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FAMILIAR STRANGERS: Be a Voyeur, Detective, Surrealist, Humanist!

May 3, 2014May 24, 2023 Matthews Gallery2 Comments

Untitled, Unknown

“A photograph is usually looked at—seldom looked into,” said Ansel Adams. When it comes to the pictures in our upcoming show, there’s no other option but to dig a little deeper.

FAMILIAR STRANGERS: Vernacular Photography, opening Friday, May 16, is not your typical Matthews Gallery show. The artists who created our collection of found photographs never got the recognition that Picasso, Toulouse-Lautrec or Renoir did, but there’s no denying their aesthetic sensibilities.

That’s what has kept us digging through estate sales, thrift shops, antique stores and attics for years. We’ve amassed quite the collection of vernacular photographs, also known as “found” or “orphan” photos, and we’re not alone in our scavenging habits. Our friends on social media understand the great allure of the hunt.

“Looking at so many old and found photographs I often think that, ‘I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe,'” writes Paul Jackson, who maintains the Flickr group Found Photographs. “The person behind the camera has seen these things, lived that life..you know, we can sometimes almost taste it.” We asked several other photo finders what they love about the pursuit, and they all had equally passionate answers.

Vernacular photography presents unique challenges to the viewer, asking us to shift between different roles to grasp what we’re seeing. Our first impulse is often voyeuristic. We can’t resist a peek at someone’s intimate moment, and we swiftly draw conclusions about what’s going on. In the image above a baton girl gawks open-mouthed at a band boy, but he looks resolutely away. Is this a tale of unrequited love?

Society often slaps us on the wrist for our voyeuristic tendencies. In his brilliant essay on found photography Dr. Barry Mauer of the University of Central Florida says this instinct is something we should indulge.

“At first sight, most of these pictures are hilarious or tragic or both,” writes Mauer. “Voyeurism allows me to experience these reactions from a comfortable distance.” However, Mauer cautions against stopping there. Voyeurism often comes hand-in-hand with judgment and categorization. Stereotyping these mysterious individuals cuts us off from a rich world of visual mysteries. Time to pull out the magnifying glass.

Untitled, Unknown

If we act as detectives, this simple portrait holds a lot of hints about the bicyclist and her photographer. Did you notice the bandages on her knee and arm? If those are recent wounds, perhaps she’s just learning how to ride. It’s difficult to tie a forearm bandage on your own. Maybe the person behind the camera is her teacher and medic? On the other hand, the bags on the handlebars hint at a different adventure. One of them looks like a canteen. Could the other hold snacks for a picnic?

Teasing out these details is invigorating. To take it one step further, note the composition of the photograph. The front wheel is cut off and part of the path is visible behind the girl. This perspective, when combined with the subject’s bent posture and excited face, lends the photo a sense of forward movement. Our mysterious photographer has imbued a picture of a static bike with surprising dynamism. Was that his or her intention?

Untitled, Unknown

Of course, in the end we’ll probably never know if our inferences are correct. Who better to help us surmount our fear of the unknown than the surrealists? André Breton and his friends were inspired rather than daunted by impenetrable mysteries. They sought out fragments of culture, watching films from between their fingers to try to catch discreet details and writing stories based on dreams they had about real experiences.

Both techniques allowed them to focus on details they otherwise would’ve ignored. In the photo above, our interest in the group in the foreground distracts from the odd figure standing in the far background. Cropping the photo brings up a whole array of new questions.

Detail of previous photo

In a broader context the entire photo is a fragment. The man in the foreground’s stern expression stands alone, isolated from what happened before or after. Perhaps he cracked a smile a moment later, but this short glimpse of his day at the pool has a foreboding air to it.

“The surrealists used fragmentation as a means to knowledge, discovering significance in the fragment that had been concealed in the contextualized whole,” Mauer writes. It’s not hard to trace the progression of this thinking to Marcel Duchamp’s use of found objects, or to the Dada artists’ repurposing of vernacular photos in collages (more on all of that in an upcoming blog post).

