Keith Haring Exhibition @ Akron Art Museum - Against All Odds

Keith Haring: Against All Odds

Akron Art Museum

April 15 - September 24, 2023

KEITH HARING

Untitled, 1982

Acrylic on vinyl tarpaulin

180 x 180 in. (4750 x 4570 cm)

Collection of the Rubell Museum

Keith Haring artwork copyright © Keith Haring Foundation

KEITH HARING

Untitled, 1984

Ink on leather

35 x 42 in. (89 x 106.7 cm)

Collection of the Rubell Museum

Keith Haring artwork copyright © Keith Haring Foundation

KEITH HARING (Collaboration with LA II) 

Untitled, 1982

 Acrylic and ink on fiberboard

 Collection of the Rubell Museum. 

Keith Haring artwork copyright © Keith Haring Foundation

The Akron Art Museum presents Keith Haring: Against All Odds. Organized by the Rubell Museum and the Akron Art Museum, this show provides a sweeping overview of the height of Keith Haring’s career and includes more than 110 original objects made between 1981 and 1990. The Rubell Museum holds one of the largest private Keith Haring collections in the world. Many of the works that are on view at the Akron Art Museum were acquired by the Rubell Museum shortly after Keith Haring created them and around the same time as they were first presented publicly. 

Keith Haring’s career in art took off through chalk drawings in New York City subway stations and, during the 1980s, exploded into paintings, drawings, large-scale murals, fashion, and pop culture. The artist channeled his newfound popularity and his signature style of bold and energetic outlines into expressions of love and positivity. He also used his art to make political statements against war, environmental destruction, racism, and more, and to advocate for gay rights and AIDS awareness. 

“The exhibition [...]  highlights Haring’s commitments to art and politics, as well as his relationships with artistic peers like Jean-Michel Basquiat and Andy Warhol. We are looking forward to sharing Keith Haring’s work, his ideas, and his personality with our visitors,” said Jeff Katzin, Ph.D., Curator for the Akron Art Museum.   

In 1986, Keith Haring opened his Pop Shop in New York City’s SoHo neighborhood selling shirts, posters, and other items to break down barriers between fine art and broad audiences. While many artists shy away from commercial enterprises, Haring was committed to making his art more accessible. The Museum have an area that has been hand-painted by local artist Ron Copeland in the style of Keith Haring’s Pop Shop, providing an exciting, immersive environment for reflection, education, and programs. 

Keith Haring’s monumental painting of two figures dancing around a heart and his Statue of Liberty sculpture created with Angel Ortiz will be on view through May 14. After their limited time at the Akron Art Museum, they will head to the West Coast to join a traveling exhibition. These two works were part of Keith Haring’s debut exhibition at the Tony Shafrazi Gallery in New York City in 1982. This was his first show at a commercial gallery, and the success of the exhibition cemented his place in the world of fine art.  Two additional works, courtesy of the Keith Haring Foundation, will be on view starting May 16.    

“We are honored to be showcasing Keith Haring’s work on a grand scale here in Akron. His unique imagery is immediately recognizable around the globe, even for those who are not familiar with his story,” remarked Executive Director and CEO Jon Fiume. 

AKRON ART MUSEUM - AAM 

1 South High Street, Akron, OH 44308

akronartmuseum.org

Jim Dine Prints: 1985-2002 at Akron Art Museum

Jim Dine Prints: 1985-2002 

Akron Art Museum 

January 17 – March 27, 2004 

Ohio-born sculptor, painter and printmaker JIM DINE is one of America’s most famous living artists. Since the 1960s, Dine has transformed familiar, everyday objects such as hearts, bathrobes, tools, owls and skulls into powerful symbols of loss, longing, joy and wonder. The Akron Art Museum presents forty-seven monumental prints by this legendary artist with Jim Dine Prints: 1985-2002.

Born in Cincinnati in 1935, Jim Dine took evening art classes at the Art Academy of Cincinnati and later graduated from Ohio University. In 1958 he moved to New York City where he created performance art pieces, paintings and sculptures that incorporate real-life objects such as tools, lawnmowers and showerheads. Unlike the Pop artists with whom he is often associated, Dine does not use popular imagery to be humorous or ironic. Instead, he depicts objects that hold deep personal significance for him and conceives of each work as a kind of self-portrait.

