Go Figure! Curated by Beth Rudin DeWoody @ Eric Firestone Gallery, East Hampton, NY

Go Figure! Curated by Beth Rudin DeWoody
Eric Firestone Gallery, East Hampton, NY
May 25 – June 22, 2019

Eric Firestone Gallery presents Go Figure!, a group exhibition about an ongoing dialogue between contemporary figurative artists and figuration of the 1950s, 60s and 70s and includes works by the following artists: 

Tunji Adeniyi-Jones • Emma Amos • Will Barnet • Diedrick Brackens • Katherine Bradford • Delia Brown • Joan Brown • Alex Bradley Cohen • Lucille Corcos • Mira Dancy • Elaine de Kooning • Charles DuBack • Angela Dufresne • Martha Edelheit • Eric Fischl • Natalie Frank • Barnaby Furnas • Shirley Gorelick Mimi Gross • Ridley Howard • Konstantin Kakanias • Sam Kalda • Maira Kalman • Howard Kanovitz • Alex Katz • Bill King • Marcia Marcus • Liz Markus • Jan Müller • Joe Overstreet • Philip Pearlstein  Vanessa Prager • Eleanor Ray • Walter Robinson • Mira Schor • Joan Semmel • Jansson Stegner • Ruby Sky Stiler • Billy Sullivan • Nick Weber • Tom Wesselmann • Jane Wilson • Jason Yarmosky • Hartwell Yeargans • Yelena Yemchuk

Curator Beth Rudin DeWoody says:

I’ve always been attracted to figurative painting and drawing even though I love abstract and minimalist art. I also love the in-between when figure melds into the abstract.  There are many young artists who are looking back to some of the great figurative artists of the mid 20th-Century, putting their own 21st-Century influences and viewpoints onto the works.  

The exhibition is about pairing contemporary artists with artists of the mid-20th Century to shed new light on the strength of their voices, and continued relevance today. Despite the dominance of Minimalist and Conceptual art, a surprising number of artists in the 1960s and 70s were using figuration to pioneer aesthetic and political ideas that we often take for granted today. 

In the historic work, we see explorations of personal identity and societal roles within a range of portraiture. Artists look at the domestic and the family, the fictional studio space, and the world outside.  In many works, an intimate space collides with a broader popular culture image bank.  Traditional images of the nude are undone, appropriated by a female gaze or a deconstruction of formal conventions. The exhibition displays a massive range of material approaches, from a finely rendered touch, to collage and impasto surfaces, to work that exists in the space between painting and object. 

The pairings that guided curatorial selections are often playful visual connections, but can also reflect more literal mentorship or inter-generational connections between the artists.

Beth Rudin DeWoody, art collector and curator, is President of The Rudin Family Foundations and Executive Vice President of Rudin Management. The Beth Rudin DeWoody Collection has over 10,000 works in various media, including painting, drawing, sculpture, works on paper, video, and installation, by leading and emerging contemporary artists. It also includes significant holdings of iconic furniture, design, objects, ephemera, and artist’s books. The Collection has been the subject of exhibitions featured at the Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach and the Parrish Museum, Water Mill, among other institutions. In December 2017, Beth Rudin DeWoody opened The Bunker Artspace in West Palm Beach, Florida to present viewable storage of her collection, as well as exhibitions. 

Beth Rudin DeWoody has curated numerous exhibitions, including “I Won’t Grow Up” at Cheim & Read, New York; “Think Pink” at Gavlak Gallery, Palm Beach; “Bad For You” at Shizaru Gallery, London; “Please Enter” at Franklin Parrasch Gallery, New York, and “Really” at Wilding Cran, Los Angeles.

ERIC FIRESTONE GALLERY
4 Newtown Lane, East Hampton, NY
www.ericfirestonegallery.com

Reclamation! Pan-African Works from the Beth Rudin DeWoody Collection @ Taubman Museum of Art, Roanoke, VA

Reclamation! Pan-African Works from the Beth Rudin DeWoody Collection 
Taubman Museum of Art, Roanoke, VA
March 3 - September 2, 2018

Hank Willis Thomas 

Branded Head, 2003 

Ed. 1 of 3 lambda photograph, digital c-print , 99 x 52 inches 

© Hank Willis Thomas. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York

The Taubman Museum of Art presents Reclamation! Pan-African Works from the Beth Rudin DeWoody Collection, featuring more than 100 works from various media highlighting the global migration of peoples across the world.

Drawn from DeWoody’s significant contemporary African diaspora collection, it features world renowned artists such as Willie Cole, Hank Thomas Willis, Kerry James Marshall, Kara Walker, Romare Bearden, Kehinde Wiley, Sandford Biggers, and Yinka Shonibare MBE (RA) among others working in a broad reach of media and conceptual approaches.

"I am delighted to share this important selection of Pan-African artwork with the Taubman Museum of Art and Roanoke community,” said DeWoody. “Reclamation! introduces themes of globalization and diaspora that I feel are especially timely and important within art history. It is truly special to me that this exhibition will include my very first acquisition, by Benny Andrews in 1969, alongside major works in my collection spanning the 1940’s to present. It has been a pleasure working with the Taubman Museum of Art to develop this wonderful exhibition, and I look forward to the opening in March 2018."

The exhibiting artists create work that investigates the universal conversation of migration, history, race and representation in art being made today. The exhibition captures the personal stories and collective histories of artists reflected through installations, videos, paintings and sculptures. The exhibition aims to represent artists whose work references ownership of their own home countries while developing narratives that embrace global histories.

About the Collector: Beth Rudin DeWoody, art collector and curator, resides between Los Angeles, New York City, and West Palm Beach, Fla. She is president of The Rudin Family Foundations and executive vice president of Rudin Management. Her Board affiliations include the Whitney Museum of American Art, Hammer Museum, The New School, The Glass House, Empowers Africa, New Yorkers for Children, and The New York City Police Foundation. She is an honorary trustee at the Brooklyn Academy of Music and on the photography steering committee at the Norton Museum of Art in West Palm Beach.

Reclamation! Pan-African Works from the Beth Rudin DeWoody Collection is co-curated by the Taubman Museum of Art with Laura Dvorkin of the Beth Rudin DeWoody Collection.

TAUBMAN ART MUSEUM
110 Salem Avenue SE, Roanoke, VA 24011
www.taubmanmuseum.org