In the end analyzing and relating to the “characters” in these photographs helps develop our skills in another field: humanism. It’s amazing how connected we can feel to a person we’ll never meet, and how powerful our feelings of empathy and sympathy can be when we exercise them. Look long enough, and you’ll start to imagine that these familiar strangers are looking right back.

Step into the shoes of a voyeur, detective, surrealist and humanist at FAMILIAR STRANGERS: Vernacular Photography, opening Friday, May 16. Also, make sure to check out our fascinating interview with four found photography collectors and connect with us on Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr for more gallery news!

THE LUMPKINS LEGACY: Bill’s Last Request

April 24, 2014April 24, 2014 Matthews GalleryLeave a comment

William Lumpkins Jr. next to his father’s serigraph “Abstract Landscape #3“

At last Friday’s opening of NEW MEXICO MODERNS: The Lumpkins Files, William Lumpkins Jr. was a quiet presence. He stood to the side surveying his father’s work or chatted softly with visitors, many of whom were family friends. One woman had known his dad, who died in 2000, through an art discussion group that met at local coffeehouses. “Whenever Bill spoke, we all had to lean in. He was such a lovely, gentle man,” she said.

Will’s father may have passed down his mild temperament, but both men are also legendary for their fierce artistic passion. Will has carefully preserved the artwork in The Lumpkins Files show for years, and meanwhile has developed his own artistic style. The jacket he wore to the show was emblazoned with intricate celtic knots and a dragonfly.

When we asked about his dad, the more colorful side of Will’s personality emerged. Here’s William Lumpkins’ son on his father’s never-before-seen artwork, and why he decided to release it more than 15 years after Lumpkins’ death.

What’s it like to see your dad’s work hanging in the gallery?

Well, his work was all around us growing up, so it’s not that strange. The gallery did an excellent job though.

When did you first bring the work to Matthews Gallery?

About a year and a half ago. I had shopped around and didn’t relate to anybody until I met Larry.

Where did you keep it for all these years?

I had it in a case between sheets of acid-free paper. When I was teaching at Virginia Commonwealth University, I was in charge of museology. It was a whole print and painting conservation training program. So my dad knew that I could take care of them. Watercolors in particular are a sensitive thing for archiving.

Why didn’t he want you to release them until now?

It didn’t have to do with the work. He said to me, ‘Okay, you wait until after you’re 70 because by then your personal artistic statement will be you. You won’t have to mimic me.’ So at 70, my artwork was me and I brought these out again.

Were you ever tempted to release them before that?

No, it just didn’t seem right until I started looking around recently. I trusted you guys.

One of the biggest surprises in this body of work was the watercolor from 1937. That’s one of the earliest Lumpkins pieces we’ve ever seen. Did you know it was in there?

I knew that the work spanned a lot of time. When Dad was closing down the studio, he picked these out because these were the ones that he really liked from different points in his career. He felt that they were significant, and that they weren’t typical. His typical work is pretty well-known, but these he wanted to hold out so that they’d be totally new.

What was your vision for this show?

I gave the work to Larry and said, ‘Do you what you think is best.’ I just want them to be out in the open where they can be seen. If people want them enough, if people like them a lot, that’s good.

Hear more from Will Lumpkins in this week’s Pasatiempo, and visit the show at Matthews Gallery through Friday, April 25. For more images from the opening, check out our photos page and connect with us on Facebook and Instagram.

NEW RELEASE: Fremont Ellis of Los Cinco Pintores

April 12, 2014April 12, 2014 Matthews GalleryLeave a comment

In 1921, Fremont F. Ellis and his friends Jozef Bakos, Walter Mruk, Willard Nash and Will Shuster founded an avant garde art society that would change Santa Fe forever. The five men were in their early 20s, and most of them had recently migrated there from the East Coast. They chose a name inspired by their new life in the Southwest: Los Cinco Pintores (The Five Painters).

In December of that year, Los Cinco Pintores mounted their first group exhibition at Santa Fe’s Museum of Fine Arts. Their work was diverse in subject matter, but their rallying point was modernism and the art of early Taos painters Robert Henri and John Sloan of the Ashcan School.

