1958-1988, hand-colored lithograph, 9″ x 7 7/8″
The Songs of Maybelle Stamper
January 21 – March 3, 2000
The Gallery of Fine Art at Edison Community College is pleased to present the exhibition “The Songs of Maybelle Stamper.” Comprised of nearly 80 works from the estate of Maybelle Stamper the exhibit includes chromo-lithographs, hand-colored lithographs, watercolors and drawings. The exhibit is on loan to the Gallery of Fine Art from the McKissick Museum of the University of South Carolina. This exhibition is made possible through the William R. Frizzell Memorial Endowment.
Born in 1907, Maybelle Richardson Stamper was committed to becoming an artist by her teen years. She studied, initially, in her home town of Dublin, New Hampshire, and continued her education at the New Hampshire State Normal School, the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and at the Art Students League in New York City.
By the early 1940s Stamper had achieved considerable success as an artist and teacher. She exhibited at several New York galleries, the Cincinnati Art Museum, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York acquired Stamper’s work for their collections. Karl Zigrosser, Curator of Prints at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, wrote that Stamper was “one of the most imaginative and technically accomplished printmakers working in America today.”
In 1947, Stamper moved to then little known Captiva Island. She gave up her academics to pursue the personal and artistic journey that would occupy the rest of her life. In Florida she continued her work – usually in watercolor and lithography – pulling her own prints on the press that dominated her small beach house. Those prints and paintings are filled with introspective images, and sometimes annotated with diary-like inscriptions. She called them her “songs.”
Living a frugal and hermit-like existence on Captiva, Stamper continued working through the 70s and 80s, but sold her work only when she needed to buy life’s necessities. Her focus was her “songs,” and she wanted no exhibitions of her work until after her death. Maybelle Stamper died on Captivia Island in 1995.
1998, vegetable dye transfer on polylaminate, 61″ x 61″
Robert Rauschenberg: Recent Work
March 10 – April 16, 2000
The Gallery of Fine Art, Edison Community College, is pleased to present the extraordinary exhibit “Robert Rauschenberg: Recent Work.” Comprised of work completed between 1997 and 1999, the exhibit will open March 10 and close April 16, 2000.
Robert Rauschenberg, often cited as the most important artist of his generation, did more than any other artist to reach beyond contemporary thinking by challenging limits, perceptions, and every other boundary in sight. After all, this is the artist who erased a de Kooning drawing, created a tire impression on paper with John Cage, worked extensively with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, ushered in “Happenings” and “Pop Art,” and influenced virtually all artistic thinking since Abstract Expressionism.
A career retrospective was organized by and displayed at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York and the Guggenheim Museum, Soho, in late 1997. The exhibit of more than 400 pieces showed Rauschenberg from 1948 to the present. In the fifty years of relentless pursuit of imagery, Rauschenberg’s mark of free association and experimentation is seen on painting, performance, collage, sculpture, printmaking, and photography. It was Rauschenberg’s first retrospective since 1976 and one of the largest exhibitions ever held of work by a living artist. Following the New York opening the exhibit began touring with stops in Houston, Texas, as well as venues in Germany and Spain.
The exhibit at The Gallery of Fine Art, Edison Community College, is comprised of 13 large format pieces ranging in size from approximately 5’ square to 10’ x 15’, completed between 1997 and 1999. These works, made with vegetable dye transfers on polylaminate, utilize a highly technical process of computer-driven laser transfers of his photographic images onto the pictorial surface.
It is a very significant opportunity for Southwest Florida to view these rarely seen pieces selected from Mr. Rauschenberg’s collection. To make this exhibit more available to the students and faculty at Edison Community College and to the greater Fort Myers area, the normal days of operation are being extended to include Mondays.
Annual Student Art Show
Images 2000
April 19 – May 7, 2000
This is the final exhibit of the school year and features work created by Edison art students. 1st, 2nd and 3rd place awards will be presented in the categories of Photography, Drawing, Ceramics Painting, Design, Ceramics Wheel and Ceramics Hand. In addition, a “Rising Star” award will be awarded to a full time, first year student who shows exceptional promise.
Florida Artist Group
May 19 – June 20, 2000
More than 50 artists from one of Florida’s most professional art organizations show their works in this 50th anniversary exhibit.
The Florida Artist Group is Florida’s oldest statewide organization of professional artists. The purpose of the group is to stimulate the attainment of the highest standards of creative art within the state of Florida.
http://www.floridaartistgroup.org/
Arts for ACT
June 29 – July 9, 2000
This is a preview exhibit of the work of more than 100 artists. The artwork will be auctioned later this summer to benefit Abuse Counseling and Treatment.
