EASTON, MD.- The Academy Art Museum announces three new exhibitions. Werner Drewes Retrospective and A More Abundant Life: WPA Artists from AAM’S Permanent Collection and Beyond are open through March 2, 2022.
Also opening is Moveable Image: Video Art by Collis/Donadio, Shala Miller and Rachel Schmidt. This video installation is open January 11 - March 6, 2022.
Werner Drewes Retrospective
This exhibition brings together more than 65 of Werner Drewes’s (b. 1899, Canig, Germany; d. 1985, Reston, VA) fine prints, paintings, and watercolors made over the course of his career. Drewes was a prolific artist who studied at the Bauhaus in the early years of his career and later emigrated to the United States to escape the rise of the Nazi regime. A master printmaker, Drewes studied at Atelier 17 and taught at the Brooklyn Museum as part of a Works Progress Administration government program. His visual language, ranging from representational landscapes to abstract forms, tells the story of an artist who becomes acquainted with America through printmaking: first via keen and layered yet slightly distant observations of urban and rural landscapes, and later via dynamic abstract explorations of his complex inner world. Influenced by Paul Klee, Oskar Schlemmer, and Wassily Kandinsky—who were early teachers and mentors—Drewes became a part of the cohort of American artists who shaped the trajectory and importance of abstract printmaking.
Drewes was a prolific maker and created more than 700 fine prints in his life. Together with Stanley William Hayter, who founded the Atelier 17 printmaking workshop, he improved the intaglio technique in color prints. His work and exhibitions were frequently reviewed by major publications, and he had a major retrospective at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in 1984. Other notable exhibition venues include the Brooklyn Museum, Black Mountain College, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Whitney Museum. Drewes’s work is in the Permanent Collection of MoMA and the Indianapolis Museum of Art, among other institutions.
A More Abundant Life: WPA Artists from AAM’S Permanent Collection and Beyond
Following the Great Depression and as part of the government’s New Deal program, the Works Progress Administration (WPA) started the Federal Art Project, which provided artists with paid commissions and teaching assignments all over the country. From painting large-scale public murals to providing graphic design work, WPA jobs kept artists employed, and alongside other wide-ranging employment initiatives, helped the country steadily reconstruct “a more abundant life.” This more abundant life was a vision president Franklin D. Roosevelt described in speeches during the time, and the WPA solidified the role of the arts as important to American recovery. Many of the artists who held WPA jobs were able to remain practicing artists and went on to define American modern and contemporary art in the mid-20th century.
The exhibition offers historic fine prints and photographs by WPA artists, including Robert Blackburn, Jacob Kainen, Russell Limbach, Georges Schreiber, Rufino Tamayo, Dox Thrash, and Charles White. It is on view concurrently with the retrospective of fellow WPA artist Werner Drewes, who taught at Brooklyn College as part of the program.
Moveable Image: Video Art by Collis/Donadio, Shala Miller and Rachel Schmidt
Moveable Image: Video Art by Collis/Donadio, Shala Miller and Rachel Schmidt explores the spatial possibilities of video art and highlights contemporary works that transcend the conventional rectangular screen. Shala Miller, Rachel Schmidt and artist duo Collis/Donadio (Shannon Collis and Liz Donadio) deliver moving image works in their respective visual languages that shift the viewer’s experience from viewing a flat surface to becoming immersed in an installation. Whether it is Collis/Donadio’s layered projections that create trompe l’oeil dimensionality, Rachel Schmidt’s unconventionally-shaped wall frames constructed from plastic trash with which she frames her videos, or Shala Miller’s use of an antique glass door as a projection screen that references domesticity and gender roles, the video installations in the exhibition find nuanced ways to make the image moveable, dynamic and haunting, and place the viewer in the dead center of the work rather than a safe distance from it.
The habitual experience of viewing moving image works is often stationary. The works in Moveable Image, however, invite the viewer to move around the installation and engage with the videos from different points and angles. Doing so, the viewer is asked to notice new dimensions, such as presence and temporality. While the conventional moving image transports the viewer to the there and then, works in Moveable Image allow the viewer to consider the here and now, leaving open the fourth wall for ruminations on wide-ranging contemporary issues the artists explore, such as selfhood, identity, and climate change.
