Two Floors Feature James Rosenquist, Andy Warhol, and Much More
JACKSONVILLE, FLORIDA (January 22, 2016)— Printmaking is taking over the Museum of Contemporary Art Jacksonville, a cultural institute of the University of North Florida. Two floors display the art of printmaking, including two featured exhibitions, the UNF Gallery at MOCA, and the Permanent Collection.
Time Zones: James Rosenquist and Printmaking at the Millennium is MOCA Jacksonville’s self-curated exhibition running February 13 through May 15 on the second floor.
Rosenquist, a pioneering Pop artist who first earned his living as a billboard painter, came of age in the booming economy of post-World War II America. Finding his subject matter in the detritus of consumer culture and the remnants of everyday images, his idiosyncratic visual language is one saturated in the American vernacular. Rosenquist’s imagery is dense, compacted, eccentric, and often hard to decipher. His implausible juxtapositions, strident DayGlo colors, and seemingly discordant couplings often bombard the viewer.
For an artist whose career has spanned more than seven decades, time is an apt topic. With the Deutsche Guggenheim project The Swimmer in the Econo-mist as a touchstone, Time Zones traces this evolution and exchange of ideas and motifs across media into the present day. Although Rosenquist will deny any chronology or linear narratives in his work, The Swimmer in the Econo-mist is a history painting of our time—a summation of the past and one steeped in optimism for the future. At the intersection of two centuries, this series afforded the artist the opportunity to reflect back upon the twentieth century while looking forward into the twenty-first. Time Zones examines Rosenquist’s late career—from his visual inventions to innovations in painting and printmaking—and its continuing impact.
The presenting sponsor of Time Zones is Deutsche Bank.
In Living Color: Andy Warhol and Contemporary Printmaking from the Collections of Jordan D. Schnitzer and His Family Foundation takes over the third floor.
Organized by the Joslyn Art Museum in Omaha, Nebraska, the exhibition opens February 13 and runs through May 15.
Andy Warhol (1928-1987) depicted the world with the volume turned up. Employing a seemingly endless palette, his work has challenged our perceptions of popular culture, politics, and consumerism for more than fifty years. Warhol was the central figure of American Pop Art, a genre that emerged in the late 1950s in reaction to the heroism of Abstract Expressionism. For Pop artists, social and political turbulence coupled with unprecedented consumerism meant that art was no longer about the persona of the heroic individual artist, as it had been in the years immediately following World War II. Warhol and his contemporaries sought to eradicate the notion of the “genius artist” and downplay the role of originality in art, adopting mechanical means of generating images, such as screen-printing, which theoretically allowed for an endless production of images. In drawing inspiration from the rapidly changing world around them, Pop artists sought to be more inclusive in their subjects, and more aware of the day-to-day conditions of contemporary existence.
Spanning three decades of Warhol’s career, this exhibition features some of the artist’s most iconic screen prints, including his portraits of Marilyn Monroe and Mao Zedong, the splashy camouflage series, and the controversial Electric Chair portfolio. Drawn exclusively from the rich collections of Jordan Schnitzer and his Family Foundation, In Living Color is divided into five sections—experimentation, emotion, experience, subversion, and attitude. In each, Warhol’s work is placed in conversation with other artists of the postwar era who use color as a tool to shape how we interpret and respond to images.
In addition to Warhol, the exhibition features the work of fifteen artists:
• Josef Albers
• John Baldessari
• Louisiana Bendolph
• Ross Bleckner
• Louise Bourgeois
• Chuck Close
• Richard Diebenkorn
• Sam Francis
• Helen Frankenthaler
• Keith Haring
• Anish Kapoor
• Dorothea Rockburne
• Ed Ruscha
• Frank Stella
• Mickalene Thomas
The Other: Nurturing a New Ecology in Printmaking features twenty-three women who expand the definition of printmaking in the UNF Gallery at MOCA. The exhibition runs January 23 through April 10. Printmaking is, by its nature, a fecund artistic environment. In 1960, it was a woman—June Wayne, the founder of Tamarind Institute (from which so many of these works are graciously on loan)—who went so far as to call it “an ecology.” Women, many of them unsung, have been printmaking pioneers, exploring, publishing, and defining the boundaries of the medium over the decades. They push against traditional methods of production (cutting their prints by hand; pinning them to the wall). They embrace larger contents (social media, crowdsourcing). They are true to their bodies and themselves. Their means of production may be diverse, but still, as is printmaking’s true nature, ever democratic and accessible.
UNF printmaking professor Sheila Goloborotko curated the exhibition, which features:
• Taylor Bisanzio
• Suzanne Caporael
• Kate Collyer
• Amy Cutler
• Elaine de Kooning
• Lesley Dill
• Karen Kunc
• Nicola López
• Sheila Goloborotko
• Catherine Graffam
• Taryn Mcmahon
• Jill Parisi
• Judy Pfaff
• Liliana Porter
• Jaune Quick-to-See Smith
• Alison Saar
• Kiki Smith
• Tanja Softic
• Jillian Sokso
• Swoon
• Shelley Thorstensen
• Marie Watt
• June Wayne
Prints from MOCA Jacksonville’s Permanent Collection are on display in the David A. Stein Family Gallery on the second floor. Works by Vito Acconci, Jim Dine, Helen Frankenthaler, David Hockney, Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Rauschenberg, Larry Rivers, and Rosenquist complement the three exhibitions.
MOCA Jacksonville collaborated with John Hutcheson, a Tamarind master printer and instructor of printmaking at UNF, to create audio guides for twelve objects throughout two floors with details about how the objects were created and Hutcheson’s personal stories.
The supporting sponsors of the exhibitions are Judy Eisen, Scottie and Winfield Gartner, and Todd Sack and Barbara Sharp.
ABOUT MOCA JACKSONVILLE
Founded in 1924 as the Jacksonville Fine Arts Society, MOCA Jacksonville is a private nonprofit visual arts educational institution and a cultural resource of the University of North Florida located in the historic Western Union Telegraph building in the heart of downtown. MOCA Jacksonville serves the community and its visitors through its mission to promote the discovery, knowledge, and advancement of the art, artists, and ideas of our time. For more information, including hours of operation, admission prices, and upcoming exhibitions and programs, visit mocajacksonville.unf.edu or call 904-366-6911.