“These men believe in color and are not afraid to use it,” wrote a critic who attended the inaugural show. “Upon entering the galleries, visitors are greeted with a great shout of color that’s almost stimulating.”

Over the next few years, Los Cinco Pintores worked together to build a row of casitas along Camino del Monte Sol near Canyon Road. This earned them another nickname, “The Five Nuts in the Adobe Huts”. Meanwhile, word of their exploits had reached other artists back home.

By 1923 another group called the New Mexico Painters was exhibiting paintings of sweeping Southwestern landscapes across the Midwest and the East Coast. Artists like Randall Davey, Andrew Dasburg and Theodore Van Soelen settled in the area, and the Santa Fe Art Colony was born. The City Different has fostered a vibrant art community ever since.

These newly released works on paper are by Fremont Ellis (1897-1985), who was the last surviving member of Los Cinco Pintores. Ellis grew up in Montana and was inspired to become an artist at 14 when he saw Albert Bierstadt’s paintings on a trip to New York City. He worked as a photographer in California before settling in Santa Fe, and used his photographs of landscapes to inspire his painted compositions. This body of work holds the vigor and immediacy of the artist’s many outdoor adventures.

Learn more about Fremont Ellis on our website, and connect with us on Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr for daily gallery news. Also, don’t forget to mark your calendar for our exhibition NEW MEXICO MODERNS: The Lumpkins Files, opening next week!

BURST OF BRILLIANCE: Adolph Gottlieb’s Southwestern Epiphany

March 29, 2014July 7, 2014 Matthews GalleryLeave a comment

“It was like being at sea,” said Adolph Gottlieb. The artist had just spent a year in the Desert Southwest- from 1937 to 1938- and returned to his hometown of New York City with a radically altered style. “There’s… a tremendous clarity of light and at night the clouds seem very close,” he continued. This was a very different type of “sea” than the one that carried Gottlieb on his inaugural artistic journey. When he was 17 he dropped out of high school and caught a merchant ship to Europe. He spent two years there, including six months in Paris where he audited art classes and visited the Louvre every day. Back in New York, he studied at The Art Students League and befriended Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko and Milton Avery. Together they founded the abstract expressionism movement, working to develop color field painting and other innovations. They remained close until Gottlieb decided to strike out on his own to Tucson, Arizona. It was an endeavor that would markedly separate him from his contemporaries, even after his return to the East. Gottlieb’s New York friends called the style he had developed in Arizona simplistic, but the artist refused to look back. He distanced himself from his colleagues and focused on developing a Surrealist style. Experiments with automatism and surrealist biomorphism helped him create an abstract symbol system for his gridded Pictographs series. Finally, in the 1950’s, he started work on two series that would become his most well-known work. Both series are represented in our collection, and their very existence seems linked to the bare, elegant vistas of the Desert Southwest.

IMAGINARY LANDSCAPES

Around 1950-51… I was finally getting away from the pictographs and looking for something… So it was necessary to find other forms, a different changed concept. So finally after a certain period of transition I hit on dividing the canvas into two parts, which then became like an imaginary landscape… What I was really trying to do when I got away from the pictographs was to make this notion of the kind of polarity clearer and more extreme. So the most extreme thing that I could think of doing at the time was dividing the canvas in half, make two big divisions and put something in the upper division and something in the lower section.

The color and texture of the land mass in “Green Foreground” recalls Gottlieb’s sea simile. In this period the artist was consolidating surrealist and abstract expressionist theories by approaching the two movements as different sides of the same coin (hence a “polarity”). Our lithograph implies a fantastical landscape, but works just as well as a flat, wholly abstract composition. If we imagine ourselves exploring this terrain, it would look much like Gottlieb’s surroundings in the Southwest, albeit with a greener tint.