Jim Dine Prints: 1985-2002 features the artist’s signature motifs of bathrobes, hearts, hands, and the Venus de Milo, themes the artist has recast in inventive ways since 1985. In conjunction with the exhibition, Dine’s Painting Around Mount Zion, a monumental image of four bathrobes owned by the Akron Art Museum, is also on view. The exhibition also features some of his newest subjects such as owls, ravens, trees and the character of Pinocchio, reflecting a more brooding, romantic sensibility.

Over the past four decades, Jim Dine has produced an incomparable body of paintings, sculpture, photographs and prints. Dine recently completed a monumental bronze sculpture of the Venus de Milo for the US Courthouse in Cleveland. Called Cleveland Venus, it was installed atop the new building this past October.

The works in the Akron Art Museum exhibition reveal Dine’s expressive vision as well as his devotion to innovative printmaking techniques. The artist uses power tools to carve images into printing plates, combines multiple techniques within a single print and hand colors many works, using brushes, his fingers and even a straw broom. Like his paintings and sculptures, Dine’s prints are characterized by both technical virtuosity and emotional intensity. They are grand in scale, extraordinary in technique and rich in allusion, with a powerful visual and emotional impact not to be missed.

This exhibition was organized by the Minneapolis Institute of Arts in collaboration with Pace Editions Inc. and Jim Dine. 

AKRON ART MUSEUM

70 East Market Street, Akron, Ohio 44308

www.akronartmuseum.org

Paul Stankard Glass Sculptures at Akron Art Museum - Flowers in Glass: Glass Paperweights and Sculptures by Paul Stankard

Flowers in Glass 

Glass Paperweights and Sculptures by Paul Stankard

Akron Art Museum

9 November 2002 - 2 February 2003

Akron Art Museum presents Flowers in Glass: Glass Paperweights and Sculptures by Paul Stankard. The exhibition features over 60 of the legendary glass artist’s floral paperweights and sculptures. The works are all from the collection of Cleveland area glass collectors Mike and Annie Belkin, who own one of the largest Stankard collections in the world.

Considered to be one of the most important and prolific paperweight artists, Paul Stankard is simultaneously a master glass artist and an astonishing realist sculptor. Throughout his thirty-year career, he has challenged the limits of glass as an art form. His early works focused on uncannily accurate glass flowers, perfect in color and delicate detail. Inside his glass creations, he constructs amazingly minute, highly detailed microcosms of plants and insects. Viewing his work, one is instantly transported to a different time and place—from a meadow of wild flowers to a pond resplendent with water lilies. It is difficult to believe that you are not confronted with nature itself, miniaturized and preserved forever at its peak by crystal-clear glass.

Look more closely, though, and there is even more to these swirls of worlds than the complexity of botany. By experimenting with color and composition, Stankard has achieved his own personal interpretation of nature. Layers of glass create fiction, metaphor and allusion. Some of the flowers, such as the coronet in Coronet, Blueberries and Damselflies, are not even native to nature, but the artist’s fanciful inventions. In a number of the more recent sculptures that Paul Stankard has termed “Botanicals,” tiny root people, words or the female form–which represents the earth spirit–become clear, intermingled among the roots. In commenting on these botanical interpretations, the artist has stated: “I am interested in integrating mysticism, informed by botany, into my work, giving the glass an organic credibility. Through the work, I explore the cycles of nature with wildflowers as a personal metaphor. The addition of tiny root people and word canes as emblems allude to unseen forces of growth and decay.”

Moreover, Paul Stankard has altered the way people view paperweights by changing their very shape. The artist has transformed paperweights from the traditional, round French style (what most people consider when they think of paperweights) to rectangular blocks composed of two or more laminated glass pieces forming one complete scene. In this regard, his paperweights have come to be viewed as sculptures, and Stankard has emerged as one of the most influential glass artists of his time. Indeed, his works are featured in museums throughout the world—from Washington, D.C. to Tokyo, Japan.

Paul Stankard does not just depict the natural world; he uses art to express his awe at the miracle of nature and to hint at the unknowable wonders lying beneath the world’s visible surface. The artist himself has noted: “My work is my prayer,” and his stunning sculptures express this spiritual component silently through form and color. Come to Flowers in Glass and delight the eyes, the intellect and the soul!

Flowers in Glass is organized by the Akron Art Museum from the collection of Mike and Annie Belkin.

AKRON ART MUSEUM

70 East Market Street, Akron, Ohio 44308

www.akronartmuseum.org