30 p.m. in Wannamaker Hall, on the Principia College campus (Elsah, Illinois).  The lecture is free and open to the public.

Born in Santiago, Chile, in 1956, Alfredo Jaar has lived and worked in New York City since 1982.  One of the most important artists in the contemporary international art world, Jaar is known for his uncompromising work as an artist and his integrity as a human being.  He is expert at the act of paying attention to issues in the world, and through his innovative practices in a range of media—photography, film and video, sculpture, installation, and public interventions—Jaar brings the viewer’s attention to difficult, often tragic events such as genocide, displacement of refugees, various social and racial injustices, and the imbalances of power among nations and peoples. 

Jaar’s public art and museum and gallery exhibitions intersect with many disciplines—among them history, philosophy, political science, sociology, biology, and the fine arts.  His artwork can be thought of as interventions to insular thinking and disassociation, and as invitations to deeper understanding and empathy. He poetically protests indifference and public amnesia, and asks the viewer to contemplate and engage in ethical practices. The conceptual and aesthetic depth of Jaar’s art is a compassionate gesture to those who have suffered and are suffering in the world.

The artist has an extensive international exhibition record. He has participated in multiple Biennales of Venice, Sao Paulo, and Documenta (Kassel, Germany). Jaar has realized more than seventy public interventions around the world. Over sixty monographic publications have been published about his work. He became a Guggenheim Fellow in 1985 and a MacArthur Fellow in 2000. He received the Hiroshima Art Prize in 2018 and the Hasselblad Award in 2020.

Jaar’s work can be found in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art and Guggenheim Museum, New York; Art Institute of Chicago and Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; MOCA and LACMA, Los Angeles; MASP, Museu de Arte de São Paulo; TATE, London; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Nationalgalerie, Berlin; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Centro Reina Sofia, Madrid; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; MAXXI and MACRO, Rome; Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlaebeck; Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art and Tokushima Modern Art Museum, Japan; M+, Hong Kong; and dozens of institutions and private collections worldwide. He is represented by Galerie Lelong in New York City.

This lecture was the inaugural lecture of the Schmidt Family Lecture Series in Contemporary Art.