BURSTS

After doing the imaginary landscapes until say 1956, in ’57 I came out with the first Burst painting… There was a different type of space than I had ever used and it was a further clarification of what I was trying to do. The thing that was interesting that it was a return to a focal point, but it was a focal point with the kind of space that existed in traditional painting. Because this was like a solitary image or two images that were just floating in the canvas space. They had to hold the space and they also had to create all the movement – that took place within the rectangle.

Gottlieb’s Bursts are Imaginary Landscapes that have further dissolved into abstraction, though their compositions still root them somewhat in reality. In “Crimson Ground” two discs rise (or set) like a sun and moon from a monochrome tangle with the most ephemeral of horizon lines.

When I started doing the Bursts I began to do part of the painting horizontally. It was necessary to do that because I was working with a type of paint which had a particular viscosity, which flowed, and if it were on a vertical surface it would just run. If it were on a horizontal surface, I could control it… I was using a combination of brushes and knives, palette knives… and spatulas… I’ve tried everything, rollers, rags, I’ve put paint on with everything.

“Crimson Ground” isn’t a painting, but it still has a painterly quality to it. The edges of the discs are uneven and textured, and the forms below are as splattered as a Pollock drip painting. This further highlights the polarity between the surreal landscape and an abstract expressionist painting. One is focused on depth, the other focuses solely on the surface. Learn more about Adolph Gottlieb on our website, and connect with us on Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest for to-the-minute gallery updates!

HART & SOUL: Fine Furniture with New Mexican Roots

March 22, 2014April 17, 2014 Matthews Gallery2 Comments

Roch in our Southwestern Art Room with his hand crafted pie safe and bench

Roch Hart‘s first steps into fine furniture making were the result of a big dilemma.

“I fell in love with Spanish colonial furniture. I had to have it, but I couldn’t afford it,” he says. He had never learned a craft before, but he was determined to do something. He started by buying all the books he could find on building furniture.

More than two decades later, Roch pulls up to Matthews Gallery in a big red jeep. He takes two impeccably hand crafted pieces of furniture from the trunk. One is a tall corner table emblazoned with a Cochiti Pueblo-inspired design, and the other is a pie safe with intricate latticework and a special type of dovetail joint in the door. Roch is the very first fine furniture maker to join our stable, and his mastery of the craft is truly spectacular. In a way, these beautiful objects are generations in the making.

Roch’s great grandmother came to Santa Fe in 1881. She was a single 16-year-old woman who braved the Old Santa Fe Trail, probably to escape an arranged marriage. Soon after her arrival she married a German man and they opened a mercantile near Canyon Road.

“She came from an aristocratic family. She had lots of money, but she chose the poor man’s way in,” Roch says. Her daughter, Roch’s grandma, grew up among the local tribespeople and learned their language and lifestyle. “My grandmother would go out and show me edible plants, and she could even butcher things,” Roch explains. “She could take a rabbit, take and a stick and ‘Bang!’ Then she would show you how to prepare it.”

She was also a great admirer of native art. She taught Roch about kachina dolls and paintings she collected. Roch’s mother took it one step further, trying her hand at retablo painting.

Roch took a different path, enrolling at New Mexico State University and then studying to be a police officer. He spent 20 years at the Albuquerque Police Department, but his love for New Mexico’s multicultural history always stuck with him.

Corner table with Cochiti design detail

When he got interested in furniture making in the early 1990’s, Roch started by studying the intricacies of the Spanish colonial style. He learned that a particularly sturdy joint, the mortise and tennen joint, was the only one Spanish colonists were legally allowed to use. He also discovered that the pervasiveness of trasteros (a Southwestern style cabinet) was due to a high colonial tax on closets.

“At the same time that I was learning all this, I realized I wanted to do something different,” Roch says. “I didn’t want to keep replicating colonial.” The budding craftsman’s big breakthrough came on a visit to the Nicolai Fechin House museum in Taos.

Fechin (1881-1955) was a Russian painter and craftsman who settled in New Mexico in 1927. He purchased a two-story adobe home and greatly expanded it over the next few years, carving intricate doors, windows and furniture pieces that were inspired by European and Native American aesthetics.

