Academy Art Museum Presents Waterwall Installation in Plexiglass Cube on Front Lawn

On October 9, the Academy Art Museum in Easton will present Waterwall, a site-specific installation by artist Katherine Tzu-Lan Mann of Washington, DC who is also this year’s Visionary Artist for the Museum’s Virtual Craft Show 2020 to be held October 16 through 18.

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.

“The resulting texture is as immersive as it is mysterious, inviting the viewer to contemplate the alternating moods and movements throughout the work,” states Mehves Lelic, Curator of the Academy Art Museum.

Waterwall is a mixed-media installation created by combining acrylic, sumi ink, silkscreen, and cyanotype on collaged translucent vinyl over glass. Mann describes the work as “a three-dimensional landscape painting: a riff on stained glass, a maximalist immersive gardenscape, a fantastic escapist porthole.”

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.

Katherine Tzu-Lan Mann is a recipient of the Sustainable Arts Foundation grant, a Fulbright scholarship, the A.I.R. Gallery and Lower East Side Printshop Keyholder Fellowships, the Hamiltonian Fellowship and the Mayor’s Award in Washington, DC. Mann’s work has been exhibited at the Walters Art Museum, American University Museum at the Katzen Arts Center, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Rawls Museum, the Art Museum at SUNY Potsdam, as well as the US consulate in Dubai, UAE and the US embassy in Yaounde, Cameroon. She holds a BA from Brown University and an MFA from MICA.

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.

For additional information, visit academyartmuseum.org, academycraftshow.com, or call the Museum at 410-822-2787.