At the Katzen

I have just received the Katzen Arts Center at AU coming schedule and let me tell you, there's a ton of terrific shows coming up soon.

Jack Rassmusen, the energetic director of the Katzen, seems to have broken the code that has elluded most DC area museum directors and curators: DC museums can offer a mix of national, international and DC area art and artists and still be at the leading edge of an important and diverse exhibition program.

Here's what'coming:

Opening November 14, 2006
Carlos Saura: Flamenco
November 14 — January 21, 2007
Spain’s most talented, best known Flamenco performers and musicians over the past several decades are caught in these photographs by the eminent film director, Carlos Saura. Together the photographs reveal the dazzling talent of Saura, not only an authentic artist of film but of photography as well. Organized by the Embassy of the Kingdom of Spain (which by the way is a jaw-dropping building that managed to marry an existing Georgetown structure with a super-modern addition).

Gifts from the Katherine Dreier Estate
November 14 — January 21, 2007
This AU Museum holding, part of the Watkins Collection, was donated by the Katherine Dreier estate in 1952 through the efforts of collector-patron Duncan Phillips. The exhibition features nine modernist works by Paul Klee, Marc Chagall, Kurt Schwitters and others. Katherine Dreier’s much-studied Société Anonyme, a loose knit group that included Marcel Duchamp and other progressive artists working in Paris and New York, helped launch the 20th century’s first trans-Atlantic avant-garde.

William H. Calfee and the Washington Modernists
November 14 — January 21, 2007
Calfee was chair of the American University art department from 1945 to 1954 and a central figure in the development of post-war art in the Washington area. This exhibit concentrates on Calfee’s cast bronze sculptures and features works by other artists working in Washington during the 1940s and 50s including Law Watkins, Robert Gates, Sarah Baker, Karl Knaths, and others. Calfee and the other Washington modernists played an important role in mid-century Washington art and through their work at the Phillips Gallery Art School, Studio House, American University, and Jefferson Place Gallery and they helped to establish a contemporary dialogue for art in Washington, D.C.

Mark Cameron Boyd: Logocentric Playground
November 14 — December 15, 2007
Washington area artist Mark Cameron Boyd has been exploring “text as a language for painting” through the use of his original text transcription process since 2003 (disclaimer: I love Mark's work and have curated him into two "Text" exhibitions myself). In Logocentric Playground, the artist seeks to engage visitors in the making of art, to invite their interaction and consideration of the possibilities of communication through art and language. The installation also incorporates reading and interpreting texts.

Opening November 21, 2006
High Times, Hard Times: New York Painting 1967-1975
November 21 — January 21, 2007
This comprehensive traveling exhibition by Independent Curators International — in Washington for its only mid-Atlantic showing — tracks an under-recognized but fecund period in New York painting. Artists such as Lynda Benglis, Yayoi Kusama, Blinky Palermo, Elizabeth Murray, and Richard Tuttle moved paint onto floors, built eccentric canvas structures, used their own bodies to create compositions, and incorporated traces of reality to deepen the power of the image.

Twenty-first Century Ibero-American Art
November 21 — January 21, 2007
Ibero-American Art Salon 2006 presents an exhibition of approximately 40 paintings and mixed-media pieces that reveal the diversity of contemporary art in the Spanish and Portuguese speaking worlds of Europe and the Americas. The exhibition, drawn from a pool of 20 artists from Central and South America, Spain and Portugal, is presented in conjunction with the Association of Ibero-American Cultural Attachés and juried by museum director/curator Jack Rasmussen.

Talia Greene: Entropy Filigree
November 21 — January 21, 2007
Building on her continuing exploration of our control of nature and the body, Philadelphia artist Talia Greene transforms the detritus she finds around her into an intricately woven filigree of hair, dried flora, and bug parts. Her work questions dichotomies surrounding aesthetics and the body by drawing them closer together, finding sensuality in abjection, decoration in waste, and design in entropy.

Guy Dill: A Decade
November 21 — January 28, 2007
A new series of dramatically curved sculptures in bronze by this internationally known, Los Angeles-based artist will be exhibited in the museum’s sculpture garden. This body of work by Guy Dill, composed from a similar ‘palette of shapes,’ emphasizes in distilled forms, architectural conflict, movement, and an unlikely grace from decisive geometric components. Certain works in the exhibition may at first glance appear incidentally figurative, but only enough to evoke a physical relationship with the viewer.

All I have to say is WOW!