Academy Art Museum Presents Warhol and Vogel Exhibitions and Site-Specific Outdoor Installation
The Academy Art Museum has opened two new exhibitions Accidental Icons: Warhol’s Photography and The Dorothy and Herbert Vogel Collection: Selections Lesser Known and Unseen Works from the Vogel Collection, as well as a site-specific outdoor installation called Waterwall.
From the late 1950s until his death, Andy Warhol produced thousands of photographs of his Factory life, surrounded by fellow artists, celebrities, and socialites. Warhol’s Polaroids and silver gelatin prints are lesser-known compared to his monumental silkscreens, drawing, and films that transformed the course of American art. From close, brightly-lit Polaroids (some of which served as drafts for his silkscreens), to lucid yet moody silver gelatin prints of the people, objects, and places of his time, Warhol created a visual diary that transformed the personalities in his midst into vernacular icons.
Accidental Icons: Warhol’s Photography offers a glimpse into Warhol’s photographic oeuvre. Actresses Jane Fonda and Pia Zadora; Native American artist and activist RC Gorman; socialite and trophy hunter Elsa Talayero; model Juliana Siu; basketball star Kareem Abdul Jabbar and author Truman Capote make appearances in Warhol’s photographs, bringing together threads from the New York City scene that arguably made, and was later sustained by, Warhol. The exhibition includes works on loan from the Salisbury University Art Galleries.
The Dorothy and Herbert Vogel Collection: Selections Lesser Known and Unseen Works from the Vogel Collection exhibition presents highlights and previously-unexhibited works from the Vogel Collection. The Academy Art Museum was honored as the Maryland recipient of the Collection’s 50 Works for 50 States initiative in 2008. Featuring works on paper and sculptures by prominent contemporary artists such as Richard Tuttle, André Cadere, Robert Barry, Steve Keister, Moshe Kupferman, Lucio Pozzi, Edda Renouf, and others, the exhibition reveals both the landscape of 20th-century American art and the story of an exceptional collection.
The selection presents some of the most illustrious examples of abstract and minimalist art in America that addresses the profound socioeconomic and creative transformations of the postwar period. From Tuttle’s whimsical but interpretative watercolors on ruled paper to Cadere’s color-coded sculpture with an elusive solution, the exhibition revisits simultaneously radical and subtle ideas that defined the future of artistic production.
Waterwall is a site-specific installation by artist Katherine Tzu-Lan Mann on the South Street Lawn at the Museum. This mixed-media installation was created by combining acrylic, sumi ink, silkscreen, and cyanotype on collaged translucent vinyl over glass. Artist Katherine Tzu-Lan Mann describes the work as “a three-dimensional landscape painting: a riff on stained glass, a maximalist immersive gardenscape, a fantastic escapist porthole.”
Mann is an American painter whose work explores mythology, identity, and landscape, particularly through the unique dialogues she crafts between the slow and permeating movement of ink and paint and the dynamic layers of collaged and printed elements. Waterwall harkens back to centuries of cave murals found in Dunhuang, China, where paintings do not just describe landscapes, but become environments and magical symbols themselves. As sunlight passes through the walls and ceiling of the cube on the Academy Art Museum’s grounds, Waterwall bathes the viewer in light and detail, creating a verdant, melting, glowing, fragmented, personal, and mythological realm. The bespoke plexiglass structure for the Museum lawn was designed by Mitch Hager of HAGER + HUCK Architecture. Sponsors of Waterwall are the Maryland State Arts Council, Talbot County Arts Council, and Catherine McCoy.
Accidental Icons: Warhol’s Photography will be on view through January 17, 2021 and The Dorothy and Herbert Vogel Collection: Selections Lesser Known and Unseen Works from the Vogel Collection will be on view through November 29, 2020. Waterwall will be on-site through spring 2021. Exhibitions are sponsored by the Talbot County Arts Council, the Maryland State Arts Council, and the Star Democrat. Waterwall will be on-site through spring 2021. The Museum is open daily, Tuesday through Saturday from 10:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. and on Sunday from 12 noon to 4 p.m. For additional information, visit academyartmuseum.org or call the Museum at 410-822-2787.
Cover image: Waterwall, a site-specific mixed-media installation by artist Katherine Tzu-Lan Mann, is now on display on the Museum’s South Street Lawn.