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  • Resonance Collective Dance Performance

    Erlanger Gardens will come to life with a site-specific performance event invoking the wonder and desire of nature through a visceral landscape of moving bodies and sound. Monmouth University has united visual artist Lucy Kalian, whose work is being shown this semester in the Pollak Gallery and The Resonance Collective; a collaborative interdisciplinary dance and vocal ensemble, bringing our environment to life through stunning imagery and virtuosic physicality. The Erlanger Garden performance will begin at 12:00PM and will feature an original dance and electronic/live vocal piece. This is the beginning of a day-long event culminating in the Pollak Gallery opening of Lucy’s Swells and Soundings exhibit at 6:30PM. Within her exhibit, Lucy explores the tidal forces at work where land and water meet. This exhibit is cosponsored by the Urban Coast Institute. 

    Erlanger Gardens are located
    right outside Wilson Hall. Pollak Theatre will serve as the location for the dance
    performance in the event of rain. 

  • Lucy Kalian Gallery Talk

    Lucy Kalian, artist of “Swells and Soundings,” will be having a talk at the Pollak Gallery at 4:00 PM.

  • Gallery Talk: Bruce Dorfman & Ira Goldberg

    Please join us for an informal gallery talk with exhibiting artist Bruce Dorfman and Ira Goldberg, Executive Director of the Art Students League of New York.  The discussion will offer visitors the opportunity to ask questions, and hear stories about the artists life, work, and experiences working as a professional artist in NYC.  In addition, Mr. Goldberg’s long association with Mr. Dorfman will add addition insight into the artists work and history.

  • Sheba Sharrow

    Through a vigorous and poetic hand, her work reflects on brutality and simultaneously pays homage to the animating power of solidarity, warning us: Remember, history’s tragedies repeat.

    Born in Brooklyn in 1926 to Russian-Jewish immigrant parents, Sheba Sharrow grew up in Chicago and earned her BFA at the Art Institute of Chicago, studying with Boris Anisfeld and Joseph Hirsch. She continued her studies at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts and earned an MFA at the Tyler School of the Arts at Temple University. She has been considered part of the “Chicago School” of imagist painters, fitting generationally into the “Monster Roster” group of artists from that city, including the most well-known of her classmates to lead the charge of image and ideas over pure abstraction, Leon Golub and Nancy Spero. A resident of Cherry Hill, New Jersey, Sharrow died in 2006.

    In the dominant milieu of Abstract Expressionism beginning in the 1950s, which actively rebelled against identifiable “meaning,” Sharrow remained grounded in a humanist tradition and a social context. Curator and writer Alejandro Anreus placed her “in the company of Kollwitz, Beckman and Orozco,” and writer Amy Fine Collins linked “her sensibility to German Expressionism.”

    Sharrow’s unique style of storytelling and her occasional use of poetic text stand her apart. Her artistic intentions were deeply intellectual. “As long as the world is going the way it is going, I cannot stop doing what I have been doing,” Sharrow told The New York Times in 2002. She lamented, “We cannot seem to get it right.”

    The works will be on loan from both James Yarosh Associates Fine Art Gallery and the Estate of Sheba Sharrow as well as from institutions such as the Jersey City Museum of Art and private collections.

  • Women’s Rights Are Human Rights: An Exhibit of Selected Works by Jacob Landau

    Monmouth University Galleries opens an exhibition of works exploring the theme of justice for women by American artist, humanist, and teacher Jacob Landau.
     
    Born in Philadelphia in 1917, Jacob Landau launched his career as an illustrator, winning national prizes at age 16 and a scholarship to the Philadelphia College of Art. He had over sixty one-person shows and was the recipient of many awards, including Tiffany, Guggenheim and National Arts Council grants. 
     
    Landau’s art, devoted to the “advocacy of the human,” which entails “revelation of the tragic” and “hope of transcendence,” embodies a vision of justice for women. Powerfully and subtly erasing inherited gender boundaries, it triumphs. In his watercolor AS ABOVE  SO BELOW he gives us an unforgettable vision of the “patterned energy” that is the just relation between sexes. We see masculine “incompleteness” and feminine “imperfection” in balanced unity. The man below and the woman above, declaring together: “I and thou we create each other.” And by this creation of the human imagination we are convinced of its truth. 
     
