TAMPA BAY.- The Tampa Museum of Art will open on September 15 the exhibit Theo Wujcik: Global Warming Tampa Bay artist Theo Wujcik creates two site-specific paintings for the museum’s Center Gallery. In addition, five paintings from Wujcik’s latest series, called Global Warming, will be on display. The exhibition as a whole addresses Wujcik’s personal response to the urgent environmental concern known as global warming. Confronting the various issues associated with drastic global changes, Wujcik poses the question “what does it take for the viewer to adjust his/her vision and truly see what’s happening because of global warming as well as to take action?”
In the painting series and site-specific works, Wujcik uses squares of color – pixels – to serve as a metaphor for apathy. The “digitized” areas of the paintings simultaneously conceal and reveal the compositions and their underlying messages. Rather than merging into an image as a whole, each pixel is its own color and form and thus demands recognition in its own right. Despite their conflicting nature, the pixels play an important role in conveying each work’s unfolding drama. As these works indicate, Wujcik has once again reinvented his painting style and produced a new body of work that leads to new directions.
Wujcik studied fine art at the Center for Creative Studies in Detroit and did post-graduate work in lithography at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque. He is a Tamarind master printer, co-founder of the Detroit Lithography Workshop and was shop director of Graphicstudio at USF from 1970 through 1972. His work has been featured in solo exhibitions at Brooke Alexander, Inc. in New York, the Donald Morris Gallery in Biumingham, MI and Indigo Galleries in Boca Raton, FL.
Wujcik was awarded a research and creative scholarship grant from the University of South Florida, a printmaking fellowship from the National Endowment of the Arts, a Ford Foundation grant and a Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation award for graphics." Most recently, he has received grants from the Richard Florsheim Art Fund and the National Endowment of the Arts, through First Night International.
His works are in the permanent collections of numerous museums including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the Chicago Institute of Art, the Whitney Museum of Art in New York and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.
Wujcik’s 30 year retrospective exhibition at the Gulf Coast Museum of Art, Largo, FL (1999) was supported by grants from the Richard Florsheim Art Fund, the Elizabeth Firestone Graham Foundation, the USF Publications Council, the St. Petersburg Times, Bonita Cobb and James Rosenquist. The exhibition was traveled to the Lowe Art Museum, Coral Gables, and the Polk Museum of Art, Lakeland.