On that first visit to the museum, Hart was busy crawling on the floor and inspecting every angle of Fechin’s furniture when the artist’s daughter Eya appeared. They started talking, and she recognized his passion for the craft. “She had so much in-depth knowledge, and I didn’t even know who she was,” Hart says. She walked him through the house and pointed out different styles and techniques her father used.

“Fechin blew me away,” Hart says. “He took art and applied it to furniture. I had felt caged in by the things I was learning, but all of a sudden I realized I could do anything I want.” Just as Fechin had drawn from multiple influences in his work, Hart began to use styles and motifs from the different cultures around him.

Pie safe with rosette detail

Hart carries his latest works through the gallery to our freshly painted Southwestern art room, carefully placing two pieces in opposite corners. He’s eager to point out his stylistic choices. The rosettes on the sides of the pie safe are inspired by Native American metalworking techniques, his choice of joints was influenced by Fechin and the gridded design in the front is all his own. On the front of the corner table, a stepped carving bordered by elegant curves represents a Cochiti blessing.

“I incorporate my love for the Native arts, for the Spanish and for my European ancestry,” Hart says. “I try to tie a little bit of everything into every piece.” The works before us bear clear markings of the artist’s rich ancestry and influences, but they also hold a heaping dose of something else: Hart’s soul.

“I think furniture should be art,” Hart says. “It’s unique and really fits my love for Santa Fe and New Mexico.”

For more news about Roch Hart’s latest work, check out his artist page on our website and connect with Matthews Gallery on Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest.

LOR’S LORE: Introducing Artist Lor Roybal

March 15, 2014March 15, 2014 Matthews GalleryLeave a comment

Lor Roybal, Dodge’s Disbelief, acrylic on paper
When Lor Roybal‘s big blue van pulls up in front of the gallery, we’re never quite sure what’s in store. She’s a blur of swirling textiles as she bursts through the door with something bright and colorful in tow. Her specialty is portraits, usually of characters from dreams or her vivid imagination. Sometimes she carries a box packed with miniature paintings and other times she holds a large frame in her hands. Once she brought by a loose stack of old sketches and wild free verse poems.

Lor is a familiar face in Santa Fe’s art community, but no one seems to know much about her. She lives somewhere along the Pecos River north of Santa Fe. Her two-room house is off the grid so she heats it using firewood in the winter. Her dog is her closest companion and painting is her favorite pastime. She is a scholar of art history.

“When I first started showing people my little paintings, I would say, ‘Here’s my treasure chest of gems,'” Lor once told us. There’s definitely something precious about Lor’s colorful faces. Each subject has a name and thorough biography. There are daring circus performers and pensive poets, gossipy grandmothers and mischievous little boys, cherubic elves and long-departed spirits. Some of the figures are intelligent riffs on other artists’ styles, from Picasso to Chagall to Renoir, but all possess a wild twist of Lor’s style.

Lor is now officially part of our stable, and we couldn’t be prouder to represent her. As you’ll see in her latest batch of acrylic paintings on paper, the artist is truly one-of-a-kind. Check out some of the work below, and connect with us on Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest for continued updates.

Lor Roybal, Posi, acrylic on paper

Lor Roybal, Emile’s Incredulity, acrylic on paper

Lor Roybal, Stendhal’s Boat, acrylic on paper

Lor Roybal, Young Clown Lujo, acrylic on paper

MEMORY IN BLUE: Jan van Leeuwen

February 26, 2014February 26, 2014 Matthews GalleryLeave a comment

Jan van Leeuwen, Barbed Wire No. 1 (Cyanotype), Matthews Gallery

What color is memory? Is the human soul tinted by life’s great joys and sorrows?

Jan van Leeuwen‘s darkest recollections are a deep blue tide. His self-portraits take shape much like memories do. It’s a long process with details fading in and out of focus, projecting visions of the self that never feel quite complete. It took a lifetime for the photographer to discover his medium, but when he did the images came spilling out.

