At AU, an Abundance of Craftsmanship
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, March 9, 2007; Page WE28
As seven (yes, seven) new exhibitions were unveiled to a knot of arts writers on a recent Monday morning, American University Museum director and curator Jack Rasmussen joked about the extra mental effort involved each time his modest-size institution -- at three stories and 30,000 square feet, it's nevertheless the area's largest university exhibition space -- rotates in a new crop of shows. "If this were the National Gallery of Art," he wisecracked, "I wouldn't have to work this hard to tie everything together."
Judging by the art on view, he's not the only one who has been working hard.
  Seven shows at the museum include sculpture and plein-air landscapes, including Stanley Lewis's rich "DC Backyard." (Collection Of Erein And Henry Justin) |
In Rasmussen's words, what ties these shows together is the flavor of "high craft," and he's not lying. From Madeleine Keesing's paintings, whose thickly impastoed surfaces appear to have been squeezed from a caulk gun or pastry bag, to Richard Cleaver's bead-encrusted, Faberge-egg-like painted ceramic figures, much of the work bears evidence of long labor. For a few, the payoff is dazzling.
Baltimore-based artists Keesing and Cleaver are among the clear winners: Keesing, not just for her meticulously layered color-field abstractions, whose powers lie in vibratory harmonies created by two or more pigments, but also for her densely swirling prints and works on paper; and Cleaver, whose personal-to-the-point-of-hermetic symbolism, evoking the artist's childhood and homosexuality, suggests the iconography of Byzantine altarpieces, only more mysterious.
Both Keesing and Cleaver are known commodities around here. More of a revelation, despite his having taught at American University from 1990 to 2002, is painter Stanley Lewis, whose retrospective, focusing mainly on plein-air streetscapes and views of tree-lined yards, is shockingly good. I say shockingly because Lewis's apparent subject matter, at least as evidenced by his titles -- e.g., "Corner of Connecticut Ave. and Calvert St.," "View From Studio" -- is as banal as it gets. The artist's execution, however, whether paint on canvas or pencil on paper, consists of battle-scarred surfaces that have been built up, pieced together, stapled together, scraped away and cut, forming a richly documented record of the act of painting.
That they are, in a word, a mess, at least as physical objects, creates a delicious tension with their almost pristine draftsmanship, keeping what might otherwise have been ho-hum landscapes from being anything but boring. Looking out the museum window, it might occur to a visitor that Lewis's trees form a nice counterpoint to those of artist Dennis Oppenheim's "Alternative Landscape Components," whose sculptural metal "branches" sprout plastic laundry bins and wastepaper baskets in the museum's outdoor sculpture garden.
Sculptor Duane Hanson's (1925-96) famously realistic, life-size human figures, 15 of which have been scattered throughout the museum in trompe l'oeil fashion, are more problematic. On one level, Hanson's sculptures haven't aged well. Like the now-antique-looking accoutrements his characters pose with (the once-colorful jigsaw puzzle, for example, assembled by a little girl sitting on the museum floor, the out-of-fashion clothing, the wigs that look borrowed from a J.C. Penney floor display, circa 1979), Hanson's art feels dated, especially when compared with the higher-tech work of contemporary sculptor Ron Mueck.
Rather than detracting from its power, however, the air of a faded snapshot -- underscored here for the first time by old reference photographs Hanson made -- lends the work a layer of meaning and poignancy I doubt was ever intended when the figures were made.
Less successful is a hodgepodge exhibition of contemporary glass art. Organized by Florida's Habatat Galleries, "Contemporary Glass: Beauty and Innovation" smacks a bit of opportunism, seeing as it serves as a kind of advertisement for the opening of Habatat's new Tysons Corner branch. Similarly, the wooden forms of "Robert Brady: Sculpture 1989-2005" are handsome but lack oomph. Of course, that may merely be the result of art fatigue, the inevitable result of wading though so much art that reeks so much of sweat.
MADELEINE KEESING: ASHES AND EMBERS Through March 18.
STANLEY LEWIS: A RETROSPECTIVE Through April 8.
CONTEMPORARY GLASS: BEAUTY AND INNOVATION Through April 8.
DUANE HANSON: REAL LIFE Through April 15.
RICHARD CLEAVER: FAMILY FICTIONS Through April 15.
ROBERT BRADY: SCULPTURE 1989-2005 Through April 15.
DENNIS OPPENHEIM: ALTERNATIVE LANDSCAPE COMPONENTS, 2006 Through April 15.
All at the American University Museum, Katzen Arts Center, 4400 Massachusetts Ave. NW. 202-885-885-2787. http:/
Public programs associated with the exhibitions include:
March 17 at 4 Gallery talk by Dennis Oppenheim.