    The exhibition features a selection of twelve pieces. All works are from Monmouth University’s extensive collection of Jacob Landau’s work, comprising over 300 prints, drawings and paintings. The collection was gifted to Monmouth University in 2008 by the Jacob Landau Institute of Roosevelt, NJ. This exhibit is co-sponsored by the Jewish Culture Studies Program and the Honors School of Monmouth University. 

    Opening Reception: Monday, April 10, 2017 from 4:30 – 6:00 p.m.

     

    Docent tours are available (for times, contact Professor Noel Belinski 732-263-5425; email: nbelinsk@monmouth.edu).
     

  • Transition: Vietnam – Photography by Mark Ludak and Andrew Cohen

    Vietnam is a country in transition.  Intrigued by the rapid transformation of Vietnam, one of the fastest growing economies of the world Monmouth University professors, Mark Ludak and Andrew Cohen have returned multiple times to photograph this region.  A dynamic, youthful country, especially seen in mega-cities like Ho Chi Minh City (Sai Gon), it is a country where the traditional and contemporary are reconstituted into distinctively Vietnamese manifestations.

  • NATURE AND NURTURE – Mother/Daughter Artists: The Paintings of Cheryl Griesbach and Claudia Griesbach-Martucci

    After working almost 20 years as an illustrator with her husband Stanley Martucci, in 2000 Cheryl Griesbach began creating a body of paintings based on her interests in European 18th and 19th century still-life, botanical, and landscape art. Cheryl’s painting technique was derived from Flemish painting that she had explored as a student at The School of Visual Arts where she is now on the faculty since 1985. Her method includes the manipulation of segments of Northern European paintings and incorporating that imagery in building a new landscape, like a stage. Cheryl has received many awards, including last year’s best in show at the Monmouth Museum’s 38th international juried awards show.

    Cheryl’s daughter Claudia, having grown up with both parents as artists, gave her an innate inclination to explore her imagination and develop knowledge of oil painting.  Admitted into The School of Visual Arts, her parents alumni, Claudia in her third year first began to primarily use oil paint as her medium to illustrate the 18th century fairy tale Donkey Skin by Charles Perrault.  Claudia graduated with honors and was then accepted into the Masters Program, Illustration as Visual Essay, with a limited class of 20 students. With her background in Illustration and skills in using oils learned from he mother, all of Claudia’s paintings tell a story. Her end of the year show paintings began to carve out some of the subject matter she wanted to explore, “that behind every exquisite thing that exists there is something tragic” a quote from Oscar Wilde’s Portrait of Dorian Gray. Claudia is currently working as a painting assistant to the artist Jeff Koons, while pursuing her own personal work.

  • Maunderings by Tonya D. Lee

    In this exhibition, artist and Monmouth University Art and Design faculty member, Tonya D. Lee presents a collection of multi-discipline work that explores the abstraction of nature and environment through the combination shapes, patterns, moments and pauses that are derived from passive spaces, fleeting thoughts and changing winds. Location and process are in a conversation about ephemeral moments of beauty. Using a multi-disciplinary process of combining painting, drawing, collage, construction, and digital media, the obsessions with materiality explore form and color as an echo of the present overlapping past presents — form and color negotiating to exist as object and subject.

  • Oceanids by Joseph Coscia Jr.

    Oceanids are some 3000 nymphs in Greek mythology who watch over fresh water: rain, clouds, lakes, springs and rivers, as well as pastures, breezes and flowers. They are the daughters of Oceanus and Tethys. Coscia, the Chief Photographer at the Metropolitan Museum of Art has spent countless hours with classical sculptures, photographing them in various settings and seasons. He focuses on the qualities of light on sculpture in changing conditions, and the shifting effects of natural light on stone surfaces. His photographs of museum pieces explore elements of the art outside the context of the museum setting.

    His recent work draws on Man Ray’s solarization techniques. This effect reverses the shadow areas and transforms the sense of weight and volume of the objects, so that they appear suspended in air or water. The forms are evocative of earthly creatures or fossils; photographing and printing them using recreated old photographic techniques removes time specificity, so that they also are suspended in time.

    Coscia, Jr. received his MFA from Hunter College in 1989 and his BFA from Kutztown University of Pennsylvania in 1982. His photographs have appeared in numerous publications and museum books, most notably Light on Stone, a photographic essay published by Yale Press in 2004.

  • First Senior Show: Fine Art & Animation

    Featuring the work of Monmouth University graduating seniors who will receive their degrees in Fine Art and Animation.