Leeuwen was born in Amsterdam in 1932. In 1940, when the artist was 8 years old, the Dutch surrendered to the Nazis and Leeuwen watched as his community fell apart. Jewish neighbors and schoolmates fled or were taken. Over the course of the four-year occupation, the young boy’s confusion turned to anger, frustration and guilt.

Leeuwen’s first career was as a kitchen wares distributor, and he learned how to work a camera by photographing the products. He took his first serious stab at the medium in 1986 when he was in his 50’s, mostly so he’d have something to do when he retired.

Drawing inspiration from the innovative spirit of the Dutch Renaissance masters, Leeuwen developed his own method of producing photographs. He uses a 100-year-old wood camera to capture an image on resin-coated paper, creates a negative and then makes a contact print using a UV-B lightbox.

The process of capturing and transferring the images echoes the artist’s struggles with the trauma he experienced in his youth and the impact it has had on his identity. For the cyanotype in our collection, the artist used a long exposure to fracture himself into eight meshed figures. The only thing starker than their furrowed brows is the strand of barbed wire that stands in their way.

Leeuwen created Barbed Wire No. 1 in 1993. A year later he quit his job to pursue photography full-time. Since then he’s had a stellar contemporary art career, with shows across the world and artwork in The Photo Review, Art in America and many other publications.

The artist’s success hasn’t dampened the intimacy of his self-portraits, or lightened the burden of his memories. However, Leeuwen reminds us that sadness is accompanied by beauty, and creation always surmounts the pain of destruction.

Learn more about Jan van Leeuwen’s art and life on the Matthews Gallery homepage, and connect with us on Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest for more gallery news.

PICASSO GETS BURNED: 5 strange facts about the Vollard Suite

February 14, 2014 Matthews Gallery1 Comment

Pablo Picasso, Personnages Masques et Femme Oiseau, aquatint and etching

When it came to marketing himself, art dealer Ambroise Vollard (1866-1939) was a pro. He had a knack for scouting out young artists with rockstar potential and he wasn’t afraid to ask for favors later on. Vollard gave Pablo Picasso his very first gallery show in 1901. By 1930, Picasso was world-famous and Vollard enlisted him for a special commission. In exchange for paintings by Renoir and Cezanne, Picasso would create a series of 100 etchings ending with three portraits of Vollard.

What better way to immortalize yourself? Picasso completed the Vollard Suite over the next seven years, and it would become one of his most famous print suites. The first etchings in the series are in the neoclassical style and show a sculptor in the studio with his beautiful muse. As World War II set in, Picasso turned to darker subject matter culled from Greek mythology. A friendly minotaur appears, but soon grows agitated and violent. By the end of the series the minotaur has lost his vision and wanders aimlessly.

At Matthews Gallery we have the 24th print from the series, titled “Masked Characters and Bird Woman“. In our research on the print, we’ve discovered some pretty weird facts about the Vollard Suite. Five things you (almost surely) didn’t know:

1. Armed Art Critics Attack!

Spanish paramilitary group Guerrilleros de Cristo Rey on the march

Aside from Steve Wynn 0r Olga Dogaru, Picasso’s most violent critics might just be fascist paramilitary group Guerrilleros de Cristo Rey. Picasso finished the Vollard Suite in 1937, but Vollard’s untimely death in 1939 and World War II prevented the prints from going on the market until the 1950s. In the 1970s, the series starred in a short-lived exhibition in Madrid. In protest of Picasso’s political views on the Spanish Civil War the Guerrilleros stormed the show, tore down the prints and burned them with acid. Ouch.

2. Death by Foot

Image from Honore de Balzac’s The Unknown Masterpiece

Sometimes, art kills. Scholars have tied the Vollard Suite to Honore de Balzac’s short story “The Unknown Masterpiece.” The tragic tale chronicles an artist’s frustration at his inability to capture a model’s supreme beauty on canvas. He manages to paint her foot, but soon gives up and commits suicide in despair. Picasso explores similar themes in his etchings. His lover Marie-Therese Walter appears throughout the series, at first as his adoring model and then as a girlish guide to the blind minotaur. The artist has lost his power to capture his model in his art, and now she nimbly leads him toward death.

