Annette Lawrence: Piano
Dunn and Brown Contemporary, Dallas
January 10 - February 15, 2003
Dunn and Brown Contemporary presents a one-person exhibition of Annette Lawrence’s most recent paintings and drawings. In this new body of work, Lawrence further investigates her ongoing interest in the visual representations of text, music, and sound. One of the most important artists of her generation, Lawrence continues to draw upon her past in an exhibition of great sensitivity and subtlety.
Just over a year ago, Annette Lawrence turned her attention to a piano lesson book from her childhood that she had saved. Drawn in her own hand as a seven-year-old, the pages of the piano journal chronicled each week’s lesson. Reflecting upon these abstract drawings from her youth of musical notes and symbols, Lawrence discovered a fascinating source for her newest body of work. Through an intense investigation of the lesson book pages and her own hand as a child, Lawrence began making a series of drawings, exploring the conceptual nature of text and time. Fragments of this abstract, visual text become the foundation for Lawrence’s own language in this exhibition. Throughout Piano, Lawrence records and reflects upon the passage of time in a variety of forms.
At the age of 37, Annette Lawrence has been recognized nationally as an artist of tremendous talent. Lawrence has been the subject of one-person exhibitions at the Dallas Museum of Art, the Sweeney Art Gallery at the University of California, Riverside, The African-American Museum in Dallas, ArtPace: A Foundation for Contemporary Art in San Antonio, the University of Michigan Museum of Art in Ann Arbor, the Community Artists' Collective and the Firehouse Gallery in Houston. She has appeared in many group exhibitions including, the 1997 Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York; the first and eleventh rounds of installations at Project Row Houses, Houston; The Texas Collection, Modern - Postmodern, at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Gender: Fact or Fiction at the Laguna Gloria Museum of Art in Austin; and Finders Keepers, at the Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston.
Annette Lawrence has served as an artist-in-residence through the Texas Commission on the Arts and at the Fordsburg Artists’ Studios in Johannesburg South Africa. She has received prestigious fellowships, including the Core Fellowship from the Glassell School of Art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston as well as Camille Hanks Cosby Fellowship for African-American Artists from The Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine. Furthermore, Annette Lawrence has received grants from the Cultural Arts Council of Houston, the Dallas Museum of Art, and Art Matters, Incorporated. Originally from New York, Annette Lawrence is currently an Assistant Professor of Painting and Drawing in the School of Visual Arts at The University of North Texas in Denton, Texas.
DUNN AND BROWN CONTEMPORARY
5020 Tracy Street, Dallas, Texas 75205
www.dunnandbrown.com
