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Michael Ned Holte on Barry Le Va
Barry Le Va, Minneapolis Institute of Art, 1968.
BARRY LE VA came into my life in fall 2002, my first semester of grad school, when I chose a large drawing by him as the subject for my lengthy final paper in Bruce Hainley’s art-criticism seminar. The drawing in question had been recently acquired by the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, where it hung alongside works by On Kawara, Adrian Piper, Ree Morton, and Lecia Dole-Recio. I remember this because I had never spent so much time looking at a single work in a museum. Its title
The visual art scene, however, lacked a center. Local artists were creating work that could compete in New York, but Texas galleries weren’t interested in showing contemporary art, and few buyers knew what to select to impress their friends. “It was just bluebonnet paintings,” remembers the artist Barry Buxkamper, who was an undergraduate student at UT when he first met Hickey. This was the void Hickey set out to fill.
The name “A Clean Well-Lighted Place” was a reference to a rather bleak story by Ernest Hemingway, who was one of the subjects of Hickey’s dissertation, and a literal description of what he wanted to create: a gallery with good art on the walls and good natural light. It was also an inside joke about what the gallery represented to him: the controlled burn of his previous life as an academic. “I coined the first axiom of ‘combat aesthetics,’ ” he later said. “Nothing can light up the place you are like a burning bridge behind you.”
Portrait Society Gallery of Contemporary Art opens an exhibition of Shari Urquhart s tapestries
Shari Urquhart, Its 10 o Clock Do You Know?, 1982. 71 x 107 inches.
MILWAUKEE, WI
.-Portrait Society Gallery of Contemporary Art is presenting this major exhibition in conjunction with The Warehouse. Forty years of Shari Urquharts fiber art tapestries are being presented in two Milwaukee venues. This is the first time this extraordinary group of more than 30 monumental, figurative textiles from the artists estate has been shown together.
In addition, Portrait Society presents a related show featuring the work of Chicago artist Phyllis Bramson, who attended graduate school with Urquhart.