MANETTI SHREM MUSEUM’S SUMMER SEASON FEATURES SUSAN SWARTZ
By StoryStudio
The Manetti Shrem Museum’s inaugural summer season welcomes two exciting American artists to highlight the university’s distinctive legacy of nurturing and exhibiting innovative contemporary art.
Nature Revisited 44, Acrylic on linen, 42x84” 2018.
In Susan Swartz: Breaking Away, 2006–2018, the artist is motivated by the grandeur of nature combined with an exuberant celebration of the materiality of paint.
Swartz grew up in Pittsburgh and began her art career in the traditional style of realistic landscape painting. She was the Official Olympic Environmental Artist for the 2002 Olympic Winter Games in Salt Lake City. But in the last 10 years, from her Utah studio, Swartz’s work has veered more toward the Californian tradition of artists, filtering imagination into abstraction on the canvas.
For example, Swartz’s Serenade of Lilies (2007), which opens the exhibit, uses a spectrum of greens to evoke a lily pad–covered pond. Layers of acrylic provide a leafy, three-dimensional texture. The result is a clear reference to a scene in the natural world that, upon close inspection, gradually blurs into a colorful dreamscape.
In a concurrent exhibition, Andrea Chung: You broke the ocean in half to be here, the artist melds media and material in her collages, prints, video, and sculptures to expose the role of labor in post- colonial societies, primarily island nations in the Indian Ocean and the Caribbean. Organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, this is Chung’s first solo exhibition. The centerpieces are cyanotype prints of lionfish, an invasive species that has wreaked havoc in the local Caribbean ecosystem—a powerful metaphor of colonialization. In the work Filthy water cannot be washed, the spiny fish, rendered translucent by the print, crowd into the frame, creating chaos in the previously tranquil sea of deep purple and blue.
Included in this exhibition, Chung’s May Day is a series of cutouts that removes black laborers from Caribbean tourism ads and brochures. Ghostly white silhouettes now dwell in the fields and mills, essentially giving the black workers time off from their lives of toil in service to the white colonialists.
“The Manetti Shrem Museum is delighted to present the Northern California debut of two artists whose work is based in experimentation and exploration of natural and cultural forces,” notes Manetti Shrem Museum founding director Rachel Teagle. The Museum’s summer season launched on June 30 and will continue through September 2, 2018. Admission is free for all.