2000, 20″ x 10″ x 8″
Kathleen Holmes: Pathways
July 12 – September 2, 2000
Painter and sculptor Kathleen Holmes is one of the busiest artists in Florida. In 2000 alone she will have exhibits in Atlanta, Chicago, Memphis, Miami, and Orlando. Those five locations represent one third of her schedule for the year; the other two thirds of her schedule include eight stops in Florida.
The popularity of Kathleen Holmes is not hard to understand. Her work is dramatic and subtle, alluring and provocative, insightful and challenging, and it remains accessible. Kathleen Holmes creates work that is abstract and realistic, contemporary and traditional. She creates paintings and sculptures that act as metaphor for her heritage of Southern culture. Artistically she crosses boundaries both in time and concept, incorporating her delicate Flemish like painted glazes with found objects and direct presentation in the tradition of Dove, Shapiro, and Rauschenberg. With the premise or core idea of Southern culture Kathleen draws from personal experience creating intimate metaphors that lead the viewer to tradition, family, patterns of society, and the role of women in our culture. For Holmes, it also leads to the expression of her feelings about the life patterns that we follow, including emotional, social, behavioral, and spiritual.
Holmes was born in Monroe, Louisiana in 1953 and spent most of her childhood in the South (Louisiana, Tennessee, and Texas), with the exception of some time in the Caribbean and the Middle East. She has no formal degrees and has been creating art in Florida for 15 years; she currently resides in Lake Worth, Florida.
http://www.kathleenholmes.com/
Alan E. Cober: A Retrospective Afterlife
September 15 – October 29, 2000
The Gallery of Fine Art at Edison Community College will present an exhibition of the work of the late illustrator Alan E. Cober in Alan E. Cober: A Retrospective Afterlife September 15 through October 29, 2000.
In conjunction with the exhibit the Director of the Selby Gallery Director, Kevin Dean, will give two gallery talks about Cober’s work and his time at Ringling School of Art and Design. Open to the public at no charge. October 3, 7 p.m. and October 4, 2:30 p.m.
An admirer of German Expressionist Otto Dix, Cober developed his own distinct, expressive style that perfectly suited the sharp-edged subjects of modern life reflected in the stories he illustrated for publications such as Rolling Stone, Time, Newsweek, Life, Look and the New York Times. His emotional pictorial essays on Willowbrook, the New York State institution for the mentally handicapped; prisons, and the aged was published in 1975 as The Forgotten Society.
Cober’s long, successful career was punctuated when he was credited with expanding the possibilities of contemporary illustration by erasing the line between it and fine art. David Schuster, Illustration Department Chair at The Art Institute of Boston, said of Cober, “By following his personal vision and instinct for social justice, Cober enlarged the parameters of visual graphics in the 20th century and paved the way for a new genre – one that blurs the distinction between fine art and illustration.
Nancy Weekly, a ZAKS Illustrators Source Web site author said, “….Cober creates gripping visual images that provide evidence of the harsh realities of contemporary events, cast in a format that will reach a universal community and instigate change.”
Innovators of American Illustration author Stephen Heller said, “Cober was a pioneer of expressionist illustration. He influenced many in the seventies, due in part to his teaching and in part to the national accessibility of his work.”
Prior to serving as a visiting artist in Illustration at Ringling School from 1995 to 1997, he was for 10 years a professor of art and distinguished visiting artist at State University of New York at Buffalo.
Cober received many accolades for his work. He was one of the few artists to receive 10 medals from the Society of Illustrators inNew York City.
During the last three years of his life, Cober began creating three-dimensional versions of his bizarre hybrid figures in clay. The exhibition in The Gallery of Fine Art at Edison Community College will present his clay sculpture along with a large retrospective of his work as an illustrator and artist, and a selection of his all-important sketchbooks.
The exhibit was organized by the Selby Gallery, Ringling School of Art and Design, as a national tour.
9th Annual Student Scholarship Exhibit
November 8 – December 3, 2000
The Gallery of Fine Art, Edison Community College, and Henderson, Franklin, Starnes and Holt, P.A. are pleased to announce the annual student scholarship exhibit. This mixed media exhibit of work done by the art students at Edison Community College opens this Wednesday, November 8th with a reception and awards ceremony in the Gallery between 6:30 p.m. and 8 p.m. Henderson, Franklin, Starnes and Holt, P.A. sponsors the scholarship awards and organizes the local venues where the exhibit will be shown. After the exhibit is shown at Edison Community College it will be shown at Big Arts, The Lee County Alliance of the Arts, Broadway Palm Dinner Theatre and the Cultural Park Theatre.
Following the opening reception, November 8th, the Edison Community College Concert Band, under the direction of Dr. Dennis Hill, will perform in the Barbara B. Mann Performing Arts Hall at 8 p.m.
Both events, the opening reception and the concert, are open to the public at no charge.