3. Sweet Art

Sugar lift aquatint from the Vollard Suite

It seems Picasso had a sweet tooth. The ever innovative artist experimented with new printmaking techniques for the Vollard commission, including dry point and aquatinting. The latter method allows the artist to create varying tones on the print using particles of rosin and an acid. Sugar lift aquatinting is a sweet variation. A layer of sugar syrup is applied to parts of the print and then burned off with acid to create dark fields on a white ground (see the dark patches in the image above).

4. Clairvoyant Pablo

Picasso possessed many artistic talents, but was he also a fortune-teller? One of the Vollard prints shows a model who is a doppelgänger for Picasso’s lover Francoise Gilot, though it prefigures their relationship by over ten years. Third eye or not, the artist noted Gilot’s resemblance to his archetypal female figures when he met her. It made quite the flattering pick-up line.

5. Vollarchitecture

The Vollard Suite in Curitiba, Brazil

In more recent news, the world’s first rotating building is named after the Vollard Suite. The futuristic residential complex in Brazil opened in 2001 with an exhibition of Picasso’s prints. Its design resembles a Greek pillar, a reference to Picasso’s neoclassical style in the suite (check out the b ird lady’s perch in our print). The skyscraper’s $400,000 apartments turn 360 degrees every hour. It might sound dizzying, but something tells us the extravagant artist would approve.

Learn more about our Vollard print here, and connect with us on Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest for more news from Matthews Gallery!

CURATE THIS, CURATE THAT: Place your votes!

January 22, 2014January 22, 2014 Matthews Gallery1 Comment

The selection process for our social media-curated show COLLECTOR’S CHOICE is underway, and fans on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Tumblr and other networks have placed their votes. It’s time for some tie breakers on WordPress! Check out the match-ups below and vote for your favorites in the comments section. From January 31 to February 5, we’ll unveil your selections in the gallery and online.

JAMIE CHASE

ROUND 1! Jamie Chase is known for his figurative work like image #1, and also his abstracted landscapes like #2. Which one should appear in the show? Take the curatorial reins!

WILLIAM LUMPKINS

Do you prefer William Lumpkins‘ careful watercolor brushstrokes (#1) or experimental wild felt-tip pen marks (#2)? Read more about the influential Santa Fe modernist here before you decide…

KATE RIVERS

Curate this! Should we feature a Kate Rivers book collage in the show, or one of her nests? Read about her mixed media work in this blog post, and vote for #1 or #2 in the comments.

HANNAH HOLLIDAY STEWART

These tall, spindly bronzes might be very different, but they’re both by powerhouse feminist sculptor Hannah Holliday Stewart. Figurative or abstract? Curate that!

PAUL GAUGUIN

Two Tahitian myths inspired these woodblock prints by Paul Gauguin. Which do you prefer? Read about them in this blog post, and vote now!

Thanks for participating in COLLECTOR’S CHOICE! To place your vote on other social networks, connect with us through the links on our About Page.

BE OUR CURATOR: A Social (Media) Experiment

January 16, 2014January 16, 2014 Matthews GalleryLeave a comment

When we cooked up a full-fledged social media strategy for the gallery early last year, we had no idea what we were in for. Twelve months and countless posts, photos, tweets, likes and pins later, we’ve learned a lot. No offense to professors past, but engaging with our vibrant online community of aesthetes has been the best art course we’ve ever taken. It’s high time we thanked you for your passion, so pull out your CV and add “curator” to the list. Starting tomorrow, we’re giving you the opportunity to help us put together a very special show.

COLLECTOR’S CHOICE: 10 Artworks We Love will feature art chosen by online fans across all of our social media platforms. Keep an eye on Matthews Gallery’s Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest or other networks from Friday, January 17 through January 30 to vote on your favorite work in our collection. From January 31 through February 5, we’ll unveil your selections in the gallery and online.

Join us as we shatter the definition of an art curator and gallery show. There’s no one we’d rather collaborate with! Learn more about the show on the Matthews Gallery website.